Reading about Miles Morales
May. 15th, 2014 12:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithMy partner Doug found this wonderful interview with the creator of the Miles Morales Spiderman. It talks about why he made a mixed-race Spiderman and what superheroes mean to the audience. Some thoughts ...
"It's a story with a very strong theme: "With great power comes great responsibility." And that theme is so perfect in its simplicity that you could build a religion around it. As a fan, I carried it around with me, but when you start writing it, you realize, Oh, this is the most important lesson in the world. It's not a superpower lesson. It's a lesson about power, itself. If you have the power to sing, or to grab people's attention, or anything, then with that comes responsibility that you need to identify and raise yourself up to."
Agreed. This is part of my personal code of honor. Your responsibility always matches your power. If you don't have any power, you're not responsible for anything in that area. Wherever you do have power, you are responsible for using it well.
"The most cosmetic change we made, obviously, is a couple of years ago when we made the determination that, if Spider-Man were created today, there's a very large percentage chance that, based on where he's living and who he is, that he would be a person of color. So we made the choice to send Peter Parker off with a heroic death and have a new young man take the mantle in the form of Miles Morales, who’s half Hispanic and half African-American."
I think this is incredibly important. It makes me want to buy the comics, not just because I love the character concept, but because I want to encourage and support that kind of writing -- where someone actually looks at the world, asks what it needs, and also takes into consideration real facts such as demographics. I do this in my writing. It's not just about creating diversity. It's about matching the local color of a specific area if that's what you're writing about. Frex, my Walking the Beat is set in Jamaica Plain, and there are some characters from the Dominican Republic because that's a local trend there.
"Now, you can't make these decisions [to be more inclusive] consciously, because then you're just writing in reaction to things, and that doesn't work out, dramatically. But subconsciously, if you look at the world around you and see your readers, you go, I wanna write something that I know is true. So you start writing women better and you write people outside of your experience better, because you look at pages of other people's comics and you don't recognize it as the world around you."
Actually, you CAN make a conscious decision to write more inclusive characters, or to change any other aspect of your writing. You can do whatever you want with it. If you're only writing to tick a representation box, it'll probably suck. But if you decide that you want to fill a gap, and make an honest effort to find out what's missing and fix that, then it'll probably be at least decent. Some people write intuitively, some logically. Some write things down, others make things up. It all works for somebody. Do what works for you -- and what is meaningful to you.
"Just yesterday, a woman wrote an article analyzing what she thought was a poor comic book cover, and she was met with just a bunch of shitty anonymous people being awful to her online. I think that a huge problem is people who read comics and don't understand the point of superheroes, which is to be the best version of yourself. You love Captain America? Well, you know what Captain America would never do? Go online anonymously and shit on a girl for having an opinion."
This is the whole point of cultural material in any medium: giving us a chance to imagine ourselves in other circumstances and how we would face the challenges that a character does. Stories can show us the best behavior or the worst behavior, and how that works out for a given character. I feel that we need superheroes in general, and the archetype of the Unsullied Hero in particular, to ring the gold bell at the top. And we also need terrifying villains to remind us of how awful people can be. A good story should make us think about the characters' choices, what they did and why, because that helps us make the right choices in our own lives.
Believe me, when you have very little time to make a very important decision, that mental practice matters. If you've done it before in your imagination, you're much better prepared to respond quickly and effectively when real life throws you a curve ball.
I feel that we need heroes for inspiration. They show us what the best behavior looks like. Maybe you can't lift a car like Captain America ... but you can open a door for someone with their hands full, and little things like that help make the world a better place too. Actions matter. Inspiration matters. Stories matter.
"It's a story with a very strong theme: "With great power comes great responsibility." And that theme is so perfect in its simplicity that you could build a religion around it. As a fan, I carried it around with me, but when you start writing it, you realize, Oh, this is the most important lesson in the world. It's not a superpower lesson. It's a lesson about power, itself. If you have the power to sing, or to grab people's attention, or anything, then with that comes responsibility that you need to identify and raise yourself up to."
Agreed. This is part of my personal code of honor. Your responsibility always matches your power. If you don't have any power, you're not responsible for anything in that area. Wherever you do have power, you are responsible for using it well.
"The most cosmetic change we made, obviously, is a couple of years ago when we made the determination that, if Spider-Man were created today, there's a very large percentage chance that, based on where he's living and who he is, that he would be a person of color. So we made the choice to send Peter Parker off with a heroic death and have a new young man take the mantle in the form of Miles Morales, who’s half Hispanic and half African-American."
I think this is incredibly important. It makes me want to buy the comics, not just because I love the character concept, but because I want to encourage and support that kind of writing -- where someone actually looks at the world, asks what it needs, and also takes into consideration real facts such as demographics. I do this in my writing. It's not just about creating diversity. It's about matching the local color of a specific area if that's what you're writing about. Frex, my Walking the Beat is set in Jamaica Plain, and there are some characters from the Dominican Republic because that's a local trend there.
"Now, you can't make these decisions [to be more inclusive] consciously, because then you're just writing in reaction to things, and that doesn't work out, dramatically. But subconsciously, if you look at the world around you and see your readers, you go, I wanna write something that I know is true. So you start writing women better and you write people outside of your experience better, because you look at pages of other people's comics and you don't recognize it as the world around you."
Actually, you CAN make a conscious decision to write more inclusive characters, or to change any other aspect of your writing. You can do whatever you want with it. If you're only writing to tick a representation box, it'll probably suck. But if you decide that you want to fill a gap, and make an honest effort to find out what's missing and fix that, then it'll probably be at least decent. Some people write intuitively, some logically. Some write things down, others make things up. It all works for somebody. Do what works for you -- and what is meaningful to you.
"Just yesterday, a woman wrote an article analyzing what she thought was a poor comic book cover, and she was met with just a bunch of shitty anonymous people being awful to her online. I think that a huge problem is people who read comics and don't understand the point of superheroes, which is to be the best version of yourself. You love Captain America? Well, you know what Captain America would never do? Go online anonymously and shit on a girl for having an opinion."
This is the whole point of cultural material in any medium: giving us a chance to imagine ourselves in other circumstances and how we would face the challenges that a character does. Stories can show us the best behavior or the worst behavior, and how that works out for a given character. I feel that we need superheroes in general, and the archetype of the Unsullied Hero in particular, to ring the gold bell at the top. And we also need terrifying villains to remind us of how awful people can be. A good story should make us think about the characters' choices, what they did and why, because that helps us make the right choices in our own lives.
Believe me, when you have very little time to make a very important decision, that mental practice matters. If you've done it before in your imagination, you're much better prepared to respond quickly and effectively when real life throws you a curve ball.
I feel that we need heroes for inspiration. They show us what the best behavior looks like. Maybe you can't lift a car like Captain America ... but you can open a door for someone with their hands full, and little things like that help make the world a better place too. Actions matter. Inspiration matters. Stories matter.
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Date: 2014-05-15 08:09 am (UTC)I remember another writer saying they decided in one work to default to female and only make a character male if there was a reason (with a really low bar for "reason", such as "it makes this scene easier to write because the two people in it will use different pronouns"), and among the feedback was asking if it was set in a matriarchal dystopy, because all the men were gone. What does that say about the usual male-default fare we're offered...
0_o
Date: 2014-05-15 06:05 pm (UTC)Creepy.
But then I freaked out the entire population in the Carl Brandon party at Wiscon once: Someone asked what stories we'd written with no white characters. Everyone named one or two stories right off the top of their heads, or in a few cases, several stories. I named one, paused, named another, paused, and kept going like that. And then they were all staring at me. I had to stop and explain that I did not file my stories by character race and had to mentally sort through them all. Apparently that's not what everyone else was doing. Then it came out that their stories with no white people were all "about" race in some way, whereas most of mine were like that because I'd set them in places where there simply weren't any light-skinned people around. I was kind of bothered that nobody else seemed to be doing that. Everyone else was looking at me like I'd grown another head.
I've done the same thing with gender. I've written stories with all guys or all girls or all some other gender, or a mix that leaves out this or that. Some settings are mixed-gender and others are genderspace. It depends on the needs of the story. Once in a while I'll do a story "about" gender but usually I am just writing about people of uncommon genders who are having adventures the same as more typical gendered characters. I have a handful of characters with uncommon gender traits in Polychrome Heroics, but Calvin/Calliope is the only one I can think of for whom that is a primary focus. For the others it's just part of who they are, which may come up occasionally but not all the time.
>> What does that say about the usual male-default fare we're offered... <<
That we're living in a dystopic patriarchal rape culture?
Re: 0_o
Date: 2014-05-15 06:28 pm (UTC)I don't write nearly enough, but at least the probably best-developed corner of one of my worlds is a country where light-skinned people are a tiny majority, so a lot of stories taking pace there not featuring any of them would be likely.
I'm reminded of comments I've seen on people asking for more inclusive books, that characters of color, or QUILTBAG characters, should only be in a story when them being "that" is important to the plot, otherwise it's just distracting. I just... Damn, I should write up a blog post comparing that with demanding no protagonist may be male, unless the story is about him grappling with the whole male gender role nonsense, such as in Billy Elliot.
Re: 0_o
Date: 2014-05-15 06:35 pm (UTC)It's okay to say that's the only kind of story they want to read, because taste is personal. It's not okay to say "should only be" because nobody -- not even an editor -- has the right to make declarations for the whole of literature.
>> I just... Damn, I should write up a blog post comparing that with demanding no protagonist may be male, unless the story is about him grappling with the whole male gender role nonsense, such as in Billy Elliot. <<
Go for it. It's time somebody talked about the damage of default. If you write it, let me know and I'll link.