I say this as someone who still occasionally pulls up a YouTube video of a supercut of 300 up against the song "Tangerine Speedo" to emphasize the accidental homoeroticism of the movie, just for giggles: it's a graphic novel. Art oversimplifies to make its points, and graphic novels are no stranger to that. Perhaps they are even the best example of doing so.
That it doesn't align with your personal politics at the time is not a crime. It's not even interesting. I can imagine fewer things more boring than someone going over a work with a fine-toothed comb looking for violations of their own personal Hays Code. None of them will turn that level of inspection on their ideological pets, only their "problematic faves."
I dare her: do romance novels next, and do it from a men's rights perspective. I've read my fair share of them, they're all a real crapfest if you want to think of men as actual people instead of living props in the Happily Ever After each heroine is owed. But that doesn't sell clicks on Polygon.
It's ok to go through 300 to laugh at homoeroticism, but not ok to discuss the points that art is trying to make when it oversimplifies?
My only problem with this is the cultural critic's insistence on assigning everything they enjoy with a complex intellectual meaning and significance. It's self-praise, in the guise of analysis, used to rationalize the sheer amount of time spent consuming popular products of the culture industry.
Isn't this insistence what we teach kids though? We make them read and analyze novels even when they have little context to put those ideas into. You can read too deeply into everything, even when it isn't the author's intent.
On the other hand, some of the things in popular culture are what teach us about what the world is like. For example, I would wager that more people are taught what guns are like by video games and movies, than the actual physical objects themselves. This means that there is some purpose to analysing popular products from a variety of angles. It might teach us new things about the world. We probably do it from the same few (political) angles too often though.
There is a reason to read for what it says to you, rather than what the author says or even what they say it says. The art means whatever it means to you.
Teachers often teach that very badly, but the lesson is buried in there. Discover what you like, then inquire about why you like it and how it does that.
It's not about teaching you about the world. It's about teaching you about yourself, and then about other people.
The problem is how expensive these products (especially the specific cases of books, AAA games and movies) are to produce, and monopolies on distribution. The messages that they communicate are the closest thing to actual direct mega-corporate speech that exists. The institutions who produce these things are the bad guys. Their primary messages are optimistic happy consumption to defy death, or cynical world-weathered resignation to unavoidable consumption.
All of this speech comes from like 10 world-spanning companies and everyone is on everyone else's board.
Books and indie games usually aren't much different, because they are imitative of the dominant content owners. A world of fanfic. And of course, in the case of books, the world has about 4 publishers that sell 80% of them.
The problem is how expensive these products (especially the specific cases of books, AAA games and movies) are to produce, and monopolies on distribution.
Books aren't expensive to publish like theatrically released movies and AAA games. According to the 2019 Publishers Weekly ranking of global publishers, Penguin Random House issues 15,000 titles a year with revenues of 3434 million Euros (2018). That puts cost-per-title well under $0.25 million whereas AAA games start at tens of millions per title. I don't know if ROI is similar but initial cost to bring a new work to market is much lower for a book.
Not to mention that, despite the terrible ways they manipulate it, Amazon's self-publishing programs are genuinely cheap and reasonably easy to use. And if you don't need to make money from your art, you can host it at any number of sites for free or your own for more time than money.
No one is saying it's a crime, and actually no one is going over the work with a fine toothed comb looking for violations -- these things stand out plain as day to readers who are disappointed to only see people like themselves caricatured or reduced to mere plot devices in works that they had come to cherish.
I don't think the article is good, either; in fact, I think it's pretty lazy, but telling a woman to go read romance novels and complain about them instead feels... reductive.
A person will feel the urge to criticize something if they care about it. She's criticizing comic books because she loves these comic books. She probably doesn't care about romance novels. Instead of saying "Go criticize romance novels instead!" have you considered, well, having someone who likes romance novels criticize romance novels for you? It'd be way more effective.
I use computers. I relentlessly criticize software. I wouldn't be able to do a good job at it if I was told "Oh, you have criticisms of modern software? Go critique architecture from your lens!"
This woman knows comic books. She loves comic books. She has some criticisms about comic books. This doesn't mean she knows or cares about romance novels. I use computers. I love computers. I have some criticisms about computers. I don't know the first thing about architecture.
Paying people to complain about things has never made much sense to me. Roger Egbert was the laziest form of entertainment. Reviews are pointless in an era of ubiquitous communication, and public critique never truly leads to better art as much as it leads to safer art.
I'm against the article's existence, but I'm also against the idea that the author should be told to complain about romance novels, too. The criticism of the criticism is bad, but the initial criticism is still boring and offers nothing new.
Extraordinarily rarely; it's even quite rare (outside of novels catering to specific fetishes) for a lead male character to not be quite successful in whatever their life-activity currently is.
> I dare her: do romance novels next, and do it from a men's rights perspective.
There is some weird gatekeeping in this thread. The blogger is a self-proclaimed lover of comic books writing a critique of Frank Millers work - and you demand she write about romance novels? Where is is suggested she even have any interest in that genre?
Boring and utterly uninteresting people that are deeply convinced their cliche ideas and prejudices are important are the most tiresome phenomena of this age of decadence of Occidental Civilization.
I wonder if the Roman Empire had the same problem, and if so, I think it died of boredom.
That it doesn't align with your personal politics at the time is not a crime. It's not even interesting. I can imagine fewer things more boring than someone going over a work with a fine-toothed comb looking for violations of their own personal Hays Code. None of them will turn that level of inspection on their ideological pets, only their "problematic faves."
I dare her: do romance novels next, and do it from a men's rights perspective. I've read my fair share of them, they're all a real crapfest if you want to think of men as actual people instead of living props in the Happily Ever After each heroine is owed. But that doesn't sell clicks on Polygon.