featuring my media obsession.

Don't cry. If you have become human enough to cry, then all the magic in the world  cannot change you back

Ask a historian, “What was mankind’s greatest invention?” Fire? The wheel? The sword? I would argue it’s history itself. History isn’t fact. It’s narrative, one carefully curated and shaped. Under the pen strokes of the right scribe, a villain becomes a hero, a lie becomes the truth.

“Survival requires sacrifice.”

'Hey maybe now that Constantine's ex girlfriend is a queer Black woman, she shouldn't also be a thief and an addict. Let's not fall into that stereotype.'

'And maybe the nonbinary Desire could get, like, quasi-dream-consent from Unity Kinkaid instead of just flat out raping her in her sleep...especially now that Unity is a Black woman. Actually, wouldn't Desire want Unity to...desire...them before fathering the child anyway.'

'And what if The Corinthian fucks a guy and doesn't kill him because, like, maybe let's separate his queerness from the fact that he's a nightmare & serial killer.'

Look, I'm more than thirty years older than I was when I picked up Sandman #9 ("Tales in the Sand", Nada's story) at a rummage sale. I don't need to prove—and I don't need my fiction to prove—"realness" and "seriousness" by being all dark and gritty and mean just because Real Life is supposedly always dark and gritty and mean. In some ways I'm a LOT angrier than I was when I was sixteen, but the things I look for in fiction are not always exactly aligned with that anger anymore.

Which is to say that of the many memorable comics panels from that late-80s, early-90s period, this one from Grant Morrison and Chas Truog's Animal Man #26 ("Deus Ex Machina") is maybe the one I feel the most deeply these days.

And their WHOLE arc is about learning to protect each other, about learning that the survival of the group has to outweigh everything else. That’s the point of Bo and Scotty stealing food and then finally learning that they don’t have to, that the other boys won’t let them starve. That’s the point of the arc following the assault, where it revolves around the boys all deciding that as much as the detest what Seth did, they can’t just let him die in the woods alone, because they’re all in this together. They all decide to come together, even knowing what Seth did, until it’s revealed that Seth is too much of a monster for them to feel safe with him around. They gave him a second chance, until his lies come apart and they expel him for the good of the group.

And the boys also had to deal with one of their own being a monster, which the girls did not have to deal with. It’s easier to create a strong, familial bond when you trust that you’re safe with these other people. What Seth did to Josh broke the trust they had built. They come together and slay an apex predator. They’re clearly on their way to building a strong, close bond, and then it’s completely shattered by Seth. The tension we feel between them all comes from the sudden awareness that they don’t actually know if they’re safe together anymore. They thought that the one thing they could count on on that island was that, with literally everything else trying to kill them, the eight of them would be safe together, and that was ruined. That’s why, especially at first, it’s an all or nothing, us or him mentality. That’s why they fight over what to do with the fish, how to handle the situation with the lighter, etc. They aren’t just at odds with Seth now, they don’t trust each other at all.