#22.06.19

but it’s late and you’re still breathing and i’m still waiting on a break-through miracle cure, an unforeseen advance  in modern medicine

How do you move forward?

Time and time again, writers often ask characters this when they are in the same rut, are unable to move on with their lives and to find them in the situation in which it doesn’t let them to move on with their lives. Far too often people want more of the same, yet no real weight behind it or the water levels won’t reach till their knees. Writer Grant Morrison once wrote that Marvel was leaning more conservative when it came to their characters, especially with their X-Men titles, and as they fell in popularity, the company suffered for it. What began about a story about a group of teenagers who faced their world in the face of adversity, that they refused to buckle and give in to hate, to move forward until they reached adulthood. Since then it grew stale, and increasingly so.

“(The books) had grown from a rule-breaking, distorted pop group to a more careful, cautious approach, afraid of change that kept them linger in the past.” Grant Morrison wrote in a manifesto, aiming to explain their ideas for the X-Men book when he took over in the really early 2000s. The problem was that the X-Books had grown static where dead characters returned to life, the mourning stages only lasted 3 panels, and the dead would return to life once a new writer took over, and far too often it’s the same excuse: The character(s) was alive this whole time; they were clones, had powers to make clones, failed experiments who fought they were the real deal when in actuality the real character was kidnapped, had exact replica models of them to the exact cellular detail which includes character quirks and mannerism, flaws, and even memories. Nevermind that a character just died and people mourned, but that’s okay. Your tears means nothing, fictional or real.

So, why bring this up?

Because it’s something I keep thinking about when talking about my own characters in similar vein. When one of them dies, pass their cowl forward to the next in line, or vanishes without saying a word - It should feel impactful. If it’s a story about death, it should be meaningful and it should show about it changes the field. Death, by nature, is a traumatizing experience and it changes people. My goal, as a character creator, writer, and someone who thinks about all of my characters as if they are real people, is something I lean towards strongly. A strong example is a character of mine that failed saving his best friend from taking his own life, aiming to end the greed and corruption of the same criminal underworld they both grew up in and refuses to turn it into a circle of chaos and destruction. He had already gone into the deep end, and there was no light in the tunnel. The only way forward was to let others live, despite he never knew he could forgive himself for the violence he had committed. The one who survived fails, at first, to understand this. He looks back on everything that has happened. He had spent 20 years thinking what he thought was a good thing, a good deed, but failed to see the bigger picture, and now it was too late. His best friend was dead, and knew he had to change.