#heresyposting

Originally, I was very interested in the Christian canon. I grew up in Utah, almost everyone I knew had some sort of connection to the church. Everyone knew each other from there, everyone had events and connections and stories that I never did coming from a more Celtic family. It was isolating in a very real way to be the only non-mormon kid in a classroom. I went to church several times and even had one on one lessons with missionaries for a fee months before giving up.

It's not that I don't like a lot of the concepts in Christianity- a lot of the imagery is very powerful and at its base a lot of the story has genuinely interesting structures, even if the actual wording is pedantic and dull.

(Its at this point I tell you that I was never at any point interested in Christianity as a religion, I just wanted context for what was going on in the world around me. I view the Bible and basically any other holy texts as fundamentally no different than the illiad or Romeo and Juliet- an old book that a lot of people have really complicated feelings about, removed from its original context but telling some sort of narrative that is still valid in the current cultural zeitgeist.)

That said, at some point so many people had so many different opinions that different authors (scribes, prophets, whatever) started writing their own versions of each of the texts, retconning characterizations and events and entire fundamental mechanics of the story that in some ways it became completely unrecognizable. Then, at some point down the line, someone decided to try and "reset" the canon, taking all of the most popular versions of the story and condensing it down to the least common denominator, creating "non-offensive", white bread characters to avoid telling anyone they are wrong. They stripped the story down from some breathing, beating thing and made a cardboard cutout of the original, and THEN stuffed it with enough propaganda that it nearly collapsed under its own weight.

And Marvel comics do the exact same thing, almost word for word.

And I hate it. I hate seeing something get so big because it resonates with an audience in a way that it wriggled into their very being, changing the way people define themselves and how they see the world around them, only for that success to trap it in an inescapable web of manipulation and greed that changes it irreparably.