Category: Writing

The Tell-Tale Heart: It has been alleged that I am insane, but I assure you, no madman could possibly have premeditated a murder as thoroughly as I did. Let me write down all the details for you.

The Cask of Amontillado: You remember that asshole Fortunato who was always rubbing my nose in how much richer and more successful than me he was? Yeah, this one time I murdered him as a prank.

Masque of the Red Death: Once a prince and a thousand of his noble courtiers sought seclusion from a plague ravaging the countryside and so retreated into an abbey with seven totally isolated apartments, six of which were bright and colorful and the seventh was, like, super cursed. A reanimated corpse showed up a to a masquerade ball six months in and the prince was like “a good stabbing will sort you out” and chased the Red Death into the cursed room and then everyone died of plague. Honestly, the weird thing is that it took this long for disease to catch up to a thousand people living in an abbey with seven apartments.

Murders in the Rue Morgue: My good friend proto-Holmes has discovered from interviewing those who overheard the deed that the perpetrator of the gruesome murders at the Rue Morgue spoke a language that none of them recognized. From this it follows that the culprit is obviously an orangutan.

The Pit and the Pendulum: Nobody expected the first torture porn to have been published in 1843.

The Raven: I found a parrot having a goth phase who only knows the word “nevermore” so I keep asking it if good things will happen to me and getting angry when it says no.

The Black Cat: I love animals so much. You wouldn’t believe how much I love them. I did tear a black cat’s eye out that one time but in my defense it did bite me. And yeah, I did then hang it, like, with a noose, but it kept looking at me with its one remaining eye and being scared of me and I don’t need that kind of judgemental energy in my life. But I love animals so much that I adopted a new suspiciously similar looking cat to make up for it. And sure, it reminded me of the cat I murdered so much that I tried to axe murder the cat and when my wife tried to stop me I axe murdered her, but see above regarding judgemental energy. I am focusing on self-care right now and I cannot let these toxic cats I keep adopting get in the way of that.

The Fall of the House of Usher: My good friend Roderick Usher’s sister died so I helped him entomb her and then read him a bedtime story. The house obligingly provided sound effects matching what was going on in the story, something which neither of us decided was worth investigation. Turns out we accidentally buried his sister alive and she was screaming and banging on the walls of the tomb. Long story short they’re both dead now.

The general consensus of the Death Note fanbase is that Misa Amane is an idiot that Light gets saddled with in order to throw the delicate balance between him and L back into uncertainty, thus keeping the story interesting. The general narrative purpose of Misa is definitely accurate. She’s not as smart as Light, but she has more supernatural power than he does, which means she represents both a chink in his armor and a potential opportunity for him. She’s also obsessively in love with him, which means Light’s only choice for passing on that package is to kill her, which would cast a shitton of suspicion on him, further incentivizing to accept Misa’s assistance.

But while Misa Amane is not as smart as Light Yagami, she is smarter than you. It’s predictable but still annoying how many fans arrogantly assume Light’s perspective on this, that Misa Amane is an idiot far beneath their own level of intelligence. In fairness, Misa herself projects this image. Like Light, she puts a lot of effort into her appearances, and the appearance she projects is that of a bubbly goth-pop idol, which means she intentionally comes off as kind of dumb. But her actions reveal repeatedly that she is smarter than average – she only comes off badly by comparison to Light and L.

Unlike Light, she is much less deliberate about her appearances. Misa would never spend a tennis match trying to figure out if it’s more or less suspicious if she wins or loses. For starters, tennis isn’t part of her goth idol style to begin with, but even if it were, she would blindly assume that there’s no way a tennis match could give any meaningful information to L about whether or not she’s (a) Kira.

And she is 100% correct. One of the things that sets Death Note apart from other media is how it shows intelligent characters, especially Light Yagami, going through the process of questioning assumptions about the world, including the part of the process where their initial assumptions turn out to be completely right. L can’t and doesn’t get any meaningful information about whether or not Light is Kira from that tennis match. Its only purpose in the story is to show that Light is constantly thinking about these things even when it turns out he’s in no danger at all, because an effective ploy to discover his identity won’t announce itself, so he has to be always on.

Misa, on the other hand, only stops to think about something when she sees some obvious sign of danger, and when she does that, she can come up with some really clever ideas. Sending a tape to news stations as Kira is obviously dangerous, so she stops and thinks about how to do it without getting caught and comes up with a good plan. She tricks an unnamed friend into getting her fingerprints on the Kira tapes, so not only did Misa leave no evidence herself, she’s put misleading evidence on the tapes instead. Now, if the police arrest her friend, the Kira murders will continue unabated. The tapes might be chalked up to another one of Kira’s supernatural powers, mind-controlling people to send messages. Misa also already knows this friend’s name and face, so she can tie off the loose end in an emergency – she offers to do so for Light. Considering how quickly she makes the offer, this is presumably her plan as soon as her friend gets arrested, since her friend has enough context to figure out what Misa did once she knows that her fingerprints appeared on the Kira tapes somehow.

Be real: You probably would’ve known to wear gloves while making the Kira tapes so that you wouldn’t leave any fingerprints of your own, but you absolutely would not have constructed a ploy to trick someone into planting their own fingerprints on the tapes in order to frame them.

Having done one smart thing, Misa then decides that the universe now owes her success, and makes no effort to get rid of the stamps, stationary, or pen that she used to fake the message, let alone make sure that any of the pollen on the envelopes is all stuff that can be found in the Kanto region, where Kira is by now publicly known to originate from. She’s not fully stupid with this, she keeps all that stuff in her room, but she isn’t anywhere near the paranoid overdrive that allowed Light to stay level with L long enough to get enough lucky breaks to eke out a win.

Every time Light gets frustrated with Misa being “stupid” it’s for something that no ordinary person would’ve ever thought of. He’s not angry that Misa is dumber than average because she’s not. He’s angry because Misa is dumber than him, that he could do better if he were in her position, and also because he’s a megalomaniac who lashes out whenever anything goes wrong for him. The closest thing to an actual dumb move Misa ever makes is when she forgets L’s name, but this 1) comes after two months of supernatural memory-erasure bullshit, during which she was unable to use the kinds of tricks people normally do to keep important information in their head over a long period of time.

And 2) this also comes at the part of the story when the emphasis on the real, practical intelligence of characters is totally collapsing anyway. The only reason Misa even reaches her hidden death note is because L has suddenly gone braindead and forgotten that he has tons of physical proof that Misa sent the Kira tapes and is definitely complicit in the Kira murders, and allows her to walk around totally unsurveilled. Yeah, yeah, there’s a fake rule in the death note he recovered that suggests Misa can’t possibly be using the death note to kill people, but 1) L immediately suspects that rule might be fake, something more in line with his usual level of intelligence, and 2) even if it didn’t occur to L that the rule might be fake until after he’s done this, all this proves is that Misa did not personally use the death note to kill anyone. She’s still definitely in on it, and letting her walk away unsurveilled could still let her provide critical assistance to Kira. Shinigami eyes work through photographs! A 2004 flip-phone is absolutely capable of killing L! I’m not marking Misa down for forgetting a name when L is also acting much, much stupider than normal.

Misa Amane is, similar to Light Yagami, a depiction of intelligence laid low by hubris. She gets what she wants for a while before ultimately losing everything because it turns out she’s not as smart as she thought she was. Like Light, she’s used to being the smartest person in the room and assumes that anything she tries will work the first time because that’s usually how her life goes. She goes up against the deep institutional knowledge of the police, cleverly jukes one method of getting caught, and then gets blindsided by three more that the police have worked out over a century of trying and failing and trying again, whereas Misa acted alone (her meeting with Light came afterwards) and only got one chance to get everything exactly right.

Some of the most well-known Lord of the Rings “plot holes” are actually very easily explained.

“Why didn’t they just fly the eagles to Mordor?”

Sauron has air units. Given the lack of any specific numbers given for the number of eagles, the number of those hell-hawk wyvern things the ringwraiths ride around on, and how far off Sauron’s lidless eye would’ve been able to see the eagles coming, we have to assume that all those numbers work out in favor of the conclusion that informed characters in the story come to: Sneaking the Ring in on foot is more likely to succeed than trying to punch through Sauron’s air defenses with the eagles.

“Why wasn’t Mount Doom guarded?”

It’s impossible to willingly destroy the Ring. Hobbits are significantly better ringbearers than Sauron ever accounted for and Frodo still couldn’t manage it. Gollum destroyed it by accident. The fumes from Mount Doom also make it difficult to climb and, presumably, preclude the stationing of orcs on its slopes or especially at the Crack of Doom itself. Frodo and Sam pass out several times on the way up. Sauron totally does surround Mount Doom on all sides with tens of thousands of orcs, and when he moves them away, it’s because he thinks Aragorn has the Ring and is using it to try and attack him at the Black Gate. So when he moves his orcs away from Mount Doom, it’s because he thinks he’s repositioning them so that they’re all between the Ring and Mount Doom, where normally half of them would be on the other side of Mount Doom from the Black Gate.

Super heroes are mythical figures. Their stories get told and a canon of their exploits and adventures gets built up from the stories that people like enough to bother retelling. Sometimes a definitive work is written that incorporates basically all of a mythical cycle in one text, like Le Morte d’Arthur, and sometimes the myths never get collected in one place but the overall life story of a character still emerges from all the different stories, like the Trojan War (of which the Iliad recounts only the crucial turning point, not the entire story).

For example, here’s the rough life story of Batman that has emerged from 100 years of stories:

Bruce Wayne’s parents, Thomas and Martha Wayne, are killed by a mugger in front of his eyes as a child. When he grows up, he dedicates himself to martial training, physical and mental discipline, and leveraging his wealth towards becoming the crimefighting vigilante Batman. Early on he’s angry and brutal, and his butler Alfred is his only confidant. His foes are organized crime gangsters like the Falcone Family, Penguin, and the Black Mask. As his career goes on he forges relationships with allies like Jim Gordon and Harvey Dent, and begins training an expanded roster of sidekicks who graduate into hero allies: Batgirl, Robin, Nightwing, Huntress, the Bat-family. Batman’s growing roster of allies allows him to finally start healing from seeing his parents die as a child, as he begins raising a family of his own, of sorts.

The relatively ordinary criminals who were his nemeses fall to the wayside under his caped crusade, but the power vacuum gives rise to a menagerie of more bizarre foes: Scarecrow, Mr. Freeze, the Riddler, Twoface (after a tragic accident disfigures Harvey Dent and pushes him over the edge), and most iconically, the Joker. Batman and the Joker fight for the soul of Gotham for at least a decade, long enough for Jason Todd to go from Robin to Red Hood. During this era, Batman joins the Justice League, becomes friends with other heroes but especially Superman.

At some point, Joker dies. The myths vary as to how, exactly. Sometimes Batman finally breaks and kills him, sometimes he gets himself killed in one of his fits of reckless showmanship. Regardless, once Joker’s gone, the fight for Gotham is basically over. Other supervillains continue on, but by this point defectors are starting to line up for Batman’s side. Catwoman, initially a wild card, is firmly on Batman’s side (though not a reliable ally). Red Hood, initially sided firmly with the rogues gallery, is now more or less on the Bat-family’s side. Talia al-Ghul flips sides completely and mothers the youngest of the Robins with Bruce Wayne.

Batman Beyond may or may not fit into the mythic cycle. It’s a specific work written with only the Animated Series in mind, skipping over the entire Death-of-Joker era (which the Animated Series didn’t have) to set up its post-Batman setting. Batman Beyond is well-regarded so the motive is there to try and incorporate it into the cycle, but it’s also hard to reconcile the state of Gotham City in Beyond with the unambiguous fact that late stage Batman has a huge reserve of sidekicks and hero allies most of whom are younger than him. What happened to Nightwing? What happened to Talia? What happened to Damian Wayne? Terry McGuinness is a really good Batman but it’s weird that he’s on his own with just an aging, physically incapacitated Bruce instead of playing Robin to Nightwing or Damian.

Anyway, the somewhat confused state of the end of the Batman cycle is both totally normal for mythic cycles and also doesn’t detract from the greater point. Nobody ever set out to gather all the Batman stories into one collected narrative, but people have told stories of young Batman and old Batman and a rough outline of Batman’s life has emerged from it all.

So what does all this have to do with Spider-Man? Well, Spider-Man’s been a more soap operatic character for a long time. The core of Spider-Man is the coming-of-age story, of learning how to wield the power he’s been given. Spider-Man can never seem to get past, at maximum, the age of about twenty-eight or so, and he’s noticeably falling behind his peers in standard life milestones by then, with no children and not even married. And it’s not because he doesn’t want these things. Black Cat offers very much to lead Peter into a life that rejects the standard social norms, and while he dabbles with the idea, he never actually does it. In the end, Peter Parker’s love interest is Mary Jane, not Black Cat, and the usual vibe of a Black Cat arc is that Black Cat misunderstands who Spidey is and why he is where he’s at. She assumes that Spider-Man is failing to marry Mary Jane because he doesn’t really want to, that he’s being pressured into pursuing it by societal expectation, but the course of the arc reveals that Peter Parker very much does want to be a regular boring member of society, he’s just crushed by the dual-burden of also using his superpowers to keep people safe from supervillains.

And if Peter ever gets past that angst and struggle, he won’t be Spider-Man anymore. People want Peter Parker to eventually figure things out and get to live a happy, balanced life, but there’s not really any story there, so we only ever see Peter in that 15-28 age range. Unlike Batman, there’s no phase where his rogues gallery crumbles away to leave behind a board full of allies arrayed against a shrinking number of enemies, and implicitly total victory is now imminent. Flash Thompson gets to mature from high school bully to a hero-without-powers, Eddie Brock/Venom gets to become an anti-hero who’s finally gotten over his vendetta with Peter, but Peter himself has to be tormented by angst, trapped in eternal purgatory, never able to grow past being a well-intentioned high school or college student who’s doing his best to handle the enormous responsibilities life has thrust on him.

Until Miles Morales. As originally introduced in the Ultimate comics, Miles Morales is a replacement for a dead Peter Parker. That’s a valid way to do his character, I guess, but it does mean that Miles tends to be basically just Peter Parker but again. Having no active Peter Parker to contrast against, it’s easy for Miles to gobble up all the usual Peter Parker things that people expect from a Spider-Man story.

The version of the story told by the Spider-Verse films, though, tells it differently. Sort of. It actually repeats the Ultimate plotline pretty straightforwardly for Blonde Peter Parker. But Blonde Peter Parker isn’t our Peter Parker. Our Peter Parker struggles under the burden of being both Peter Parker and Spider-Man, and frequently fails at one to pull out a win for the other, almost always sacrificing Peter Parker for the sake of saving the city as Spider-Man. He doesn’t have a high-tech spider cave, he has a shed. He’s Peter B Parker, the man who was never able to be there for Mary Jane or anyone else in his life as much as he wanted to be, because there was only one Spider-Man, and it had to be him who saved the city, every time, and usually there wasn’t any time left over to be Peter Parker after that.

Until Miles Morales. Now there is another Spider-Man. Now Peter can take the night off to be with MJ while Miles takes care of things. Finally, at long last, he gets to marry Mary Jane (yes, they did get married in the comics, but the relationship worked so poorly that even though fans utterly loathed the arc that decanonized it, they still never went back on it). He gets to raise Mayday Parker. He gets to have all those things that his myth cycle up until now has only portrayed him as wanting and not getting to have.

Like Batman Beyond, the Spider-Verse films are very hard to fit into the overall myth cycle of Spider-Man, although (also like Batman Beyond) they’re sufficiently well-received that people might damn well try anyway. That is, it’s hard to fit the events of the Spiderverse movies into the generic life and times of Peter Parker that emerges from what stories get retold over and over again. Spider-Man has the advantage that the entire second half of the protagonist’s life is basically blank, though. While the majority of Batman stories take place when he’s in his 30s, stories about Old Batman are very much a thing in a way that stories about Old Spider-Man aren’t, really, which means “what’s Peter Parker like in his 50s” or even “what’s Peter Parker like in his mid-to-late 30s” does not have an agreed-upon answer in the myth cycle so far, so although the Spiderverse answer is deeply incompatible with many, many other stories in a way that, for example, the Venom symbiote is not, the lack of competition means that Spiderverse might win anyway.

But even if the Spiderverse angle gets contained to the Spiderverse movies and gets ignored by other Spider-Man stories (like the Insomniac video games), I think Miles Morales is crucial to Spider-Man’s overall myth cycle. Spider-Man needs to be angsty, a mess, unable to keep up with all the responsibilities thrust on him by both his regular life and his superpowers. But if Miles Morales is the main character, then Peter Parker doesn’t have to be like that – he can finally get his ducks in a row, figure out his life, be Spider-Man part-time to help show Miles the ropes and provide backup for major crises but spend most of his time raising his spider-baby with Mary Jane and living a normal life.

To immediately qualify the clickbait title: There is a trend in modern Batman to make Harley Quinn into an anti-hero. Generally speaking she leaves the Joker for being an abusive boyfriend and strikes out on her own, often with help from Poison Ivy and/or Catwoman, keeping the general Harley Quinn style but fighting now for the good guys. This comes up in the Suicide Squad movies (particularly the good one, although the bad one did something similar, just without Joker being abusive – and there’s signs that the Joker was originally supposed to betray Harley Quinn but it was cut from the final movie), the Injustice games, and it’s the central premise of the Harley Quinn TV show.

Particularly in the TV show, though, the focus on Harley Quinn in particular highlights problems with the premise. Harley Quinn’s whole aesthetic is derived from an obsessive tailing after the Joker – if she’s leaving her abusive relationship behind, why isn’t she ditching that aesthetic? For that matter, Harley Quinn’s only superpower is being handy with a baseball bat and her primary skill is psychiatry, although plainly she’s not very good at that. You could rewrite her backstory so that she’s successfully rehabilitated some number of supervillains (even if they’re just D-listers like Calendar Man), but then you’re on the hook for writing the Joker such that he plausibly converted a psychiatrist who’s actually good at this, rather than a true crime fan girl with an obsessive streak that made her good at school but bad at medicine.

Fact is, the good ending for Harley Quinn is that she leaves the whole clown crime aesthetic behind to become a criminal psychiatry professor at Gotham University, teaching students without any more direct interaction with the super-criminals she has such a dangerous fascination with.

But while that’s a good ending for the story of Harley Quinn, it’s not going to carry a TV show. And the fact is, sexy female Joker-flavored anti-hero taking over the underworld is a cool premise. I can see why people want to wrench Harley Quinn into that role despite the rough edges. But the perfect character for literally exactly that was created in 1976: Joker’s Daughter, also known as the Card Queen.