A Lesson in Relativity

[thedeadlyhook]

A Very Happy Birthday to dessert_first and to romanyg!!

Here's an interesting exercise in perspective: while walking through the park today, Toys and I came across a feral cat sitting in some dead leaves. Strangely close to the footpath. We thought it might be hurt, and approached. But lo and behold, the cat wasn't hurt - it was, in fact, "playing with," as cats do, a very teeny-tiny mouse. What we'd thought was a victim was, in fact, a victimizer! (The mouse got away because we intimidated the cat enough to back off, so that's a story about the unintentional effects of blundering intervention, I guess.)

Which brings me to a string of interconnected thoughts.

Now, the penultimate episode of Who Wants to Be A Superhero? was perhaps the most emotional piece of TV I'd seen in a very long time - I cried, dammit, cried my eyes out practically that whole last half hour when they eliminated Major Victory. It was moving. But I was kind of disappointed in the final elimination. I was rooting for Fat Momma by the end because she's a much more original character. She looks different, her powers are different, she's got a different outlook. I'd read her comic book. Hell, I'd volunteer to write it! Feedback, though, nice as he seems and the comic-book-geek angle aside (which, I note, didn't work all that well for that Green Lantern manifestation that comics fans tend to refer to, not-so-affectionately, as "Crab-Face Kid"), is yet another white guy who's dying to play quarterback. And, y'know, I'm kinda bored already.

What's so different about Fat Momma, though, you might ask? Simple - she's a defender, a momma, like it says right there in her name. She's there to protect kids from bullies and to inspire them to have self-esteem. That was her power. She grows to enormous size, and that's a power you only can use for two things: rampaging, or to play blocking action against other huge menaces. Think sumo wrestlers. Or Godzilla, and it's worth noting that his career contains both.

I would've liked to have seen that done in a comic. The hero mom who takes down the bullies. Go, mom.

That, though, leads me to thinking about Buffy, so I'm gonna put that under a separate cut.



So part of this was inspired by a discussion I was having over at herself_nyc's journal with auroramama about Character Archetypes, which is another post, but it did start me thinking about the panel about Character Archetypes at writercon, where I'd put forth the notion to the audience that Buffy was brand-new archetype, not really something there was huge precedent for. To my surprise, the audience disagreed, and rolled out examples from Whedon interviews in which he'd claimed to have based the character on The X-Men's Kitty Pryde, and also Wonder Woman. At the time, I didn't really have a good response ready (yep, I should've prepared more), but after further thought, here's a reconstruction of where I'd been going with that thought.

Buffy is a Defender character. See above, e.g., Fat Momma. She's a goalie, the person guarding the gate. The gate to HELL, of course, the Hellmouth - she has a fixed location, a fixed populace who she is meant to protect.

This is unusual. It really is. If you read your Joseph Campbell carefully, the one thing people always seem to miss about the archetypcal "Hero's Journey" is the "journey" part - it's meant to be a representation of the coming-of-age stage of life. The boy leaves home, undergoes a ritual, and returns a man. LEAVES HOME. Exit the nest. Goes on a literal journey.

Buffy doesn't leave home. She IS home. Protecting the nest.

Wonder Woman, on the other hand, does leave home. Comes of age, leaves Paradise Island, goes to the outside world. So does Kitty Pryde. Gains her powers at adolescence, leaves home to become an X-Man. Both of these characters are on heroes' journeys in the classic sense. Buffy too, can NOW be seen to be on a hero's journey - the last shot of the series, after all, shows her facing an open road. So Buffy finally leaves home, starts her literal journey, and she even picked up a magical hero's weapon just before that. Now she fits the Campbellian model.

But before that? She was definitely something else. A hero, yes, but not the journeyman-quarterback-questing-hero type. She was the guardian at the gate, protector of our home fires. And that IS original, or at least a type without a lot of other examples*, because America is not culturally in the habit of making iconic heroes out of its moms. Or at least, only lionizing them after they've given their all and died. Sad to say. (Which actually leads me to wonder if the reaction to BtVS would've been different, in a Women's Studies sense, if the show had ended with "The Gift," and if so, what that says about us culturally?)

*Doctor Strange was the one comic-book hero I could think of that really fit the same bill as Buffy, as a gate-guarder; Batman, Spider-Man et al only seem to stay in a centralized location chiefly because they live there rather than a particular need for it, although you could make a certain case for Batman being Gotham's Fat Momma.

Comments

[thedeadlyhook.livejournal.com]

You know, I think we just had the same conversation over here, trying to think of every heavyset character in comics. : )

There was also Mr Monster, who gained weight after he (unbeknownst to him) married a vampire, and she fattened him up with home cookin'.

Of those, I think only Volstagg and the Blob, though, fit the Defensive Linebacker powers model. I think Bouncing Boy would count as an offensive lineman.