When I came up with this blog it was supposed to be a place to help me deal with the minor annoyances, vexations and oddities that come with being a modern citizen of the internet. I'd rage at the stupid silly things that came across my various social media sources and get a good chuckle out of the process. It was a way for me to be negative about the things I was seeing on the internet that angered me in a positive way, fully knowing they weren't extremely important. For awhile I also took a stab at positivity with some of the other posts that happened here. Especially during Women's History Month. But now I'm back and oh boy, do I have some opinions on some silliness that's been occuring lately strap in ladies, gentlemen and non-binaries because this is going to be a long one! Unfortunately, I think the topic we're dealing with today DOES matter. That's why I'm mad. It deals with critical thinking in fan culture and a frustrating level of cognitive dissonance.
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| And so... it starts. -_- |
Let's start with my opinion here because lord knows I've got one. The question you're probably asking is, do I think it was right to take the ad down. Well here's your answer.
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| Obvious yes is obvious no? Wait... |
The Reactions
Alright, in order for me to cut this apart we're going to need to first look at the dumb reactions that set me off in the first place. Please understand what follows is opinion but nevertheless some folks are probably about to have their fee-fees hurt.
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| Oh LORD did I miss getting to use this thing! |
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| Pictured ladies and gentlemen, the meme you have to blame for this particularly effusive rant! |
Sweet merciful heavens where do I even begin with this thing? This meme is like a poster child for all the things I actually loathe about memes. It's shallow, lacking in an ability to engage in critical thinking or analysis, ignores any concept of context and wallows in a level of smug, glib condescension that smacks a juvenile's need toward self-importance and agrandiizement. How utterly fitting that it have Deadpool as a spokesperson. Deadpool; the poster child for juvenile, glib self agrandizement. The major difference here however, is that Deadpool is actually funny. There's several serious problems with this and I'll come back to them later at the end when I'm done raging with a hint of sarcasm in the writing here but do you know what this argument sounds suspiciously like to me?
It sounds a lot like the people who whine at POC's when we point out the problematic nature of white washing in films, or POC life and death in stories being used solely to motivate the white leads and willfully refuse to understand why it's a problem but then pitch a hissy fit when a black actor gets cast as a historically white character or when a formerly male character is reimagined as a woman calling reverse racism or reverse sexism or *gasp* hypocrisy! I swear I feel like this meme crawled out of the hairy unwashed jock strap of a reddit forum with its fedora tipped, screaming "M'lady," at the top of its lungs. This meme comes from the same place as the people bitching about a female ghostbusters, a black Heimdall or Human Torch and claiming that people who would be mad at a white Black Panther are hypocrites in that case. Hint: They're not and I think that I shouldn't have to make clear AGAIN why that's the case.
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| Pictured, a near accurate reenactment of my reaction to that meme above and deciding the line had to be drawn somewhere! |
But nevertheless I've seen this shitty meme spouted off routinely by people I'd have NEVER expected to share it. People who would never fall into that reddit style sewer. People of great intelligence and fortitude of thought who's momentary cognitive dissonance made me wonder how a black hole didn't open up and swallow them from the level of fracture it should have caused. Some are even utterly brilliant people which just goes to show even a finely tuned sports car can have a hiccup now and again. For whatever reason this caused a few usual rational people to miss an some important points.
Now we come to another reaction meme and this is the first one that I saw.
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| I have trouble believing that "Kaos Amalgam" is this person's real name |
Once again I see the same bullshit arguments of "Stop ruining our fun!" "Stop reading so much into things!" "You wouldn't be this upset if X, Y, or Z conditions were different." To me, this reads much the same as some ignorant fucks saying, "not everything is about race" to derail legitimate discussions about how we handle racial issues in the U.S. because to someone dealing with the systemic affects of racism everyday, EVERYTHING is about race in one form or another. Similarly, when someone deals with sexism day in and day out yeah, everything is about sexism and confronting that is fundamental. You don't get to tell us to take comic book movies seriously and then say they don't mean anything or not to read into them. That's what you do with media when you take it seriously.
But let's talk about one of the major issues with this thing that I think a lot of people miss and on a certain level, it's because we don't teach pictoral literacy in school with art classes being cut constantly. The reasons that images like this are so problematic is because they rely on what I like to call visual cliche. And here's the thing, I've dealt with this sort of thing before. Fun fact, Magic: the Gathering had almost this EXACT same controversy a few years ago.
If you're unaware, MTG tells its story on hte cards but because of the nature of the game, often cards aren't seen in the contexts necessary to get the full measure of things. Especially when the same story is told over multiple cards. The two cards in question here are called Triumph of Ferocity on the left and Triumph of Cruelty on the right.
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| You really could teach a composition class with these two images |
It was one of the few times people have gotten seriously up in arms about a bit of MTG art in my memory and the images divided the community pretty strongly. Triumph of Ferocity even had a few MORE things going against it than the Apocalypse image does, including the fact that the composition wants to focus on the woman's (Lilliana's) face but just draws your eye to her boobs and the post felt to many, myself included kind of rapey. It even has the same mildly sexist (and I say mildly as an understatement) title/tagline thing going on. Triumph of Ferocity is a great card name in a vacuum but when coupled with a semi rapey image the connotations get uncomfortable and I think people grossly misinterpret why this is. It's not about not being able to show a woman in peril in the middle of a fight with a man, it's about how well you do it. Two things will get you forgiven a lot, context and technique and both are actually working AGAINST the image here. It's not about who's threatening whom to me. From an artistic standpoint, it's all about power differentials and visual depiction.
As I said before, if we're not careful as illustrators it's easy to go to the easy way out to solve an artistic problem. ESPECIALLY on a tight deadline when you need to put food on the table and pay bills. But we need to step up our game here because I'm not sure I could have come up with a more on the nose depiction to show a visual cliche in action and how it can get a negative reaction from even an immensely skilled artist like the one who worked on the image. When we're not careful the powerful male figure strangling the delicate seeming woman weakly struggling becomes that easy way out. This could have been solved by body language and compositional changes on the part of the woman in both the X-men image and Triumph of Ferocity. Both could have shown greater struggle and hinting at teh woman's ability to overcome the obstacle or a complete change in composition and image structure to avoid the cliche. Contrast this with Triumph of Cruelty where we see the ables have turned but the composition doesn't make the same mistake and make the male character seem as helpless a and submissive in his body language as the other image does. The low image, setting us below BOTH characters emphasizes that we are weaker than both characters and thus elevates their power. The focus is on the main character, Garruk, being strangled and grabbed and we see him struggling actively against the zombies with focus paid to his muscles and giving us a sense of his struggle. In Ferocity, the flat camera angle robs Lilliana of her powr in the composition. We see her readying a spell and her face contorted in rage but look how hard it is to see, even in that blown up image and her pinned down body posture with her arms spread doesn't read as effectively fighting. It reads as a subconsciously submissive body language and believe me, submissive is the LAST word you use to describe Lilliana. I understand the ire from both sides but as an illustrator I come down on the side that it's up to us to do right by our characters and treat them with the care in depiction they deserve and it's time to come up with a better way to picture conflicts like this. Want to know why I think that? Because Wizards has demonstrated before they can show these two in conflict without resorting to that cliche. Don't believe me? Here!
Full disclosure, this wouldn't have worked for the card art but it demonstrates my point about how there's not one singular way this interraction between the two of these characters could have gone down.
But "Arwin, you loquaicious degenerate you, even if I bought your point, that only deals with Collossus. He's struggling sure but how do you explain the dude in the bar?" I'm getting to that figment of my imagination I may have kind of strawmanned there but I don't think so because it's a valid question. Remember what I said about context? That scene is in the movie itself and we already know this guy isn't just some random schmuck. He's one of the two weakest characters in the movie in a fight but he has a massive amount of pull with the mercs in the story and half a second later everyone in the bar has a gun drawn on the the woman strangling him. Unlike Mystique, he was in no real danger and we knew it because it wasn't sitting out unaccompanied on its own. More on that in a minute.
And now we come to the serious stuff. The big point I've been building to and saving for this. A lot of people calling this capitulation to SJW's (Social Justice Warriors) or claiming that this is another example of how easily offended we've become or claiming that this was just done because some people are abusing the term "triggering" I think missed the real reason for the outrage. First of all, the images the first meme I showed cite from Deadpool were both in the movie proper. They weren't used in the ad campaign and thus, shown divorced from their contexts. That's why I know the problem wasn't with Apocalypse strangling Mystique. Because nobody called it out in the movie. Folks were just as fine with that as they were with the stuff in Deadpool.
The issue here is that it was set on a billboard, devoid of context with the line, "only the strong survive." Mystique is given no sign that she has the ability or agency to prevail and thus, the image tells us that she is unlikely to survive and that she is not strong. That she is, in fact, weak. And on some level, this also invalidates the arguments in the second meme. Because if it were a male character, they wouldn't be meekly holding onto Apocalypse's arm. Wolverine would be digging in his claws, Cyclops would be shooting off his optic blasts, Gambit would be brandishing a playing card etc. Mystique doesn't seem to be afforded the same chance to be fighting. Heck, Even Xavier would probably have his finger to his temple in the universal symbol for "Telepath doing telepath things!"
Furthermore we're talking about a company using violence perpetrated against it female lead to advertise and sell. To me, and I'm not sure that some of the people arguing in favor of the billboard's removal have articulated this or done so in the clearest manner, that's the most damning problem. Think about that for a second! Think about it that in a society that has women killed for refusing to date men, a society that threatens women with violence for merely walking down the street in tight clothing or little clothing (I can't be the only one who remembers Mystique is nude most of the time) what that says about how little we value women when we're ready to make a spectacle of the violence against them and we have them meekly submitting to it rather than actively working against it to sell tickets to a movie. Especially when Mystique's character is one defined in the comics from what I understand, by guile, ambition and extreme cunning befitting Magneto's right hand spy.
So this isn't about hypocrisy. This isn't about SJW's trying to ruin your ability to tell stories (And I hate to keep harping about it but I bet people complained about some similar pejorative term for people who care about moving society forward trying to get people to stop doing black face in movies too), it's about how a company lacked the foresight to understand that their ad played in some ugly, sexist, visually cliche space and not recognizing a massive out of context image could have a negative impact in the real world.
But on another note as to the absurdity of the violence against men by women being okay while the violence against women by men being cringeworthy double standard I just have to ask some people what fucking rock they've been living under! Yes it's a double standard. To quote a comedian I like a great deal, those are about the only standards we have! Just like slavery and its legacy are part of the reason white washing is shitty but POC moving into roles previously monopolized by non-POC is kind of cool, the enduring patriarchal dominance of western society is the reason Collossus gets to be slapped around a bit but this billboard causes problems. It's called punching up in comedy and it's important to examine here. Yes, violence against men by their partners happens both male and female but when I can go to google and get over 200 million hits for searches about women being violently assaulted by men for the most trivial of reasons and even the first stories when I search for men assaulted by women actually deal with the former rather than my search, there's a problem.
In a world where Ke$ha's producer, Bill Cosby, James Dean, Johnny Depp and others who've assaulted women and gotten off scot free or relatively scot free there's a problem.
In a world where Daniel Hortzclaw spent years abusing women and nobody cared to stop him until years later there's a problem.
In a world where just this fucking week the Standord rapist was sentenced to only 6 months for raping an unconscious woman, of which he'll only serve 3 there's a fucking problem!
But please, continue to propagate a meme that completely ignorese all of this in an attempt to seem clever but fucks it up to high heaven and just comes off looking misogynist.
I await your angry responses in the comments.
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| I promise you I'll be quite unbothered. |
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