Comments on "An Open Rant to Aspiring Superheroes"

[jack]

http://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/896631.html

I liked seeing how suspicious many people were about the League of Superheroes in this story. I tried to make the other groups realistically varied, evil like hedge funds or illegal wars, with a fairly stable place in the world even if you don't like it, rather than like Demons of Pure Evil (which I think is a problem with many superhero stories). But I intended the League to be exactly as seemed: a bit ineffectual, but generally well-meaning and mostly trying to do a good job. I was pleasantly surprised I'd built in enough ambiguity people could see the world from a completely different viewpoint to me and the story still worked.

I was curious:

* How many people read the story
* If you did, which bits of the world you were curious about?
* Where you thought the League fell on a scale from "pure good" to "pure evil" :)

Comments

[simont]

I read it.

I specifically didn't have an opinion on the League, precisely because the story's framing was such that we only saw their own side of the story! Any announcement put out by a particular group which paints that group as having my best interests at heart is essentially neutral in terms of its effect on whether I think they actually do have my best interests at heart, because of course they'd say that whether they did or not.

If I were trying to make that judgment in the real world, I'd go and see what a variety of other sources thought of them, and also read their detailed reasoning and try to spot flaws in it myself using my own knowledge of whatever it was they were talking about. But, of course, here I don't have any other points of view to cross-refer to, and I don't have any knowledge of this 'superhero powerstones' system which doesn't come from the League's propaganda itself, so I can't do any of that.

So, for me, the League could perfectly well have been either sincere or deliberately trying to appear sincere, and nothing in the story distinguishes those cases. I had assumed that ambiguity was a more or less deliberate effect.

[jack]

Thank you! Yeah, that exactly makes sense. But it seems, sometimes people DO take first-person accounts at face value. I think I'd not realised there'd be a significant difference between a first-person account, and an in-world first-person account, but it makes sense there would be and I'm quite pleased how it turned out.

[simont]

Yes, I think there's some kind of a subtle difference between first-person statements made by a character to another character in the fictional world, and first-person narration of the whole story to the reader by a character; in the first case, you clearly have to keep in mind all the same possibilities for misremembering, exaggeration, self-delusions and outright lies as you would if a real person was telling you a story, whereas in the second case the first-person grammar is often implicitly intended by the author to indicate not "I am telling you a story after the fact" but more "you are seeing an accurate representation of the inside of my head as the events happen". (Not necessarily, of course – sometimes authors subvert that expectation by making the first-person narrator deliberately unreliable – but I think it's fair to say that when authors do just want to present the accurate view from inside the character's head, first-person narration is the usual way to represent that on the page.)

And even beyond that, in-story first-person accounts between individuals have a greater chance of being straightforward and honest than in-story organisational press statements, which even from well-meaning organisations are almost certain to have been carefully wordsmithed by PR people to ensure they're "on-message".

[ptc24]

It was a good read. I wanted to know about the further adventures of Rick Hardball, and his struggles to maintain a serious tough-guy image whilst being stuck with implausible baseball-themed superpowers. I took them more-or-less at face value - perhaps exaggerating when they said they had "the greatest overall power". I'd be suspicious of the claim that it all comes together when it matters - if there weren't conventions of the genre; if I put my genre-savvy brain theme, a motley bunch of ill-assorted heroes can totally save the day in the end, although at the price of great embarrassment along the way.

[jack]

:) Thank you.