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]

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".