Peiratikos

Somehow I thought I’d write something meaningful before now, but somehow sleep and work and Christmas shopping and Christmas knitting and Christmasy giving got in the way. Odd. I do still have things to say about labelling and ratings, but for now go read about how the creators of Hotel Rwanda successfully fought for a PG-13 rating (New York Time subscription required, and the article may not be free by the time I get back, which is why I’m giving it now) and watch the director’s commentary to Saved and watch Whale Rider and think about its rating, and then you’ll be able to write that post for me and I won’t have to bother. Instead I can go out into almost-record snow to drive to Buffalo, New York, home of snow and winter weather, yet warmer than Kentucky last I checked. At least I hope I can, because it would be really depressing to be stuck in some motel in the middle of Ohio because the highways are closed or something like that.

Anyway, a week after reading Identity Crisis #7, I get to come back to it and remind everyone that I was Cassandra and that I’m unsurprised. Mostly for my own purposes, I’m going to just gather things I said leading up to the last issue here, just in case you really want to know what I thought.

After reading issue 4, I think the last I read before this final episode, I made threats about how angry I would be if Spectre was using singular “they” to avoid giving away the fact that the killer was one woman. And lo, this is a trick every bit as good as having Jean give herself away by knowing something she couldn’t have known. What a writer that guy is! Wow!

Here’s Steven’s post on misogyny where I talked a whole lot about reading and also about how the story could turn out to be good and subversive and probably wouldn’t. It didn’t. And I was right that the pregnancy subplot was a dead herring, but wrong that I would stick with the series.

And how did the sexual assault tie into this, since its inclusion is the reason I felt morally obligated to read the story at all? Not a lot, and I briefly touch on my thoughts about that in this comments thread. And by the way, it’s really driving me crazy to have see people implying they themselves are sensitive and pro-woman while constantly saying “assrape”, and I pick on ADD only because I’ve seen him use the term several times, but he’s not alone. (As an aside, why do so many men make rape jokes so much? Or do I just not hang out with the right women who are doing this too? There seems to be a gender divide and I know a lot of the theories, especially about the prevalence of prison rape jokes and homophobia in its most etymologically literalistic sense, but it still seems to me that they ought to be self-aware enough to be troubled by this. I’m troubled by it, but I don’t think that matters in a larger sense.) (As a second aside, I should probably check whether the text in Identity Crisis uses the term “rape,” because if this is the case there’s a good chance it could invalidate all the readers who want to argue this was a depiction of anal sex, but I can’t do it decisively because I don’t know the DC Universe legal code’s stance on defining sex crimes.)

Anyway, there’s probably more of it than that, but I feel sufficiently vindicated, or something. I thought it was poorly written and not well-drawn throughout and the story was ridiculously bad. And maybe I’ll find the missing issues and write about the ethics of mindwiping (which I learned last night also happened in the Marvel Mangaverse, although I accidentally dropped the book in the bathtub before learning the full consequences, and the pages seem amazingly porous) and bad portrayals of sexual assault, or maybe I’ll never write about Identity Crisis again, which would also be fun.

And speaking of fun, if your idea of it is digging out a car and then setting out on a car trip that could take twice the time it ought to and maybe involve closed interstates, you’re going to be awfully jealous of me for the next many hours! Steven has burned some cds and there’s good conversation to be had, and if it comes right down to it I’m willing to make the sacrifice of eating the cookies I’ve made to pass the time. So we’ll be back after the weekend, cold and exhausted and probably still happy, and maybe even blogging. Enjoy the break.