buffer-overrun reblogged your photoset
Ugh, I’m so ambivalent about this story arc. Constantine is such an unalloyed dick. (Maybe because I’m still catching up on a lot of the intervening issues from the 90s, and early Constantine is really not this vengeful? cold? violent?)
Also, like, do I like it as bisexual representation? He’s kind of a psycho. Though I’m also deeply suspicious of the idea that everybody who isn’t a model citizen better stay out of the limelight. (Through a weird series of events I was invited to be on the Maury Povich show when I was 21 as part of Marjorie Garber’s book tour for Vice Versa, and I said no, because I basically thought I was the worst possible example of a bisexual and would set the whole movement back.)
But the idea of Constantine playing the femme fatale (instead of the hard boiled detective) is very appealing. He is someone who is willing to use (and use up) his body and his soul in whatever is the most expedient way, so it makes a lot of sense.
Also evil Bruce Wayne is a genius idea.
Like there’s so much going on with this arc, and so much of it is from someone other than John’s POV (like, John is an unreliable narrator to begin with, and then so much of the rest of the John/Stanley stuff is built on other people’s accounts, including Stanley’s, who probably should not be trusted on principle), so I literally never felt like I was getting a real grasp on wtf was actually going on, and how much of the most disturbing parts were actual John Constantine personality vs John Constantine Playing A Role (and/or John Constantine Dealing with the Stress of Playing a Really Difficult Role in a Very Damaging Way). For instance, the stuff about John coming off as a brutally violent control freak...I mean those are not character trait I would have genuinely attributed to John based on his behavior in other issues, either the violent or the control freak part.
And then, SW Manor is 100% a horrible person, but I almost get the feeling John doesn’t even really care so much about that. Like he wants to screw Stanley over for personal revenge reasons, which is understandable, and he does it in a very calculated and precise way that I don’t actually think is beyond John (who has screwed over a lot of people similarly underhanded and brutal ways though not...perhaps so literally). John’s there to seduce him, sure, so he’ll be vulnerable enough to kill (I mean they were never going to arrest the guy), but it’s not out of a sense of justice or ‘doing the right thing’ or anything. Maybe that’s why people tend to be weirded out about it, aside from how personal and vicious the whole thing is? I don’t feel like John seeks revenge all that often - he does shitty things to protect himself a lot, he occasionally does things to protect people he cares about or to do damage control for someone else, but it’s rare that he seeks out people who’ve screwed him over, y’know? At least not in a long-game situation; he usually gets even very quickly, if that’s what’s going to happen.
As for bisexual representation, man, that’s the worst thing to try to get out of Hellblazer, honestly. John’s bisexual and I will go to the mat on that argument, so everything he does he does as a bisexual (human disaster), and in some ways that’s the best kind of representation, that’s he’s just a dickbag with that as an element of who he is, but hardly the main story. And there is historically some great subtextual stuff about how obviously he’s part of the queer community, even before the “odd boyfriend” line.
But when the only m/m relationship we actually see him in is one a) based on deceit, entrapment, and unhealthy obsession; b) full of purposefully off-putting BDSM stuff (which is like, fine, consensual, and hardly the worst part of that relationship, but you know that’s not how it was meant to come off); and c) with a child murderer/molester, well, like, that’s pretty much every negative bisexual cliche in one charming bundle (deviant promiscuity & danger to society, etc, etc).
I mean on the one hand John taking on the femme fatale role is fascinating, and kind of refreshing narratively, like, way to make use of an inherent, long-ignored part of a character and integrate it into a very old-fashioned noir convention in a way that shakes things up a little. (Interesting note: I watched the second Sin City movie right around the same time I read this arc, so they’re kind of linked in my mind, and feels totally in tune, if only Sin City wasn’t so aggressively hetero about everything).
But on the other hand, because that aspect of John’s sexuality (that he’s attracted to and sometimes bangs dudes) is so rarely brought up in text, the fact that it was here, purely as a manipulative tool (on John’s part) and for the shock value (on the writer’s), runs the risk of making his bisexuality seem like another facet of John’s ‘I will use any means necessary to claw my way through life’, like, he’s not actually attracted to men but he’s willing to sleep with one who’s obsessed with him for his own gain. (And this isn’t an idle concern on my part, btw: I have actually seen this argument/explanation used w/r/t to this arc, and with John in general: that he sleeps with men not because he has actual desire to, but to get something out of it.)
And hell, maybe that was the intent, at least in this particular arc (I’ll argue that in earlier issues it was more about further distancing him from the traditional Straight, Upstanding, Moral Englishman model of heroism). But I found it really off putting, while at the same time being reluctantly supportive of it generally for serving as a reminder that John is bisexual.
tl;dr - NOT MY FAVORITE HELLBLAZER ARC. Not actually all that glad it happened, except as the reminder that John is bi. Hoping for better representation in Constantine: The Hellblazer, ‘cause we’re not getting it in the show (*sobs*).
