#katetakes

[upagainstthesunset]

Any new Orion depiction worries me when I know a "true face" reveal is coming. One of the main things about him is that he hides his real face because HE believes it is too monstrous to behold. In universe it does shock people, but out of universe the concern is how the writer or artist decides what he will look like. Saying that he is a beast, shameful, must be hidden away and then showing a face that some people may identify with would be terrible. And to a certain extent there is no avoiding it because someone somewhere might share some traits.

But a lot of us prefer the in universe reading of his true face being nontypical and definitely not fitting the norm for New Genesis (everyone is traditionally beautiful in an irl western sense), but the key difference is that it's not actually as bad as Orion thinks. All of the ugliness is internalized and projected, he struggles to unpack and separate where he is from, his nature, who he is, and his face.

I've gone on about this before, but like it or not, our faces are the thing most of us identify with. And they're certainly what strangers see us as first and foremost. We are human, and our human brains make snap judgments. And Orion would be shocked if anyone was able to look past that initial judgment. Even to his closest friend, he fears showing what he thinks represents the worst aspects of himself.

And so from a writing point of view, it has to be a balance. It has to be handled so carefully. Orion should not have a face meant to scare the audience. If anything, he should be written to be complex, to not fill the role of movie monster, to be more than what he looks like. And if the writing is strong, it will swing 180 and instead of putting facial differences in a negative light and leaving it at that, it can show the value in looking beyond someone's face to see who they truly are.

[upagainstthesunset]

I am once again reminded how much it feels like speedsters could be incorporated further into the Fourth World. And no I'm not talking about the multiversal map and the stupid speedforce barrier or the bleed or any of that. Im talking VIBES. Theres something so elemental and fun but with an undeniable twist of angst about being a DC speedster, and the style of it slots right in with the other goings on of the gods. But of course they themselves are merely Earth humans, not gods... Or are they? I think the more that writing over the years has developed what it is to be connected to the speedforce yet to live a human life is actually not too far off from what we might see in a good 4W story. And aside from that, even if we look at the individual characters, each one of them would be fantastic to have a 4W arc and become immersed in that world. I'd really love to see it. It's been danced around so many times but I'm waiting for a writer to come along and galaxy brain a full story about it. Exploring what it is to be accepted, to be family. Exploring what it is to be living on a plane that other peers dont or cant understand. Exploring having a connection to this ultimate and yet mysterious power that could consume you. I would like to see it.

[upagainstthesunset]

At this rate DC's so obsessed with characters having biological children, Jeremy Adams is gonna write a Superman book where Ma and Pa Kent have a baby together

[upagainstthesunset]

I saw a post that said "skill gap" or something similar, but I was scrolling by so misread and thought it said "kill gap". And for a moment I lived in a world where there was discourse about characters getting together but not having done roughly the same number of murders, and therefore it was problematic.

[upagainstthesunset]

Question for the room. Do you consider Metron old? Like not actual age because he's thousands of years old, we know this. I mean the vibes. Do you think of him as an old man? Maybe not as old as Highfather but he's certainly not a young god. So what is he? Middle aged? Older? What's the mood here fellas?

[upagainstthesunset]

I really appreciate how in the end, there really weren't any non Fourth World characters in Kirby's New Gods and Hunger Dogs. A lot of it takes place in Metropolis, but Superman isn't there. No other Earth heroes pop up to obligatorily remind us it's a DC capes book. And Hunger Dogs doesn't even feature the other Fourth World main characters (would've been nice to tie up their loose ends, but it is what it is). It was about Orion. It was about Darkseid. And even with whatever editorial nonsense happened with the graphic novel, it stayed true to its focus. From a story writing perspective I've really come to appreciate when creators decide they don't actually need every single Cool Idea or every Fun Cameo. I like a succinct story. Sometimes that can come across as simplistic, but to me it feels more fabled and i already used this word, but focused.

[upagainstthesunset]

I do really appreciate that the end of Hunger Dogs, which concluded Kirby's work on the Fourth World, was left on a vague yet positive note.

And then when I read Ram V's final page of his New Gods run, it was very reminiscent in a way. Not sure it was intentional, but in both after the smoke clears and the question of "what happens next for these people" is begging to be asked, we see Metron. It ends on Metron providing a future, a way forward. Potential.

I wish that the run after Hunger Dogs had continued the story, but Starlin all but ensured that wasn't going to happen because he wanted Cosmic Odyssey to be the Fourth World's canon, and then Evanier was voluntold to shoehorn Starlin's handful of issues in. And then at that point it's like well gotta keep going, plus the fans want to see more Orion, more New Genesis vs Apokolips, more Darkseid. So the ending that Kirby gave us was discarded for good.

I think it was Simonson who once said he preferred to write in a way that puts the toys back in the box rather than break all of them. It was Starlin who said Death of the New Gods was a mercy killing. Conway said he wrote the Return of the New Gods to be deliberately different in tone than the original, because why would he do the same thing as a book that was cancelled. Byrne made a point of starting his run from where things left off in the early 70s, which is probably the closest to a continuation we've ever received (for better or worse). And I'm sure all the other writers have gone on record about their own takes, I just don't remember off the top of my head.

You know, my original point with this had started out as a comparison of the original and the newest endings, but now I'm really thinking about how each writer has approached the work and how they've ended it. Could be a good topic for a full wordpress blog post later.

And I was also going to go into how cool it would be to see Hunger Dogs brought back into canon somehow. I mean, it's comics. Anything can happen. I just like the idea of exploring what stories might arise after Metron brings the new planet. Where would they end up? What conflicts would arise?

But we WILL get to see what futures unfold with Metron's newest offering of potential. Im so happy that something more awaits Orion, and this time we will actually have a next chapter to the tale that continues on rather than disregarding whatever had happened immediately before. Ram has done a lot to bring in small pieces of many past runs, but of course has created his own origin and mythos along the way. But as far as being respectful of everything that has come before, and playing with all the proverbial toys instead of leaving them in the box to collect dust, I think he's done a fantastic job.

[upagainstthesunset]

Something funny about discord is when the conversation in a nsfw channel gets off topic for a while, then someone says something like "anyway, none of that was nsfw so uhh blowjob. Okay we're back on track"

I imagine that happened on old message boards and irc back in the day too. The beauty of human nature 😌