My response to the recent “comics broke me” hashtag and related melodrama.
It’s bad when fans know of creator abuse but still grab their favorite titles, but when artists know these stories and still line up for work, they are enabling no matter what they tell themselves to sleep at night. My dreams coming true are not the responsibility or priority of others, and are really not worth the suffering of others. Aside from harms done by the big two, who are 100% responsible for the Hero Initiative needing to exist, comic books only break people who believe themselves too good to scrub toilets for a living. People working themselves into poverty and an early grave because their ego welcomes the hollow promises that getting rich and/or famous for their shit will magically happen to them where it failed to happen to literal thousands of others. It’s preferring a fantasy over reality, especially when the best that most can reach for is aping the works and careers of those who came before.
Nobody likes when I write with such airs, but the world isn’t burning while people indulge fantasy, it’s burning because of it. Fandom dwells in a denial, the reality escaped from being that none genuinely want new content, only for what little they’re already familiar and comfortable with to be prolonged or endlessly reenacted. As though no other interest exists, it’s mistaking personal taste for what is status quo or superior, and wherever their interests are not catered there must surely be an arrogance or ignorance to blame. Partisans in the world of politics do this all the time, showing how there is no leftism in governance of the western world, only competing shades of self-interest, of rightwing. When anything approximating a policy is concerned with denying rights and/or resources and/or opportunities to others, it is very much rightwing. Actual leftism prioritizes the needs of others as opposed to mandating whichever private bias, desires, fetishes, quirks, whims and wishes be replicated by others. Whereas rightwing ideology prioritizes wish-fulfillment, leftism affords nothing to esteem, because all merit and mettle are gone to those suffering actual tribulations more troubling than a slighted ego. It’s why right-wingers are so drawn to symbolism, always artificial, and always a thing to hide their shame underneath. The one reason I stopped conducting creator interviews years back was realizing I could insult any one of them, repeatedly, and it always went over their heads because one and all were they having one-sided conversations. Oblivious to everything outside the confines of their esteem. Hundreds of interviews, along with thousands of reviews all negative though worded in such ways that publishers thanked me, offering me opportunities to pitch which were always laughed off, for even the modicum of self-awareness negates all need for a surrounding cult of personality. My whole lifespan as a journalist can be concisely summarized as me attempting to prompt others into applying their creativity towards anything more productive than the avoidance of problem-solving.
There are things the world would not endure were its supply to vanish, but fantasy doesn’t rate. If you could truly fill your stomach with fantasy or with hope, all those self-inclined depending on their sell would learn firsthand the sadomasochistic irony to earning one’s living. Fantasies can be avoided, but the majority of peoples are reluctant to a fault of the reality where any addiction could and should be dropped. The fear encroaches by prospects of realizing that they are in fact no longer capable of generating thoughts or feelings without matters to replicate. I wonder sometimes, if the nostalgia they feel for whichever bygone era when artificial cultures did grant them satisfaction, is actually their remembering the last occasions where they could independently find value in a given thing, prior to them giving up the ghost for ignorant bliss. If goods were being produced to meet existing demands, marketing would be entirely unnecessary, because the people knowing what they want would be what prompts production of the goods. But society concerns itself with manufacturing demand to meet preordained goods, limiting beneficiaries as much as it diminishes freedom of choice for customers and audiences. Told what to think, what to feel, what your needs be.
I get nonstop ideas, I am ideaspace incarnate, but I don’t share most of it unless I’m saying something that has never been said or something that needs to be heard, and I always accepted how there’s no rewards to doing so, but rather than push costs for it onto others I take the real hits in this life. I come to the proverbial table prepared to offer a thing, rather than dictate the meal of others. One Aesop is worth more than all the talent and skill of everyone in a credits box past, present and future. My attempts at fiction cast me as a starving artist not for lack of procuring an audience, but because I don’t honestly care about influencing others. Were anyone to find usage for what I make manifest, god bless them, but they do not owe me their love, their time or their space because what I can make manifest I make manifest without regardless.
It is retarded to argue over perceived values to fantasy, it’s far worse to allow oneself to be destroyed by it.