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Controversial blog posts

Every now and then, I think I should do a blog post discussing the role of minority characters, closeted homosexual characters, and class-conscious/class-aspirational characters in my book, "Verbosity's Vengeance".

Then I remember that, because it's primarily a geeky superhero novel, I never should have put all that complex, multi-layered literary stuff in there in the first place. It was especially ill-advised to interweave it and rely on the reader to pick up on it, instead of simply bludgeoning the reader over the head with it.

So that blog post goes unwritten.

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4 comments:

  1. More sand through the hour glass. It goes whether we like it or not.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Replies
    1. The good guys in the book are all white, well-educated with anglo names. Bad guys are minorities and immigrants. That wasn't an accident, or an unconscious expression of innate, assumptive privilege. Not to give away the ending, but I made it clear in the denouement that the class-based exclusion of The Other by the existing power structure is what set off the escalating super-villain chain of events.

      However, I also made it clear that this exclusion is only a false exclusion. Immigrants and minorities have actually done quite well in this society. Specific examples are given in several scenes. What's taken for race/ethnicity based exclusion is, in fact, demonstrably a result of the rejection of an individual, not rejection of a group. There's much more self-loathing than actual societal loathing going on inside the supervillain's mind.

      But like I said, ethnic perception and self-identification complexities like this are a bit out of place in a superhero book.

      Delete
  3. I disagree with the last part of your reply to Catherine. Seems like there was a lot of introspection in comics, last time I picked any up to read. Maybe not race- or class-based stuff, but lots of stuff about identity. 'Course, most of us are too busy drooling over the superheroine's chest to pick up on it. :-P

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