The Hugos: "nerd-on-nerd violence"

Wired has a piece up about the Hugos - Puppies, Puppygate, SJWs, the hotmess of this year's slate, the No Award results, G.R.R.M., etc. It's titled, "Who Won Science Fiction's Hugo Awards, and Why It Matters". (The fact that the headline has to explain what the Hugos are is an indication of the audience this piece is pitched to.)

One chunk which particularly caught my eye was this:

As an aspiring lit-fic snob author, I can't wait to get out of this crummy neighborhood I live in. With my next book, I will completely turn my back on a genre that's given me tens of thousands of hours of reading pleasure. Within five years, Franzen and I will be drinking ice water together at a tastefully exclusive dive somewhere in Brooklyn, sneering at the proles. Count on it.

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Slow Death of the Fantastic Four

Why can't the studios get the Fantastic Four right? Three big-budget tries, three flops (or two disappointments and one dog, depending on how you look at it). They're a decent superhero team, with varied powers that are interesting. Moreover, they have a 60 year archive of story lines to choose from. Surely somewhere in there would be one that would work on the screen. My theory is that the writers are too focused on the set-piece trope of the FF vs. their most iconic antagonist: Dr. Doom.

One problem with movie adaptations of Dr. Doom is the same problem that Green Goblin had in the first Spider-Man movie: he cannot express much emotion under an obscuring mask. In the comics, this wasn't a problem, since the shape of the mask changes slightly to convey emotions. In a movie that's not possible. Iron Man's ostensibly fixed mug does the same flexible thing in the comics, but the movie solved that rigid face problem with the clever device of the in-helmet projection, which allows the audience to see the actor's face.

But beyond the muffled voice and flat face, Dr. Doom was a cardboard cutout supervillain for years before he grew into the remorse-driven, megalomaniacal dictator of Latveria with a meaningful set of motivations beyond I WILL DESTROY YOU REED RICHARDS AND TAKE OVER THE WORLD. A more complex and interesting backstory is tough to set up in a movie if you also have to spend a long time explaining why he wears the Doom armor.

So, when the high-level radioactivity of this year's terrible Fantastic Four movie cools off enough that another studio decides to take another crack at them (2025? 2030?), I hope the writers a) don't bother with an origin story beyond a three-minute opening montage, and b) ignore the siren song of Dr. Doom and go for someone like the Puppet Master or Annihilus.

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