Good day, friends. You may have heard of me before, but I suspect most of you have not. I've written a few things here and there, most justifiably forgotten. One of them was a series of superhero stories, which I eventually quit posting here after deciding I should give them some rewrites and pop the whole series on the Kindle.
It's been slow going, because I'm a slow writer. And I keep looking for ways to complicate the work so I have to keep going back to rewrite over and over. I added two new characters and added them into the previous stories through the rewrites. I finally got it down to the storyarcs for the last three characters -- but I still don't know when I'll be done with them, since I don't have plots for them, and it generally takes at least a year to write these damn things anymore.
And then I decided to add another new character. This time, I looked at the rotten world around us, with the worst people in the world working to immiserate and criminalize and murder people for being trans, and I realized I really, really, really wanted to write a trans superhero. First, because trans characters should be written, for the same reason trans people should exist, and second, because I've written a bunch of stories about a city full of superheroes who are White, Black, Latino, Asian, Christian, Muslim, atheist, gay, lesbian, and bi, and out of seven million people, and 23 superheroes in Metro City, there absolutely should be at least one trans hero.
And knowing anything about how the right-wing in this country would like to treat trans people -- or any LGBTQ people or women or racial minorities -- and realizing that the Republicans are almost certainly going to get their way on everything in the next six months to two years, I started to wonder if I needed to make Metro City look less like a comic book city and more like a real-world one.
One of the things about superhero stories is that the classic superhero tale presupposes a stable, oppression-free, socially progressive society where the heroes' primary duties are fighting street crime, battling supervillains, and dealing with crossover events. But America isn't a stable society anymore, and it never was free from oppression. And I'm toying with the idea of yet another rewrite of Metro City, where the heroes still deal with crime and supervillains, but also have to work to protect the homeless, smuggle banned books and medical care into the city, and protect people from fascist police and government officials.
And the problem that springs from there is the fact that Metro City is a light-hearted series. And it's not in any way easy to ride the middle ground between Silver Age superheroism and our soon-to-be fascist hellhole dictatorship. Can you make a series about wisecracking superheroes, mad science ducks, robot ninjas, time-traveling dinosaurs, and space pirate gorillas in a setting where Nazis march in the streets, women are executed for having abortions, parents go to prison for supporting their trans kids, and only white male property owners are allowed to vote?
On the other hand, it's more than possible that I'm just making extra work for myself so I don't have to do any actual writing. And it probably wouldn't hurt the story to preempt America's bad future altogether. "Hey, guys, remember a few years ago when the Republican Party got taken over by fascists, dumbfucks, and a kiddie-fucking game show host with bad hair, and they all tried to overthrow the government? Remember how all the superheroes got together and threw the whole bunch into space jail? Things sure have been nice since then, right? Well, back to fighting the disembodied robot brains from Planet X!"