Thank goodness Jongor can save the wilting white girl from the sub-men!
I don’t have much to say other than to nod along with this io9 article by Charlie Jane Anders, entitled Can You Update Pulp Science Fiction Without Being F-ed Up? but I really want to repost this sentence from the conclusion:
And hey, it bears repeating: None of this would be such a problem if pop culture in general, and science fiction in particular, was about newness and freshness, instead of rehashing. If we were constantly getting excited about new ideas, instead of nostalgia and call-backs to the stories of our youth (or our parents’ youth, in many cases.) We’ve said it before, but no harm in saying it again.
It goes into Tintin in the Congo, Avatar, John Carter et al., The Mandarin (Iron Man’s Fu Manchu villain), and, of course, Jar Jar Binks.
8 Comments
Your girl does not seem to be wilting so much.
Ironically, she’s wilting while she … blossoms?
A you can imagine, I’m dealing with this a lot myself. Here’s a blog post I wrote about it:
http://simoncarryer.blogspot.com/2010/01/conan-and-racism.html
Yeah, your game is probably why this article leapt out at me.
… there’s something funny with Blogspot. I think it just deleted my response to you.
You are welcome to email me at simoncarryer at gmail.
The ‘Sub-Men’ as you call them seem totally uninterested in the ‘Wilting’ lady. I think this is a portrait of a man struggling with his own homosexuality.
The lady is fuzzy, in the background. as if the viewer is leaving her behind. The subject of the piece…the ‘Man’ is virile, yet helpless in the hands of the ‘sub-men’ as if he is giving into his instinct. He cries for normalcy yet is denied. We are drawn to the leopard skin groin pad and the ‘sub-men’ clamoring to remove it. As if the Man is slowly giving into his desires of man-flesh. One can not help but notice the curved phallic symbol of one of the sub-man’s tail and the grim satisfaction of another as to the subjugation of the man into his baser instincts.
This genre is, without a doubt, the gayest of the boys’ fiction genres.