doyle

Have been reading fic featuring John Constantine on Ao3
and looking up pictures
and finding tumblrs that haven't posted in like a decade but did do a lot of pictures of his tattoos and spells.

Have decided that Vertigo Hellblazer is darker than I actually want to read, which I decided once before hence not having any but one of them any more.

Also the summaries I read on the internet are veeeeery different on different wikis and fansites. Like, not agreeing on the basic facts, different. So that's handy.

I do not know what DC have been doing with Justice League Dark but I am not sure I want to find out. I mean that was my conclusion from reading up on the animated movies I found but also, that's... a lot. Complicated. Tangles. None of it has gripped my imagination so far.

Well, almost none. I was reading a lot of fic with a new to me character in and then an author's note said he was only ever in comics as the villain in at most six issues of nu52. And I am reasonably certain that what the fic has been doing with him is not what the comics did. It's like they don't understand the appeal of starcrossed bisexual polyamory where the members can be seen as worked examples of the road not taken for each other.

I shall probably finish reading all the fic in this category pretty soon.



I am increasingly concluding that the guy in my head, smudged together from The Interesting Bits of vaguely remembered stories across at least thirty years by now, is someone who needs to fly be free into his own version of the Trenchcoat Urban Wizard archetype. John is archetypal now and there's so many versions of him out there. It's cool, but. Makes it frustrating when we're all giving him the same name. My guy leaves out so much canon did in any given canon I can't keep calling him Constantine, though obviously there is no shortage of Johns.

Actually I looked up a graph of naming in the UK and apparently John as a name has swooped waaaaaaay down the rankings, enough it gets age specific to assume it is The Ubiquitous Name. It's still top 200 but it's not top 100 let alone top 10. And you only have to check the historical graph on behindthename to see it sitting near as anything at number one for most of the twentieth century. But that means people in their 20s or 30s already have a different perspective on the ranking.

I mean when I was in school no one called John or James was actually called John or James except by teachers, because you'd never sort them all out. They just had nicknames.

Weird way to feel old.




I have been thinking about chosen names though. Like, who would choose to be John Constantine, with all this all as an open book example? Who would name themselves after Jack Harkness? It's not quite compelling enough to write up but it's a shiny to turn over. Because obviously the original characters choose to be themselves on a daily basis, and Harkness chose the name. And I remember cosplaying and trying to do The Swagger for an assortment of characters (conclusion: different with these hips). People choose who to be and some of it is from an array of pop cultural options and no amount of being an absolute disaster will be offputting to all observers.

Like tattoos. Trying to find ones the characters have leads to ever so many that people have of the characters. Which is a lot to wear around, you know?


And I was also thinking about magic and the meaning of spells. I was thinking of autoantonyms. That is words that mean their own opposites. People used them 'wrong' so many times that there are two common widely held and opposite meanings. And if you think the Words matter in magic? Really interesting gnarly problem. If you find an old spell it's not just a cursive lemon demon problem, it's about knowing what all those words meant to That person at That time. Which is basically impossible.

And then the symbols! How many symbols have we used and drifted away from over the past few decades because all the connotations went weird? Even skipping the symbols that end up on the ADL list there's a whole set about snakes and lions and badgers and ravens. Those are all big powerful symbols but then someone repackaged them for their trademarked magic school books. And now what do they mean?

So you get these big Magic symbols, the complicated swirly ones people look up and argue about, and what they originally meant has been written over and colonised so many times, not least by comics using them. And anyone trying to sell you a strict package of meanings is trying to sell you a whole lot else as well.

Plus the bit from Wrath of the Righteous where Mephistopheles explains devil contracts and how one time someone laughed at the idea he owned their soul because look at this misspelled contract, that isn't written Mephistopheles, is that even your name?

Mephistopheles goes off and does a hell legal thing, comes back and says, It Is Now.

That's potentially so overpowered. But it's like being able to buy up companies and trade as the new names. Here you are with all these contracts, oops they're with Hell now, wonder how that'll work out for everyone.

... now I'm imagining having some really good contracts and some archdevil just goes off and tries to steal your name and you have to pursue it in court...

I mean it's more a chaos thing to steal names, law would get you to sign them over.

Still. Tricky.



I am pondering also historical specificity in characters and horror stories and what it does to have a specific time and place and social and legal situation involved.

Like, say you've got two characters who are born three years apart, so when homosexual activity got legal one was 13 and one was already 16 when the Act was passed. You could reasonably extrapolate tha they had different reactions to that. Like maybe the 16 yeqr old had already decided to ignore the law, because sex. But the 13 year old could look at the law and think, well, 21 is legal, waiting for legal is at least theoretically possible. And then 21 is a long way away. But it gets interesting if his rebel phase starts then.

Or, you can have those two characters both in the same year at school, and they see the laws change and they will effect them exactly the same. But they choose different.

One is a story about the impact of social factors on the individual and the other is just, like, free will.

But if you don't give the story specificity you don't have the option of the layer of story that is about social factors.

And that drives the horror into the realms of the purely personal, sort of, ish. Like the horror might be about believing you were always already a sinner and that might have clear resonance with being queer in a homophobic religious context, but without specifics to attach it to the social legal religious layers are being ignored and it is being presented as a purely personal issue.

Horror can be used for so much. Not all of it particularly freeing.



The older I get the more I feel like I don't have much to say, seeing as I haven't been leaving the house much for... well, pretty much ever.

But on the other hand I see some of what other people have to say and kind of want to flag it up
like er, hang on, actually...



Today's thought is looping back to Legends of Tomorrow and how you make such a different story out of saving Astra or Astra saving herself, who misuses what powers, how that works out long term. They spun some interesting changes there.

Like Dawn on the tower being sacrificed. That was her blood and her power. How different does the story get if they'd spent the year teaching her to use it?



And I get frustrated how seldom you get generations of female power. Like Willow was basically self taught after Jenny was killed off, and skipped the summer with the Coven like all she learned there was detox. The story is a woman alone finding her power. Into every generation.

Like erasing women's writing and finding out there are women in SF like the new big thing, it is wearying.



So I have thoughts rattling around but neither story nor conclusions just yet.

Shall see.