The Gunslinger Mentality (or Why did I Block You?)
Why do people feel the need to dominate conversations that don’t have anything to do with them?
On any given day, I field between three and ten people (who are often rude or ill-mannered in their delivery) who feel the need to let me know they don’t appreciate my world-view on comics, narrative storytelling, and the history of the comics. Essays I write of my own free will, just because I enjoy the industry and feel I should be able to have an opinion, without having to apologize for it.
So, why did I block you, comic troll?
Because you don’t have a profile and a host of smaller things which left me to believe you were just a comic troll out for a stroll from under your bridge. Most trolls lack a profile of any note, have failed to write any content beyond their response to me, makes you look like one of the many unpleasant and contentious individuals I have to field every day who creates an account on Medium, just to be obnoxious and inform me how much more they know about comics than I do.
(While your subsequent post reveals your true intent, I insist for just a moment that you look at it the way I have to whenever anyone does what you just did.)
On a regular basis, I am forced to contend with the Gunslinger Mentality, a condition quite common to writing on the subject of comics in the online community. Like the Western gunslingers of media lore, there is always someone who wants to challenge the fastest (presumably) best gun in the West. Or for you anime fans, people who are seeking to acquire the Number One Headband…
Everyone believes they are THE authority on comics and whenever they see someone who doesn’t agree, they break out their knowledge base and presume to school the interloper, even if they weren’t directly challenging you or your viewpoint.
I am a professional writer. I endeavor to write materials I can be proud of, work that is both informative and entertaining when it can be. While Internet culture has promoted a habit of random people bursting onto a scene and endeavoring to correct everything in sight, it is, in my opinion, poor etiquette, undermining any merit to your case.
As a professional writer, I take the forty years of reading comics and nearly 2,500 articles (1540 articles on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Stack Exchange and 796 on Quora as well as a 150 or so on a number of other professional online publications) as sufficient street cred to allow me to post an article without having every person with a computer and a comic axe to grind showing up and informing me about the inadequacies they perceive in my knowledge base.
My expertise, such that it is, on the histories, comic backgrounds, and on the subject of narrative storytelling rarely NEEDS someone to inform me of just how little I know, relatively speaking, compared to a stranger I just met on the Internet who needs to tell me I am wrong.
It’s not as if I didn’t know about the Justice League satellite (which more often is attributed to a group effort of the scientific expertise of a variety of heroes on the Justice League payroll, particularly Post-Crisis) or the creation of Brother Eye (which in its original writings had NOTHING to do with Batman) or the Hellbat Armor (while attributed to Batman utilized a host of technologies of NON-HUMAN origins) or his bat-cloning technology (which found its origin in the Batman Beyond series) or the other billion or so bat-gadgets Batman is attributed to having access to over his seventy-five year character history would somehow have escaped my notice during my tenure of reading or consumption of Bat Lore.
Because, instead of introducing yourself, you immediately set out to decide to challenge my work without bothering to determine if what I wrote had any merit. Or to look and see if I had written any other documents explaining why Batman SHOULDN’T be the equal of any of DC’s other already existing super-geniuses. Of which I have done both.
Batman’s pedigree as a character shouldn’t require he be the absolute best, most intelligent, most driven, having the most will-power, gathering the best technology from across the galaxy and reverse-engineering it into new and exciting tech that no one has ever created, while training five to seven of the world’s best crime-fighters, battling alongside the Earth Greatest Heroes on cases which span the galaxy, cross time and space and rewrite legendary events on a monthly basis, while still being a master of 128 martial arts and having a greater scientific genius than one Lex Luthor, a man who spends ALL of his time doing nothing but advanced super science the likes of which almost no one on Earth can conceive of, let alone design. Batman is crazy dedicated (emphasis on crazy) but even he has to sleep.
As far as FEATS are concerned, I have NO interest in comparing them because I find them meaningless since across the eras, different writers, genres, styles of writing and techniques change how each character appears over the DECADES. Rarely are any two feats truly able to be compared equally, even in the same era or decade.
As a result, the comparison of “feats” is relatively mindless and empty to me. Thus I rarely indulge in it. The essay: The Quantification of Mythology explains this in greater detail.
In an attempt to make Batman capable of hanging with the Justice League, his plot armor, his superhuman intelligence, mastery of physical and mental disciplines ends up making him the equal of Superman, while not having any super powers, which is supposed to be the point of his existence.
IN SUMMARY:
Given this as a constant annoyance everywhere I write, I tend to block anyone and everyone who fails to even introduce themselves before they offer me a backhanded complement and then proceeds to believe they are educating me because they think I am somehow uninformed and only with their immediate and timely intervention, can I be enlightened.
If that was not the case, and you have said as much, I have unblocked you with the expectation we can continue to engage in polite discourse with renewed clarity in our relationship. Good day to you, Jacob.
Thaddeus Howze is an award-winning essayist, author and journalist for websites having discriminating tastes in speculative fiction, non-fiction journalism and critical thinking.
Today he is still missing his cat.
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