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starr-fall-knight-rise · 4 years

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I am actually curious: you have your stories happening approximately 2000 years in the future, yet the tech you describe is MAYBE 150 years later than what we have now. I'm just wondering if that's maybe due to a cataclysm of some kind in your world's past? It has got me wondering, because 2000 years in the future I could see us having tech that quite literally looks like magic to us 21st century boggles. Not criticism, merely my curiosity getting killed by my love of new sciency shtuff.

Um looking back on my entire answer I realize that I over-answered your question, and also gave a history lesson on what happened in the next 2000 years..... so um yeah that’s why the answer is so long and complicated.

Ok, I am actually very glad that you asked this question because I have been getting some questions about it.

Number one reason for there being no really special technology is that..... actually there totally is magic technology that war cannot even conceive of yet. They have warp cores that can fold space, and they have fusion engines on airplanes, and they have completely clean energy and prosthetic technology that is more cybernetic than prosthetic including limbs that can sense heat and pain, and the complete mechanical replacement of eyes, and probably other organs. They can definitely 3D print organs and they have shrunk MRI technology down to a handheld device. The ocean has been cleaned up and the atmosphere is safe. They have gravity generators, and weapons capable of destroying planets. They can create artificial atmospheres on places like the moon utilizing the gravity fields etc/ etc. So as for the first point, their technology is very very advanced.

Second to address the 150 year thing is that I tend to disagree. in the seventies they told us we would have flying cars and that isn’t even close to happening. I think people tend to underestimate the time it will take to innovate certain things. I know for a lot of us we have seen a huge explosion of technological advancement in our lives that makes the possibility seem so likely, but I would argue that the explosion wasn’t really that at all. If you think about it i phones haven't really changed since they have been sent out. Apple is just adding extra cameras but not really innovating the technology anymore/ And in reality, we have absolutely no clue how we would even start creating wormholes. I mean it is such a distant and strange possibility that we wouldn't even know where to start and most people think it probably inst even real

My other point is that if we go about two thousand years in the past, we see that technological advancement didn’t really come as far in that time as we think it did. yeah they might see what we do as magic but it was just a logical progression of their technology. They had chariots so we made it out of metal and put an engine in it. I honestly don’t see us advancing any faster towards the true intergalactic age faster than they advanced into making a simple car.

I honestly think its not actually the technology that everyone has a problem with, but the context in which I place it. The true question here is why is the CULTURE so similar to ours. I mean lets be honest its just 2010s two thousand years in the future, and I did that for a reason. Number one because I cannot conceive of how culture and language might evolve. Likely we wouldn’t be able to understand each other and the culture of the future would be so alien and strange that it would be like reading A Brave New World, the concept is interesting but its impossible to feel personally connected to the characters. I made the culture so much like it is now because I wanted a deep culture connection from the audience to the crew, while also making it easier on myself and others to understand them.

I can explain this in a couple of ways, and the big one is the internet. The internet is still around and contains all the information we have put on it since conceiving of the idea. We cant go back to year 1 AD and know what they were doing and thinking , but 2000 years in the future they have everything about us documented in videos and whatever else on the internet. I think cultural evolution slowed down because they had access to us. Language evolved and then recycled itself kind of like how we are seeing a resurgence of certain slang terms. The language doesn't evolve so grandly because the internet gave them access to materials in our time and to understand it and enjoy it they just didn’t move forward. IN fact the culture then became a culture of recycling where people just sort of go back, pick their favorite time period and live accordingly. Popular worldwide right then is the 2000s hence the use of our style, but if you walk down the streets of somewhere like LA you are going to see people dressed in Victorian era fashion or 80s or even greek. They don’t move forward culturally because they all became hipsters and decided to cycle it back.

One last point is that I think they focused on earth before they focused towards space simply because of WW III which nearly destroyed the planet with radiation. Scientists all across the world hand to band together to help and solve the problem of cleaning up radiation and they had to do it quickly. Once done the near death of the planet scared so many people that a few countries decided to join together. America being america refused, but the current political climate caused the second civil war thus ending the united states government as we know it. Europe melded together to protect itself from Russia who sort of ate all the surrounding countries. The united states Joined Canada and allied with Europe. The Chinese continued their colonization efforts in Africa but more obviously this time. Australia stayed with Britain and Europe despite China also colonizing most everything around it. south america broke down but was pulled together by some sort of political leader who then allied with mexico and Cuba sort of turning the continents into countries .

Then world war IV happened, and this time they had the technology to stop the issue of radiation, but that just meant some government decided its ok to kill more people since we won’t actually hurt the planet. billions died. That scared them into recreating the UN and the vast majority of countries decided to join, and if they didn’t their people rose up and pushed them out of power. All accept for Asia.

After that they went back into space technology, created a base on the moon and colonized Mars which took another very long time which is actually making me question weather 2000 years is enough. Then within the last hundred years of this story taking place the Pan-Asian war happened in an effort to bring them into the UN. Vir’s father fought in that war, and they eventually won with the help of the people on the inside who actually wanted to join making earth a unified front. After china joined their scientists were instrumental in helping to create the first warp core since now instead of innovating against each other we were innovating WITH each other

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jcmorgenstern · 5 years

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@superohclair oh god okay please know these are all just incoherent ramblings so like, idk, please feel free to add on or ignore me if im just wildly off base but this is a bad summary of what ive been thinking about and also my first titans/batman meta?? (also, hi!)

okay so for the disclaimer round: I am not an actual cultural studies major, nor do I have an extensive background in looking at the police/military industrial complex in media. also my comics knowledge is pretty shaky and im a big noob(I recently got into titans, and before that was pretty ignorant of the dceu besides batman) so I’ll kind of focus in on the show and stuff im more familiar with and apologize in advance?. basically im just a semi-educated idiot with Opinions, anyone with more knowledge/expertise please jump in! this is literally just the bullshit I spat out incoherently off the top of my head. did i mention im a comics noob? because im a comics noob.

so on a general level, I think we can all agree that batman as a cultural force is somewhat on the conservative side, if not simply due to its age and commercial positioning in American culture. there are a lot of challenges and nuances to that and it’s definitely expanding and changing as DC tries to position itself in the way that will...make the most money, but all you have to do is take a gander through the different iterations of the stories in the comics and it’ll smack you in the fucking face. like compare the first iteration of Jason keeping kids out of drugs to the titans version and you’ve got to at least chuckle. at the end of the day, this is a story about a (white male) billionaire who fights crime.

to be fair, I’d argue the romanticization of the police isn’t as aggressive as it could be—they are most often presented as corrupt and incompetent. However, considering the main cop characters depicted like Jim Gordon, the guys in Gotham (it’s been a while since I saw it, sorry) are often the romanticized “good few” (and often or almost always white cis/het men), that’s on pretty shaky ground. I don’t have the background in the comics strong enough to make specific arguments, so I’ll cede the point to someone who does and disagrees, but having recently watched a show that deals excellently with police incompetence, racism, and brutality (7 Seconds on Netflix), I feel at the very least something is deeply missing. like, analysis of race wrt police brutality in any aspect at all whatsoever.

I think it can be compellingly read that batman does heavily play into the military/police industrial complex due to its takes on violence—just play the Arkham games for more than an hour and you’ll know what I mean. to be a little less vague, even though batman as a franchise valorizes “psychiatric treatment” and “nonviolence,” the entire game seems pretty aware it characterizes treatment as a madhouse and nonviolence as breaking someone’s back or neck magically without killing them because you’re a “good guy.” while it is definitely subversive that the franchise even considers these elements at all, they don’t always do a fantastic job living up to them.

and then when you consider the fetishization of tools of violence both in canon and in the fandom, it gets worse. same with prisons—if anything it dehumanizes people in prisons even more than like, cop shows in general, which is pretty impressive(ly bad). like there’s just no nuance afforded and arkham is generally glamorized. the fact that one of the inmates is a crocodile assassin, I will admit, does not help. im not really sure how to mitigate that when, again, one of the inmates is a crocodile assassin, but I think my point still stands. fuck you, killer croc. (im just kidding unfuck him or whatever)

not to take this on a Jason Todd tangent but I was thinking about it this afternoon and again when thinking about that cop scene again and in many ways he does serve as a challenge to both batman’s ideology as well as the ideology of the franchise in general. his depiction is always a bit of a sticking point and it’s always fascinating to me to see how any given adaptation handles it. like Jason’s “”street”” origin has become inseparable from his characterization as an angry, brash, violent kid, and that in itself reflects a whole host of cultural stereotypes that I might argue occasionally/often dip into racialized tropes (like just imagine if he wasn’t white, ok). red hood (a play on robin hood and the outlaws, as I just realized...today) is in my exposure/experience mostly depicted as a villain, but he challenges batman’s no-kill philosophy both on an ethical and practical level. every time the joker escapes he kills a whole score more of innocent people, let alone the other rogues—is it truly ethical to let him live or avoid killing him for the cost of one life and let others die?

moreover, batman’s ““blind”” faith in the justice system (prisons, publicly-funded asylum prisons, courts) is conveniently elided—the story usually ends when he drops bad guy of the day off at arkham or ties up the bad guys and lets the police come etc etc. part of this is obviously bc car chases are more cinematic than dry court procedurals, but there is an alternate universe where bruce wayne never becomes batman and instead advocates for the arkham warden to be replaced with someone competent and the system overhauled, or in programs encouraging a more diverse and educated police force, or even into social welfare programs. (I am vaguely aware this is sometimes/often part of canon, but I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s the main focus. and again, I get it’s not nearly as cinematic).

overall, I think the most frustrating thing about the batman franchise or at least what I’ve seen or read of it is that while it does attempt to deal with corruption and injustice at all levels of the criminal justice system/government, it does so either by treating it as “just how life is” or having Dick or Jim Gordon or whoever the fuckjust wipe it out by “eliminating the dirty cops,” completely ignoring the non-fantasy ways these problems are dealt with in real life. it just isn’t realistic. instead of putting restrictions on police violence or educating cops on how to use their weapons or putting work into eradicating the culture of racism and prejudice or god basically anything it’s just all cinematized into the “good few” triumphing over the bad...somehow. its always unsatisfying and ultimately feels like lip service to me, personally.

this also dovetails with the very frustrating way mental health/”insanity” or “madness” is dealt with in canon, very typical of mainstream fiction. like for example:“madness is like gravity, all it takes is a little push.” yikes, if by ‘push’ you mean significant life stressors, genetic load, and environemntal influences, then sure. challenge any dudebro joker fanboy to explain exactly what combination of DSM disorders the joker has to explain his “””insanity””” and see what happens. (these are, in fact, my plans for this Friday evening. im a hit at parties).

anyway I do really want to wax poetic about that cop scene in 1x06 so im gonna do just that! honestly when I first saw that I immediately sat up like I’d sat on a fucking tack, my cultural studies senses were tingling. the whole “fuck batman” ethos of the show had already been interesting to me, esp in s1, when bruce was basically standing in for the baby boomers and dick being our millennial/GenX hero. I do think dick was explicitly intended to appeal to a millennial audience and embody the millennial ethos. By that logic, the tension between dick and Jason immediately struck me as allegorical (Jason constantly commenting on dick being old, outdated, using slang dick doesn’t understand and generally being full of youthful obnoxious fistbumping energy).

Even if subconsciously on the part of the writers, jason’s over-aggressive energy can be read as a commentary on genZ—seen by mainstream millennial/GenX audiences as taking things too far. Like, the cops in 1x06 could have been Nick Zucco’s hired men or idk pretty much anyone, yet they explicitly chose cops and even had Jason explain why he deliberately went after them for being cops so dick (cop) could judge him for it. his rationale? he was beaten up by cops on the street, so he’s returning the favor. he doesn’t have the focused “righteous” rage of batman or dick/nightwing towards valid targets, he just has rage at the world and specifically the system—framed here as unacceptable or fanatical. as if like, dressing up like a bat and punching people at night is, um, totally normal and uncontroversial.

on a slightly wider scope, the show seems to internally struggle with its own progressive ethos—on the one hand, they hire the wildly talented chellah man, but on the other hand they will likely kill him off soon. or they cast anna diop, drawing wrath from the loudly racist underbelly of fandom, but sideline her. perhaps it’s a genuine struggle, perhaps they simply don’t want to alienate the bigots in the fanbase, but the issue of cops stuck out to me when I was watching as an social issue where they explicitly came down on one side over the other. jason’s characterization is, I admit and appreciate, still nuanced, but I’d argue that’s literally just bc he’s a white guy and a fan favorite. cast an actor of color as Jason and see how fast fandom and the writer’s room turns on him.

anyway i don’t really have the place to speak about what an explicitly nonwhite!cop!dick grayson would look like, but I do think it would be a fascinating and exciting place to start in exploring and correcting the kind of vague and nebulous complaints i raise above. (edit: i should have made more clear, i mean in the show, which hasn’t dealt with dick’s heritage afaik). also, there’s something to be said about the cop vs detective thing but I don’t really have the brain juice or expertise to say it? anyway if you got this far i hope it was at least interesting and again pls jump in id love to hear other people’s takes!!

tldr i took two (2) cultural studies classes and have Opinions

#wow this was a hot fucking mess #i tried to be organized but my thoughts weren't coming out super well #again anyone interested please feel free to jump in or correct me at any place you feel like #i die on the ''jason todd would be treated horribly by fandom if he were a character of color' hill tho #i could go on about 1x06 until im blue in the face but that's the uhh overview. the executive summary.#dc titans #i need meta tags and shit for this show #god help me in too deep #finding the meta side of fandom was a GIFT tho i love this shit #so excited

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