The Fantastic Versus The Mundane

In the webcomic Moon Freight 3, which sadly is no longer available complete online and I don’t think is still in print (leaving me short the final volume), a cargo inspector and his robot companion inspect cargo going between worlds. At least until his sister invents faster than light travel and he’s out of work. The theme of the comedy strip is just an average person living in the future, seeing how what’s science fiction and amazing to us is no more amazing to him than our microwave or cellphones…and they didn’t even have smartphones when the comic began.

I remember hearing an old Buck Rogers radio drama where Buck and Wilma were all excited about how fast their travel tube was taking them, but I wasn’t convinced it was anything new in their world. It should be like us getting in a car and noting it’s faster than a bicycle. Meanwhile in the Superman radio drama’s first episode, Lara notes how easy it is to visit her neighbor with one leap, since the source of Kal-El’s strength and leaping came from his biology and not a yellow sun. It was an error because the point was Earth’s lighter gravity allowed Superman to “leap tall buildings” back then, but for her it was a simple explanation of something Jor-El would tell her Earthings can’t do. For them the fantastic was just normal.

That’s not what we’re talking about here.

I’ve begun to see that in various ways, the fantastical worlds of science fiction, fantasy, and even the action dramas we loved in the 1970s and 1980s that were so wild and interesting are getting grounded in things like “reality” and “seeing yourself”. While I have nothing against grounded stories or any representation that isn’t just clueless stereotypes and lack of believing in yourself because of  “the Man” keeping you down, and there are plenty I enjoy, it shouldn’t replace the more exciting and imaginative worlds that also entertain or could be used to speak on real world issues. Unfortunately, those worlds are now in the hands of people with limited imaginations and the results are actually kind of boring.

Take for example games set in high fantasy. The current generation of creators want to represent transgender people post-operation with surgical scars in the character creator of the upcoming Dragon Age video game franchise entry. Wizards Of The Coast want to add people in wheelchairs to Dungeons & Dragons and other games. In both cases this is odd because it’s a fantasy story, meaning fantastic and not our world. I’ve been stuck in a wheelchair while recovering from my surgery and I was more than happy to finally regain my working legs and be able to walk and what passes for running and dancing again. (Was never good at either.) I was lucky because I just had to get over being bedridden. Most people in wheelchairs may never walk again if they’re paralyzed. If they lost a limb, they might have some kind of prosthetic, and those are advancing all the time so you could someday see people with a robotic limb replacing the one they lost and having a normal life. Someone with a damaged spine or nerves so far are not so lucky.

The barbarian can’t even see over the steering wheel, and he’s still cooler than he is back home. At least he’s an isekai victim before being isekaied was cool.

What gets me is why these game creators think someone would want to play as someone in a wheelchair, especially if they’re trapped in one normally. Having a high-tech wheelchair might be cool in a science fiction setting, but that would be one closer to modern day. Seeing someone in Star Trek’s timeline in a wheelchair, and I think they actually did this on Discovery, makes less sense than Barbara Gordon’s time as Oracle, and they know aliens and sorceresses. Functioning electronic eyes like Geordi had in Star Trek: The Next Generation and the upgrades he got in the movies so Levar Burton didn’t have to wear that banana clip over his eyes and pretend he could see now (possibly ironic) were treated as new technologies, but our prosthetics were somehow better than theirs. They had a third world war involving genetic supermen but they still should have way better tech than us. Limits do benefit the drama, but let’s be reasonable. When Christopher Pike was stuck in a wheelchair-like device it was because his whole body was damaged by radiation, their way of hiding the death of Jeremy Hunter forcing them to replace the actor for “The Menagerie” while using footage from “The Cage” and pretending it’s the same guy. They didn’t have the pattern buffer miracle cure at the time.

Those were evolving futures that you watched get more fantastic, and some of that stuff is now weaker than what we use in our daily lives. Our phones do more in one device than their separate communication and scanning database devices. Going back to the fantasy games, the key word is FANTASY! I’m already playing as a character who is 10 times more badass than I’ll ever be, so why would I want to not be able to walk? I should have legs with muscles so awesome women are begging to wrap themselves around them in one of those seductive poses you see in high fantasy art. I should be able to RUN up to an…um, whatever we’re allowed to fight nowadays since orcs and ogres aren’t allowed to just be evil henchmen anymore for reasons best left to a different article…and punch him/her/it in the face before taking it down with my impossibly big sword that totally isn’t overcompensating for anything because that’s huge, too.

The point of a fantasy is to be what you wish you were, which is also confusing why the transgender person would want post-op surgical scars like some activist badge of honor. Wouldn’t it be easier to just be born the right gender and not have to worry about it? Or at least use magic so there is no scar and all the baby making parts work? That goes for sci-fi as well. Be born what you think you should be and not have to go through life being the wrong gender in your mind. We’re already taking care of a handful (clearly not enough but medical science marches forward) of diseases and disorders while the baby is still in the womb, or at least alerting the parents their kid will have Down Syndrome or something so they can be prepared. Meanwhile the Enterprise is restoring people from forced aging by using an old pattern buffer memory in the transporter’s subroutines and growing new organs like replacing a section of fence.

No theatrical battle between shapeshifters? Truly we live in the blander timeline.

Even James Bond has lost his cool gadgets. No cigarette lighter flamethrowers. No watch explosives. No ring with a secret listening device. I wouldn’t be surprised if his car no longer has guns or an oil slick. Maybe a GPS if he’s lucky. That stuff may not have come from the books, and listening to Stam Fine’s reviews of the Bond franchise I don’t think the books took anything but a title and some character names, but it’s something that became synonymous with Bond, James Bond and we can’t even do that. It also plays to the idea of the “grounded” takes on Batman. Matt Reeves stated he didn’t want to bring in characters like Gentleman Ghost or Clayface. Everyone seems worried about pulling a Joel Schumacher, but the problem there was that he was flamboyant but still in a dark world, a clashing of the Silver and Dark ages of comics. You can do Mr. Freeze without all the ridiculous ice puns. Batman (’66) pulled them out only rarely, and the DCAU didn’t use them at all. Instead we get a Riddler who is looking to “expose the truth” rather than challenge himself by proving his mental superiority while trying to find someone who actually has a chance of matching wits with him, a Joker who wears make-up rather than being the result of a chemical bath, and everyone else that couldn’t exist in our world (and thank God their versions don’t, either) given the heave ho.

It’s one of the reasons I couldn’t get into the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, and yes I am picking on that again. I’m sure it can handle me given how praised it is in the science fiction fandom. (Don’t tell Hollywood or they’ll try to ruin that, too. Darn geeks liking things that aren’t cool to the elitists.) In the original series Starbuck and Apollo were just names of people from planet not-Earth. Ron Moore decided to be boring. They actually have almost Earth sounding names, including family names that developed because of Earth culture and history. So we respectively get Kara Thrace and Lee Adama, when Adama used to just be another name and not a last name. The idea of an alien culture rebuilding their lost society within the colony ships so as to not lose their heritage or all semblance of a normal life, or developing a culture, technology, games, and curse words was surprisingly alien to him, so he made them as close to us as possible. Boringly so if you ask me.

Fiction doesn’t necessarily have to be an idealized world, though you’d think in the games you’d want to play someone more interesting than you. “I want to roll this stock broker character. He’ll handle all gold counting and invest them wisely in..what’s so funny?” No, you’re playing the healer, the warrior, the catburglar, or the master crafter. If you’re the barmaid, it’s only because you’re waiting for a dungeon raiding party in need of your amazing archery skills or seeking revenge on some archmage that also turned your kid brother into a toad. You’re a more interesting you in a more interesting world, even if it’s one you wouldn’t want to live in for real because you wouldn’t be living for very long.

It’s not “you can’t believe a trans person in a wheelchair could fight a cyborg dragon”, it’s “I can’t believe you would want to play a warrior in a wheelchair who isn’t already the gender you wish you were…while fighting a cyborg dragon”, like you can’t believe we already solved for X. There are people who play alternate genders they don’t want to be in real life for fun (or because they want to see a hot girl’s backside the whole game and not a hot dude’s, or vice versa if you’re more into dudes than girls) or because they prefer that play style. I want the cool gadgets and weapons, I want to be more interesting than I am in my normal life, and I want the world I’m watching passively to be more interesting than the one I live in actively. Unfortunately, it seems too many writers today can’t bring themselves out of the real world, to believe in anything better or cooler than what they’re in, and that everything should reflect the real world.

How boring.