Today’s Storytellers Vs. Heroes And Heroism

Before I start I need to apologize to my regular readership. I do everything I can to keep this site out of the culture war and politics, which gets harder and harder as activists seek to twist everything to their point of view, even the stuff they’re elitist snobs against or just don’t fit their tastes. BW Media Spotlight is about storytelling media, not the press and not pop culture, politics, or anyplace they all meet. Unfortunately, to properly move into this topic I’m going to have to for a moment and this is going to be a bit more rambly than normal–which given how many of my commentaries are stream of consciousness is saying something. Please bear with me. We’ll be back on track.

Okay, so on September 10th, political activist and influencer Charlie Kirk was assassinated. If that’s not undenyable you may be part of the problem. I don’t care if you liked or hated the things he spoke about. I’m not going to go into the latest news on the shooter because it may all be outdated by the time you read this anyway and will go into sociopolitical areas I’m still trying to avoid to stay on the topic of this website. I usually call out activists left or right only when their views negatively affect the presentation, creating a preachy mess with characters that actually come off the opposite of what’s intended. Again, I discuss stories. However, a man who just set up a table on a university campus and challenged other people to challenge his perspectives being shot in the neck, the general area of our voice boxes, is either intentional or irony. Either way, it’s horrible, and his wife and young children (the latter never having experienced any death before most likely) now have to live without their husband and daddy. Imagine telling someone who barely understands life why their father is never coming home again and what they saw, especially your child. If you support the shooter, go away because you don’t belong around a site that discusses superheroes so often.

Which leads to our topic. I’m writing this on September 11th to go up September 12th. It wasn’t easy to put this together. Even after a nap, I’m still plenty mad and I never knew the man or his family. YouTube started sending me some clips of his previous college campus visits in the days before the shooting, interestingly enough. I saw nothing there that would lead to these actions. He fought with words and was ended with a bullet because the shooter refused to challenge his words. And yet, the people who write words for a living–ones about heroes fighting villains, monsters, and the everincroaching darkness are required to not be the things heroes fight. Unfortunately, this incident has proven this to not always be the case, a revelation that actually started because Donald Trump kept Democrats from claiming the first woman president (due mostly to the women they chose if they were honest) has again flashed with Charlie Kirk’s death, as comic and video game creators have come out in support of the murder of a man whose biggest crime was speaking words.

To bring this back to the site’s topic and the topic of this article, this made me think about the directions stories have gone, with far too many pushing away existing heroes to replace them with the writer’s “better” heroes or to outright embrace the villain…and some of this predates Kirk OR Trump.

The event that started this drive to make this article came not from Kirk’s murder. I got that out of my system on Facebook:

A man died today.

Men die every day. Women, too. This man went to a college campus to tell people what he believed and challenge opposing opinions. He wanted to talk to people.

This man was a husband and father, 31 years old. The wife will never hold her husband again and has to explain to two little children why daddy isn’t going to come home again before they really understand what death is.

He was not killed by “the left”, though on social media people who claim to be on the left are celebrating this man’s death for the things he said. Not things he did. He never killed anyone, or assaulted anyone, or called for people to riot. He didn’t push drugs or force women to debase themselves for money or amusement. He just went to a place and talked to people. For that he was shot, and people are trying to twist his own words against him, never understanding those words in the first place because they hate having their views challenged.
He was killed by a man who hated him. We don’t know why, though we can guess it was for the things he said. It wasn’t an “accident from a celebrating supporter” as one news guest tried to claim like a complete moron. He was shot because a man hated him and had the means to end his life with no opposition because he didn’t care what was or wasn’t “legal”. He wanted the man dead, and he won.
This is not a time to celebrate. If you are, please tell me so I can not follow you or outright block you. This isn’t a time to push your cause. If it is, you are more interested in the cause than the man who died for his cause.

If you hate me saying “pray for the man’s widow and fatherless child” I don’t care. A man died. A man who simply talked to people. A man who leaves family, friends, and coworkers grieving. A man who loved life, his wife and children, and other people, but disagreed with someone’s view of the world and tried to state so the best way he could. He was shot in the neck. For talking. That’s either the real irony or the goal. He was in the middle of a public area designed to challenge ideas and panicking anyone that might have listened to him. Men and women not much younger that the victim who came to listen and ran for their lives because someone decided what the man was “allowed” to say in a country that allegedly values free speech. He wasn’t hiding. He went to a place and invited people to challenge his worldview who were willing to listen to what he had to say. He was killed by a man who wanted to silence him, who did hide to silence another’s point of view.

A man died today. A woman lost her husband. Children lost their father. People lost their friend, their family member, their sense of security–whether they agreed with the man or not.

A man died today. If you’re celebrating, YOU are the evil one. End of story.

One of those celebrators was Gretchen Felker-Martin, a trans comic writer whose Red Hood #1 hit comic stores the same day Kirk was killed. Felker-Martin could have said nothing, or said “I didn’t agree with his views on transgenderism, but killing a man in front of his family and a large crowd is wrong and hurts our cause”. Instead, Felker-Martin went to Bluesky to cheer on the murder, including the line that will or should follow this person forever: “I hope the bullet is okay after touching Charlie Kirk”. This is after a statement about the comic, where the writer’s idea of positive writing and promotion is responding to complaints where a group of police officers commit suicide (I don’t know the context because I haven’t read it…because it’s Jason Todd) was to be confused because the writer didn’t consider police officers as “people”. The video below by Comics By Perch, which I chose for being a politically neutral channel, shows more things the writer has said in the past, and even Perch, someone who advocates for the comic business outside of the culture war and blows off radical comments if it doesn’t ruin the story, still called for the writer’s firing.

I should also note, even that the anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers and all the lives lost when the planes hit and the towers fell, the writer praised that action as well. You’d think with all of this DC wouldn’t have even given this person a comic. To their credit, they did cancel the book immediately, offer money or credit back to the stores, and are trying to find the art team a different book to work on. Not replaced the writer: killed the comic and took the financial hit on what came out. I don’t have Bluesky, and the fact that people like this ran to it is why, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are creators taking Felker-Martin’s side in this.

However, the fact that Jason Todd had his own comic is an oddity. DC wants their own Punisher while Marvel is trying to bury the character, created in the 1980s to set a Charles Bronson/Death Wish style character in the Marvel universe because it was popular at the time. He also started as an enemy of Spider-Man before shifting to the Kingpin, enemy of Spidey and Daredevil, and going after mobsters. Jason Todd abandoned Batman’s moral teachings, whether he had reason or not after what the Joker did to him. Meanwhile, both DC and Marvel have tried to redeem their longstanding villains. Lex Luthor, whose indirect actions have lead to many deaths, is now trying to be a hero, as was Black Adam, who directly caused many deaths. Marvel is doing the same with Norman Osborn, making him Spider-Man after all of the evil he’s done–including killing Peter’s fiance and never getting major punishment for it.

The other big one in my circles right now is Sucker Punch. One of their senior devs also celebrated Kirk’s murder. For someone more knowledgeable on this one, the only one I follow who dived into it is Az from HeelVsBabyface, so there is angry swearing. After doing his own coverage of Felker-Martin he went over the developer, who worked on Ghosts Of Yokei. A sequel to the beloved Ghosts Of Tsushima, a game used as the counterpoint to Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, there was already concerns because the next game went with a female protagonist in a time when women would not be allowed to be samurai (ninjas, maybe), mostly out of recent storytelling history than any concern about the game…until the voice actress for the main character went on activist rants.

I don’t know where to check on presales for games, so I don’t know if Az’s information is up to date even when the video was made. (Again, I’m writing this the night before trying to actually make deadline, which I had trouble doing this week.) In his previous video he said that pre-sales for Ghost Of Yokei have started going down, but Az himself was one of the game’s defenders based on the previous game’s accuracy to Japanese life and culture to a degree that even Japanese gamers thought a Japanese studio was involved, a counter to everything Ubisoft did wrong with Assassin’s Creed: Shadows to Japanese history, culture, and even religion thanks to the breakable environments including temples.

These are the people responsible for writing stories of heroism while trying to change games where you play bad guys (like the Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row franchises) to match their worldview. They may be murdering people, selling drugs, and running over prostitutes to get their money back, but they aren’t queerphobic? They can’t even let evil be evil. They try to redeem evil or make them look less evil. Stories that focus on mobsters, drug pushers, and the like have been around since the days of Al Capone and The Untouchables. There used to be counters, though. They weren’t supposed to be sympathetic except for how their bad choices led to their destruction. Now we celebrate the criminals and punish those who stand up against them. All over mainstream storytelling studios and publishers, from the writers to the directors, the actors to the programmers, this has been going on for years, especially after Trump started breaking minds and pushing the far-left to even condemn not just mainstream liberals but their own people if they so much as differ on one cause du jour. Ask J.K. Rowling. She follows the left on everything except transgenderism, which goes against her feminism, and has put her under verbal attack even from people who made movies based on her works who probably didn’t even care about that cause at the time.

Writers using their stories to attack people they don’t like goes back to Shakespeare and probably older. In recent years it’s been extremely vicious, and only meant to please themselves while the readers, viewers, and players scratch their heads in confusion if they don’t care or disagree with them. That’s because their “heroes” act more like villains, pushing their views on other characters with force. Not surprising from an extremist perspective that can’t even let people rest in peace. For their enemies, of course it’s the continued attacks like Kirk. For their allies it’s always “rest in power”, meaning even in death they aren’t allowed to be at peace. I hate it when I see “rest in power” and have no trust in anyone who uses that expression. Power is the goal of a villain. Peace is the goal of a hero. Mix that up and you show you shouldn’t be writing heroes.

I also stopped following a reviewer whose work I enjoyed after he posted on X-Twitter an equally poorly timed comment about how Kirk was pro Second Amendment, as if blaming Kirk for what happened to Kirk, or at least suggesting (on purpose or not) that he was partly to blame. Again, I wrote this before we even caught the guy responsible, though as I add this article in it sounds like they might have. Either way, if you’re going to murder someone, do you care if the weapon is legal? How can I trust your views on fictional heroes when you celebrate someone’s death? I don’t believe you understand what a hero is. The Punisher doesn’t throw a party after killing a mobster, and killing mobsters is all Frank Castle does. Mobsters do evil things, not sit around and talk to people.

Look, a lot of this is ranting on my part, and I again apologize. If I didn’t get this out of my system, like the Facebook speech I posted earlier, I wasn’t going to be able to focus on what BW Media Spotlight was intended for: examining the art of storytelling to make myself a better storyteller. That’s what I want to talk about. When the people responsible for taking over the heroes I love, who inspired me as a storyteller and a kid shut off from the universe at large to be a better person as much as my parents did, and either destroying their spirits or corrupting them to evil to be replaced by their creations because they want that famous brand name to be about them and make the fictional world represent their narrow view of “reality” no matter how unreal the world they’re taking over or creating is, I’m going to be mad enough to write that run-on sentence and leave it as is. The fact is I’m angry. I hate the way the world has become.

Know what I’m not doing? Murdering a family man whose views I disagree with in a public place where he’s willing to debate you. Not ruining a beloved franchise to make it all about me. Telling people they’re the source of evil unless they work to destroy the lives of others for not towing the “proper” point of view. I’m just making my case for better stories. It’s my way of bringing people together to have an open conversation to make the world a better place. I never met Charlie Kirk, but what happened this week does the exact opposite of that on a larger scale. I don’t discuss the culture or politics. I discuss storytelling and pushing for better stories. Next post I’ll return to that. I just really needed to vent and Facebook wasn’t enough.