BW Media Spotlight

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 I’m not going to go into the latest news on the shooter because it may all be outdated by the time you read this anyway and will go into sociopolitical areas I’m still trying to avoid to stay on the topic of this website.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.

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Remembering 9/11

It’s been more than 10 years and we still remember. I was going to write an article, and I may do it for tomorrow, but right now I’m kind of upset. We just had a man murdered yesterday in front of his family and a large crowd, and a bunch of people are not only celebrating but making a list of who they want killed next for daring to not succumb to the hivemind. Some of those same people cheer on 9/11 or spout conspiracy theories. Discussing this is not within the realm of this site. This isn’t even a pop culture blog, and I still want to form a storytelling-related topic. I’m just not in the mood today, and hopefully tomorrow I’ll go into why.

We’re all human beings on this planet, even though some of those “people” try to prove otherwise. Never celebrate slaughter. Never push to end free speech, because someday it could be you if the winds change. As Bill & Ted would say, “be excellent to each other”. Disagreement is not hate until you make it hateful.