Now that the spoiler is out of the bag, as the whole world knows that Robin is dead, again ... for this week's adventures climbing the cliffs of insanity, I explore why Batman is immortal but the children around him keep dying, how sometimes fanboys can go insane when judging women cast in iconic Marvel or DC roles, and my eldest son's obsession with the new Fire Emblem game, Awakening.
Bruce Wayne seemingly cannot die but his sidekicks can.
Three Robins have been killed off in the past 25 years. That's a rate of one dead underage crime-fighting assistant every eight years. Jason Todd, the original replacement for Dick Grayson, who became Nightwing, was the first to be killed in 1988. Jason's fate was determined via call-in 800 number. Fans voted for him to die he was blown up in an explosion, deemed unworthy to wear the pixie boots.
Though that call-in vote may have been rigged. In a special feature in the Batman: Under the Red Hood Blu-ray, former Batman Editor Denny O'Neil claims the votes to kill Jason may have been rigged by a single caller in New Jersey. If so, this voter has had more influence on the last quarter century of Batman stories than any creator.
Because once this story was told, it seems that it had to be told again, and then again.
I'm not passing judgment on Grant Morrison's story in Batman Incorporated. He's clearly been telling one long story since he first started on the Bat books six years ago and the death of Damian Wayne, the son of Bruce Wayne and Talia Al Ghul, may yet have twists and turns.
But, still, the trend of dead children is a bit disturbing.
After Jason Todd, it was the turn of Stephanie Brown, whose death brought such fan outrage that a whole website became devoted to her mistreatment and she eventually returned, at least for a little while.
Jason Todd was eventually brought back from the dead, too. So maybe the murderous but oddly endearing Damian will be back too.
But that begs the question: if everyone is brought back from the dead, why even write the death in the first place? Isn't that story played out as well?
Maybe today's readers haven't read the previous two stories and the idea is fresh to them?
Except Death in the Family has become a widely read story because of Jason Todd's return. And Stephanie Brown headlined her own book just a few years ago. So that's not it, especially since direct comic sales rely a great deal on repeat customers and long-time fans.
The death tool creates many questions that break the suspension of disbelief. If Bruce Wayne was driven to become Batman because of seeing his parents die, shouldn't he be absolutely crushed by the death of a child? How could he function after? And in the new DC, the "Robin" identity has become Batman's internship. Yet this is the second Robin to die in this continuity.
Batman: Worst Mentor Ever.
But I suspect this problem is due to something outside the stories: the fact that most of DC heroes aren't allowed to age.
Batman has to stay at his set age of around thirty. Yet his sidekicks age. That means if they get older and grow up, he might get old in the comics. And that's not allowed because Bruce Wayne is always supposed to be Batman, so the sidekicks get tossed aside. Kids are killed off, not adults.
But what if that wasn't the case? What if Bruce Wayne were allowed to age and pass on the Batman mantle and the rest of the Robins were allowed to grow up? I used to think that I'd never accept stories with anyone else in the cape and cowl but lately I've come around to the idea that the heroes should age. When I was a kid reading comics, DC allowed its original Golden-Age heroes to age on Earth-2, meaning Batman did retire, eventually becoming police commissioner.
Why force Batman or the other heroes to stay young when there are all these new, younger characters around? DC could easily have a book dedicated to "classic Batman" where he's young and having adventures, and at the same time, have books that tackle later in his career or his successor's career.
Nowhere can this problem be better seen than in what has happened to the Teen Titans. They're all sidekicks but because their mentors are set in time, they keep getting changed or rebooted into something unrecognizable. So if you grew up reading Young Justice or you think Wally West is the Flash, forget it. Those guys are all gone now.
But their mentors remain the same, dead kids or no.
She's Too Ugly To Be Mary Jane!
We superhero geeks like to get as much information as possible about upcoming superhero movies. So I saw multiple tweets about on-set photos of Shailene Woodley, who is playing Mary Jane Watson in the sequel to The Amazing Spider-Man movie. And mostly what I heard was "she doesn't look pretty enough." Because, apparently, she was photographed without makeup, looking like, well, an attractive women you might run into on the street every day rather that extra-hot supermodel Mary Jane.
I could go on about what's wrong with this and the impossible standard of beauty that women tapped to play roles in superhero movies are held to by some fanboys, but the discussion over at DCWomenKickingAss covered it all.
Fire Emblem: Awakening May Be Responsible For Keeping My Son From Getting Into a Good College
Amazon was out of the game for the first couple of weeks it was released, which may have been a good thing because it meant my son, a high school junior, had his mid-terms out of the way when it arrived. He's been spending a lot of time on the couch playing and creating his armies.
I'll let him explain why he likes it. I suspect Damian Wayne should have been a character in this game. Over to him:
It's a really old school turn-based RPG series that's always had my attention.
This latest edition of the series has some great call backs to earlier titles with game mechanics and references with various weapons and a surprising degree of self awareness. The programmers clearly had a lot of fun making it. There's weapons like the log and the ladle you can use to kill Kings and Emperors and one boss who adores his mustache to the point where he claims he is invincible because of it. (To be fair, it does look like it was passed down through the Armstrong family for generations.)
Other than those tidbits, it's the gameplay itself keeps me coming back to the series. Unlike regular RPGs, you don't get a party of five or so and save the world. No, you raise an army of dozens and save the world. And you can train each and every one if you're demented enough.
It's also difficult. If you make one wrong move, one miscalculation, one stupid risk, you could lose a member of your team. Oh, and they don't come back. They're dead. If you want them back, you have to restart the level, and those range from 10 minutes to over an hour. For new players though, there's a mode that lets you save anytime and not lose troops permanently.
But that is for cowards who aren't prepared to smash their 3DS into pieces and hock them at the neighbors because that Wyvern Rider came out of nowhere and killed your healer.
They added new stuff to keep the formula from getting stale. You can pair up to increase your stats to comical levels and train your weaker troops, and the support system got a nice overhaul. They even recognized how broken the healing system was and make you use stronger staves because heal won't cut it anymore if you need 30 more HP.
The game feels a lot bigger too. There are so many bonus missions and other maps you can buy in addition to the way the game spikes the difficulty though. You promote at around the same time, but they make the enemies relentless at times so it can be difficult for just one of your guys to plow through everyone. The stats also get much higher too. It took a bit of adjusting to get used to the bigger stakes compared to the previous installments.
There is one aspect that is both surprisingly innovating and highly disturbing though.
At first I was glad that there were hardly any worthless already trained troops with stats that would run out in the long run (pre-promotes) but when the children of the characters start to pour in as a result of support conversations and marrying off your characters, your army actually has less potential in the endgame in comparison with a few exceptions.
This is a nice twist, but the children have some disturbing implications. Their stats are high if the parents have high stats, which means this is a type of video game breeding. Now I'm fine with Chocobo breeding in the Final Fantasy games, but these are humans. Fake humans, but you're still making a generation of selectively bred children who once rigorously trained have the power to crush all who oppose them without any mercy whatsoever.
I know this was not an implication meant by the programmers, but still, its kinda high on the creepy scale. Not gonna stop me from playing through more than 3 times though.
Oh, and Mom, this isn't gonna be why I don't get into college. If anything, it's gonna be watching three Seasons of The Walking Dead in three days and then trying the same thing with Breaking Bad.
