Thinking Out Loud: Convergent Lepidoptery

My partner has not seen Stranger Things, so we've been watching through seasons 1 to 4 in preparation for the final installment dropping in a few days. When we got to Stranger Things 4 and Eleven travels in her own mind back to Hawkins Lab and her childhood as an experiment in psychic weapons, it triggered a memory in me. If you're a few years either side of 40 and did your primary schooling in Australia, there's a decent chance you came across the 1992 Brian Caswell novel, A Cage of Butterflies. Now, it has been several decades since I have so much as thought about A Cage of Butterflies, let alone read it, so I'll be working from memory and internet resources, as I couldn't lay my hands on a copy and this is pretty time-sensitive. In the novel, seven teenagers with genius-level IQs form a Think Tank at a government institute where they discover five seven-year-old subjects with psychic abilities known as "the Babies". Our heroes rescue the Babies with the help of two teachers and the novel goes basically where you'd expect for the era. Oh, and the Babies all have shaved heads. 

Now, that's a pretty bang-on description of Hawkins Lab as presented in Eleven's memories in Stranger Things 4, and there's a butterfly reference in season 1 (blink and you'll miss it though), so just how deep do these similarities go? Well, not that much further. None of the child or adult characters in A Cage of Butterflies truly have an analogue in Stranger Things and the latter clearly owes a lot of its DNA to popular films of the 1980s as much as cult and pulp stories. I really don't believe that the Duffer Brothers would have so much as heard of A Cage of Butterflies, as tied-in as it is to a specific time and place for so many. No, I believe both works are more likely drinking from the same well of influences, from the obvious 1980s films like Firestarter and Village of the Damned to real life conspiracies like MK Ultra and the Montauk Project, the latter being so obvious as to get name-checks in Stranger Things. Of course, creepy psychic children goes at least back to The Coming Race, but the fact that both these texts landing on the same visual language is pretty interesting to analyse. 

Brian Caswell was born in the 1950s, so he's certainly a "Baby Boomer", whereas the Duffer Brothers are around my age, so "Elder Millennials", one would think that their influences in media would have led to an at least somewhat different interpretation of essentially the same concept, but somehow it didn't. It's like how almost all cosmic horror owes some debt to Lovecraft, even unconsciously, but with creepy children and hospitals. One might even draw comparison to the "Black Eyed Kids" of popular conspiracy mythos and be pretty comfortable in that assertion. As I don't spend a lot of time with the horror genre, I can't be sure just how widespread these tropes are, but from my metafictional readings of Stranger Things, I feel they may be pretty standard. Stranger Things is an obvious bricolage of ideas and concepts that came together really well, it's really no surprise that other versions of similar ideas are floating around out there. I don't remember A Cage of Butterflies all that well, but the fact that an entertainment juggernaut of the 2020s reminded me of a book from the 1990s that I had to read once felt worth at least noting. 

(PS. One of my overriding memories of reading A Cage of Butterflies is that one of the teen characters goes on holiday with his family at some point. In the middle of the action, one of our leads disappears for a chapter or two to visit Queensland. As a child it baffled me that this guy would just bugger off during a daring operation to free exploited children, but that may be my memory fogging with time.) 

Superhero Media: Godzilla Vs King Gidorah

Considered one of the best Godzilla films of it's era, Godzilla Vs King Gidorah is almost an excellent place for non-fans to jump in and attempt to enjoy the King of the Monsters, but not quite. The Heisei era of Godzilla (running 1984-1995) is typically considered to not be the best era for the world's best known Kaiju, with the mid-1990s being the first time in history where the Gamera franchise took over as the biggest in the genre. For the new era, Godzilla Vs King Gidorah attempts to reposition Godzilla as an anti-hero within his own universe, much as the Legendary films would years later in the West. Struggling to endure yet another Godzilla rampage, the Japanese government is offered a lifeline from an unexpected source; the future. Yes, this Godzilla film features time travel and more references to hit 1980s Western Action Films than you would expect, all with plenty of monster fights to keep the pace up. So yeah, it's a blast.

I notice that a lot of people that only watch Western Kaiju films tend to complain that there's "too many humans, not enough monsters", which leads me to think that they've never seen an actual Japanese Godzilla film; which is just full of interesting human characters doing things to drive the plot. As much as I like the parts of Kaiju films where the monsters are hitting each other, if the entire film were just that, it wouldn't be interesting and Godzilla wouldn't be one of the biggest pop culture exports Japan had ever managed. Godzilla Vs King Gidorah strikes a good balance, with a solid core cast that helps build the mythos of Godzilla, confirming his nuclear origins, but codifying the idea that he was a surviving dinosaur on a small Pacific Island and that it was specifically the Bikini Atoll tests that began the creature known as Godzilla. Throw in a robot for The Terminator references and a sprinkling of predestination paradox, and that's a solid Science Fiction core for your silly monster movie.

Even though Godzilla Vs King Gidorah was made in 1991, it feels a little dated for that time in terms of effects, as the Japanese film industry lagged behind Hollywood's tech boom. Still, the model work is great, and except for the odd flying scene, the incredibly complex King Gidorah suit/puppet is a marvel to behold in motion, but for those more used to CGI, it can be jarring and look a little goofy until you acclimatise. When describing where Godzilla Vs King Gidorah fits in the overall franchise, it may be fair to call it a kind of "soft reboot", a lead-in to the Heisei era that sets the tone for what will come, and, as such, it can be a good place to start if you want something closer to modern cinema than the older Godzilla outings. Oh, and this film is the origin for Mecha-King Gidorah. 

The Slizer Project - Part II

In our last article, I was talking about the silly game I played with my Lego men as a boy and the huge, sprawling narrative and lore that spilled out of that. For those who think this is a big waste of everyone's time, this is forming part of a series of loosely-aligned articles I've begun work on, including the Danton series, where I look over my old notes or take another look at a "bad" piece of media and try to parse out something of value. Sure, many of the ideas I had when I was a child or teen lacked subtlety, borrowed directly from other sources or were just overdone, but there are gems in there that I may as well use, rather than discard.

When we last left our protagonist, who, of course, had my name originally, but got rechristened 'Calvin' in a later draft, had just been arrested for illegal time travel and offered the chance to join the organisation that had tracked him down. Calvin is introduced to the Slizer Team, a military organisation set up by, but independent from, the great powers of The Century. The Century is an area of space and time in which advanced societies exist, finding it once they break the time barrier and conquer interstellar flight; think of it like a 'higher' universe, only much smaller. Honestly, I never got that part down, and it doesn't really make sense, it was just a way to justify the "boarders" of the setting. A big shock awaits Calvin, as most of his former crew of time travelers, except the traitorous Richard and deceased Stephen, of course, are present and also part of the Slizer Team. Calvin and his friends, and a few new characters and former antagonists, mostly aliens, form a unique team within the broader organisation, which is more military in focus, using their experience to travel into history and stop rogue time travelers.

Man, I know I was a literal child when I came up with this stuff, but it's giving me major ACAB vibes now. Oh well, it does get better, I promise. Much like Calvin, his friends have spent time in different periods of history, learning new skills that now come in handy on missions. Combined with the new members, the team takes a little while to gel, but becomes pretty effective at their missions, capturing rogue elements and keeping history intact. As some antagonists recur, our heroes begin to see a pattern and start investigating just why so many incursions into the timestream and The Century itself, are happening. Some investigation soon reveals a broad organisation behind much of the time crime happening, not merely come conspiracy, but a whole revolutionary army looking to overthrow the current hierarchy and liberate Time Travel for their own purposes. Now, as much as I love a good people's revolutionary army, The Resistance here is mostly wrong, seeing Time Travel as a resource to exploit rather than a resource to protect, like the Slizer Team tries to do. With the reveal of the Resistance, the conflict moves to The Century itself, with a full-scale guerilla war breaking out.

Whilst there are definitely some cool spaceship battles and the like, most of the conflict is in small raids, spy games and terror attacks, keeping our heroes guessing as to who they can trust and how to even fight such a foe. As the military industrial machinery of The Century starts to fail under the pressure, the Slizer team makes a desperate decision to take on the Resistance leadership directly, assaulting the planet they're hiding on in a sci-fi commando raid complete with plenty of flying lasers, spaceships and, of course, sword fights. Look, I was a kid, I was just getting into 40k and the minifig I used for Calvin came with one of those cavalry sabres, so a big sword fight to round out the story was pretty much a given. Actually, for a long time this fight was meant to be a big deal in Calvin's journey as a character, being the first time he kills someone deliberately and/or without his own life being in danger. We'll see how that plays out later, but for now cutting the head off the snake has worked to a certain degree, and The Resistance surrenders for the most part.

Victory has been achieved, and peace reigns for now, though some Resistance cells are still active, the Slizer force has control of the Timestream once again. Battered but emboldened, the powers that be look at shoring up their defenses for the next threat, revealing a new hybrid weapons platform that is ready for field testing; the Slizers.

Superhero Media: Carmen Sandiego (Netflix)

After seeing a few reviews for this version of Carmen Sandiego, I decided to start watching it in-between other programmes, and quickly found myself more than a little charmed. Whilst the individual elements of Carmen Sandiego rarely rise above the level of competent, the complete effect is rather excellent and the overall progamme highly engaging. Having been raised on a secret island university for criminals, "Black Sheep" flees when she fails the final exam, takes the name "Carmen Sandiego" from a coat and starts to fight her previous colleagues. Yes, in this version, Carmen steals from thieves, only to return the valuable historical artifacts later as she attempts to bring down V.I.L.E. (Villainous organisation for Intrigue Larceny and Evil) and stay ahead of the law herself. Helping Carmen out are Player, a teen genius hacker, and a two-person Bostonian brother and sister racing team, both of whom seem to have a massive crush on Carmen, but we won't be doing any of that, because this is for the kids.

VILE is made up of a faculty of semi-retired master thieves and a cadre of younger criminals all of whom have a theme and gimmick; like "Neil the Eel" who wears a friction-less suit, "The Goat" who does Parkour or "Crackle" who has a shock stick. In this, VILE isn't wholly dissimilar to something like HIVE or Crossbones' crime school from mainstream comics, though Carmen's team definitely has more of a "Ocean's 11" vibe with a splash of The Avengers (the British one). The formula of Carmen Sandiego is pretty set, with a new item to be stolen each episode and an explanation of the history and culture of the the place the team is headed to, many of which are actually pretty interesting. For example, the intro to Australia actually covers our strict biosecurity laws and the reasons behind them, which is almost never covered in popular media. Though Carmen does just visit the Outback and the Sydney Opera House, so I wasn't too excited.

The narrative through-line, such as it is, concerns Carmen searching for her family, and whilst the story comes across a little rushed in the last season, I was never disinterested in what was happening. Again, nothing in Carmen Sandiego is exemplary, but every element is done with a great deal of competence and the final product is both highly engaging and visually excellent. If you're looking for a criminal organisation a tad more grounded than Hyrda or AIM, VILE may well fit the bill, and even if not, Carmen Sandiego is a decent binge for a slow weekend that doesn't outstay its welcome or try to be anything more than it really needs to. Whilst I won't be actively seeking a 28mm Carmen for my games, should I happen to stumble across something suitable, she would at least make a fun little table "Easter Egg", like my TARDIS, Madagascar Penguins or Batsignal.

Thinking Out Loud: Sayian Biology

So here's a weird idea that's been knocking around my head for years and won't go away; Sayians and Kryptonians have a lot in common. Now, I don't just mean that elements of the Superman story were incorporated into Goku's background when it was translated to English, but rather that there a similarities between the Sayian and Kryptonian races within their respective fictional universes. Something that doesn't come up much in DC Comics, but is there if you look for it, is that Kryptonians (and also Daxamites) are inherently stronger and tougher than humans due to their having a "higher molecular density". Now, that's comic book nonsense, because if it were true, Clark Kent would weigh much more than a human of the same size and someone would have surely noticed, but hey, we love comics because we're dumb, so let's run though this a little.

Just how strong and tough Superman would be without the Yellow Sun of Earth is never really covered, but I have to assume somewhere above the human average for a man of his build and below what we'd call truly superhuman. So where does the most over-hyped race in Dragon Ball history come in? Well, way back in the very first episode, Bulma shoots Goku with a machine pistol and whilst it really hurts, it doesn't break his skin at all. In the first episode of Dragon Ball Z, Raditz is able to catch a bullet with his finders and throw it back at lethal velocity with ease. We know that the fighters in the series can deflect blows with their ki, but right at the start of Dragon Ball, Goku hasn't learned to manipulate his ki yet, at least not consciously, so there must be something about him that prevents the bullets from doing real damage. Something like a greater density of Goku's flesh?

Yes, it's a silly idea, but it's the kind of silly I love in my supers and just sits in my head rent-free until I write these articles. Let's the crazy out, I guess? A higher molecular density would also explain why the Sayians are such strong warriors and come back stronger each time they heal. Hell, it may even help provide some answer as to where the extra mass comes from when they transform into Great Ape form, if the extra density unfolds somewhat. For the record, Hulk just pulls his extra mass from another dimension (basically super-Hell) in the comics at my last check, though it may have changed since Immortal Hulk. Umm, not sure there's anywhere left to go with this, so, hopefully something better next time.

Superhero Media: Arrow - Season 8

And here the programme that launched the CW DCU comes to an end, a few years too late, low on quality and pretty wonky in terms of lore, but, somehow, Arrow gets a better ending than the last few seasons would have deserved. At the risk of sounding overly sarcastic, probably my favouirte element of the final season of Arrow is that it is only a handful of episodes long, rather than the standard twenty-something, so the narrative is condensed and there is very little filler. The previous season having ended with the Monitor taking Oliver Queen away to do his bidding and keep the multiverse safe from... I think it's meant to be the Anti-Monitor? As usual, the crossover is mostly in other programmes, so I only saw a little bit of it, but it looked like fun and I will probably check it out at some point.

What the device of having Oliver traveling the Multiverse really enables is a tour of characters and locations from the history of Arrow, a kind of farewell parade, if you will. This sounds good in theory, but there's a huge amount of season one and two continuity that I just didn't remember, what with it having been half a decade since I saw them. I'm sure there's a group of fans out there who go back to the previous seasons regularly, but I'm not one of them, so I was completely lost for entire stretches. Much of the rest of the episodes deal with the children of "Team Arrow", who I find pretty tiresome, but the bits where they get to team up with their parents in their prime are enjoyable enough.

Somehow, the last episode is actually really good, with very little action and a focus on each remaining character getting their moment to say goodbye. Although trite, this farewell is pretty well executed, feeling genuine and heartfelt when it needs to be. The part everyone talks about is John Diggle finding a Green Lantern ring, but I personally enjoy Mad Dog's journey from murderous vigilante to mayor of the city through a humanist platform. I cannot honestly say that Arrow is worth the time it will take to watch all of it, but I don't regret having done it now that it's finished. What came after Arrow, like The Flash and Supergirl is typically much better, but without CW and DC taking a risk on a character and franchise that most people didn't know, they never would have existed. Well done, Oliver Queen, you did not fail this franchise, even if huge chunks of it were quite bad.

Thinking Out Loud: Do Cyborgs Dream of Electric Lesbians?

Following on from my watching of the 2019 Ghost In The Shell film, I was discussing the franchise with friends and one of them was surprised when I mentioned that, canonically, Mokoto is a Lesbian. Is this something that people are not aware of? I'll admit that most versions don't cover Mokoto's sexuality as explicitly as the original Manga, with that one page I'm sure you found pretty quick, but even Stand Alone Complex has pretty obvious elements hinting at what's going on, or did you not notice that all of Mokoto's friends are women and they like to all sleep in her four-poster bed? I think the problem of "Queer Invisibility" is down to two reasons with Ghost In The Shell, one being that a hetronormative societal lens tends to minimalise queer behaviour; "oh they're just gal-pals!". Secondly, elements of Japanese Queer culture are not often translated over to the West and can be missed. Even with all my broad reading and viewing, I've found scant little available in English, though I highly recommend the novel Forbidden Colours if you can find it.

Anyway, let's discuss that infamous page in the manga, the one with all the naked women. There's some translation issues, but what is essentially happening is a group of women are using cyberwear to link their brains together and trigger a shared orgasm. Now, that's not strictly sex as we currently understand it, but it's pretty damn sapphic behaviour, especially for a high-ranking member of the Japanese Military. And here's were we finally get to the point I have to make about Scarlett Johanssen playing Mokoto. In Stand Alone Complex and S.A.C. 2nd Gig, it is pretty strongly hinted that Mokoto defected to Japan during "the war" (in-setting there was a third World War, but the details are pretty sketchy), most probably from Europe, as she's dismissive of Americans pretty often. But why bother with this character element? Well, even today, Queer persons and culture tend to be marginalised in Japan, so a Japanese creator wanting to make a queer character might be expected to find a way around criticism by, just for example, making her European rather than native-born Japanese.

Now, the 2017 Ghost In The Shell kind of wimps out on what could have been an interesting premise around Mokoto's origins and sexuality, but how much of that is down to backlash against Johanssen playing a character many assume to be Asian is pretty difficult to determine. I recall getting into a pretty fierce argument with a Chinese-Australian acquaintance who was adamant that Johanssen was "stealing" the role from an East Asian actor, and whilst I can see her perspective, Mokoto is, in a sense, a European woman wearing the "shell" of a Japanese woman. Of course, the 2017 version did nothing with this premise, which could have been really interesting, instead making Mokoto a Japanese woman in a European cyborg shell. I tend to believe that particular script element was due to backlash against Johanssen in the press, but of course I can never prove it. Hopefully any future adaptations of the story and characters for Western audiences do something interesting with Mokoto and her complexities.