The Battle Continues Over "Childish Things"

hawkeyefan · Feb 7, 2019

doctorbadwolf said:
Eh, that criticism is broadly applicable enough that it's functionally worthless, IMO, unless applied to a specific work, creator, studio, etc.

Fantasy novels, sci-fi, television, movies, table top games, video games, music of pretty much any genre, whatever. It can all be said, with equal accuracy and thus equal uselessness, to be childish and unsophisticated.

To some extent, sure.

But the serial nature of superhero stories....especially the most successful and well known....essentially places them in a loop that always circles back around to the default starting story point. No matter what happens, things will eventually revert to the status quo. As such, continually enjoying such stories without eventually seeing the loop can be a bit odd.

They can take Spider-Man and tweak his origin, reveal his identity, kill Aunt May, and all kinds of other changes....and then boom, it's all back to the default status quo.

At any point in the loop, sure there are stretches that can be incredibly entertaining and creative and thoughtful. But taken as a whole, I can see how it can be viewed as a bit childish. It doesn't mean I'm perpetually a child if I still enjoy superhero stories, or that I can't enjoy other things. But I recognize it myself. I'll put down a comic and think "wow, I got nothing at all out of that....it's no different, and actually probably inferior to the stuff I read when I was 10". When I get that feeling, I stop buying the book in question.

Generally, I think a lot of it comes down to the creators involved, and what they choose to do, or sometimes more importantly what they are allowed to do, with the characters.

Again, I am not saying that Maher is right. Ultimately, he's wrong because he's conflating the genre and the medium. And then even taking his comments as they relate to the superhero genre, I think he mostly misses the mark, but I can at least understand the criticism.

Dannyalcatraz · Feb 7, 2019

It’s a paradox of sorts that the most popular superheroes- and comic strip characters- are most at risk of getting stuck in loops. Victims of their own popularity.

OTOH, some of the second tier (or indie) characters- even those on the cusp of breaking through to the top- are free enough to evolve and even die. And sometimes, that freedom lets the creative staff do some of their better work with those characters. Tell stories they don’t think they could with the marquee properties.

Immortal Sun · Feb 8, 2019

The long and short of all of this is that "That's childish!" is just a phrase some people use to lord themselves over others. Plenty of people get called childish for being sports fans, for loving the military, for voting republican/democrat/neither, for buying a sports car, for not having children, for spending their hard-earned money on a cheesecake.

It's just absurd. The only purpose it serves is to make Person A feel superior to Person B for not participating in "childish things".

Hussar · Feb 8, 2019

Y'know, I was cogitating the notion about "adult" fiction vs YA fiction. And something occurred to me. Someone upthread, I believe it was [MENTION=40171]Shashara[/MENTION]k talked about Shakespeare, Melville, and Dickens as examples of "adult" fiction. Ok, fair enough. But, isn't the defining characteristic of something that is "childish" that it's something that children and young adults do?

So, how many adults do you think actually read or watch a Shakespeare play compared to the number of high school aged people? How many people, outside of high school, actually attend a Shakespeare play or read one? The overwhelming majority of consumers of Shakespeare for the last century or so have been teens. If you head down to your local library, and found a Shakespeare play or a collection of sonnets, and then tracked down all the people in the last, say, twenty years who had checked out that book, I'd think you'd find that the overwhelming majority would be high school students. Virtually no one over the age of 25 anyway.

Same goes for Dickens or Melville.

So, how is Shakespeare an "adult" author when the overwhelming majority of readers are under the age of 20? How is he any more adult than JK Rowlings or those terrible Twilight books? The average age of a reader of A Christmas Carol is likely no different than the average age of a reader of someone reading Batman.

It's not like Dickens or Shakespeare were writing for adults anyway at the time. They were the Marvel Universe writers of their day. Pop culture works meant to be consumed by the masses. What's the difference?

doctorbadwolf · Feb 8, 2019

hawkeyefan said:
To some extent, sure.

But the serial nature of superhero stories....especially the most successful and well known....essentially places them in a loop that always circles back around to the default starting story point. No matter what happens, things will eventually revert to the status quo. As such, continually enjoying such stories without eventually seeing the loop can be a bit odd.

They can take Spider-Man and tweak his origin, reveal his identity, kill Aunt May, and all kinds of other changes....and then boom, it's all back to the default status quo.

At any point in the loop, sure there are stretches that can be incredibly entertaining and creative and thoughtful. But taken as a whole, I can see how it can be viewed as a bit childish. It doesn't mean I'm perpetually a child if I still enjoy superhero stories, or that I can't enjoy other things. But I recognize it myself. I'll put down a comic and think "wow, I got nothing at all out of that....it's no different, and actually probably inferior to the stuff I read when I was 10". When I get that feeling, I stop buying the book in question.

Generally, I think a lot of it comes down to the creators involved, and what they choose to do, or sometimes more importantly what they are allowed to do, with the characters.

Again, I am not saying that Maher is right. Ultimately, he's wrong because he's conflating the genre and the medium. And then even taking his comments as they relate to the superhero genre, I think he mostly misses the mark, but I can at least understand the criticism.

And I'm saying that he is wrong about the genre. Not just "mostly misses the mark" but "is completely ignorant regarding the thing of which he speaks, and is speaking entirely out of his butthole".

Spider-man and MJ aren't, to my knowledge, back together. Pete isn't a teenager again. Gwen Stacy is never coming back (outside of alternate universes).

Damien Wayne might come back to life again, if he hasn't already, or he might not. Even if he does, it won't be a retcon or a "return to the status quo", because even his arrival was a change to the status quo, and barring a new reboot, they aren't that prone to ignoring events like a character dying. They tend to continue to inform that character's ongoing story. The older Robins will never be Robin again. Jason Todd will never be a character who hasn't been brutally murdered and then resurrected by a sociopath who believes he is necessary to the development of humanity, a piece of Jason's humanity lost in the resurrection.

Regardless of any "status quo", the very fact that you can point to stories within these universes that are award worthy literature makes Maher's "criticism" complete nonsense, as close to objectively false as one can get about art.

Vanveen · Feb 8, 2019

Y'know, I was cogitating the notion about "adult" fiction vs YA fiction. And something occurred to me. Someone upthread, I believe it was @Shasharak talked about Shakespeare, Melville, and Dickens as examples of "adult" fiction. Ok, fair enough. But, isn't the defining characteristic of something that is "childish" that it's something that children and young adults do?

So, how many adults do you think actually read or watch a Shakespeare play compared to the number of high school aged people? How many people, outside of high school, actually attend a Shakespeare play or read one? The overwhelming majority of consumers of Shakespeare for the last century or so have been teens. If you head down to your local library, and found a Shakespeare play or a collection of sonnets, and then tracked down all the people in the last, say, twenty years who had checked out that book, I'd think you'd find that the overwhelming majority would be high school students. Virtually no one over the age of 25 anyway.

Same goes for Dickens or Melville.

So, how is Shakespeare an "adult" author when the overwhelming majority of readers are under the age of 20? How is he any more adult than JK Rowlings or those terrible Twilight books? The average age of a reader of A Christmas Carol is likely no different than the average age of a reader of someone reading Batman.

It's not like Dickens or Shakespeare were writing for adults anyway at the time. They were the Marvel Universe writers of their day. Pop culture works meant to be consumed by the masses. What's the difference?
This thread has a lot of smart people offering naive/non-professional opinions. The reality is a little different.

I did graduate work at a top university with America's leading expert in American publication history...basically, the study of "how well books did" when they were actually published. Everything you think you know about this is wrong.

Shakespeare is Shakespeare because he invented the way we represent ourselves in words. (Two tests: think of a character in the past 400 years whom Shakespeare could NOT have invented. You can't. Secondly: name a book other than the Bible that a stranger in a bar will have read or experienced. To spice this up, assume he always tells the truth and that he will cut off your finger if you guess wrong. Which would you choose?)

The idea that Shakespeare was "pop culture" is wrong for lots of reasons, the biggest one being that "pop culture" as a concept only dates from the 1960s. He was more like pro football--a whole bunch of people went to the plays. Many were felons. Few knew much about "dramatic art," and fewer cared. Many spent most of the "game" not watching the "game," even (especially) the rich, smart ones.

All the authors you mention were most certainly writing for adults. Children were typically considered not human until the 19th century, and "childhood" as a concept was only really established in the 1950s when child mortality began to be unusual. The idea of writing "for children" as we consider it dates from around 1870, although the moral aspect of children's writing was fiercely advocated until the Baby Boom, when Seuss and others began to attempt children's writing from a child's purported perspective. Dickens wrote for "families," a concept that was also beginning to be invented in the 19th century, and essentially his "market positioning" (read it to everyone in front of the fire) defined the market. His most direct descendant is Disney. George Eliot, a far better novelist and far more influential *as a writer* to later novelists, did well but not as well owing to not following Dickens' positioning.

Comics are not very sophisticated on a literary spectrum; people who think they are, are the equivalent of Iowans who think that Des Moines is a cosmopolitan, hip city. It most certainly is, for them. Quite frankly, there's very little to be done about this: rubes will stay rubes or completely transform into something entirely different by, say, moving to London. And it doesn't matter. London, well, Londons. Proust keeps on Prousting.

Vanveen · Feb 8, 2019

[q]Y'know, I was cogitating the notion about "adult" fiction vs YA fiction. And something occurred to me. Someone upthread, I believe it was @Shasharak talked about Shakespeare, Melville, and Dickens as examples of "adult" fiction. Ok, fair enough. But, isn't the defining characteristic of something that is "childish" that it's something that children and young adults do?

So, how many adults do you think actually read or watch a Shakespeare play compared to the number of high school aged people? How many people, outside of high school, actually attend a Shakespeare play or read one? The overwhelming majority of consumers of Shakespeare for the last century or so have been teens. If you head down to your local library, and found a Shakespeare play or a collection of sonnets, and then tracked down all the people in the last, say, twenty years who had checked out that book, I'd think you'd find that the overwhelming majority would be high school students. Virtually no one over the age of 25 anyway.

Same goes for Dickens or Melville.

So, how is Shakespeare an "adult" author when the overwhelming majority of readers are under the age of 20? How is he any more adult than JK Rowlings or those terrible Twilight books? The average age of a reader of A Christmas Carol is likely no different than the average age of a reader of someone reading Batman.

It's not like Dickens or Shakespeare were writing for adults anyway at the time. They were the Marvel Universe writers of their day. Pop culture works meant to be consumed by the masses. What's the difference? [/q]

Click to expand...

This thread has a lot of smart people offering naive/non-professional opinions. The reality is a little different.

I did graduate work at a top university with America's leading expert in American publication history...basically, the study of "how well books did" when they were actually published. Everything you think you know about this is wrong.

Shakespeare is Shakespeare because he invented the way we represent ourselves in words. (Two tests: think of a character in the past 400 years whom Shakespeare could NOT have invented. You can't. Secondly: name a book other than the Bible that a stranger in a bar will have read or experienced. To spice this up, assume he always tells the truth and that he will cut off your finger if you guess wrong. Which would you choose?)

The idea that Shakespeare was "pop culture" is wrong for lots of reasons, the biggest one being that "pop culture" as a concept only dates from the 1960s. He was more like pro football--a whole bunch of people went to the plays. Many were felons. Few knew much about "dramatic art," and fewer cared. Many spent most of the "game" not watching the "game," even (especially) the rich, smart ones.

All the authors you mention were most certainly writing for adults. Children were typically considered not human until the 19th century, and "childhood" as a concept was only really established in the 1950s when child mortality began to be unusual. The idea of writing "for children" as we consider it dates from around 1870, although the moral aspect of children's writing was fiercely advocated until the Baby Boom, when Seuss and others began to attempt children's writing from a child's purported perspective. Dickens wrote for "families," a concept that was also beginning to be invented in the 19th century, and essentially his "market positioning" (read it to everyone in front of the fire) defined the market. His most direct descendant is Disney. George Eliot, a far better novelist and far more influential *as a writer* to later novelists, did well but not as well owing to not following Dickens' positioning.

Comics are not very sophisticated on a literary spectrum; people who think they are, are the equivalent of Iowans who think that Des Moines is a cosmopolitan, hip city. It most certainly is, for them. Quite frankly, there's very little to be done about this: rubes will stay rubes or completely transform into something entirely different by, say, moving to London. And it doesn't matter. London, well, Londons. Proust keeps on Prousting.

Edit: fix quote tags

Dannyalcatraz · Feb 8, 2019

Vanveen, please fix the formatting of your last couple of posts.

See this thread:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?348563-Dark-Text-on-a-Dark-Background-Tutorial

As for this:

Comics are not very sophisticated on a literary spectrum; people who think they are, are the equivalent of Iowans who think that Des Moines is a cosmopolitan, hip city.

Would I compare Justice League of America #175 to Finnegan’s Wake? No.

Would I denigrate comic fans as immature/hicks while conveniently ignoring exemplars within that genre that have been recognized by the same organizations that consider a wide variety of the other literary genres out there? Also no.

Pulitzer, Hugo, Newbery, Caldecott, Michael L. Printz, Coretta Scott King and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights boards have all granted literary awards to comics and graphic novels. Which begs the question: are THEY the equivalent of Iowans who think that Des Moines is a cosmopolitan, hip city?

(If your answer is “Yes.”, then your ivory tower is showing, and you should really tuck that away.)

billd91 · Feb 8, 2019

Vanveen said:
Comics are not very sophisticated on a literary spectrum; people who think they are, are the equivalent of Iowans who think that Des Moines is a cosmopolitan, hip city. It most certainly is, for them. Quite frankly, there's very little to be done about this: rubes will stay rubes or completely transform into something entirely different by, say, moving to London. And it doesn't matter. London, well, Londons. Proust keeps on Prousting.

Someone needs to dust off his Scott McCloud.

Celebrim · Feb 8, 2019

Vanveen said:
I did graduate work at a top university with America's leading expert in American publication history...basically, the study of "how well books did" when they were actually published. Everything you think you know about this is wrong.

Oh dear, save us from the pseudo-intellectuals.

Shakespeare is Shakespeare because he invented the way we represent ourselves in words.

Do you mean for the English language, or just generally? Because if you mean generally, I'm finding that statement a bit ridiculous.

think of a character in the past 400 years whom Shakespeare could NOT have invented.

Are you seriously advancing an argument from the counter-factual as evidence?

Secondly: name a book other than the Bible that a stranger in a bar will have read or experienced. To spice this up, assume he always tells the truth and that he will cut off your finger if you guess wrong. Which would you choose?)

In the United States? 'Great Gatsby' or 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. If I meet a stranger in a bar, I will assume that the works he's most certainly read are not the ones people read as a matter of taste or choice, but ones assigned to him in high school. And 'Great Gatsby', 'To Kill a Mockingbird', 'Huckleberry Finn' and a few others are probably right up there with Shakespeare because well, that's what they make you read in high school. In fact, 'To Kill a Mockingbird' might be a safer bet than Shakespeare, because which play or plays that they read probably depended on whether or not they were in an honors course, but everyone was made to read 'To Kill a Mockingbird' at some point.

The idea that Shakespeare was "pop culture" is wrong for lots of reasons, the biggest one being that "pop culture" as a concept only dates from the 1960s.

Popular culture as a phrase dates to at least 1825, and as I understand the concept the phrase meant pretty much what it means now. I don't know what concept you are talking about, but popular culture has been around pretty much since the time society got sufficiently wealthy to stratify.

Seriously, stop wagging your credentials around like you can talk down to this crowd and get away with it. We're not rubes, and you're not as sophisticated as you think you are. You're talking like someone who has only a casual acquaintance with the subject matter involved, and as such are presenting it in the most unnuanced simplistic manner possible, like someone who read a magazine article on the subject and only partly remembers what was said.

The Battle Continues Over "Childish Things"

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