unpretty:

it’s really wild to see how batman has evolved over time as a consequence of writers wanting to change everything while also changing nothing because any comic that lives that long is a shambling stitched-together corpse

early batman is a swashbuckler and he’s having a good-ass time beating up these bad guys, because he existed in the context of organized crime being a big fucking problem. they were coming out of the 1930s. that’s the era of al capone, you know? john dillinger only died five years ago and he was a fucking celebrity. and batman shows up to be like YOU KNOW WHAT’S COOLER THAN SHOOTING PEOPLE AND BRIBING GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS? BEING BATMAN.

early batman could not have been more clearly edutainment, pulpy enough to make kids feel like they were reading That Good Shit but always with a really obvious message (the message was DON’T DO A CRIME). he fights a lot of giants because having to protect yourself from people twice your size is very #relatable to children.

when he adopts robin it’s very clearly to give kids a character to relate to more strongly than they can bruce wayne–FIGHTING CRIMES ISN’T JUST FOR RICH MEN, IT’S ALSO FOR COOL KIDS LIKE YOU. see how cool robin is, kicking the shit out of these dudes? don’t you wanna be cool, like robin? he’s from the circus, that thing you wanted to run away to because that’s a viable life choice in this era!

bruce wayne was rich but his whole cover was that rich people are fucking useless. a man who inherited money? a fucking useless, lazy shit, no question. this was just accepted by everyone, that obviously an heir would never be suspected of doing anything that might take effort. the difference in attitude on a fundamental level toward the idle rich is staggering.

his wealth is also MONUMENTALLY downplayed, in the same way you see in old movies. they deliberately did not film the philadelphia story in an actual mansion because they didn’t think anyone would believe that the rich got to live like that. so bruce wayne ends up looking like he lives in a tract home in a suburb. “is this how rich people live? yeah, sure, probably. who cares, let’s fight crimes.”

they only introduce a backstory after the comic has been going for a while, because at first it’s like? why would he need a reason to fight crime? it’s fun? but i guess they figured they had to create SOME reason for bruce wayne to not be completely useless, as all rich men are. why is bruce wayne the only rich man capable of doing cool shit? because his parents died, that’s why. check out robin kicking this dude in the head. fucking sweet, right?

there’s a whole storyline where batman fights a whole fucking town because it’s corrupt and the cops are corrupt and THE WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM IS CORRUPT so he’s gonna FIGHT THE WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM IF HE HAS TO, FUCK YOU AND FUCK YOUR COCAINE.

then the comics code happens and fucks everything. batman can’t fight, like, systemic corruption and dudes with tommy guns anymore. all the crimes get CARTOONY AS SHIT. the joker isn’t just a murderous jewel thief with a weird face, he’s a fucking clown. he’s a weird clown man committing clown crimes. puns everywhere. suddenly batman is fighting Supervillains, and they’re all insane. but they aren’t, really? they are a cartoon’s idea of insanity, like a wolf in a straitjacket getting hit on the head with a mallet. when a character is insane what that actually means is they’re wacky, they do weird shit, they have no meaningful motivation and do crimes for no reason because the alternative is having them commit real crimes for good reasons and that’s not good for the kiddos. the fact that batman changed so much after the code is fucking WILD because, remember, it was ALWAYS for the kids. it was BLATANTLY for the kids. the code still managed to fuck it just through the culture shift it created.

then later there’s this shift, again, away from the code and away from kids entirely. late seventies, i think? fuck if i know, i don’t know shit about damn. suddenly they want to be more GRITTY and REAL and DARK. they want REAL CRIME. batman is PUNCHING RAPISTS IN ALLEYS. but this isn’t the era of dillinger anymore. as a society, collectively, we understand more about crime and the societal forces that drive people to crime and so on. there are a lot of alley rapists in this era of comics tbh and this is probably why. rapists always deserve to get punched regardless of class struggle. also at this point we understand more about violence, and people who are violent, who commit acts of violence and solve problems with violence and enjoy being violent. a rich guy having a blast kicking a guy in the head for robbing a bank is no longer great optics.

so batman stops having fun. this is now his dark mission, his grim assignment. he doesn’t like this job, but someone’s gotta do it. he will not smile as he punches a rapist in the head. this is serious business. i don’t necessarily have a problem with this decision, because i think it’s a legitimate course of action to say “in a modern context, these behaviors become unacceptable, and so we will change his behaviors so that he can continue to be a heroic figure”. that’s valid as a motherfucker and i wish more people would remember that the whole point of making batman a grump was so that he could continue to be a good guy, as opposed to the alternative of gleeful violence.

(getting rid of most of the violence is also good–he’s a detective–but these are comics we’re talking about here so lol)

and then there’s the villains. you’d think this would be the point where they say “hey, maybe let’s go back to the way some of our villains were before the code”. you’d think that if they hated the goofy villains so much they’d just move on. but it’s comics so nothing ever goes in the trash for good. and that’s when you have writers who look at a cartoon wolf in a straitjacket and they say “that’s not what insanity looks like! we should make him a sociopath.”

i mean you could have just said “let’s stop calling him crazy and try to find a better motivation for these crimes, like being an asshole” but instead now batman has all these villains with sociopathy and OCD and DID and schizophrenia, because that makes it REAL, because now instead of being cartoon crazy people committing cartoon crimes they are real crazy people committing real crimes!! OH BOY

and at some point someone looks at this and goes “you know i feel like this might be ableist as shit” and writers could have said “yeah in retrospect the only evil clown i’m aware of was legally deemed sane and didn’t actually commit thematically appropriate crimes, so maybe mental health isn’t the issue here” but instead they said “yes, batman is kind of an asshole to be punching these sick people, but he’s a necessary asshole because without him there would be Crazy Crimes and we all just have to come to terms with that i guess”

now we’re at this place where we’re trying to reconcile about eighty years of nonsensical horseshit and all of these decisions that were made because of shifting cultural attitudes or to sell comics or because one writer in particular assumed everyone would love his cool OC as much as he did, and there are writers going “you know, bruce wayne probably has pretty severe ptsd” and there are writers going “what if batman was the REAL villain all along” and there are writers going “lol rich man wears bat costume to punch the mentally ill and poors, did u ever think about that” and there are writers going “hey have you heard of this ayn rand chick because boy howdy i just did and now i’ve got ideas”

but the reality is that heroism and goodness are not static concepts that look the same to all people even within the same era and trying to reconcile every different version of what the popular conception of heroism has looked like for almost a century is dumb as hell and batman should have entered the public domain in 2014

feynites:

oshkeet:

feynites:

quinzelade:

soundssimpleright:

quinzelade:

feynites:

So the footage of Owen training the tiny raptors in the new Jurassic World kind of (inadvertently, I think) confirmed something that always bugged me about the social dynamics mentioned in the first film.

Owen’s using the term ‘alpha’ wrong.

Of course, the concept of pack alphas is rooted in a lot of erroneous studies anyway. But if we take his actual assertions about it and Blue’s behaviour at face value, then Owen is wrong. He’s not the alpha. Blue is the alpha. The pack follows her cues, that’s why they go with her when she decides to follow the Indominous, and it’s also why they listen to Owen – because Blue does. If Blue stops, so do the other raptors. They’d don’t just wait it out to see who’ll win, they immediately follow Blue’s lead.

Blue’s the leader. 

Owen is, actually, the mediator.

He is the one who stops disputes between the raptors and defuses tense situations. He is permitted this status precisely because he’s physically weak (compared to raptors) but socially important. His social importance was created by rearing the raptors and forming emotional bonds with them. But they know full well that he’s squishy and beatable (though they probably don’t realize just how lethal some behaviours might be for him, comparatively). Blue knows she can kill Owen and that Owen is not strong or very useful at leadership decisions for a velociraptor pack. She accepts his input because he’s dad.

So since Owen actually isn’t even in the running for pack leader, and challenging him would be pointless because then you’d just hurt him and cost the pack a socially important member, and also probably get beaten up by Blue, he is the ideal mediator of disputes. His intervention de-escalates situations by reducing the amount of violence that’s permissible. 

But because he was using so much containment and physical force (even if it was through equipment, obviously) to keep the raptors in check, I think Owen misjudged his placement in the raptor social group. Especially since he actually was tougher than them when they were babies. He thought they listened to him because they believed he was stronger than them, and that this was an illusion he had to maintain.

That was never actually the case, though. Blue knew Owen was way weaker than her the whole time. She just valued him anyway.

There’s probably a metaphor about toxic masculinity in there somewhere.

You had me until the last line.

Would it still work for you if you removed “toxic”?

Nope. One bloke misunderstanding his social role in a group of bloodthirsty, primitive monsters is not a good or accurate metaphor for men.

Not a good one for women either if we’re the aggressive monsters, hmm?

Actually, what I was alluding to was the concept of Owen fixating on the assumption that he had to protect his social position via force and a misrepresentation of his own physical power, as having some allegorical similarities to masculine expectations of leadership and authority.

It’s not so much that he misunderstands his role in the social group that’s relevant, but why.

And that doesn’t actually require that the raptors be allegorical stand-ins for women. Because the dynamics of or composition of that social group is irrelevant, the salient point with regards to the toxic masculinity quip is Owen’s preconceptions about authority in the animal kingdom.

But, if we do want to look at the raptors as an allegory for women, it’s still not all bad. Because one of the major themes of the Jurassic Park movies is that the dinosaurs are not monsters. The monsters are the scientists and businessmen who seek to profit from their existence, who have made them, manipulated them, fenced them in, etc..

The reason why the dinosaurs are a problem in the movies is because they break free of the confines constructed around them, and then it’s no longer just about what the humans want, but about what the dinosaurs will do. And the messages of the movies, overall, is that responsibility still lies with the people who built the cages and manipulated the living things into forms and shapes they found pleasing, not with the creatures who then proceeded to liberate themselves.

But that’s a bit more of a stretch.

Still, that’s why I was deliberately vague with that last line. There’s always more than one way to read a story. Or piece of meta, as it happens.

Not gonna lie, I thought the ‘alpha’ line was more for the ease of the audience (since people believe that sort of thing still) and partly to maintain the theme name of the group (“Alpha”, Blue, Charlie, Delta, Echo)

Ironically, the term alpha makes more sense for the OG raptors. There’s significant increase in complexity in how they act as a species across the original 3 movies, and a popular theory is until the raptors started free-breeding and living in self-regulating packs instead of being lab-grown (IIRC Owen points out the only reason the Pack gets along is they’ve been socialized), they couldn’t act “naturally” and that might have made them overly violent and aggressive.

I think this was even the canonical explination for the Big One in the original movie; she was thrown in with the existing pack with presumably little socialization and straight up killed nearly all of them to establish dominance.

Initial studies of wolf packs, which first concocted the ‘alpha’ theory (that’s still erroneously used in a lot of dog training and by weirdo misogynists), were basically a bunch of scientists trying to study the social behaviour of some of stressed-out, unrelated wolves that they’d randomly stuck together. Sort of like the equivalent of trying to understand all of human society by going to a prison. They observed the wolves fighting and contesting with one another, still forming a sort of social group, but a violent one where the majority of wolves only ‘followed’ whoever the biggest bully was. And of course, frequently challenged said bully for position.

It wasn’t until later that studies actually examining wolf packs in the wild figured out that wild wolves have a more familial structure, and don’t struggle for dominance all the time. By then, though, the preconceptions about wolf behaviour were rampant and they persist even now.

So in that sense, the OG raptors and specifically Clever Girl/The Big One would be way more appropriate for any kind of ‘alpha’ dynamics claim. You’re absolutely correct, because they’re basically a dinosaur recreation of that same mistake with the wolves. The original raptors were social animals raised without proper communal and social interactions. They were constantly stressed and excessively violent, because they perceived nearly everything as a threat and also didn’t know how to interact normally with other raptors.

The raptors that Dr. Grant meets in the third movie, at Site B, have been living wild in their own communities for a while by then. They only bother with the humans because they want their eggs back. As soon as they have them, and Dr. Grant manages to kind of communicate some not-sinister intentions, the raptors go back to hunting meaty herbivores instead of these scrawny weirdo humans. Infamous in how the scene was handled, maybe, but actually more in line with the behaviour of intelligent wild animals – there are better things to hunt, so once the problem is solved, there’s no reason to waste any further energy on it.

(Well, curiosity, maybe, but these raptors probably also retain some background wariness of humans – making it more compelling to just avoid them in the end.)

Interestingly, as an aside, the first movie also adequately illustrates the fallacy of ‘alpha’ dynamics style thinking. Y’know, the same concept that has people mistaking ‘survival of the fittest’ for ‘survival of the most physically powerful’? The raptors have defaulted to this kind of social group, which serves to make them terrifying in their pursuit of the much-squishier humans. But the format falls apart entirely when they come up against the T-Rex, which is fully capable of killing all the raptors. But the T-Rex is also more easily fooled and evaded by the humans. If the T-Rex behaved like the raptors, then Dr. Grant and the kids would have been dead the minute it got them out of the cars. Instead, they survive, as does the T-Rex – but not the raptors. 

The social group that revolves around violence and physical domination is doomed to be killed the minute something bigger comes along.

On the other hand, the raptors in the third movie just go back to their business. And in Jurassic World, the Indominous is basically another Clever Girl – the raptors following her proves deadly for all of them except for Blue, and Indominous also gets killed by something that’s ultimately bigger and badder.

So while the choice of language doesn’t really match up to it, ultimately, the movies have directed a lot of thematic criticism towards the whole ‘alpha’ concept. 

While I doubt it’s intentional, I do think that this actually illustrates Owen’s major character flaw. Claire’s is obvious, of course. She greenlit the I-Rex project, and ran the park for years while viewing the dinosaurs as ‘assets’, only really conceptualizing them as living creatures after the first time she saw one die. She was so caught up in the perspective of business and profits that she was dangerously irresponsible in her decision-making without even realizing it – essentially carrying forward the themes critiquing capitalism and corporate greed that have always been part and parcel of the series.

But Owen is often deemed insufferable because the narrative doesn’t seem to think he can do any wrong.

However, if we look at him as someone who’s own misunderstanding of the animals in his care was just as dangerous and detrimental as Claire’s, I think a more well-rounded picture of events becomes clear. Both characters failed to really understand the impact their choices were having on the world around them. If Claire’s embodying the cautionary tale about the corporate side (and the potential to make amends), then Owen is embodying the cautionary tale from the ‘dominant species’ side. Which both combine to illustrate the theme of mankind’s hubris, but also the hope that our mistakes won’t be the end of us if we can adapt and learn better.