Friday, February 15, 2019

What Do Heroes Do To Monsters? (The Talk of the Saints)

Commissioned by Neon Sunrise Publishing

Content Warning: Mentions of rape.
 
"Terror! The Human Form Divine!"
The dichotomy between hero and monster, as is the case with most dichotomies, is a false one. Monsters are, like most things, societal constructs built to define the difference between us and then. We tell stories of monsters to show who we should be afraid of; be they those who worship the wrong gods, have the wrong skin color, having an abnormal limb, or do the wrong things, it matter not. What matters is that “we” are not “them.” Because “we” would never want to hurt “us” by doing something monstrous like changing the world. We lash out at those who hurt us and call them monsters, even when they’re trying to help.

The hero, by contrast, is the one who always helps no matter what. They save the weak, they heal the sick, and slay the monster. But there’s an exceptionality to heroism that is closer to the monster than “normal” people. Normal people, after all, don’t react to personal tragedies by, say, dressing up as a bat and fighting clowns or cat people or that asshole in film studies class who thinks liking Citizen Kane is something to lord over people. A hero is as much an “other” as the monster is. It’s just that heroes align better with normal people’s sensibilities better.

Consider the Academy Award winning picture The Shape of Water. The hero of that story is a fish man, literally the Creature from the Black Lagoon: a metaphorical beast of the Amazon out to ghastly things to the women (or, to make the metaphor more explicit, the white women). And yet, in The Shape of Water, he’s the romantic lead. The one who heals the sick, saves the princess, and slays the monster. The monster, by contrast, is what people would have called heroic once upon a time: a square jawed two fisted man’s man who goes to far off lands and brings back treasures unseen by human eyes. Think Doc Savage or Indiana Jones or even Batman. In this telling, he's the kind of guy who feels he’s owed sex because he saved the girl and slayed the "monster." And for his cruelty, the monster slays him and lives happily ever after with the woman he loves. Other, older stories would have him be heroic for having his way with the woman. James Bond, notably, raped Pussy Galore into being a heterosexual.

The point is that heroism and monstrosity are concepts that shift and evolve over time such that one can become the other. Which brings us to Tom King and Jason Fabok’s one shot Swamp Thing story. The obvious path would be to explore this within the lens of Alan Moore’s seminal run on the character, as Moore is a major influence on King’s work. The problem with that approach is that King’s Swamp Thing isn’t as psychedelic or weird as Moore’s is. It certainly fits within the genre of weird fiction (indeed most superhero fiction to one extent or another does), but the story of Swamp Thing traveling the endless winter with a child isn’t as weird as, say, expies of cartoon characters landing on Earth only to discover it too isn’t free of pollution, the werewolf being used as a metaphor for feminine rebellion, fish vampires who live in the lake, zombie incest rape, or Nukeface. Hell, Morrison and Millar's run on the character had an issue where he was summoned to a parallel universe where the Nazis won the war as a means of destroying the world. The Road, but with a plant monster seems almost quaint in comparison.

Indeed, the story itself fits within a trope of the flawed father figure traveling with a child. Be the story that of Logan, Game of Thrones, God of War (2018), or the one we’re going to focus on: The Last of Us. The Last of Us tells of a man broken by the end of the world, which was caused by a floronic plague that turns people into plant like beings. Plant Things, if you will. He travels the wasteland of America with a child named Ellie who can stop the plague and bring things back to the way they were. But it will be at the cost of her life. The man decides, without consulting anyone, to “save” the child. Not out of love, though cruelly he does love her, nor because she doesn’t want to die to save the world (Ellie makes that point explicitly clear at the end of the story), but because he can’t face losing another child. It’s selfish and cruel and awful, but that’s love for you.

Swamp Thing too loves the child he is traveling with. He wants to protect him from the monster that has caused the world to freeze, made everyone hostile to each other, and must be fought on a constant basis. But the truth is that the child himself is the monster, the one responsible for freezing the world. And to save the world, to bring back the green, the child must die. Everyday, Swamp Thing remembered this. Everyday Swamp Thing chose to forget. He loved the child, so he didn’t want to kill him. Even though he knew it was the right thing to do, he couldn’t.

Until he could.

Until it got too cold, and he was forced to kill the child he loved. Who loved him back as well. He just didn’t want to die. There was no malice, no intended cruelty to the monster. Just a scared little boy who didn’t want to be alone in the cold. It would be so much easier if we couldn’t love those who were cruel to us and they couldn’t love us back. If the baddies had no interiority, no humanity, no reason to be saved. If only we lived in a world of monsters and heroes, things would be so much simpler.

The truth of the matter is being a monster or being a hero aren’t things you are. At best, they’re labels given to people to separate us from them. But more than that, they’re things you do. You do heroism like saving children or being kind to strangers when they need you to be and you do monstrous things like killing children or kicking a man when he's down. We separate these things into binaries because they are exceptional things that normal people could never do. But the truth is… we can be heroes as much as we can be monsters. The snow monster didn’t make us cruel any more than the swamp monster made us kind. We have the potential to be both, or neither. For we do not live in a world of monster and heroes.

We live in a world of people.
“Responsibility? Yet you consider her fit to bear that of a hero? Don’t worry: all she needs to do is answer a question. A question so simple even a child could answer. So Child… You are a hero. That is a monster. Tell me: What do heroes do… to monsters? What do heroes do to monsters…?” 
“SAVE THEM!”
-Sarah Jolley, The Property of Hate

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