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The Gamma-ization Of Superman

Donal Graeme
February 5, 2017

I have been meaning to write this post for some time after numerous discussions withNSR, but never got around to it. However, Cane Caldo’s latest post, The Judgement of Freaks, finally convinced me to get something down on electronic paper. Cane’s post exams Sci-Fi/Fantasy fans and their nature and how it interacts with the market. The part that interested me was this:

But if we talk about the collective of fans, a great many of whom are strange and ill-formed, then I must say that it does have to be this way. What these strange and ill-formed SF&F fans want is a structure of the superficial. The less substantive the better, for under it they can do a couple things.

  1. Transform their crippling weirdness into a minor flaw which is subsumed under the temporarily-irrelevant category of real life.
  2. Practice a wide assortment of perversions disguised as make believe.

Thatâs why there are so many freaks in the comicbook store. Thatâs why there are so many freaks at the Star Trek conventions. Thatâs why there are so many freaks at Renaissance festivals, comic conventions, anime conventionsâ¦there are a lot of freak conventions.

I have no idea how much experience Cane has with this sort of folk. I’ve always had the impression he was a jock in high-school, and not the nerd type. Unfortunately, I was the nerd type, and so I am all too familiar with these freaks. And freaks they are.

Oh, not all of them. I’ve been to comic shops and conventions and Ren fairs and the like. Not everyone there is a freak. But plenty are. Perhaps even a majority at many of these events/places. The thing is, this didn’t always use to be the case.

Years ago comics used to be much more “mainstream,” for want of a better term. But somewhere along the way that changed. Both the fans and the writers started to shift in their overall make-up, and it shows. This structure of the superficial became more predominant, and then finally dominant. Depth is out of the question in most places, and what “depth” you do get is typical SJW political drivel for the most part. The exceptions are just that, exceptions.

From my perspective comics started as a form of light fantasy entertainment. Superpowers sort of took the place of magic, and allowed for fun and interesting characters and stories. But then as the fandom and writers changed, this shifted. Light fantasy morphed into what I can only think is escapism. People created weirder and weirder characters and situations because they themselves were weirder and weirder. As for the existing characters, they were transformed in varying ways, few of them good.

Superman provides an excellent example of this. As originally conceived and as the character was written in the golden and silver age, Superman fits many of the qualities that are often in these parts called “Alpha.” I mean, really, he is the Alpha. Strong, confident, dominant and admired/envied by everyone. And of course women throw themselves at him.

But over time the character of Superman has changed. Some of this might owe to the Comics Code, put in place in the mid 50s, which made things “tamer.” However, I think that only helped lay the groundwork- it didn’t actually lead to the character changing. Instead, it was a new generation of writers (and the fans with them) that transformed the character.

An interesting fact that NSR told me is that DC Comics originally figured they had only a 3-5 year run with most of their readers, who happened to be young boys. After that the boys would start getting interested in girls and their interest in comics would wane. Apparently that influenced the business model. However, at some point super-fans showed up and started to make noises about continuity and the need to collect every comic and the like. Over time these fans became writers, and they started to change the character.

I mention this because it seems to me that the super-fans, if we can call them that, evidently didn’t get caught up in the whole “chasing girls” thing. This to me suggests that they were “out there”, perhaps in a socio-sexual way. Enter Vox’s Socio-Sexual Hierarchy. I don’t subscribe to it in full, but I think there are some useful descriptions there. Here is the description of Gamma:

The introspective, the unusual, the unattractive, and all too often the bitter. Gammas are often intelligent, usually unsuccessful with women, and not uncommonly all but invisible to them, the gamma alternates between placing women on pedestals and hating the entire sex. This mostly depends upon whether an attractive woman happened to notice his existence or not that day. Too introspective for their own good, gammas are the men who obsess over individual women for extended periods of time and supply the ranks of stalkers, psycho-jealous ex-boyfriends, and the authors of excruciatingly romantic rhyming doggerel. In the unlikely event they are at the party, they are probably in the corner muttering darkly about the behavior of everyone else there… sometimes to themselves. Gammas tend to have have a worship/hate relationship with women, the current direction of which is directly tied to their present situation. However, they are sexual rejects, not social rejects.

What I suspect is that over time many of the writers in the comics world started to fit this description. Their own nature as “Gammas” influenced their writing. They projected some of their own nature onto the characters they were writing. This is something you can see in the character of Superman. Some examples of the changes:

  • Superman was always an alien, but he still fit in while on Earth. During his Gammization, however, two things happened. Some writers had him basically disregard his Kryptonian heritage- an example of deliberately denying pride in one’s ancestry. Other writers went to the other extreme, and emphasized his alien nature. They made him feel as if he was an outcast/outsider- which is just how many of them happened to feel.
  • The way that Superman interacted with women, especially as Clark Kent, changed. In the beginning Clark was always mild-mannered, but his bumbling nature with women was also a disguise. Superman actually enjoyed pretending to be the fool who didn’t “get” women. It was all a joke to him. But over time that disguise sort of disappeared, and he lost his humor at playing people. Instead he was confused and conflicted with how he should interact with women. This can be seen in the original Superman movie from the 70s.
  • After 1986, Superman was often displaced within his own comics. Other characters would be the ones taking all the action, and he would just stand there. Along with this came a huge decrease in his power. While Superman certainly had some “power creep” in the early days, he was almost neutered once the Gammas took over the writing.

There is more, but those examples in particular stand out. Putting all of it together, we have seen Superman as a character be twisted by a wave of writers less masculine , and more freakish, than the ones who came before. Of course, he isn’t the only character so affected. And it is important to note that many comics writers from the start were freaks who wanted ways to live out their perversions- see the character of Wonder Woman, for example.

Unfortunately, I see this trend only continuing. So those of us who enjoy the old comics- the light fantasy and not the shallow escapism and perversions of today, are sort of out of luck. At least we have the old ones to enjoy.

TheRedArchive is an archive of Red Pill content, including various subreddits and blogs. This post has been archived from the blog Donal Graeme.

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Post Information
Title The Gamma-ization Of Superman
Author Donal Graeme
Date February 5, 2017 4:00 AM UTC (7 years ago)
Blog Donal Graeme
Archive Link https://theredarchive.com/blog/Donal-Graeme/the-gamma-ization-ofsuperman.24821
https://theredarchive.com/blog/24821
Original Link https://donalgraeme.wordpress.com/2017/02/05/the-gamma-ization-of-superman/
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