Quote:
Originally Posted by Zero Hunter
Because it just come of as "look at the major characters death for no real reason except to shock you" type moment without any real emotion to it. Which is pretty much what it read like in Final Crisis.
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Well, no. No it didn't.
Aside from the fact that shock is, itself, an emotion; there was no shock to it.
Which is, in itself, shocking I suppose. But more of a comment on that guy we all saw having his head sawed off by the Al Qaeda people. Utterly horrible moment, but we've all seen it, and all been left curiously cold by it. It's like our brains just can't process seeing such a thing on a video. It's too horrific to take on board, so we feel nothing.
And that's exactly the way it went down here, like a terrorist video execution -- I mean, the cell phone gimmick kind of tips us off here.
So there we have the divide:
One book gives us the standard reassuring fan service story, where the hero goes out fighting the glorious fight, and we can feel good about him falling. (As if that isn't curious in itself!) Sure, there's something archetypal about that -- Roland, say. And I remember being very cranky about the mishandling of Hawkeye's "death", so I can see where people are coming from. But still, what I'm seeing is that we don't want the death to be just brutal and meaningless like most deaths are; we require the master narrative of going down fighting so as to make sense of it.
Whereas the other book goes: no; here's a quick, brutal, meaningless death. That's how it is in the world where Evil has won. Even the death is meaningless. And instead of referring back to mythological structures of prior death scenes, it refers out to the world we live in, where bad guys do that sort of thing to good guys like Daniel Pearl all the time, and there's nothing positive to take from it at all.
And to me, this is the difference between fan service and art. Fan service is about building a world we can escape into, can pretend is our own world, and require of it that it gives us the satisfaction we can't gain in this one. Art is about using the archetypes of fiction to interact with our world.
It's the old line from the Surrealists: Art is not a mirror; it is a hammer.
Oh, and just to drive the point home: it's a Jesus thing. We need the resurrection and the salvation to make the Jesus story bearable. Strip that away, and it's just something good gone from the world just because people are bastards, and nothing good comes from it either, and we don't want to live with that.
And the man died finally on the end of a spear. I'm thinking that symbolism is not empty.