Super Villianry GO!

I am supposed to be working on mutants and mastermind's game sessions. But I'm not. Instead I am sitting here writting a blog post because I now feel like writing a blog post. So there. Also I haven't really had the chance to do that this month. I've been sick which is LAME, and now that my brain has clicked back on I should make some decent use of it. So lets see where should we start.

Ebert. Ebert is an interesting charecter, a film critic by trade he made a living off of harassing movies on tv for years and years. Then he got jaw cancer. Long, fairly horrible story short he uses twitter now, ALOT. He does some amazing writting though and he has quickly become one of my favorite people. People misstep though, all the time. Ebert misstepped when he shit all over video games accusing them of being not art. I'm not really going to address the argument proper because it isn't paticularly worthwhile. The thing about the argument is that Ebert made it after having read a bunch about video games. Now, see if he was an avid video game player I would give his argument a little bit more credit. But he isn't.

He once accused blogs of being a massive uneditied morass of opinion that is largely uneditited. He joined our ranks for that post, hope he enjoys his time with the sweaty masses.

What I do want to directly adress is our obsession with games as art because it is something that needs to be looked at a lil bit. Okay here is the issue art means respectability. It means that when something is called art, or respected as art then it falls under the first amendment. With the help of the first amendment all of those stupid laws that try to censor video games, or ban them out right won't happen. There will still be congressmen who will try to get these laws passed, but they will mostly posturing or trying to gobble up publicity. They won't be serious. As of now though, with the idea that video games are art up in the air then should they specifically be ruled as not art then we are in trouble because the laws could descend upon us in a great wave and all the sudden everything becomes very very sad :(.

The thing is though is that we shouldn't have to worry about this. We shouldn't have to be running around in this mad scramble for respectability so that we don't have to live in fear of over zelous law makers. Tv, Movies, photgraphy, paintings, none of these mediums have to deal with this shit. Neither should video games. This shouldn't even be an issue. There is no reason we should be legitimatly afraid that some day America is going to go all Australia. Oh well it is a sad sad topic. It shouldn't even be a topic. Oh well the nice thing about video gamers is that they are usually well wired and they aren't afraid to to make themselves heard. In two days Ebert got over 1500 replies and he was generally pleased at the level of literacy in the responces. He's still wrong and he isn't going to change his mind, and why should he? He doesn't have to because he has absolutely nothing at stake unlike the rest of us.

Moving on. Kick Ass.

So I read the comic awhile ago. Then I watched the trailer for the movie and I knew immeadiatly that the movie would far exceed its source material. The similarities between the movie and the book are pretty impressive but they are some important key diffrences. Them being Hit Girl. Ebert said something about this too but lets give him a rest, I said it first. Hit girl in the comic really left me cold. I was not cool with what happened to her charecter. In the comic her dad is an accountant, he kid naps her, and brainwashes her into believing that the mob killed her mom because they needed a villain. See that right there is just all sorts of fucking wrong. Comics in of themselves are littered with child charecters being thrown into dangerous situations against people who want to kill them, Robin, Bucky, teen titans, a bunch of the x-men, spiderman started as a teenager, the runaways, secret warriors, and that's just off the top of my head without an encyclopediatic knowlage of comic books. In the case of both Bucky and Robin they have been killed by villians. Robin in paticular was beaten to death by the Joker in warehouse. It was kinda fucked. Comic book violence against children is just one of those things that happens. So having a trash talking, little girl killer is a satire of all these child heroes who ended up incredibly adult situations. The problem with the comic version in the hit girl is that her agency was taken away. See in all the comic examples I listed the children all made a conscious choice to go put their lives in danger. Hit girl was brainwashed. See the idea that children don't possess any