SciFi, Fantasy, Comics, Etc.: The Intellectuals' Head Candy

Lego Catwoman Logging onto Her Laptop

Were I to engage in labeling myself one way or t'other, I would probably end up somewhere in the SJW camp, but not for the reasons the anti-SJW camp might suggest.

I want brain candy. I want texts, & movies, & art to challenge my thinking and stimulate new thought. I want to explore all the possibilities of being.

Despite my love of comics, which are often recursive and sometimes downright repetitive in their storytelling, I read them to discover the moments of "awe" hidden in them that cause my brain to rewire former connections and build new, unexpected pathways.

And, well, the old paradigms the anti-SJWs seem to exert a great amount of time, energy, and animosity defending just don't extend the story. The protagonists are the same, the devils are the same, and the payoffs take one nowhere that one has not already been.

That's not to say that genre fiction isn't also political for me. As brainstatic suggest in his/her/their post on Tumblr: SciFi, Fantasy, Comics have always served as part allegory reflecting the cultural "hot zones" of the zeitgeist of the time in which they were created.

(Though, I would add that the Clone Army in Star Wars, 

who function primarily as cannon fodder, are designed on 

the genetic material of an indigenous person of color.)

Lego Catwoman Cursing at Her Laptop

The characteristic of SJWs the anti-SJW could accurately ascribe to me, though, is intellectual snobbery. But that is only because, as a former teacher of English, I think it is the moral obligation of intellectually capable humans beings to actually develop their god-given capacity to reason.

So I insist that people who claim reason actually employ reason. Go figure.