Super Mary Sue Wins the 'Who'd Win', Yet Again

Of all the things that geeks do the 'Who'd Win' Scenario is one of the most worthy of severe mocking. Anyone with a brain and over the age of 16 will quickly realize that it is a class of characters that I hereby dub the Super Mary Sue (thanks to Rose for that name) who always win these match ups. A juvenile person who cannot stand to see his character lose, EVER, creates the Super Mary Sue. He/She is the best and/or world’s greatest at everything. (Yes I am deliberately overdoing the emphasis on this—it is what SMSs are like.) Take Batman.

Because the writers are on his side, he only loses for dramatic necessity—and even then it is because he has absolutely NO clues. He could figure whodunnit from a nondescript oily smudge and some dust, every single fricking time. Even the patently unrealistic CSI franchise would be stumped with as little as the Batman has to go on sometimes. He is as unstoppable as Cthulhu and apparently twice as scary to cowardly criminals.

Play it for laughs like Celebrity Deathmatch, if you want, but if you start taking things like Anita Blake vs. Batman seriously, you have become the comic book guy. Enter rehab immediately.

And yes, though I like him better than many superheroes, I am indeed calling Batman a Super Mary Sue. Because he is.

A Bill Gates Date

On Friday animazed and I arranged to have a date on Sunday after brunch. Since he's in Hawaii and I'm here we decided to go to simultaneous showings of The Prestige in our different timezones. It was actually rather fun, a good second best to sitting in the same theater. Plus it was a good movie as well. I saw part of what was coming right away, but I thought it was too simple, that couldn't be the trick. But it didn't hurt my enjoyment of the movie at all because the movie didn't depend upon the trick. It was all about two obsessed men destroying each other. And the strange coolness that is Nicola Tesla as played by David Bowie.

We talked for a long while after the movie, not as much before. Richie enjoyed it as well as I did, though he seemed not to intuitively grasp what was happening with the big plot device as intuitively as I did. After a while it was time for me to go and drive home. I'm pretty hopeful that this whole long distance relationship thing will work out okay.