You may have seen me from time to time talk some shit about superheroes or characters in superpowered contexts whose superpower boils down to has a gun. The Punisher, for example, is a dude in a superhero universe who isn’t really a superhero – he’s just a homeless dude in a van with a lot of guns. A prepper with a mobile home. He’s the worst.

It’s not just the Punisher (who sucks), though. It’s also something I joked about when watching Kamen Rider W (which ruled), where one of the special abilities the hero could unlock was using the trigger Gaia Memory (it makes sense in context) to get a special superpower magical gun, which I would nonetheless jokingly refer to as has gun.

This particular affect, though, is something that derives from an old kids’ cartoon that I love, and have spoken about before. It’s a reference to the name Gunhaver, from the Homestar Runner cartoon (within a cartoon? The characters are shown playing with the toys and watching the show) Cheat Commandos, a parody of 80s toy-ad militarised cartoons like GI Joe.

A thing I’ve loved about Homestar Runner is the way that their jokes, often their best jokes, involve gently pointing out details that normally go unstated (“goodbye, Baloneyman, and may we all forget you probably have a really sketchy past.”) When you watch these cartoons over and over again (and I did, because it was easy to download them and they worked on poor connections), their memetic quality was valuable and you spent time seeing the jokes from lots of angles.

There’s a lot of jokes I repeat from this cartoon, whether it’s tone or a structure of delivery, or when or what to imply about myself for comic effect, including even tangents, but okay, distracted. The point here is Gunhaver. Gunhaver is The Generic Leader of the Commandos. There’s nothing to his character, not really – he just is in charge, gives useful and boring orders, and in his appearances, just serves the basic plot of the story. When you talk about these squads of diverse characters with connected abilities, like GI Joe and MASK did, the point was to individualise characters, often with clear and visually striking gimmick.

Gunhaver’s gimmick was that he had a gun.

That’s it!

This is not to say every character with a gun is a Gunhaver. After all, lots of the science machine devices you see super-dorks use are ‘guns,’ but they’re ‘guns’ they made. They’re guns that are a thing they made, and needs special skills to make. There’s also weirdo sharpshooters like Hol Horse from Many Jojo Things I Don’t Care, where the gun is just a way to express the real powers they have, or Homura from I’m Not Allowed To Make Jokes About Madoka who is a time traveller who uses guns because guns are the most obvious thing you can do when you can also time travel and you’re a twelve year old who has no reason to respect the sanctity of life.

Not so for a Gunhaver. Gunhaver characters are notable because the thing they’re wielding is just a gun. It’s a gun, which is a commercially available product in their world. Maybe the quantity of guns suggests some kind of wealth, though that’s never really what gun communicates in media. Certainly, the absolute arsenal that the Punisher (for example, again, who sucks) drives around with represents a significant fraction of a million dollars, because guns are expensive, but that’s never the important thing.

The important thing is that in a world of the fantastic, in the landscape of the infinite ways we can make metaphors out of powers, in a place where your characterisation can be expressed by your powers, the power you have is bought something a real person can buy. And do! And some of those people are the most boring and awful people around, and they make having the gun the closest thing they have to a personality.

You can make interesting characters whose powers need to be enabled by a gun. Even Black Widow, a character I waver hither and thither on, is essentially a super-spy and gunhaver, but her gunhavery is at least an interesting part of a broader skillset. Heck, just by comparison, Black Widow and Bobbi Morse are both women who stand next to each other with nearly identical skillsets, but very different personalities, and the presence or absence of a gun in their skillsets doesn’t come up.

It’s not like bad characters Has Gun, it’s just if you’re going to Has Gun, have a reason that’s interesting. Be something other than a fucking holster.

It is the most boring bastard of a power.

Oh hey, Star Trek, a thing that two years ago I generally regarded as ‘just some nerd show I have no interest in’ that I’ve now realised I have enough of a familiarity with to be able to meaningfully research and have opinions on, that’s wild. It seems that every few months, usually when something leaves me to my own devices while work demands a lot of attention on grinding information like a research paper or marking, I will wind up using my second monitor to cannonball a television series, which has sometimes been an entire Star Trek and has sometimes been Longmire, and the show doesn’t have to be good as much as it has to be not intolerable. I suppose that sounds like an indictment of Star Trek but really it’s worth knowing that at its worst, it was never as bad as Longmire, so there’s something to be proud of, able to consistently stand above an absolutely shit series that leads with a Katie Sackhoff poledance.

The series of this season was Deep Space Nine, which I watched over the course of a few months, as my picture-in-picture soundscape filler, and I celebrated this watch by turning as many episodes as I could find one into a funny image macro that you could decipher with the context of me, as a person, informing the episode of Deep Space Nine assuming you’d already seen it, creating the impression of yourself and myself as an ingroup that shared that common experience, aka ‘memes.’

One thing that the binge generation has done for a lot of television programs is that there’s a surprising number of episodic TV shows where it was easy to lose track of the sequence of episodes unless you were a hardcore nerd with a DVD stacker, and therefore get weird impressions of how ‘close together’ some things were. There’s a sort of phantom memory that can crop up with long-running shows, like how in M*A*S*H some people may forget there ever was a character called Spearchucker.

When you view a large text with its own episodes as context, when performances that were normally week to week are instead side by side, you can get some really interesting, weird, phantom effects. If you watch all of The Simpsons in one string of episodes, the recurrent themes become obvious and the series stops being about a series going back, seven years or so later, to re-do stories with new information and instead becomes about showing an endless, toiling, unstopping cycle of awfulness, and strangely, becomes a series about how the author (in the Barthes sense) kind of hates Lisa. She’s always being shown told some hopeful story of ‘tomorrow will be better’ only for the status quo to reset hard and the next time she’s focal, it’s the same basic problem.

Deep Space 9 is not a series that benefits from being watched all in a rush, and it absolutely does not benefit from having its beloved multi-part sequences of episodes (a couple of 6 parters and one nine parter finale) treated as single, long, cannonballed experiences from someone with a notepad in hand.

Similarly, I watched all of Breaking Bad in a few days once I had a service that offered it, and when you do that, the series becomes fascinatingly blatant. If you watch it this way it seems extremely hard to me to ever see the good in Walter – there’s no break or pause in his behaviour, no time to speculate, because you know it’s coming, you know it’s right there. Breaking Bad was a media event, and it was a big deal that each week, people would gather and talk about where they imagined the story was going, or what something about the story meant. This was a big enough deal that when Breaking Bad was airing, there was a channel package advertising itself as having the show on ‘at the same time as America’ meaning you could deal with the internet without worrying about spoilers. The shared cultural moment of suspending each episode for a week and then taking time to process it changes the character of the show.

Essentially, most of the people who watched Breaking Bad made some Breaking Bad fanfiction in their head, and we just don’t talk about it, because that’s something those other nerds get involved in. Not every single white person over the age of twenty two.

I feel like this is an important piece of context to give for later, when I decide to talk about Deep Space Nine in its actuality… because boy, that series has some weird stuff in it when you view it all at once.

Iiii love symbiotic characters.

I don’t mean oh, I love how these two characters relate to one another, it’s like they’re in sync but not in a gay way or in a definitely gay way. I don’t mean characters like Sora and Riku where the individuals kinda have nothing going on but if you look at them as a pair you can use one to extrapolate that the other one, you know, exists.

Oh, but dunks on the character design of Kingdom Hearts aside, what I mean is that I have a fondness for characters who are in some way symbiotic between two identities. This isn’t just superhero stuff – though that absolutely lives in this real estate – but rather characters who can be seen as having either multiple identities in one body, or one identity across multiple bodies.

What prompted me to think about this was of all things a scene in Episode 8 of Picard, which, I am really hoping by the time this has come out, has resolved and we’re all going ‘what a jolly good Star Trek that was’ and the end of the narrative wasn’t something about, I dunno, how marshmallows are evil. In the scene in question, 7/Annika/Whatever you want to call her, in a desperate move, plugs herself back into the Borg cube, and consciously chooses to create a new collective for a few minutes.

Then when she’s done, she says Annika still has things to do.

When I was a kid, I was always fascinated by gestalt transformers, where there was one transformer that wasn’t five transformers hanging around, but was literally an individual, with its own personality, and it could break apart. Maybe it was because I was a lonely kid, always looking for people who had something in common with me, or maybe it was just because big toy cool, I always found something fascinating about nesting characters.

I wonder if maybe this is why I think that Venom is so tiresome. I find the idea of a character containing some kind of monstrous identity really interesting, and Venom just does it all in a very tiresome way, like it’s dumping plain pasta on a plate with a splat and going there. that. It’s not like my own experience writing this kind of character, where the way the two identities perceive one another and themselves plays into what they’re even for, in the story. It’s not like how I write the wolf of Rock City.

But it isn’t just a single direction, too. Swarm druids and vampiric discorporation are both really exciting, interesting ideas to me where you suddenly have one mind splitting out over a huge number of parts and still maintaining itself. How do you regard yourself when you’re a set of drones? How much of you can pull apart and still be you? What about a swarm-spawning character, a creature like the Swarm Hosts from Starcraft?

Back in Diablo 2 there were druids, druids that could summon clouds of vines and bugs and dogs and worse around them while they ran around hitting things (often with their very animal claws). That same feeling, that cloud of being who I was always appealed to me, and when I started playing around in RPG sourcebooks, it wasn’t long before I found all the interesting ways characters could extend their selves. In BESM you could make sentient weapons and tools, and then link them to your identity (so you didn’t have to track two sets of HP). Because BESM was broken as biscuits, this was also appealing to my power gamer elements, so that obviously pulled me along that route.

Part of it is internal dialogue. A character who is in conflict with themselves is common, but when you can metaphorise that, and show elements of who or what is in charge of the body at any given point in time, you get to show dimensions of where the personalities overlap or disagree. Part of it is I think that being a lonely kid makes you imagine weird friendships.

And I guess another part of it is that you can use it to show ways that people think about themselves… and ways they can be wrong.

Anyway, symbiotic characters! They’re cool! Toxin, Upgrade, Defensor, Kord and Fortress Maximus, the idea of the werewolf itself, the Trill, and 7 of 9 (not that I’ve seen Voyager yet)! These are cool and I like ’em!

Weird since one of my most hated villain groups of all time has been the Yeerks tho’.

Perhaps it’s because I love and appreciate implied storytelling following a childhood of reading probably the worst bestselling book in history that, while supposedly full of crucial information that’ll keep you from being infinitely tortured forever, is nonetheless so fantastically obscure that the vital tenent of the trinity that makes it a monotheistic text and not just another fantasy novel of fake bullshit isn’t even in there and you have to kind of guess around the edges and read the supplemental materials to get what the fuck it even means that means alternate history narratives are oftentimes wonderfully interesting to me. The problem with them, and we’re not going to talk about how long that sentence was, Dad, is that alternate histories are also extraordinarily boring works, usually penned by extremely thudding individuals and strangely, tend to attract audiences that are pretty, well, let’s just say it’s not that these communities are overwhelmingly racist, it’s just that they clearly haven’t done enough to make sure racists feel uncomfortable enough to fuck off.

But what if instead of churning through a civil war era novel that wanted to explain in detail how it went about handling the difference in Ironclad technology, there was some kind of short, fun, punchy way to get alt history, in increments of say, five minutes or less? Well, they’d have to be really good, because then you’re talking about worldbuilding for a real world history in a tiny amount of time. Maybe you’d need something to string it all together, like, you know, music and rhythm and wordplay and all that.

It’s hard to be a Star Wars fan.

Star Wars is like any long-reaching cultural phenomenon of its ilk, mostly just like anything else that’s widely recognised, memetically important, ideologically contagious and loved by an enormous fanbase. It’s not – and I do not say this to make light – unlike a religion. It has shibboleths and practices, varying degrees of expression, rituals and totems, it has a sort of generalised spine of its own cultural values, and it has some fans who are into it who are just the woooorst.

At this point, I have watched nine of eleven Star War movies I’m aware of – I’m missing Rogue One and Rise of Skywalker. Of those nine movies, most are meaninglessly silly kid’s fare that we treat as more important than I feel they deserve, Solo is the worst kind of self-gladhanding we get too much of in fandom communitie, sabacc sucks so much, I actively liked The Last Jedi, and I loved about… half an hour of Return of the Jedi.

The half hour that’s all about Ewoks.