| Why Reed Richards is full of crap |
[Jan. 20th, 2007|02:27 pm]
minigendo
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While I am mostly out of comics, I am still dragged in every now and then by friends to voice an opinion on something. Most recently this has been the slow trainwreck Marvel comics is calling its Civil War. This entire "Marvel Comics Event" has been a travesty in terms of continuity, with writers acting apparently without any editing at all.
One of the more egregious examples of this though, has been Reed Richards. Better known as Mr. Fantastic, Richards has been kicking round the marvelverse for longer than I've ben alive. Arguably one of the brightest minds in the setting, there is little if anything Reed hasn't done. He's beaten the odds again and again in the name of his ideals and values. Pretty typical hero stuff, right?
Except ... he's supporting the fascist side of the Civil War. The government controlled army of superhumans that will eventually be used to suppress all all diessent. Now, his original explanations for why this was, were examples of the aforementioned bad continuity. These explanations were 1) It's the law and 2) My Uncle. We'll get to number 2 in good time, but for now, lets focus on number 1.
Reed, as a superrhero, has only ever had a passing regard for the law. There have been times when through the machinations of his enemies, the law has turned against him, and he has defied it. In fact, the very concept of being a superhero or even a regular vigilante is to flaunt the law, so the very idea that he'd use this as a defense is laughable.
The uncle defense is equally useless. Reed revealed to Peter Parker that his beloved wacky uncle was a communist sympathizer who was destroyed by the red scare. Reed wasn't going to let that happen to him. Again, we see a weak completely out of the blue explanation that completely violates established characterization. Reed fights this sort of thing, but does not embrace it.
A recent comic dealt with these glaring retcons by ... retconning the retcon into something even more idiotic. In this it was revealed that Reed was lying about the law argument as well as the Uncle. Instead, it turns out that as a boy Reed read Asimov, and was so inspired by Seldon's psychohistory that he decided to invent it. Using these formulas Reed claims to have been able to accurately calculate the public feeling for decades. He claims further that mankind is approaching a nightmarish apocalypse where social pressures tear humanity apart, leading to an extinction.
Now, on the surface this appears a more reasonable thing for Reed to say. A man of science applies scientific analysis and comes out with an unpopular but true solution. Reed chooses the lesser of great evils, as it were. UNFORTUNATELY, while the writers happened to read Asimov, they appear to have been reading the cliff notes version and not the real thing because ... Asimov himself points out the flaws in the theory.
In Asimov's books the entire plan he mapped out is set entirely on its ear by the appearance of a single mutant, The Mule. He disrupts entirely Seldon's accurate predictions. It is only by the actions of Seldon's second foundation that things are placed back on track, and by track I mean the path mapped out by Seldon.
This fact is made doubly ironic because the Marvel Universe is nothing if not rife with mutants, any number of which are so overpowered as to be able to affect the psyche of every living person on earth. As Reed points out, psychohistory only works in broad strokes, you can't predict the actions of individuals with it. This means it falls aparts when indivduals can create large sweeping changes, which is the case in the Marvel Universe.
In fact, any number of things can cause this sort of change. For example, a sweeping technological innovation, a catastrophic environmental event, extraterrestrial contact, a contagious disease. Psychohistory is entirely unable to deal with any of these.
Now we come to the real point of this article. I'm not writing this because I'm dissapointed in Marvel's retconning their own BS, although I am. I'm writing this because they would use Asimov, even reference him, but not actually read his bloody books. Asimov was well aware of the flaws of his own literary conceit. He explored them. That was what made his work so good. And that, ladies and gentleman is the reason that Reed Richards is full of crap. |
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