Season 3 x 19 The Fanatical

15 minutes in and I had to take a break.
I was really enjoying the 1980s/ 90s style car chase and the fight in the parking garage.
Then the white racist cops show up and just let the bad guys walk away.
They don't detain Guardian because he is a vigilante.
They detain him because he is black.
How many white comicbook vigilantes have had run ins with the police over the past decades of comics and their race was never once a factor?

So I walked away also.
I might tune in next week.

Funnily enough, I had a pretty similar experiance as you Markiehoe.

They don't detain Guardian because he is a vigilante.
They detain him because he is black.

This was so stupid as to go beyond the word stupid.  So, let me get this straight.  Every white cop in America is racist? And lets criminals walk away because they are white?  Doesn't bother to ask questions, or, you know, find out whats happening?  Wow.  If I was a white cop in America, I would be so offended by this portrayal  

I actually stuck it out, and the world-building regarding kryptonians (and how they might defeat Reign) was pretty cool.  Tying it back to characters and strands introduced earlier in the season was a nice touch.

But then you got the James scene, where, surprise surprise, he (and his friends) was arrested (for no reason) when he was young.  Blah-di-Blah-Blah.

Honestly, those two scenes felt SO out of place in the episode, they may as well have held up a sign saying "PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT INCOMING!".

This is the crap that the CW needs to cut out tbh - the blatant agenda spewing, mis-representative, SJW rubbish.

Why not focus the story about being a hero and the need for a secret identity to protect the ones you love?  Why make it about race?  How does that serve the story better, in a world ABOUT SUPERHEROES WHO HAVE SECRET IDENTITIES!!

Peace.

/K

The first half of this season was so good.
I can only imagine that the higher ups, who live in all white gated communities with security guards, actually watched a few episodes of this season and said: "Enough of this bull shit. Shoehorn in Social Justice issues so we can feel all Validated,"

Indeed.

At this moment, it feels like the first half of the season was written by COMPLETELY different people, who it seems , have now been fired  

Ah well, if this is what season 4 bodes, I'm cashing in my chips.

Peace.

/K

Markiehoe wrote: How many white comicbook vigilantes have had run ins with the police over the past decades of comics and their race was never once a factor?

.

Hell, a major plot line this season on Arrow dealt with how a white vigilante was facing prison time. ironically, the FBI agent leading the charge was even an African-American woman. I enjoy all the Arrowverse shows for the most part, but sometimes it annoys the hell with how preachy it can get. the gun control episode of Arrow last year springs to mind.

Can we deputize someone to watch Season 4 for anything good (e.g., transformations)?  I'm with so many of you in saying that I think I'm cutting my losses after this season regarding the SJW writing; it can get worse, too...

Who's volunteering?

It is kind of cool when a writer can sneak in a political, or social message without the audience realizing it, until further discussion. But this is a cacophony of horrendous writing. They don’t even attempt to hide their message within relevant plot points, they seemingly have a shit pile of dirty diapers and every 20 min or so they demand that the audience smells it. Honestly, someone needs post the name of the writers on a thread. 

Polotics is is a pendulum, pull to hard on the left, it’ll swing hard to the right. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. So before more comic book characters are hijacked for this leftist nonsense, here’s my advice.....focus on character driven good story lines....cause after this episode, I think i’m Now a Trump supporter. 

I agree that this episode was especially cringey and egregious in its preachiness.

You have to think that the whole reason they cast a black Jimmy Olsen in the first place was so that "The More You Know" social-justice moments like the ones in S3E19 could be interjected. There's definitely a strong progressive agenda across the board at all of the CW shows which manifests itself in different situations depending on the context and the tone of each show (and please note: I am not a Trump supporter. I am a centrist Democrat who campaigned for and voted for Hillary and several local progressive Democratic candidates..and although I wanted a woman to be president...overall, politics based on immutable identity characteristics does bother me quite a bit as a divisive tribalist crutch that hard-leftists tend to lean on.) The one trend I do notice throughout all the shows is that they always emphasize diverse casting with some character race-swapping and consistent inclusion of biracial relationships and offspring. 

Supergirl is probably the second worst in beating viewers over the head with identity politics and ticking off diversity boxes (eg the Worldkillers), but I would say that Legends is the worst. And I think that's simply because they travel to a lot of periods in the past, when life was shorter and more brutal and discriminatory, which allows them to apply Current Year historical revisionism so often. To whatever time period they go, there always seems to conveniently be a strong powerful woman, or an activist leading a revolt against oppression, or a civil rights champion, etc. Although the characters are fun, everything seems out of place and forced to satisfy various leftist causes, like Vixen is there because colonialism, Ava is there because gay marriage, Zari (whom they were too afraid to call Isis, and too lazy to do anything more original than steal her amulet from Raiders of the Lost Ark) is there because Islamophobia and so on.

Arrow is so violent and dark that any mentions of progressivism just get swept up in its brutalistic approach. For example, when Dinah Drake went on a rampage for several episodes to avenge the reverse-fridging of her boyfriend Vigilante, that kind of grindcore feminism fit right in. And the way Black Siren/Earth 2 Laurel plays both sides in most episodes shows nuance in how she's so powerful and yet so vulnerable at the same time. If she actually appeared more often in costume, she'd be my third favorite CW female character (next to Thunder and Supergirl). 

As for the Flash, the arcs of their characters bounce around and are so inconsistent that it's hard to draw a reliable pattern, and when progressive issues come up (eg their #HashtagFeminism episode from earlier this year) they are usually dealt with halfheartedly and then disappear. In a bizarre twist, they fridged just as many female bus metas (some gender-swapped from the comics) as they did male ones. One overarching theme of The Flash, though, has been the victory of emotions over intellect. Which is weird because almost everyone on the Flash team is a scientist. This was evident in the climactic episode battling the Thinker (just like Supergirl, the Flash never kills and always tries to "find the good" in everyone if possible). And since 'feelings over facts' seems to be a core trope for activist/leftist millennials, we can still put The Flash solidly in the progressive column. So it's surprising to me how tone deaf they are about the use of the superheroine name "Gypsy" in Current Year..but that's a discussion for another time perhaps. Like I said, inconsistent.

The series that the leftist politics works the best on is Black Lightning, because it's organically centered on family and neighborhood concerns. By the end of the first season, I was living and breathing with the travails of the Pierce family and seriously in love with both daughters, and you don't get that with any of the other CW shows. Not everything is perfect - for example no matter how callous Proctor's plan was, we could have done without his "Make America Great Again" speech - but nothing else stands out as ham-fisted as the speeches from Supergirl.

Anyway, I'm going to continue to watch Supergirl as I always have, with its ups and downs. These producers have millions of dollars to produce
TV shows, and we don't - plus the content is free, so to a certain extent, you still have to be thankful for what you can get, especially when you get a good long glimpse of Melissa Benoist or Nafessa Williams or Danielle Panabaker in their beautiful costumes, which is what it's all about, am I right folks? Or you can produce your own stories, which is what I do.

In the meantime, since Black Lightning (and thus, Thunder) is done for the year, if you want to see another organically created African-American superheroine, look no further than our newest Heroineburgh episode #9 "Big Electric Cat" (Savanna vs Serpenta). If you like 80s/90s Vixen, Cheetah, Jaguar and Catwoman, this is for you! Although we do identify the heroine as residing in Homewood (a black neighborhood of Pittsburgh) and identify her tantalum amulet as "African", nowhere in the episode do we use the words "black" or "African-American". Instead, we let the story speak for itself: what if, in a city where superpowers exist, a developer tried to use a greedy supervillainess to further his aims of gentrifying the neighborhood? And what if a heroine from the neighborhood arose to stop him, but
needed to rely on the help of her mother, her pastor, an archaeologist, and a group of young activist protestors to make a difference? It really does take a village, and we don't mean the one in Zambesi. 



Also coming up by the end of the summer in Episode 11 we introduce our second black character and second inter-racial relationship, when it is revealed that corrupt officer Mark Drake leads a cabal of anti-vigilante forces called The Black Faction together with his beautiful wife, the violent Victoria Vaughan. When she closes up her vape shop at night, she becomes the villainess Vaporia, able to transform all or part of her body into smoke. And she's pretty deadly with a Tec-9, too!

Better episode, glad we can talk about fantasy vs reality. My only hope is that the writers remember how powerful they make their characters especially Reign. Except Supergirl, I totally hope they forget that Supergirl can't survive in space