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Comment by blockwriter | Hacker News Reader

These are fair points for someone that works in the industry and wishes to engage critically with her anxiety of influence, as Harold Bloom would call it. I doubt if her critique, in itself, leads to a rhetorical basis that is any more aesthetically sound. In good time, another writer will undoubtedly point out how flimsy the reactionary storytelling of the 2020s was. At least along this one axis, I am unconvinced by this article that Miller’s lurid pulp is much different from the remedies the author suggests. The proof is in the pudding.

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Say more! This sounds interesting. What are the remedies you perceive Polo as pushing here?

I don’t perceive her as pushing remedies, but I think they are suggested. The suggestion is that the works would be better if they adhered closer to “reality” or if the psychological tension was overtly comprehended and demonstrated by the writer rather than a tacit element. Many politically conscious people are just clueing into what literary criticism has long understood, although the conclusions drawn by the bulk of good literary criticism is, in my opinion, the exact opposite of those drawn by today’s reactionaries.

Essentially, I think the article discounts the merit of a regressive fantasy. Today’s comic book media complex is very involute. Characters often explicitly state these regressive elements, the sexual tension, and etc. It is novel for a while, especially when it is in vogue for a largely illiterate populace to rediscover matters of criticism that literature has always encompassed; but it is just as likely to become brittle and inbred as the big boob, prostitute, truncated demise tropes are.

Like I said, these are fair points that the author makes. It is, however, just as easy to point and laugh at someone that doesn’t seem to comprehend that they have not broken out of the aesthetic cycle, that they have failed to transcend, as it is to point and laugh at the latent homoeroticism of 300. All that being said, these are comic books, and I stopped reading them when I stopped getting pimples for good reason.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have to watch grown men dribble a leather ball around and act like every foul called against them is a grievous insult to blood and legacy.

Given that she doesn't say anything about what the alternatives should be, we can only speculate. But she would seem to be implicitly pushing that comics should be written from the upper-middle-class, westernized, college-educated liberal worldview: characters' race and sex should be interchangeable, every combination of physical characteristics should be represented but shown as irrelevant to their behaviour and culture. Characters from any time or space should naturally hold the same moral positions as any respectable westernized college-educated liberal; the reader should never be so much as exposed to characters with offensive views, much less asked to try to understand or sympathise with them. Religious and cultural differences are as precious as they are purely decorative; it's impossible for them to lead to deep moral conflicts between decent people (and of course anyone who isn't a straight white male is always decent).

Of course that's a reductive, unsympathetic view on what she's saying - but so is her approach to Miller. Perhaps she'll come up with a positive, expansive direction for comics to go in, one that makes for a richer and more deeply textured world rather than one that flattens all characters into the superficially-diverse-but-deeply-identical mold. But that's not the direction I've generally seen from people saying things like this.

…in fact, that’s not what she’s saying at all. She is free to criticize the work without making a positive case for something else, and she does. You have projected what you think she’d rather see into the essay—it’s not there.

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