A non-spoilery rant about "Kick Ass"

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 09:20:28 GMT

So, on the whole, Kick Ass was exactly my sort of film. It's both a straightforward geek-becomes-superhero wish fulfillment and a subversion of it, and the violence was glorious (I quite like violence done right). I agree with those saying that the violence and swearing really aren't worth complaining about, and aren't even extra specially celebrated compared to many other films (the violence looks like it hurts, for good guys and bad). But.

I kept hearing it was good in an over the top puerile sort of way, and was ok with that, but just before watching it found out it was based on a comic by Mark Millar. As it started I was reminded of this, and of how I felt about Wanted.
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The true identity of men without hats in xkcd

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 05:32:23 GMT

Something I never really thought about until it was pointed out to me but have been noticing more and more is who goes "unmarked" in cartoon depictions. One of the more obvious examples is stick figures: white male characters just get the default stick figure, while female/black etc ones will be marked as such explicitly. One consequence is that characters whose ethnicity/gender is not made explicit (eg most of them) are assumed to be white/male/etc.(*)

xkcd is not immune from this, the female characters pretty much always have long hair while the default/male ones hair tends not to be drawn at all.

But see Understocked. The "marked" quantities are having a beard/glasses and being a police officer, but not being black.

"Awesome" I thought "He hasn't felt the need to make non-white ethnicity a marked quantity, which in turn means his unmarked characters can be read as POC as easily as they can as white."

And then I thought "Wait, Obama isn't marked at all. He looks just like the generic protagonist(s). What if all the unmarked characters are Barack Obama?"

So that's how I'm going to read the comic from now on :D This is definitely him.

(*)This effect confuses westerners about anime/manga, since japanese people see themselves as the default and draw non-japanese people as the funny looking marked other. Unlike western animation, characters with features/colouring etc never seen in real life who don't fit preconceived stereotypes of foreigners (eg white people have big noses) are always assumed to be japanese.

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Thorns

A non-spoilery rant about "Kick Ass"

The true identity of men without hats in xkcd