🎙️Our degree of obsession, as a system, with absurd furry toon shenanigans as a symbolic representation of optimism and hope is becoming genuinely wild. We've been reading Final Crisis by Grant Morrison and the fact that they go out of their way to provide metaphysical justice for Captain Carrot and the Zoo Crew specifically because they are exactly the kind of silly, optimistic goofiness necessary to face down an embodiment of self-destructive cosmic nihilism has been an oddly spiritual experience for us. Because that just kind of... actually is how we feel? About existing?
[Behind the cut: Darkseid and the existential futility of the grindset, tooniness as queer cultural malleability, ringing endorsements of being a funny little creature]
One of the most dangerous things that mainstream attitudes of toxic positivity and hustle culture has done is create a world of deeply-perverse incentives towards behavior that is simultaneously selfish and self-negating. You are encouraged to 'put yourself first,' but that 'self' has to conform to a larger set of immutable social constants; cisnormative, heteronormative, conventionally 'well' mentally and physically by the definitions of our medical-industrial complex. This leaves you with a very narrow set of options for how you are supposed to 'put yourself first,' in which one of the first things communicated to you is that everyone else who exists is to be treated like shadows on the wall in a world where only you and the expectations of capitalism are real. And it's not really shocking to say that we find this... deeply uncomfortable as a way to view the world and the place of the self in it. A boundary is drawn where the borders of the self are impermeable, but only insofar as it conforms to a specific set of acceptable parameters: you must be the right shape, the right beliefs, the right mind to qualify for the notional protections of the grindset lifestyle. There is endless positivity on offer, only so long as you suborn yourself to a version of selfhood that denies the possibility of personal creativity and personal depth. "Individualism" wherein the individual is defined as a set, static archetype which only retains its status so long as it maintains a specific set of traits desirable to capital, a set of traits useful to be exploited. This is in fact exactly the thing that Darkseid represents in Final Crisis, as the Anti-Life Equation's transmission metric and payload: everything is unified in harmony, but it's unified into a self-annihilating monoculture where Darkseid is everything and everyone, all effort and achievement is meaningless, and nothing matters save that the pure archetype of 'superiority' can be maintained to the tune of what is basically a god-king's suicidal temper tantrum.
By comparison, what we find comforting is the idea of personal malleability. We have a lot of really weird moods and strange concerns and cares. We're just, like, silly little animals with silly little lives and paradoxically immense imaginations. We daydream and get carried off by every stray thought we have and we gravitate towards things that are colorful and weird and funny. We're mentally ill in ways that don't, like, have easy 'treatments' that just Work and Continue Working and fighting uphill against our distractability is a constant struggle. We're not girlbosses or sigmas, we're not elegant or conventionally handsome, and we're definitely not likely to succeed on any of the metrics that you'd define those by. But the reality that ANY fit into a conventional social dichotomy is a contortion means we're really good at twisting ourselves into interesting shapes, and staying optimistic about our chances when we can face the world on our own terms.
So like... yeah. Of course we love the wacky toon physics furry superheroes. Even beyond being a charming aesthetic, it's just an obviously useful personal metaphor. We also squash and stretch wildly to fit both whimsy and necessity. Yeah, we're more likely to get squashed flat by an anvil falling out of the sky, but we're also more likely to survive it. We've had, due to sheer survival needs, to develop a genuine talent for building rapport with others and a capacity to take hits that would crater people who theoretically have more financial and cultural advantages. The form distorts, but its essence remains. If Daffy Duck gets his beak blown backwards, he is still recognizably and comprehensibly Daffy Duck. To us, this is the nature of queerness and neurodivergence, the capacity to be enduringly, endearingly silly even through comically-grotesque hardship. It is a set of values where being brave, gentle, and kind is held up as a broadly pretty good way to be, and you know what, we vibe with it.
Grant Morrison clearly gets it. Obviously toons would be good at fighting embodiments of hopelessness and hollow cruelty. That's what they're made for.
