[Warning: inside thoughts of a creative type follow. Feel free to ignore them.]
If you’re a regular viewer of this blog you’re aware I’m slowly* writing Attack of the Lesbian Activist Squirrels. In case the title didn’t clue you in, it’s satirical and intended for fun. It’s probably going to get me drawn and quartered whenever the woke buzzkills detect it but I’m not too worried about that. The woke can’t help themselves. They do nothing but bitch and they’ll instinctively bitch at anything fun. It feels like you could smile at a sunset and a Karen will materialize to suck the life out of you, having been drawn, vampire-like, to the scene of joy.
(Look at how Millennials and Gen Z turned on the author of Harry Potter… the most beloved book series of their youth is now a harsh political issue. Instead of fond memories of a cute story from their childhood, they’ve created another scene of scorched earth. There are a lot of people who read the story when the young adult writing of J. K. Rowling was actually age appropriate. Now I would guess they don’t read at all.)
My story started with a joke about a bear in my birdfeeder. After that the plot took on a life of its own. I’ve followed it through twists and turns and the last chapter parked the characters to the edge of the home planet of dipshits, Portland Oregon. I’ve got one or two chapters left to wrap it all up with a pretty bow. I look forward to those chapters.
Part of the story is Velma. The plot needed Velma and I enjoyed creating her. She is the counterbalance to the two main protagonists.
Billy is pretty darned sharp but also within the range we’ve all met. The sort of fellow that would inherently gravitate toward engineering only to find himself cast out of the cesspool of mediocrity that is the modern midwit university. A tragic man who would have been welcomed with open arms some decades ago is an outsider in today’s dumbed down clown world.
Doogie is different. He’s “several standard deviations beyond the mean”. If you’ve met (or are) such a creature you know they’ll never fit in at any location or era. Doogie is so damn brilliant he likes to play mind games with sentient (and dangerous!) wildlife. His is the sort to move mental markers around the physical world as the NSA hunts for wrongthink within the realm of pure data. He might have been tolerated at a past university but is rarely welcomed anywhere.
Velma came to being because I wanted the poles of my fictional world to have balance. I also wanted to shit all over the dumbasses that think intelligence equates with dumpy, boring, nerds. (I assume that sentiment is sour grapes from the less intellectually fortunate.) Hollywood has pounded the trope to death; “She can’t be hot and smart”. With Velma, I have declared “she can be so hot your eyes fall out while possessing a brain that can vaporize your mind.” Hollywood is limited because its creative workforce is mentally limited. Thus the reliance on tropes.
Velma, like all characters, took on a life of her own. She drifted from mental risk taker to a walking undetonated nuclear bomb. I didn’t see that coming! I’m delighted. One loves to see their creations grow.
As befitting a hot, blazingly smart, shit-stirring, goddess, Velma has powers in the dark arts of bullshit. This includes her backstory with a group of siblings that are the “Scooby Doo” gang. There’s no finer bullshit that the happy, dumb, sweet, innocent, poorly animated, Hanna-Barbera, accidental hit that is (or was) Scooby-Doo. Who better than my Velma to wield the pre-programmed bullshit laid down by the Five Man Band that is Scooby-Doo? She can tap into our memories of the girl that spent her time Brain-Splaining simple plots to a stoner and his talking dog.
Alas, Hollywood digs through the graves of the past, grinds the bones it finds into a thick paste, and then smears it on the bathroom stall that is their current lack of creativity. Scooby-Doo existed from 1969 – 1976. Hacks have been squeezing that IP for the subsequent 47 years. (Not bad for a cartoon with basically one plot!) I assumed, sooner or later, someone would trash Scooby-Doo and my beloved Velma’s bullshit avatar. This year, the third or fifth or twentieth of a long panicked bullshit decline, is the year when Velma gets ruined. How unfortunate for the hot, genius, that I created.
The Drinker Recommends says that Velma is the worst thing (so far) in the shit sandwich that is modern “cinema”. I trust The Drinker.
My Velma shall soldier on alone. I knew this time would come but I hoped to have a few more years before they wrecked a happy childhood memory. Eventually all that was ever written or performed will be shit upon, but I didn’t plan for the accelerated timing.
The bummer is that it dilutes the power of bullshit, which is related to the power of shared experience. Now there are two populations in the world. Those that witnessed the real thing. And those that witnessed the undead mess that was made of its corpse and don’t know what they lost.
Allow me to draw a parallel: A few years back mobs of women appeared out of nowhere wearing a strange uniform. They were the watchers of 58 episodes of something called “The Handmaid’s Tale”. These weird women (and it was entirely women) stopped wearing pussy hats at Anti-Trump demonstrations just long enough to cosplay some sort of wish fulfillment dominance fantasy where they (women in the modern world that make up the majority of college graduates and rule almost any office job environment) are exploited victims. None of them read the 1985 book by Margaret Atwood. They don’t know the details of the book. They don’t have the mental engagement of the written word. What they saw was not what the original conveyed. I didn’t watch the TV show so I don’t know how closely the plots match, but I damn well know that no woman in 1985 wore costumes to cosplay her part in Atwood’s story.
As they upended Handmaid’s Tale they upended the simple but delightful character of Velma. The smart freckled redhead that was the integral part of a five man team 50 years ago has become a bitchy Indian single unit mocking four hapless dipshits that were (in the earlier incarnation) her friends.
Dammit. I hate to see my Velma’s small but happy bullshit connection (which was satirical but also respectful of the old stories) severed by the chainsaw of shitty narratives. Alas, it happened.
Tonight I’m going to toast my independent and fierce fictional being who’s 50 year old connection to the populace has been shredded. Lucky for me, my Velma is fearless. She has absolutely no sympathy for society, she has no remorse, her family is less a five man band than two siblings, a random stoner, a miscast dog, and her presence with the wattage turned waaaay low. My Velma has zero shits to give. Were she real, she’d see me in my cups, challenge me to a game of chess, and (when I inevitably lost) burn my house down.
If you’re of a mind, join me in a glass of bourbon to mark the moment.
A.C.
*I’m sure the slowly part is infuriating. I’ve got a day job and all that. Thank you for your patience.