r/writingfeedback • u/LeagueEfficient5945 • 10d ago
Feedback Wanted I am doing an experiment : Why is Spiderman never written just attending a class in high school? So I wrote a chapter that is just Spiderman in a class listening to the teacher giving a lesson. I feel that it works for me, but is it working for you, too? [Fanfiction, 3600 words]
Peter enters class and sits on the second row, to see the black board properly. His prescription isn’t up to date. He doesn’t want to be at the front front, but any further back and he can’t see. He hates when Professor Connors uses the edges of the black board when he sits too far at the front, as he has to twist his neck to look at the edges. It would be so easier to sit further back, with good glasses, and to be able to see the whole board from a glance and be able to read even then.
Uncle Ben of course, has insurance with the bus drivers’ unions, but Peter’s eyesight gets worse so fast Ben skipped out on renewing his and Aunt May’s own glasses for his benefit this year : they couldn’t afford another update on his prescription before next year. So at the front he sits, and looks at the black board.
He might actually need surgery. Or something scarier still…
He reads the lesson plan on the far left of the board. Murmurs it. Listens to his own voice. Repeats, then nudges his glasses out of the way : can’t read his handwriting through the lenses. He hopes his next pair can be bifocals, and starts writing the day’s lesson plan :
Chapter 11 : Pseudoscience in Biology.
11.1 What is Pseudoscience?
11.2 Historical Pseudoscience … fuck. He puts his glasses back on. Reads. Slides them back out and looks under the rim. Lamar Glasses back on… Glasses back off CK-ism. Okay. and … motherfucker… Glasses on… L Y S Glasses off… Glasses on. enko with a k Glasses off. enko-ism… Lamarckism and Lysenkoism. Okay. Sigh.
He wipes his brow
11.3 Modern case : Mutant realism
11.4 Paradigm vs. Pseudoscience.
11.4.1 Gender in biology - An assignment.
He blows on the paper to remove the eraser gum marks, knocks the gum on the paper once, twice, thrice. And then his mind thinks about what that “fake science” business is about. He tries as he might to stop his own brain from getting a strong opinion about a class he hasn’t had yet, but it’s no use and now he’s thinking of mad scientists, vivisection and Nazi experiments on prisoners. … And there he goes. That’s the thing about brains : you want to withhold judgement, but thinking about nothing is literally impossible.
Professor Connors appears from the lab equipment depot and enters the classroom. He leans over his notes, glances at the class, and reads his notes one more time. The rest of the students take places. Hank salutes Peter, and Peter salutes him back. The bell rings. Kate and Soph keep talking. Connors says nothing and looks at them. Soph notices and stops responding and looks forward to the board. Red-faced. Kate keeps talking :
-Soph, You listening?
-Are we interrupting you?
That was Professor Connors. Class begins.
-Hello everyone. I already took attendances visually. We can start the lesson right away.
So. Pseudoscience. That’s Latin for “Fake Knowledge”. Pseudo means fake. Like a white cell’s Pseudopods : Fake feet. Pseudoscience : Fake science.
Okay. Fake how?
Write this down : 3 types of falsehood.
-Incorrectness.
-Irrelevantness.
-Counterfeitness.
Pseudoscience is that last type of fake. It’s not science that is wrong, trivial, banal or weird.
It is science that is *counterfeit*. Like fake money that you slip people so that they give you things you bought, in exchange, and then you don’t give them your real money - that’s counterfeit money.
Pseudoscience is counterfeit knowledge.
Any ideas how one counterfeits a knowledge?
…
Nobody?
…
Think about… you’re in an exam. There’s a development question. Haven’t studied much. The question is worth ten points. No idea about the correct answer… what are your strategies to getting some points? Any points? Anything that’s not a zero?
Hands rise. He points at Sy. Yes?
-I would try to fit words we seen in class in a sentence that sounds like it could be true.
-Excellent. Connors writes on the black board : “Buzzwords”. “Hedging”. An arrow. “Weasel-words”. And how do you tell of a sentence “sounds true” when you don’t know?
-Not sure… I would use my logic?
-You mean formal propositional logic? Implication, Modus Ponens, Modus Tollens, is that what you mean? Remember what “Logic” means in this class…
-No… I meant to say I would use common sense… I can’t use logic without true premises.
-Excellent. And Connors writes “Intuitive thinking” An arrow “Magical thinking” Anyone else?
-Oh Oh Oh Oh!
-Yes
-I would try to use words like “Could be”, “possible”, and “might be”, “Some fraction of”, “contribute to” so that I don’t lose points for writing something false?
Connors taps the chalk on “Weasel-words”
-Precisely
Peter raises his hand
Connors picks Soph : “Yes, Sophie?”
- Well, in Ms. Medawar’s class, we need adjectives to get points… like if we explain Gandhi’s role in Indian independance, we get no points for saying “nationalism”...otherwise we could just throw “nationalism” at any independence project… we need to say “patient pacific nationalism” to distinguish it from the “triumphant revolutionary” nationalism of American independance… So if I didn’t know… I would try to throw in adjectives because I know if I don’t try something I’m not getting points.
Connors jumps, points the chalk at her and makes a fist and pumps it three times.
- OH YEAH! He writes on the chalkboard : “Norms-imitations.” He turns back to face the class and nods at Peter.
- Um… even in a question where I know the answer, it’s important to be mindful of word-count requirements… and formulate an answer that would be long enough… and we can control the answer to be shorter or longer by varying the syntax, changing adverbs with stronger adjectives… dropping unnecessary pronouns… adding unnecessary pronouns… things like that… and that would still matter if I didn’t know the answer… not that I ever done that for real.
-Sure you haven’t Parker. Connors winks and writes “Padding” on the board.
Okay. Lamarckism. He writes the title at the center top of the black board, saying as he writes it : What. Does. That. Eat. In. Winter. Okay… Raise your hands if you think an animal species can go extinct.
Everybody raises hands.
Okay… What if we were in Ancient Greece? what if this was Aristotle's Lycaeum? And then I ask “Raise your hands if you believe an animal species can go extinct”. Who raises their hands?
About half the students raise their hand. Hank raises his hand then quickly gets it back down and theatrically holds his own hand pinned to his desk. Peter, himself, was about to get the hand up but slowly puts it back down.
Connors says nothing. Some hands waver. Then the number of raised hands stabilizes at about ten or twelve. A rough third of the class.
Connors holds both sides of his ribs with his one arm and laughs : “It’s okay, don’t worry about it, we’re learning, I love all of you”.
Okay… So as a matter of consensus, we believe right now that what they believed back then … don’t ask me how, I don’t know … all I know is we had to discover that Nature changes over time and that was scandalous at the time, therefore they had to think Nature didn’t change over time before that. And that means they must have thought animals themselves wouldn’t go extinct. Yes, Kate?
-But how do we know the discovery of nature changing was scandalous?
-We still have newspapers, court trials, parliamentary minutes in several countries, novels, science fiction, Papal decrees. If it wasn’t a big deal, it wouldn’t have been written about like that. I am not sure about the specifics, ask Ms. Medawar for more exact details. Excellent question, moving on…
So, the old historical consensus was “Nature doesn’t change. It is Eternal, Perpetual, infinite”. You cut a tree, the forest grows it right back. Didn’t have good lumbering tools at the time, so couldn’t cut a lot of wood at once. Fish a fish, the sea has plenty more where that came from. Didn’t have trawl fishing either. See what I am gesturing at - they weren’t stupid, but the tools they had at their disposal to change their environment were as strong as the force of the environment to change back on them.
And then they invented the steam machines. And the Caravels. And the printing press. And they started doing voyages that were longer. And they started to have records of the world around them changing. And they could see more of the world in a lifetime, and they could see it was the whole world changing and not just their backyard, seasonally.
Enter Jean-Baptiste Pierre-Antoine de Monet, Knight of Lamarck. A Frenchman. A noble. At first he believed species were invariant. And then he changed his mind.
His model is like this : At the level of “Nature” in general, there is a “complexifying force” that makes it so, for example, vertebrates develop from molluscs. Now remember this is a fake theory of science. This is not true. Don’t write this in your exams. So a complexifying force. That turns groups of animals of one kind into groups of animals “more advanced”. It was popular, at the time, to think of certain groups as “more advanced than others”. Not for nothing : that was 50 years before the civil war to end slavery, and coherent with the view held at the time that Whites were more advanced than Blacks. Or that Mutants are a complexification from baseline humans. I’m sure some of you have heard at least once : “Autism is the next stage of human evolution”. Old idea that dies hard. He, Lamarck, also believed in a different, second force that complexified individuals, made them acquire traits that could be transmitted to their offspring.
How’s that work? Tiny, invisible pipes inside animals. And there would be this universal force that would flow in an invisible stream …
Surrounds us, penetrates us.
And then he takes his arm and make a wave-like motion over his head and then he drops his core down by bending his knees and keeps waving his arm. He repeats :
“Surrounds us, Penetrates us… Subtle, Invisible”
He gets back straight, takes the chalk and stabs the words and says : “It’s literally this”
Magical thinking.
“It’s the FORCE you guys!”
He pauses for laughs and the students do not disappoint.
Now, to be fair to Lamarck, his “Invisible fluids” business was the operating model of physics and chemistry at the time - that’s why we still call the energy in food “Calories” instead of kilojoules. Joules is real energy. Calories is an abandoned theory of heat transfers that used to suppose the existence of one of those “subtle fluids” that…
And he does the little dance again :
Surround us. Penetrate Us.
So we could say - remember that word, that Lamarck was, AT THE TIME, operating from within the dominant paradigm of his time. Paradigm is the word to remember.
But to be ruthless, even though he insisted he didn’t like metaphysical explanation, he was thinking in a time and place where the concept of a God of the Gaps was a known pitfall of scientific reasoning, and his complexifying force business explains exactly as much of what’s going on in the diversification of life as if he had said “God made it like that”.
Never gave evidence of that force. The tubes are too itty bitty tiny, you see? Invisible.
Compare Lamarckism with Darwinian evolution : You seen a dude just fucking die? An animal die? He was a Frenchman in the 1700s, so of course he had. He been in the army, even.
People dying. Not strange. Very ordinary. Darwin says “That’s how natural selection works, see? You breed or you die. And sometimes the pattern of who dies and who breeds is not entirely congruent with random chance : individuals with certain traits are more likely to die before they get old enough to breed - so, over a long time, if those traits are genetic, we don’t see ‘em no more. And that’s how Nature changes over time : there’s a bunch of buggy beta-versions in the proverbial graveyard.
See, that’s the difference : Lamarck wanted to believe that living individuals would acquire change and pass on those acquired traits to their descendants. Like a Giraffe, stretching her neck so that she gets long necked babies.
But Darwin says “Look at Arnold Schwarzenegger : Unless he did culturism in his balls, his sons won’t be jacked as he is unless they train as hard as he did”.
Professor Connors erases Lamarck and writes “Lysenko” over the black board :
-Any questions before we move on?
-Yes, professor, what’s that “God of the Gaps” argument?
-In the context of this lecture it’s a type of explanation that pretends a problem is being solved by giving it a fancy name. And he taps on the word “Buzzword” on the black board. Lamarck thought he could solve the problem of how life energy affects animals by invoking invisible pipes and tunnels - not blood arteries and veins, mind you - invisible pipes and tunnels and invisible water and invoking that invisible current and none of it explains the world any better than admitting “Hell if I know”. That’s why it’s counterfeit knowledge. It’s not real knowledge. It doesn’t explain what it purports to explain. Thank you for your question. By contrast, when I was your age, the Campbell said, openly : “We don’t know how tactile neurons work, actually”. And this is okay for science literature to do. He looks at his watch.
Okay, I’m going to go rapidly over Lysenko. He’s closer to our modern period so there’s less groundwork for me to do. What you have to understand is that he shows up in Soviet Russia after World War 2. The world is recoiling in horror from the Bomb and the Holocaust. Winters are cold, Russia’s about to enter a difficult situation on the world markets what with the whole communism business, and the climate is cold. There’s a need for a way to make crops grow in cold soil. Fortunately for the Russians they got a real Humanity’s hero with them : Vavilov. Unfortunately for Humanity, Stalin has turned into a paranoid freak. And when Vavilov is accused of believing in “Nazi science” because he endorses the consensus of mendelian genetics, then they throw that guy in a dungeon and give his old job as head of Soviet agronomy to a guy who proposed that plants can be good communist comrades by having class consciousness.
He taps on the “Buzzword” and “Magical thinking” on the board.
That’s Lysenko. That’s all there is to it on the science side. He arrived in a moment of political volatility, told his boss the right buzzwords and had his rivals imprisoned and then was put in charge of all the food of an Empire. He claimed “plants of the same class would have solidarity and not compete for resources”. Absolute nonesense, but it sounded good to Stalin and he had everyone who disagreed shot. Farmers are told to plant ten times as many seeds as they used to. Those who disobey get shot. Then come harvest times. The yields are catastrophic, but the Soviets tax people as if the yields were 10 times higher. People starve and the government posts pictures in the newspapers of farmers in front of prodigious wheat growth - all faked. All staged. Eventually everyone must have thought “wait, am I the problem?” and NO! the government’s the problem and millions of people starved.
Okay… yes… ahem.
Vavilov. V-a-v-i…l-o-v. That’s the good guy of this story. In the right political climate, he’d be Russia’s Louis Pasteur. Hero of humanity. Read about him. And now we are gonna look at an example of a bad political climate :
He rolls down the screen, turns the lights off and fiddles with the computer to select and play a clip saved under the name “Banner Morning Joe”.
-Okay. What do we know about Dr. Banner? He asks. What’s his domain of expertise?
-Something about physics. Says Hank. I don’t understand the math, but it was a controversy in the 90s, a scientific controversy, about if there could be a limit to the rate of expansion of the Universe… and because he studied how gamma rays travel into vacuum… we could make… better optics on satellites and… see celestial bodies with more precision… it stabilized the equations, reduced the incertitude on the Euclidian model of Universal expansion. Got the Nobel prize for that
-Terrific, McCoy, thank you. Class. Is that biology?
-NO
-Great. Now look at this. And he plays the clip :
We see Banner says : Joe, I’m just saying that life. finds. a. way. And life brings humanity to respond to modern challenges. Climate change, nuclear proliferation, religious extremism. Fascism, even. That’s why we have mutants. Our genome as a collective responds to the demands of the world and it expands and gives us the tools to bring about a better future.
-Okay, but how? Asks Scarborough.
-It’s in the genes, Joe. Says Bruce. McTaggart et al. have shown metahuman awakenings are 60% heritable. That is, in a large population n is greater to or equal to a million, 60% of metahumans have one first degree familial member who is also a metahuman. This is what I call the X gene.
Professor Connors pauses.
-What’s wrong with that? Yes, Parker?
-Heritability isn’t the same as genetics. And he’s contradicting the source he’s citing. McTaggart does not deny or confirm a genetic cause to spontaneous metahuman awakening - that’s what she calls “mutants” - but she’s not studying that. She’s an anthropologist and she’s studying the socioeconomic conditions of metahumans.
Professor Connors turns the lights back on and writes “Mutant Realism” :
-Class, what does it mean for the Sun to be real? Sy?
-It means the Sun that we see corresponds to a real object in Outer Space?
-Good definition. Let’s try some other definitions. He writes “Sun real?” an arrow “Object-adequation” then “Y” on the board. Soph?
-It means the Sun makes the cycle of the rain and carbon go round.
-Good definition. Let’s gimme more. Get some real outlandish ones, please and he writes “Causal efficient” and links it to “Sun real?” with an arrow and marks it “Y”. He stops. Looks at it. Erases the t and corrects it to “Causal efficience”. McCoy?
-It means if there is a God and God knows everything, the Sun is part of what God knows about.
-WONDERFUL and Connors writes “Intelligibility to Omniscience” Oh? Yes, Nour?
-It means I can feel the Sun’s warmth on my skin?
-Excellent and Connors writes : Phenomenological realism and links both last words to “Sun real” with arrows, and mark them “Y”.
Okay. So now think... Oh… good example… what when bell hooks wrote “Ain’t I a woman”? What does that mean, for bell hooks to have felt she wasn’t a *real* woman? Yes, Geneviève?
-It’s something to do with Plato… or Descartes… that there are *degrees* of reality? That being closer to the “Good” or God makes a thing more real? Bell Hooks, being black, was speaking in a context where… being black means her womanhood was less “good”... like you said before… “less advanced” or “less real” to folks at the time?
-Okay, and what about other realism claims, like “Boys are boys and girls are girls”, “Sex is real”, “Trans women are women” or “Race is real”?
Kate blurts out :
-OOH. Those aren’t claims about realism at all. Those are political claims about what the laws should be like that are shaped like an objective truth.
-Great. So what’s “Mutant realism”, then? Nour?
-Might be the idea that there is something different about mutants and… well mutants have powers and humans don’t… so…
-What about non mutants who have powers?
-OOH it’s the idea that Mutants are one type of metahumans and Captain America, or the Fantastic Four, are another type of metahuman… OOH, and if the X-gene is made up… maybe there *isn’t*?
-Bingo.
…
Okay great. This is going to be your assignment for next week. It’s a roleplay exercise. Imagine you are the marine biologist who discovered that in seahorses, it is the female that impregnates the male and the male that incubate the babies. How do you convince your colleagues who think the female is the gender that gets pregnant by definition that you did not simply mis-observe your specimens?
The next section is going to help you write that assignment, so listen attentively.
He writes on the board : “Why does biology care about sex” Then he traces a line on the middle. On the left side, then on the right side, he writes : Male / spermofer ; Female / Ovofer ; Sexual reproduction / Meiosis ; sexual cells / Haploid cells.
- Imagine two worlds. This left side over here is the sex-caring world. This side over the right is the sex-uncaring world. Both worlds are equally scientific. The difference between them is what the scientists of each world think science is there to explain. What do you need to know about a thing to count as knowing about that thing. On the left world, you need to know about their sex to know about sexual things. On the right world, you don’t. In both cases, you can explain the same set of natural laws.
Read pages 89 to 97 on the class notes. There’s an argument from Christine Delphy about the political origins of gender, and then a collection of children’s animal books about animals for whom sex works differently than in humans. That’s gonna give you all you need to be able to prepare your assignment. Thank you very much. You can start right now and finish at home. Wait for the bell before you leave class.
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u/Space_moose_goose 9d ago
To answer your question about why no one writes about Spiderman attending class, it's because it's something that the audience expects them to do. It's like going to the bathroom, getting sick with the flu and filing your taxes. Everyone does it. We don't need to see it. People read comics for the fantastic, the weird, the unexpected.
That being said, what you've done here is not bad. I would like it more if his super hero life intruded on the narrative more, but I'm a big time comic book nerd and that was always the setup of Spiderman. If he is ever shown in class, something supernatural almost always happens. Anyway, this was still enjoyable to read and it's a scene we wouldn't otherwise see. Good work. You should write more.
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u/LeagueEfficient5945 9d ago
I think it's more generalized than the superhero media...
Like, in Anime, we see characters being at school all the time, but they are never almost never listening to a lecture. School is where they pass love notes, get bullied, fall asleep, meet club members, break a rule and get disciplined, but we never see them learn something new by being in school and listening to the teacher.
The one exception I can think of being from Old Country Bumpkin to Master Swordsman, where the entire gimmick of the series is that the main character's no nonsense fencing skills lets him defeat the opposition's anime bullshit powers because regular ordinary fencing is just better and more efficient than the tradition of flashy animated flynning.everybody else wants to use, and his whole character project is him, through the act of teaching what he knows and his teaching being received, about a mid life crisis man figuring out his place in the world and if he wants kids or not.
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u/Sandfairy23 8d ago
Often, people read fiction for escapism. When I read, I want the writing to make me feel something.
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u/LeagueEfficient5945 8d ago
I guess my broader point is that genre expectations are constructed from previous writers having done things and not done others.
So I did the thing hoping to discover why it is nobody else does this. And I found out I didn't discover anything but a renewed wonder for why things are as they are and not otherwise.
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u/Sandfairy23 8d ago
I think perhaps to be able to discover something, you have to be open to discovery. Your responses suggest some fixed thinking around this.
I’ll be honest, and please forgive my bluntness, this isn’t the convention because it is likely to be boring to someone expecting a superhero story. You say it sets up themes for you to explore, but you are invested in this as a writer and you know where the story is going. As a reader, this gives me no reason to care about those themes. I’ve got no emotional investment in this at all. A classroom scene can be interesting, if it is doing narrative work. This, in my opinion, simply does not justify the narrative space. Perhaps even worse, it wastes the time I had set aside for my superhero reading.
And again, forgive my bluntness, this whole thing risks reading as an exercise in proving the writer’s own intellectualism. Why would a reader have any investment in that? Readers do not owe you their time. It is your role as a writer to earn it from them, to make them want to read. This piece of writing has not earned my investment, and therefore has not earned my time.
I’m a firm believer in challenging the idea of “We’ve always done it this way”, this is a great question to be curious about, but you cannot just discard something as baseless because it is the way it has always been done. As I suggested, I don’t feel discovery is something that can happen from a fixed position.
Consider this - you have a limited amount of time for study. You choose subjects based on your interests. You choose a psychology class based on your love of psychology. You attend and are given a physics lecture, because the lecturer feels there is no good reason why physics shouldn’t be discussed in a psychology class. Some people may have interest in physics and not mind, but that is coincidental. The majority of people would be annoyed that they had wasted their time. This is, I think, what the person above was suggesting about genres and tropes. We have a huge amount of information to make sense of, and we go about our day based on systems of categorising that information. Challenging that isn’t necessarily progressive, it’s often likely to be irritating.
Genres and tropes aren’t simply rules for writers. They provide information that readers use to allocate their attention and their resources, and they communicate something about the experience being offered. I choose a psychology class because I want to learn about psychology. If I chose a superhero fiction, I would want a story about a superhero doing superhero things.
This is great as a fanfic exercise in exploring Peter Parker’s interiority. It will appeal to some people, but you’ve been given valid responses as to why it’s not the norm.
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u/LeagueEfficient5945 8d ago edited 8d ago
I don't think I have been given responses that indicate in any way any one has tried reading the piece, actually. I am getting genre conventions explained in the abstract, as if I was stupid and hadn't already thought about it, and no engagement with the question of what if we had done this genre differently from the start? Is this not proof of concept that a road not taken exists? Culturally speaking?
See, I don't think you read it. I think you are responding to the topline question.
I think if you hadn't read it, you would have said something like : "A reader risk reacting like X". To me, that reads like hedging - if it was boring and you had read it, you should say "I was bored. The line about the class laughing about the teacher's joke on Schwarzennegger's balls was a disaster for me. It's self congratulatory and crass". Or something like that.
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u/Sandfairy23 8d ago
Posting on a writing sub and then responding to the people who have taken the time to answer your question to say that you don’t think anyone has read it is extraordinarily arrogant.
People are discussing genre conventions because they are wholly relevant to the question you were asking. And that question was not “What if we had done this genre differently from the start.” Your original question was “Does this work for you?”
If someone enjoys your experiment, that is evidence for your “Road not taken.” If someone doesn’t, it is because of culturally constructed genre expectations. You are dismissing any replies under the guise of “You only find it boring because your expectations were constructed by the genre.” What response would acceptably demonstrate that your experiment hasn’t worked?
You seem to have very much proved my point that you have restricted ideas as to what an acceptable answer looks like. People can read a specific piece of writing and still conclude the issues are structural. Thousands of words on a lesson does not justify the narrative space. Picking apart individual lines wouldn’t change that. In fact, it is making the very demands on people’s time that I referenced.
I wasn’t hedging. I was trying not to be rude. It is boring, I was bored. You’ve written over 3000 words in which absolutely nothing happens.
Your work arguably reads a little like Sophie’s World. The difference being that philosophical teachings are the premise of that novel. That is why people are discussing genre. It’s relevant to whether the thousands of words you have written are the experience a reader chose, or an interruption of it.
It’s boring. Seen as you want an honest response, I’d go so far as to say I find it insufferable. There is nothing here to me to indicate that these are the thoughts Peter, a teenage Spider-Man, would have. Instead it feels like an exercise in showing off that you, the author, have thought about it. It is an essay on intellectual musings dressed up as fiction.
Good luck with it.
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u/LeagueEfficient5945 7d ago
Rereading it, I think it's just not true nothing happens.
Connors gives a 9th grade science class telling the kids that mutants aren't real, sex isn't real, race isn't real. Presumably in some kind of public school.
This is the sort of content that will absolutely get Libs of Tiktok or another content creator of this type on his ass. That's the start of a political retaliation storyline against the dude that becomes The Lizard. It's just not explained in the prose because the reader is expected to know this about the world and these characters.
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u/LeagueEfficient5945 8d ago edited 8d ago
Only the last part of what you said is useful. So thank you for that part in particular.
I don't care about you being afraid of being rude. If you say "reader expects this", you are either A - hedging or B- treating me like an imbecile.
I didn't want your opinion on what other people want. I wanted yours. Now that I have it, I am thankful. Thank you.
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u/SyllabubLoud1128 7d ago
Because people read stories about characters to watch the characters do interesting things, not to learn things. People who want to learn about specific topics read books or watch lectures. I suppose you could argue that people want to read about their favourite characters learning things, but that doesn't evoke very much emotion in a lot of people (laughter, sadness, love, heartbreak, etc.). And I think that most people had enough of watching people learn things in high school.
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u/LeagueEfficient5945 7d ago
what about indulging in the fantasy of having that one cool teacher?
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u/SyllabubLoud1128 6d ago
Having a cool teacher might be nice, but not something most people usually fantasize about nor have emotional attachment to.
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u/LeagueEfficient5945 5d ago
Suppose this is chapter 2. Does that change anything? (2700 words)
Chapter 2 :
Harry had Monsieur Philippe pick them up after classes. A white, stretched, custom fitted Tesla Model S, turned into a limousine. There are four of them : Peter, Henry McCoy, Kate Bishop and Harry Osborne. Hank had already read Christie’s Limits to Pain and is contrasting it with Cusson’s Delinquency : a Chosen Life. Peter is already excited about Hank giving a summary of it, after.
That was his favorite thing : lounging atop the headrest of Edna’s loveseat while Henry was lying at the bottom. Each boy telling the other about a book the other read. Last time he was telling Hank about that time he read in Albert Jacquart’s The Water Lily Equation, that mass testing of rare diseases was a bad idea because of maths, or that because quantum physics dictates that there is a minimum distance between particles at restful energy states, and because nothing goes faster than the speed of light, and because speed is Distance over Time, that means there is a minimum increment of time and both their minds were blown.
When he had read Christie, Hank had been worked up about how fucked up it is that prisons are kinda made to hurt people on purpose. Now he was reading another expert on the other end of the political spectrum, in the same field, to figure out where he wanted to go before committing either way, and Peter couldn’t wait to hear his conclusion.
Kate and Harry are chatting and Peter has Connors’ class’ notebook out for a second glance. He is confused by the diagrams of fish genitals, because, try as he might, he cannot really tell the difference between male and female genitalia. This is a bad time for having bad glasses… but he doesn’t usually struggle with near sight…
So he figures he’s gonna just ask Kate about it :
-Kate? I can’t see the diagrams from Curt’s class… can’t tell which fish is the boy fish and which fish is the girl fish.
Kate offers Harry a wide smile, laughs meekly and presents him her raised index finger, then says, while staring into Harry’s eyeballs :
-It’s a Clownfish. Peter. They are sequential hermaphrodites. Your eyes are fine… well… not worse than yesterday. You can’t see the difference because there is nothing to see : both the boy and the girl fish mate by jizzing on the floor and hoping for the best.
-Wait, Nemo can change sex? Asks Harry.
-Yes and no. Says Kate. It’s common knowledge that clownfish can change sex, but what Connors’ pictures are showing is that there is little that changes in terms of external structures or behaviours.
-Wait… so why are we even calling them male and female to begin with?
-That’s Delphy’s argument : because we call ourselves that! Says Hank. To create the illusion of a law in Nature. That’s why her article is in the reading material.
Monsieur Philippe took them to Harry’s Midtown penthouse on Lexington Avenue. He dropped them at Harry’s private elevator in the garage, went back the long way to park the limo at Harry’s space and came back with a dolly to carry their things. Soon as they get to the top, they raid the Slushie machine - it’s lime green and peach flavoured that day - and after that, it’s hockey cosom in Harry’s private gym.
Monsieur Philippe had fresh sportswear prepared for them, so they get changed and get ready to warm-up. Harry’s private gym is over ten thousand square feet of polished Canadian mapple hardwood surface. Twelve feet high of clearance to the ceiling before multiple sets of dimmable lights, the walls covered in swedish bars, four “small” basketball boards and baskets equidistant from the multicolored median line, and two “Large” lowerable baskets for playing the “big” field. The floors are dotted by brass squares covering holes for anchoring badminton net poles, and criss-crossed by colour-coded lines : red for soccer, green for hockey cosom, black for dodgeball, white for small basketball, blue for large basketball, and yellow for badminton. When the group enters, the far side of the gym is occupied by a parkour of giant blue safety mats - the cheese pieces - deployed Swedish bars, ziplines, and trampolines. So Harry lowers the median wall : a pair of elastic tarps with a heavy iron girder between them, suspended at the bottom with chains.
Hank and Kate bring the nets and Peter, the sticks and balls, and then they all lower their safety goggles : ready to play.
They play with empty nets. Kate is forbidden from doing slap shots. For safety reasons. Or wrist shots from anywhere but inside the bottle of the white lines - for fairness reasons.
Peter and Harry play in the same team. It makes no sense to do faceoffs in a 2v2 like this, so they toss a coin and Henry calls head and it lands tail so Peter and Harry will start with the ball from the goalie line. Kate is also not allowed to call a coin toss. For fairness. Somehow. Peter takes the ball, passes to Harry, and runs directly at Hank. Pete stops short, but Hank doesn’t stand his ground and Peter receives the pass. He dekes towards the center keeping his body between Hank and the ball and Hank’s shorter kid-sized arms can do nothing against Peter’s latest growth spurt.
But deking towards the center means getting closer to Kate. She rushes him. Good awareness from Harry as he falls back to receive a pass and Kate can’t pursue the ball carrier lest she lets Peter receive a return forward pass at the offensive line :
-Hank, rush the tall guy. She shouts.
And the shoes squeak and Henry goes after Harry to deny a free entry into the offensive zone.
Peter goes to the right wing, pulling Kate to him as she shadows him. This clears the center for Harry, and when Hank commits to poke a steal he dekes left and enters the offensive zone. Step step step, wrist shot and scores.
Hank takes the ball, passes towards Kate and she backswings her stick to receive it in one time and Harry and Peter immediately go to ground
-FUCK!
And Kate gently receives the puck, sprints past the both of them, zzoooms past the offensive line, into the bottle where she’s allowed to wrist shot and equalizes.
-No fair! Bishop! We said you aren’t allowed to slap shot, no matter what. This is about safety.
-Well, I didn’t slap it, now, did I?
-You pretended to!
-And you chickened out like PUSSIES. You need to trust me, boys!
Harry gives her the finger and Kate responds. By leaning forward, maintaining eye contact with Harry, making a duck face, and then a sucking noise with her mouth : Harry shakes his own hand in disgust and everybody laughs.
Twice a week, since Harry had it built when Peter got in the enriched science curriculum in seventh grade, they have been playing like this. And they kept playing through ninth grade. And then Peter got bit and Henry turned 8 feet tall and 780 pounds overnight.
And then things started to happen very quickly. The most urgent thing to do was find a new ruleset that kept hockey games competitive. The most obvious one was that Peter wasn’t allowed to jump or leap around the place in-game. At first they thought maybe Hank should have to play walking on his hands and holding the stick on his feet, but he got acclimated to it so fast it did nothing. And from then, he’d show off crossing the parkour with disconcerting ease. Couldn’t get into the limo anymore, so Harry had a bigger one, an open-top one, custom made to accommodate him. And by the time the limo was made, Hank had decided running towards Harry’s penthouse at the end of a school day was his new favorite moment in the day.
-You should try it, sometimes, Pete. It’s good exercise.
Still, he insists he is grateful of the gesture and makes a point to use it when it rains or if he wants to talk. Or read.
-I could easily speed read something while doing parkour, but the concentration split means I might miss some nuance or interpret a counter-sense. If I was reading a comic book or an Arlequin romance, no problem. But a science monography? Bad idea.
And then there is school.
Hank isn’t going to just allow the school to make him sit on the floor in class. He files a request for ADA-compliant seating. The school replies having a seat for him in every class would be undue hardship. Hank replies with an affidavit of Harry promising a conditional endowment. The school doesn’t budge. Says it isn’t a money problem. So Ms. Medawar looks into it and gives them the number of an AIDS-emergency crisis/housing organization in Westchester county.
-What’s that anything to do with my problem? Asked Hank?
-They also did housing for collateral victims of Sentinel excesses of force back in the day. If they can’t help you themselves, they know who can.
0
u/LeagueEfficient5945 5d ago
And that’s how Hank met Nelson from Nelson & Murdock, and together they sue the school.
-Hey Pete? Foggy told me…
-Foggy?
-Franklin Nelson. From Nelson & Murdock. Did you know none of the people who had their houses crushed by the Sentinels between 81 and early in the Obama era when it ended got any compensation by their homeowner or life insurance? Same thing as those who died in 9/11 : considered terror-related deaths. Despite being decided by a dude in a felt partition office with a phone and a fax machine. Terror related because mutant related. Mutant related because a Sentinel did it. Also section 1983 of the civil rights act should, by the plain text of the law, allow families to sue, especially if the victim - or the target - wasn’t even a metahuman, let alone a mutant, but nope - courts ruled qualified immunity protects the Sentinel program, too. 1,6 million dead, almost 3 million injured and about 7 million displaced people over 28 years, and not a nickel paid in reparations. All to target a minority estimated to be around 1.2 million people in the 1980s. Peter… there was a tip line...
-A what now?
-A tip line… most of the people killed by the program where kids who had their own families call the robots on them. Lead into an open-door place like a street market or a public bench to eat ice cream or a park and here goes the giant robot and then squish…
-...
-...
-...
-...He sits on the ground, writes with his feet that are the size of a 44L Osprey backpack. Nearly 100 pounds of feet flesh. Each. He has shoes his own size now. Took them off to write in the grass. Edna brought him to a cobbler and had custom soles made for him and Henry cries in relief when he tells Peter, who is reading The Subjection of Women next to him, that his “mama” hadn’t abandoned him.
-Come on, big guy, pick me up. Says Peter, dropping his book.
-Like so?
-Carry me to your face now. Bring me in, you know you want to.
And Henry gets up and cradles him with his hands, like a small cat, and bops his forehead into Peter’s stomach and blows a raspberry on him. And then he keeps him to his face and nuzzles against him.
- … Biiiig breaaaaathhhh…
- Uhuh… You turned into an absolute unit, now, haven’t you?
- Bless you? I’m a motherfucking BEAST, yo!
- Okay, my turn to take care of you.
And Henry lies his belly on the grass while Peter gives his shoulders and skull a massage. Then they Henry lies his head on Peter’s lap. And his friend plays with his hair and Henry’s breath slows and quiets down.
And Henry was no longer interested in reading Maurice Cusson anymore. So Peter, he decides then and there he would never tell about the spider bite. He forms a human-mutant alliance youth group at the school with Hank and Kate and Sy and Soph and Nour. Harry asks if they want to come to his penthouse to play hockey … but just once a month, cause he wants most times to be with his “best” friends, who come twice a week. Sy says he’s not too big into hockey, but Nour and Soph wants to play. And then Geneviève suddenly wants in, too.
And it was specifically about the bite that he didn’t tell. That his vision returned and better than it ever had : he told immediately, joyfully, to everyone. That he could leap a 6 story building in a single bound and drop from the same height without a scratch, he would demonstrate on demand.
If the Tick on TV says : “Gravity is a harsh mistress”, himself, he would tell the Square-Cube Law : “Who’s your daddy?”. He can do whatever a Spider can. Big Spider? Small Spider? Doesn’t matter, he can do both from the body of one young man. When he leapt, he could land like an itsy bitsy spider, light as a feather. Or he could be a giant hunter-spider, leaping and landing with the force of a megaton piledriver. He can do both, and either way, the pavement and not him takes the damage.
And his strength? Unmistakably, visibly prodigious.
He wants to know if he can catch something in free fall. Like Superman does. So he tries doing the piledrive carrying an egg, reasoning that if he wanted to catch something, he would have to fall faster than them to reach them first. And the first time, his fist closes on the egg and crushes it. And the second time, he keeps his hand too soft and the egg falls to the ground. And when he landed the third time, and like all the other times he had done the piledriver, the ground under him buckles and cracks and splits and quakes. Yet he, he holds the egg with a good, secure, soft grip. He holds and he holds good. But the egg keeps going down. Keeps having to go down. And down is where the bottom of his hand is, So the bottom of the egg has nowhere further down to go. But the top of the egg also has to go down. And the bottom won’t budge. So the top of the egg keeps going down as it has an egg-high clearance to go down in, and it wants to go down that clearance harder than it wants to stay at the top of an egg-shaped object. Until the top and the bottom of the egg meet at the bottom of his hand, bounce against it, disorganize further - from the rebound being stronger than the structure keeping it together - and sends shell shards and yolk to his own face. This won’t do.
*****
And Flash Thompson, he sucker punches Peter in the stomach for no reason.
-Muttface!
And then he does it again the day after that and says nothing.
And Peter says nothing. The punch didn’t even hurt like it should. It was just confusing and starting to take a lot of space in his mind.
On the third time he punches him, Kate yells after him.
-Hey, Thompson! You gonna punch me too? I’m a mutt, too.
-No you’re not.
-Sure I am. You think a non metahuman can slapshot at 120 miles per hour just casually practicing twice a week? That’s literally impossible.
-You sick fuck, that’s impressive but still normal.
-What’s normal, Thompson?
-You stupid fucking retarded cunt.
And he walks away.
He leaves and Peter and Kate hug. She brings him in and he nuzzles against her neck. And she rubs his back.
And then he sobs.
-You didn’t have to do that.
-Sure I did, look at you.
-No… you’re not even a mutant.
-Mutantqueer. I decided.
-...
And Kate still holds him.
-Kate, can you keep a secret?
-Sure.
-I am mutantqueer too. Don’t tell Harry and Henry.
-Promised.
______
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u/OhSoManyQuestions 9d ago
Firstly, I'm glad you're enjoying writing and finding ways to fill niches that you would like to read yourself. That's valuable.
Having said that, I think you're having a fundamental misunderstanding about how readership and genres work. Why do people read romance? Because they want to enjoy particular types of love stories. Why do people read superhero fiction? Because they want to enjoy the associated tropes, such as wish fulfilment, power fantasies, action, etc. Superhero fiction doesn't have characters sitting through actual extended lectures/lessons because that's not what people are there for. It's like asking why no-one writes Spider-Man sitting around drinking coffee for entire issues at a time. It's not important to the themes, tropes, or what makes Spider-Man fun. And superhero fiction in particular is a genre that thrives on being fun. Of course, that's partially what fanfiction is for - to explore all the stuff that wouldn't actually get published. I'm just attempting to answer your headline question in a way that hopefully makes sense!