Episode 106: Transcript
Episode 106: Waking Up From The Illusion of Change
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction and everything else that went back in time and married itself. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm the author of a new young adult space fantasy trilogy. The second book, Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak just came out.
Annalee: [00:00:20] And I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction, my latest book is Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:31] So today, we're going to be talking about the illusion of change. Many fictional characters who have been around for decades will appear to go through huge major life changes, including having kids, getting married or even dying, only to revert to their original status quo after a while. And this is a thing that's very well known in comics. Why does change always have to be fake? Also, in our audio extra next week, we're going to be talking about our favorite non-canonical stories, stories that have been retconned out of existence or stories that officially never happened, but that are still actually great. And by the way, did you know that this podcast is entirely independent, and it's funded by you, our listeners through Patreon? That's right. If you become one of our patrons on Patreon, you are helping to make this podcast exist. Plus, you get audio extras with every episode.
Annalee: [00:01:31] What?
Charlie Jane: [00:01:31] Plus access to our Discord channel, where we just hang out all the time, except for when we're off on book tour, in which case we don't hang out there.
Annalee: [00:01:38] You were in there.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:41] But we mostly hang out there all the time. Think about it. All of that could be yours for just a few bucks a month. Anything you give us goes right back into making our opinions even more correct.
Annalee: [00:01:51] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:51] Find us online at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. Okay, let's have some illusory change.
Annalee: [00:01:58] Woo!
[00:01:58] OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Annalee: [00:02:26] Okay, Charlie Jane, you are the mastermind of understanding all of the twisty elaborate plots in my favorite comic books. I feel like you just have this vast storehouse of trivia in your brain that's been crammed in there by probably 100 years worth of comics that you've read in a short period of time. So what is this thing called illusion of change? I feel like this is a phrase that was almost… was it invented to describe how comic book plots work?
Charlie Jane: [00:03:00] Yeah, so the phrase “illusion of change” comes from the famous comic book writer Stan Lee, who created Spider-Man and The Hulk. And Fantastic Four and a billion other characters. And Stan Lee famously said, “Fans don't want change. They want the illusion of change.” Basically, the idea is that a long-running serialized narrative like a superhero comic, or any kind of a long, extended storyline is going to need to have it both ways in order to stay exciting. Like okay, take Batman. We’ll always probably come back to Bruce Wayne being the Batman and living in Wayne Manor with Alfred the butler and driving the Batmobile around because that's what most people expect from Batman. Right?
Annalee: [00:03:47] Yeah. I mean, he might have a bat motorcycle sometimes. Right? Like that's…
Charlie Jane: [00:03:51] I mean, he does occasionally ride a motorcycle, that’s true. He he has many vehicles. He has a bat plane. He has a bat sub. He doesn't only ride the Batmobile.
Annalee: [00:03:59] He has a bat pogo stick.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:59] He can only ride vehicles that have bat in the title. If you asked him to ride in a regular car, he'd be like, I can't do that. It's not a bat car. Like you'd have to put a bat on it.
Annalee: [00:04:12] That’s like the bat pogo stick. The bat stick?
Charlie Jane: [00:04:16] The bat pogo stick.
Annalee: [00:04:17] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:17] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The bat hang glider. The bat skateboard. I don't know. Anyway, so people expect Batman to be a certain way. And at the same time, it feels like it's kind of boring if nothing ever changes in Batman's world. So, for example, in the early 1990s, Batman’s spine was broken, like really badly. He had multiple spinal injuries and so he had to quit being Batman permanently. And so he was replaced by a French warrior monk who was half ape. So Azrael. His name was Azrael. But he was a transgenic experiment, who had some ape DNA spliced in with human DNA by a French death cult called the cult of St. Dumas, and this somehow made him the ultimate warrior monk because he had ape powers and human powers. And so Bruce Wayne was like, this guy should be Batman and he was Batman for a couple of years.
Batman Clip: [00:05:13] Azrael: Robin.
Robin: Jean Paul, it's time to talk.
Azrael: I thought it might be.
Robin: Bruce can't be Batman anymore. Not with a broken back. So I need help.
Azrael: The whole city needs help Robin and I'm ready. Azrael is ready.
Robin: Bruce doesn't want Azrael. Here.
Azrael: [Gasp] By St. Dumas!
Robin: He chose you to wear the mantle of the bat.
Azrael: His costume?
Robin: One of them fitted for you.
Azrael: Why do I dress as Batman? I am Azrael! I have a uniform.
Robin: You don't understand Gotham City. The madness out there is rooted in this town’s psyche. And so as the bat.
Azrael: You think I can be as good as him?
Robin: No one's as good as him.
Azrael: You're wrong. I'll be better.
Robin: Big words. Just don't try them out on Bane.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:55] So that, by the way, was the full cast audio recording of Knightfall, the story where Batman is replaced by the half ape warrior monk, and I highly recommend you to hunt it down. It's on YouTube. It's hilarious. So anyway, so they tried to pretend that this was permanent, and Bruce Wayne will be gone for good. But we all knew that eventually Bruce would be Batman again. And Azrael would go back to doing whatever it is that guy does.
Annalee: [00:06:17] Ninja ape shit.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:18] Just going around with a flaming sword, being half ape. So to some extent the illusion of change is about creating the sense that huge, irrevocable events are happening, but then not actually letting them be permanent. It's part of the soap opera quality of comics, things will never be the same again, but at the same time, things will absolutely be the same again.
Annalee: [00:06:40] So is this partly about the fact that nobody ever stays dead in comics? Or is it a little bit more than that?
Charlie Jane: [00:06:47] I mean, it's partly about that. Yeah, it's become kind of a joke in comics that death is temporary, like in the Marvel Universe. Okay, there was a storyline in the X-Factor comics, when Peter David was writing it where one of the X-Men, Siryn, learns that her father has died. And her reaction is just to laugh about it and be like, whatever. He's coming back, they always do. And it takes her a long time to work through it and realize that her father is not coming back and death is sometimes permanent.
Annalee: [00:07:14] Whoa. So after Siryn finally accepted that her father wasn't coming back to life, did he actually stay dead? Like was it actually not the illusion of change?
Charlie Jane: [00:07:25] Ha hahaha! No, no no no. He's back. He's alive. He's well, again. He was brought back to life as an evil hench person, but then he was cured of being evil. And now he's rejoined the X-Men. And by the way, his name is Sean Cassidy, which is awesome. But the illusion of change is about more than just people coming back from the dead and other similarly huge changes getting rolled back. It's also about the fact that we are going to keep seeing a young dude become Spider-Man from scratch over and over for the rest of time.
Annalee: [00:07:55] Oh, god, it's true. So does that mean that nothing changes? Because it is really weird that we have a character like Batman who's just basically the same age for 75 years at this point. Occasionally, in the films, there's like a nod to the idea that maybe he's getting a little older and like his body can't recover from like extreme pummeling as much. But he's still just getting replaced by a new, younger Batman. Same thing with Spider-Man, like you mentioned, which is even weirder, because Spider-Man has to basically be a high school age over and over again. And it gets really weird.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:36] Yeah, I mean, of course, stuff gets added over time, usually via retcons. A retcon is, basically it's a portmanteau of retroactive continuity, which is where, basically a story establishes that stuff that we thought was true about the past wasn't actually true, and that the past was somewhat different than we had originally thought. And there are major retcons that sometimes seem to become permanent. For decades, it was canonical in the Superman comics that Superman had operated as Superboy when he was a teenager and wore this kind of teenage version of the Superman costume. But that was changed in the mid-1980s and I believe that that change has stuck.
[00:09:18] There have been huge changes to the universe of the Green Lantern comics, which seems to be sticking permanently. When Doctor Who came back to television in 2005, some aspects of the show were remixed, and those remixes, for lack of a better term seem to have become part of the fabric of the show.
[00:09:38] But what it is is that you can make additions more easily than you can make subtractions or else you can make changes at the margins. You can't change the core concept too much. And for example, Doctor Who just made some huge, huge changes to the Doctor's backstory, and to the kind of core concept of the show, during the kind of Jodie Whittaker/Chris Chibnall era that is now coming to an end. Jody Whittaker playing the Doctor. And I just read an interview with the current head writer, Chris Chibnall, who said that he absolutely expects all of his major changes to the show to be reverted or ignored when he leaves, which will be in like, a few months. So it's weird, huge things have been established as facts, but they're gonna be swept under the rug.
Annalee: [00:10:20] So when you say it's easier to, with the illusion of change, it's easier to make additions to the story than it is to make subtractions like, you can add in this whole story about like Superboy and his teenage costume. But it's really hard to take that out and so that's why you need a retcon?
Charlie Jane: [00:10:41] Right. Yeah, basically.
Annalee: [00:10:42] Yeah, so the retcon is sort of the way you can kind of say, like, oh, actually teenage Superman, that wasn't really a thing, you misunderstood those 20 years of comics, or whatever.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:52] The retcons themselves have to be kind of at the margins, if they're going to stay around permanently, I think. When you see a retcon that changes the basic fundamental story in some way that kind of changes the meaning of the story, or kind of affects the status quo going forward, then that probably won't be permanent, it'll probably get reverted eventually, in a reboot, which is also a thing that comics do all the time, where basically, it's like, oh, this thing that happened no longer happened. Or ,we're going back to the original status quo, this character is coming back from the dead, because somebody changed the universe somehow, right?
Annalee: [00:11:25] Yeah. Which is where you get something like a massive comic book crossover, like Crisis on Infinite Earths, or any number of the other crisis stories where it's like, okay, we are literally just saying, we figured out some way to clear all these extra characters out, all these extra universes out, we're starting from scratch.
[00:11:42] So this is super complicated. It makes my brain explode, which is kind of delightful. But I feel like there's something about the illusion of change. That's really unsatisfying. So are there comic book creators or other creators who've kind of rebelled against the idea of illusion of change? Or did fans ever get pissed about it?
Charlie Jane: [00:12:03] So yeah, absolutely. Comics superstar Alan Moore, who wrote, you know, Swamp Thing and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, he wrote an essay in 1983 arguing against the illusion of change as a concept, calling it specious and adding, who says readers don't want change? Did they do a survey or something? That’s my British accent, sorry.
[00:12:26] And Peter David, who I mentioned before, wrote in 1998, that he felt like too much illusory change had left comics fans feeling as though nothing mattered because they knew that things would always revert back to the same old status quo. And in the ‘80s and ‘90s in comics, particularly, there was a huge move to revamp these long-standing characters and to allow them to go through major life changes. So Spider-Man got married to his love interest, Mary Jane. Superman got married to Lois Lane. The Hulk married his longtime girlfriend, Betty Ross. Batman got a new Robin, and the original Robin grew up and changed his name to Nightwing. And this all felt like a breath of fresh air and Spidey’s marriage to Mary Jane, in particular, was a huge media event.
Annalee: [00:13:11] Okay, whoa. So wait, is Spider-Man still married to Mary Jane in the comics?
Charlie Jane: [00:13:19] Hahahahaha! No. Peter Parker had his marriage annulled by Satan.
Annalee: [00:13:23] Oh!
Charlie Jane: [00:13:23] Who basically rolled him back to his 1960s status quo in the famous One More Day storyline. And this led to the Brand New Day storylines where Peter Parker is kind of back in his 1960s form. And when they collected the first bunch of those stories in a trade paperback, editor, Tom Brevoort, wrote an afterword in the in the collection, arguing that the problem was that Peter Parker had drifted too far away from his roots. He was married to a supermodel, and he was getting to have a pretty cushy life and Spidey no longer had one foot planted in the real world. Tom Brevoort argued that Spider-Man needs to be an underdog who is unlucky in life and in love.
Annalee: [00:14:02] It's so funny that there was this whole backlash against the illusion of change during the ‘80s, especially, because that was sort of a moment in US culture, when the whole country was kind of going through an ideological reboot, or maybe a retcon. Because we were bringing back the Cold War in the ‘80s. But like with more special effects. There was like a major space based weapons initiative called Star Wars. It was like the political version of the illusion of change.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:35] Yeah, and we were in some sense, kind of retconning away the Vietnam War. I mean, that was literally what we were doing as a country. We were like, trying to pretend that we hadn't suffered this huge setback in Vietnam that traumatized so many people by being like, let's just get back to the 1950s version of the Cold War where it was awesome and clear cut. It wasn't awesome. It was never awesome, but you know what I mean.
Annalee: [00:15:00] Yeah, where it was awesome for bureaucrats.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:03] And even outside comics, there was this huge seismic shift in nerd culture in the ‘80s, which was in part driven by fans who were bored with seeing the same thing over and over again. And so for example, in the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, you see Captain Kirk openly acknowledging that he is getting old, and that things are changing for him. And suddenly Kirk has a son who survives for two whole movies.
Annalee: [00:15:28] Wow!
Star Trek II Clip: [00:15:32] There's a man out there I haven't seen in 15 years who’s trying to kill me. You show me a son that’d be happy to help. My son. My life that could have been… and wasn’t. How do I feel? Old. Worn out.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:51] Yeah, I actually, sidebar, I think that they should have kept Kirk’s son around. I feel like Kirk’s son… they could have told a lot more stories about Kirk and his son and they never got to spend that much time together in those movies. And it was kind of a sad thing that they were just like, ah, we'll kill this guy off. But that's a sidebar.
Annalee: [00:16:08] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:08] So we're gonna take a quick break and then when we come back, we'll talk about why maybe change shouldn't be an illusion.
[00:16:15] OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Annalee: [00:16:21] So back when you and I were running io9, we wrote a lot and talked a lot about the conservatism of a lot of big media franchises, which is partly motivated by money and partly by politics. So the money part, of course you don't want to change things if you've got a cash cow franchise, like that's why you see tons of sequels all the time. But also, and this is where I think politics start to creep in, there's a reluctance to tinker with beloved characters, like say, I don't know Luke Skywalker, because people don't want to see him as a bitter old man, like he was in The Last Jedi. They want Him to be optimistic and happy, go lucky. Just like when everyone was a kid who kind of first encountered Luke Skywalker. So I guess my question is, if we think about the political conservatism, but also the financial side of this, are we firmly on the side of getting rid of the illusion of change in storytelling, kind of as a progressive move?
Charlie Jane: [00:17:24] Yeah, I mean, God, now you've got me thinking about like CG Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett with his like, weird, uncanny valley face as he dispenses Jedi wisdom.
Annalee: [00:17:35] I mean, that's like.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:37] That was very weird.
Annalee: [00:17:38] That was weird and I feel like that was an example of the illusion of change, right? And how hard do you have to work to do that, and kind of retcon away that Luke that made people really sad.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:51] It's complicated, right? Because there's different ways of looking at it. And one way of looking at it is that, you know, Spider-Man is constantly starring in so many movies, and obviously, constantly returning to the status quo in the movies, to a greater or lesser extent. And so people who maybe don't read comics most of the time, if they pick up a Spider-Man comic, they ought to be able to read about the version of Spider-Man that they've been seeing in the movies, or, you know, if there's a character like the Flash, who's on TV and in the movies, why shouldn't people be able to pick up a comic book and read about that version of the Flash? Like, why should there be this barrier to entry of reading comics that you have to know 50 years of stories in order to understand what's going on in a Superman comic. That feels like it's actually actively hostile to new readers. So when I think about it that way, I'm like, okay, you know, I'm on the side of the casual readers who just want to read about this character that they're curious about. I’m against things being impenetrable to kind of new readers. And you know, if you think about it, as like, there are these jaded, longtime fans who've been reading a character for decades that are like, I want something new and different but from this character that I love, versus these casual fans. I'm kind of on the side of the casual fans, but then there are other ways of looking at it, right?
Annalee: [00:19:04] Yeah, I feel like… I hear what you're saying about the casual fan because I also hate when someone who's like, I literally just want a story about like an awesome teenager who secretly can fly around using webs and like solve crime and stuff like that. And I don't want to have to know about like, the time when, I don't know, Spider-Man was a clone and like, Spider-Man married someone and then Spider-Man got young again.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:31] And Spider-Man had four arms, and…
Annalee: [00:19:36] There's been a lot of Spider-Man adventures. But on the other hand, I feel like the illusion of change leads to stagnation, where you get the same stories over and over with diminishing returns. So I'm kind of on the side of letting things change and grow. How can these characters go through so many extreme events and remain totally unchanged by the experience? How do we invest in a story where there's no stakes, because no life event is ever permanent?
Charlie Jane: [00:20:08] Right, exactly. So it really depends on what framing you use. And I personally do find it easier to believe in fictional characters who grow and change, especially when they're going through such huge events all the time. And you saw it kind of on television a little bit in the last, 20 years, where things went from being very episodic, where at the end of every episode, we would revert to the exact same status quo. Characters could never have any permanent changes. And every episode was resolved within that episode and there might be like, hints of an arc, that would be kind of like, oh, there’s a big bad or whatever, who we’ll deal with in the season finale. But we moved from that to kind of more serialized storytelling, and that has made television feel more interesting to watch on the whole.
[00:20:59] And I do think that there's a kind of rot that sets in over time, when you have the illusion of change. Illusion of change, might well have been a decent strategy in the 1960s when Stan Lee was coming up with this stuff. If you have a story that goes on for five years having like, oh, things keep kind of reverting over time, that might work for five years. But would it work for 50 or 75? I kind of wonder. I think that over time, it becomes less doable. But it's also kind of important to realize that neither side of this argument is about realism. There is a lot of suspension of disbelief that goes into all of these fictional kind of heroic characters, whether they're allowed to change and grow or not.
Annalee: [00:21:39] Right. I mean, we're supposed to accept that right after teenage Peter Parker got spider powers, he also invented a miraculous web fluid that turns solid with amazing tensile strength and stickiness and a bunch of other shit. So obviously, nobody's coming to these stories for scientific plausibility. But what about, I don't know, like emotional realism? Like, how do you connect to a character whose emotional experiences evaporate conveniently when a story arc is over?
Charlie Jane: [00:22:08] Yeah, I mean, it's really hard. And obviously, nobody wants to read or few of us want to read about a Spider-Man who's just so traumatized and kind of so wrecked by like, just constantly fighting the Green Goblin, that he can't get out of bed anymore. He's just like, which is very relatable by the way.
Annalee: [00:22:29] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:29] But nobody wants to read about that version of Spider-Man. But what happens, what I kind of was driving at when I said that it might work for five years, but not 50 or 75, is thathe eventually you just have so many storylines that have remained canon because the fans like them, or because they just feel important in some way, that the characters just get a much more cluttered past. And we will kind of have little reminders that that stuff all happened, or at least we won't be told that it didn't happen. And so they're the same person as always, they're still just like, oh, I'm still just the same guy, but they've lived through so much stuff.
Annalee: [00:23:09] Very relatable. I feel like I've lived through about 300 years worth of stuff since 2017.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:15] Yeah, and but just imagine how bad it is for Batman. I mean, so, Denny O'Neil, who edited the Batman comics for many years used to say I think that Bruce Wayne has always been Batman for about 10 years, and this will never change. He started being Batman in his mid-20s. He's now in his mid-30s. But over time, the number of events that need to be crammed into those 10 years keeps going up. And this makes it the most eventful decade ever. There have been a bunch of Robins. One of the Robins died and came back to life because Superboy punched the walls of reality [crosstalk]
Annalee: [00:23:50] Wait, I thought Superboy was retconned out. This is back when Superboy was real or wasn’t?
Charlie Jane: [00:23:57] No, there still is a Superboy but now he's no longer the teenage version of Superman.
Annalee: [00:24:02] Ah.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:02] He’s a separate character who is like just a clone of Superman, I think. He’s either a clone of Superman or he's another dude from Superman’s home planet. He just dresses in a different version of Superman's costume and he's like the kind of young, rebellious Superman, Superboy, who Superman has to kind of deal with sometimes. So there's now a Superboy, who's kind of hanging around.
Annalee: [00:24:26] Thank you for clarifying.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:26] It’s confusing. Comics are really confusing, and that's part of why this is a problem. So Gotham City has been destroyed by natural disasters and then taken over by super villains on two separate occasions. And I think it's still kind of in that, I'm just get I love to keep repeating this. Batman was replaced by a half ape warrior monk for several months. I think that's still canon. The stuff that Bruce Wayne has had to deal with over the course of a decade would give anybody major brain fog and you have to assume that many of these stories all happen on the same day because there's just not enough time otherwise. And you think about what happens to professional athletes after a decade of stuff that's much less strenuous than what Batman copes with on a daily basis. It's bizarre.
Annalee: [00:25:08] Yeah, I so I wonder if the real problem is that these characters have too much past, but they're not allowed to learn anything? Or is it that they're not allowed to feel the weight of everything they've been through?
Charlie Jane: [00:25:21] I mean, all of that. When you think about an escapist story, part of what we're escaping from is the oppressive weight of consequences. And I feel like there's a certain kind of novelty to watching Captain Kirk have a midlife crisis for a while. But then eventually, it's more fun to watch him be a swaggering young hero again. And I think that the real solution would be to, eventually when a hero has just had so much story, we move on to a new hero and find new heroes to invest in, but we're not willing to do that as a culture.
Annalee: [00:25:56] Yeah, that's so interesting, that we want to hold on to the hero, but we don't want to hold on to their past. I really love what you said about how it's kind of a fantasy of escaping from consequences. It's also a fantasy of escaping from baggage and from trauma. And so I wonder, do you think that's why we keep getting so many reboots? Is that kind of the impetus?
Charlie Jane: [00:26:22] Yeah, I mean, like I just said about Captain Kirk. We want you like a young swaggering, Captain Kirk. And now we've got two of them. Chris Pine is playing Captain Kirk in the movies. The guy who played Stefan on in Vampire Diaries, Paul Wesley, is playing Captain Kirk in the TV series, Strange New Worlds. I am so excited about, I just cannot wait.
Annalee: [00:26:43] I think he’s going to be really good, actually.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:43] I think he's gonna be amazing. He's actually a really great actor. In Vampire Diaries, he didn't get to be the fun character as much as Damon did but he always brought a certain twinkle to it. And I think he's actually a very versatile actor. I’m still going to imagine imagine Captain Kirk being like, “Your emotions are heightened right now.”
Annalee: [00:27:06] I once ran into Paul Wesley in a cafe in the Lower East Side in Manhattan. And he was super sweet.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:12] I was so jealous.
Annalee: [00:27:12] I mean, obviously he was a regular at the cafe, like I just saw him the one time but he was very bouncy, and just kind of like, hi, whatever. And I was like, ah, that's nice.
[00:27:26] So, okay, back to something more important than me seeing Paul Wesley and our feelings about Vampire Diaries. So what is the alternative to the illusion of change, if we want one? How do we keep those casual audiences that you were sticking up for, I think, rightly, who want to be able to just dive into a story without knowing, 50 years of history, but at the same time, I feel like we want to move our stories forward. So how do we do that?
Charlie Jane: [00:27:52] I think the real answer is that any change needs to be real and not an illusion. But also in some cases, it's okay to just not change. Like, at the one end of the spectrum, you've got a character like Charlie Brown in Peanuts, and nobody expects Charlie Brown to get older and learn how to drive a car or start smoking blunts behind the school. We accept that he'll always be that little kid and that's just gonna stay the same forever. But at the other end, there are plenty of characters who age in real time, because they're played by a specific actor. And maybe they experience changes that stick.
[00:28:24] Also, any change that becomes popular enough with the fans will stick. Like if the fans are like, yes, we like this version, we don't want Superman to have been Superboy when he's a teenager, then that will actually become permanent. It really depends on what the creators and the companies think that the fans want. But to some extent, I think you have to pick a lane, you have to pick a lane of are these characters going to grow and change, or are they not, and if they are, then it needs to be somewhat permanent, you need to actually commit to it.
[00:28:53] Bear in mind that all of this is driven by capitalism. Capitalism always wants us to see that things are new and different, but basically be the same. There's a reason why your laundry detergent always says “New and Improved” on the side, when it's really the same laundry detergent it's always been, it's just that maybe they changed the color of the packaging so it's new and improved. And I think that that's the logic of capitalism, they want you to feel like oh, things are just improving all the time, but without actually rocking the boat in any way, because they don't want to damage their profit margins.
[00:29:25] So I think if you're really sick of the illusion of change, one answer is to gravitate towards characters who are owned by creators rather than corporations because corporations will always be motivated in part by a desire to sell toys. And that will mean always keeping things kind of the same.
Annalee: [00:29:41] Yeah, I mean, I'm always happy to blame capitalism for this. So you know, I think it's definitely true that as long as we're selling stories for money, there's always going to be that question of how much can we change because this is a product. It's both a product and a narrative and I think that's the difficulty, right? Because the narrative wants to move forward and change. The product, like you said, the toy, wants to stay the same.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:09] Exactly. That's the perfect way of encapsulating it, thank you.
[00:30:14] Okay, thank you so much for listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. Remember, you can always find us on Patreon and we're on Twitter at @OOACpod. You can find us on all the podcast places. If you like us, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you can review stuff. Please shout us out on Twitter, we really appreciate that.
[00:30:35] Thanks so much to our heroic producer Veronica Simonetti, who just makes everything twice as sparkly. And thanks so much to Chris Palmer for the music. And we'll see you in a couple of weeks. If you're on Patreon, we'll have an audio extra next week and we'll be hanging out on Discord.
Annalee: [00:30:53] Bye!
Charlie Jane: [00:30:54] Bye!
[00:30:57] OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.