Guardians of the Galaxy, Day 4: Nerdsad

DAY 4: WHY I INVENTED THE TERM “NERDSAD” FOR THIS MOVIE

Don’t get me wrong. I’m excited about this movie. But I’m also a bit nerdsad.

If I could travel back in time, find my thirteen-year-old self reading Star-Lord comics in the back row of math class, and tell her that someday there would be a big-budget Hollywood movie called Guardians of the Galaxy, about an interstellar butt-kicking team led by none other than Peter Quill, I would probably kick myself in the shins and call myself a liar. This movie is something I never thought would happen, and I am delighted beyond words to have been wrong.

But. Nerdsad.

What is “nerdsad”, you ask? It’s a word I coined after seeing that trailer for the first time. You’ve probably heard the term “nerd rage” (also spelled “nerdrage”) before, describing that vitriolic, bile-spewing furor that erupts among geeks when the things they love are threatened or compromised. Superman has a kid? Nerd rage! Galactus is a puffy space cloud? Nerd rage! Nipples on the Batsuit? NERDRAAAAAAGE!

It looks like this. Thank you, The Gutters.

But I’m not actually angry. I’m not even particularly upset. I’m mildly annoyed and deeply disappointed. And so, since “nerdrage” is so clearly inappropriate, I give you “nerdsad”—a term of my own making, meaning that exquisite combination of melancholy, disappointment, and just a smidgen of annoyance that arises out of a geeky thing not turning out the way we geeks wanted it.

So why am I nerdsad? And why am I hoping against hope that I’ll turn out to be just as wrong in my nerdsadness as I was to believe this movie would never happen?

Peter and Cosmo, a boy and his dog. And raccoon, I guess.

Peter Quill. That’s why.
The one bittersweet point in the GotG trailer, for me, is Peter Quill, as played by Chris Pratt. Let’s look at that trailer again, shall we?

Okay, I hear you saying. He seems amusing enough. Kind of a big, dumb, lovable goofball. Sure, he’s weirdly possessive of his Walkman and has an overinflated sense of his own fame and importance, but hey, those are adorable first-act traits in a character who will eventually grow into a recognizable hero. What’s to be nerdsad about?

Just this—that’s not Peter Quill. At least, not the one I’d buy a ticket for.

Ignore Asshole Pete and Hero Pete for a moment. Cut out all the goofy cosmic stories from the 1970s and 1980s that I enjoyed so much. Ignore Timothy Zahn and Sinjin Quarrel. The first version of Star-Lord that became really popular was Antihero Pete, the one that showed up under Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning—so who was that guy?

Well, this is the first thing you hear about him, through the voice of Richard Rider, a.k.a. Nova:

Sorry about the size. Had to blow it up to make yellow text legible on a blue field. Click and zoom if you still can't read it.

It’s the worst defeat in history, Peter’s just broken out of prison, and he signs on with the vastly outnumbered and outgunned good guys. Brave and possibly crazy. And he’s good at his job, too—his advice gets Richie through the war, and his support turns Richie into a bona fide A-list superhero.

Pep talk from Captain Crazy. Perfect.

“Ain’t nobody gonna be calling Nova a lightweight Earth boy by the end of it,” he tells his protégé.

“If I live that long,” Richie replies.

“Well, obviously there’s that.”

And goofballery? No. I’ve always enjoyed Star-Lord’s sense of humor, when he had one, but it tended to be more dry wit than screwball comedy.

Yes, Rocket is STILL going on about the name.

Do you see that guy picking a fight with a prison guard over a Walkman? No, you do not. My best guess at the moment is that the Walkman is the only thing that character’s got left from Earth, which would naturally make it more precious … but that conflicts with another thing I really like about Antihero Pete.

This is not a guy who wants to be human anymore (or half-human, in his case—remember that the comic-book Pete, at least, is half-alien). This is not a guy who wants to remember Earth. He’s carrying around a huge weight of guilt, and his way of dealing with it is not dealing with it. He throws himself into fight after fight, disaster after disaster, because that’s the only way he can cope. The closest he gets to missing Earth is when he discovers that the Skrull incursion that has taken down transport and communications at his home base is just a tiny ripple of a huge Skrull invasion of Earth. Yelling at a bureaucrat who’s getting in his way, he says:

And honestly, he might or might not actually be worried about his home planet. He might just be guilt-tripping the bureaucrat. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s manipulated people.

Now, that’s quite a bit of complexity to pour into a two-and-a-half-minute trailer, or even a two-hour movie. But let’s look at the trailer version of Peter Quill, shall we? What are we getting instead?

1. He’s petty. On a lot of levels, he’s petty. He’s a petty crook (and while I can imagine the comic-book Peter Quill getting arrested, I have difficulty imagining him getting busted for something so minor as public intoxication). He picks a fight over a petty matter—a Walkman. He can’t resist flipping off authority figures, apparently just because they’re authority figures; I can see the comic-book Peter flipping someone off, but only when they’d made a serious neck-pain of themselves first. Nothing else penetrates the shell, really.

2. He’s inexperienced. That rap sheet is pathetic. He calls himself a “legendary outlaw”, but he seems to be pulling a major job without so much as posting a lookout. Nobody’s heard of “Star-Lord”, and he reacts to that non-recognition like a spoiled teenager. Honestly, the fact that Korath is clueless about him was my biggest tip-off that this wasn’t comic-book Peter. Everyone of any importance in Cosmic Marvel has heard of Star-Lord and the Guardians. Most people think they’re insane, but everyone’s heard of them. This version of Peter has not been pinballing around the universe as a cosmic hero, or fighting in any major wars, or killing thousands of people. He hasn’t done jack.

Sigh. At least he's got the insignia.

3. He’s shallow. This is less about being a shallow person (which trailer-Pete does seem to be) and more about being a shallow character. There doesn’t seem to be much going on behind him. The capsule descriptions of Drax and Gamora suggest there’s some kind of background there, some kind of motivation for what they’re doing. There are hints in Rocket’s screen rundown, too. With Groot, there’s never any way to know, but still—that’s three out of five Guardians with something resembling their rich character backgrounds from the comics. Trailer-Pete has zip. Which brings me to …

4. He’s not qualified to be in this story. Everybody in Cosmic Marvel thinks Antihero Pete is crazy and/or dangerous. But nobody questions his qualifications to lead his merry team of nutbars. He fought in the wars. He made the hard choices. He’s been around and has an established history of throwing himself into the precise moment of conjunction between fan and fecal matter. He was usually the lowest-powered member of the Guardians, but his brain and heart made up for his lost powers. Trailer-Pete, on the other hand, is obviously the hero of this story and probably going to end up leading the team because … well, apparently just because he’s their only white human male. And that is pretty thin, even for Hollywood.


That’s why I’m nerdsad. Not because trailer-Pete is so bad … but because he has the potential to be so much better. And I’ll be sad if James Gunn and the others involved with this movie pass up a great character in order to present a mediocre one.

Of course, I might be wrong.
I’d really like to be wrong about all this. I’d really like to see movie-Peter show some real character depth, and turn out to be a lot more competent and a lot more psychologically complex than the trailer made him out to be. And honestly, that’s still a possibility. Trailers are, by definition, quick hits. The Novas might not have had a complete rap sheet on him—if he does have a history that includes something like the death of a small planet, he might have changed his identity to get away from it. The Walkman could have something important in it, or the pettiness of Peter wanting to keep it could be connected to a motivation that runs deeper than just not wanting people to touch his stuff. The goofball flipping off the Nova Corps might be running a long, deep con on the audience as well as his captors. It wouldn’t be the first time. We still don’t know what those five characters were doing on Xandar; if it’s still Nova Corps headquarters, then breaking in there is the kind of trouble Antihero Pete would gladly get into in a good cause.

And that act-one theory might be true. We might be seeing Antihero Pete in this trailer, at a much earlier stage in his development—perhaps an alternate form of Asshole Pete. After all, the title of the first issue of GotG summed up why these particular loonies were the ones defending the universe:

Someone’s got to do it. Maybe the character we see in the trailer is just someone who hasn’t yet realized that someone’s got to do it … or that he’s someone. Maybe.

It’s a long shot. But I’ll hang onto it for a while. Because this next bit—this next bit right here—is the Star-Lord I’m hoping for.

Everything you need to know about Star-Lord in three scenes.
Because the Thanos Imperative storyline was designed to kill off Richie and Peter, there was a lot of character time devoted to the two of them. That includes my favorite capsule description of Pete, and my favorite moment between the two characters.

The capsule description comes fairly late in the series, in issue 5 of 6. Richie is trying to figure out where Peter and the Guardians have disappeared to. He’s gone against conventional wisdom (and the advice of most of his allies, who’ve written the Guardians off as unreliable crazies) to head off with Major Victory and go rummaging through the Guardians’ abandoned headquarters. And they have this conversation:

He’s a loon with a short fuse who jumps in without looking. That’s what’s so great about him. Bravest man I ever met.

Except, as the series has repeatedly demonstrated, Peter’s fuse is a lot longer than most people give it credit for. And he always looks. It’s just that he jumps in anyway. That conversation sums the character up—just not the way Richie meant it to.

Don’t believe me? Remember this conversation from Day 1, about abstracts?

There’s a reason it stuck in my head. That’s because the rest of the conversation, which was first shown during a Thanos Imperative flashback to the war where the two characters first met--the last panel at the bottom of the page--went like this:

That’s the first part of my favorite moment. If Death comes your way, and won’t let you pass, make sure you scream right back in his face. That has got to be the world’s stupidest life philosophy. But it works for Peter, and it obviously stuck with Richie.

The second half of the moment comes later. At the end of the series, when Star-Lord and Nova are about to face down Thanos, when they know they’re going to die horribly but they also know it’s going to save everyone they know and love (most of whom, in Pete’s case, will never know or care that he was the one who did it), this is the conversation they have:

“Rich, you really shouldn’t trust anything I say. Most of the time, I just make stuff up.”

“I know. Let’s scream in his face anyway.”

That is why I read Guardians of the Galaxy. And that is why I will be buying a ticket to this movie, even if it turns out that Star-Lord on the big screen is a refugee from a Judd Apatow flick. Because I love these characters. I love these stories. And I want to believe that somewhere, buried under all the goofballery and the Blue Swede soundtrack, is a group of characters who mostly make stuff up but will scream in the face of Death anyway.

Somebody’s got to do it.

Tomorrow: The long-awaited (or long-dreaded) reading list.

Jim Butcher and my best friend save Christmas. More or less.

This is the story of how Jim Butcher teamed up with my best friend to save Christmas.

Okay, not Christmas. But pretty close.

As regular followers of this blog probably know, I had a birthday in early September. Some people hate having birthdays. Not me. I like the idea of having my very own holiday. I traditionally bake cupcakes and spend the day delivering them to my friends and loved ones. Nothing puts you in a celebratory mood like a cupcake, and this way I get most of the cake out of my house before I can eat it all. Win-win.

This year, the last stop on the cupcake route was my best friend, whom I’ve known since we were both gawky teenagers and whom I’ll call Violet. (She asked me not to use her name in this story, for reasons that may soon be apparent to you, though I’m not sure they’re apparent to me.) She had already mentioned wanting to give me a birthday present in exchange for the cake, and I was fairly sure it was going to be a copy of Cold Days, the latest installment in Jim Butcher’s highly entertaining Dresden Files series of urban-fantasy novels.

(Quick primer for the uninitiated: the Dresden Files, arguably the most popular series in the entire urban-fantasy genre, is about a smartmouthed wizard named Harry Dresden who also happens to be a private investigator in Chicago. The eerily accurate cover blurb describes the series as a cross between Philip Marlowe and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Cold Days is the 14^th book in the series.)

Violet, bless her heart, is a latecomer to the Dresdenverse, and has recently been borrowing my paperbacks and reading them as fast as I can drop them off at her house. I had idly remarked sometime in July that I couldn’t lend her Cold Days until I bought a copy on my own—I had been waiting for the paperback because my shelf space is limited. She’d texted me the day before my birthday to say my present had arrived in the mail. So when I pulled up to Violet’s house with cupcakes at around 8 p.m., I was fairly certain I knew how the evening was going to go.

I was wrong, of course.

Violet oohed and ahhed over the cupcakes and returned my copy of Proven Guilty, the eighth book in the series, which she had recently borrowed. And then she handed me a box with Priority Mail markings on it.

There were two fat envelopes inside that box.

 “Which one am I supposed to open?” I asked.

“You pick,” she replied.

More or less at random, I picked up the envelope on my right. The top was open, and out slid a paperback copy of Cold Days. I obediently made happy oohing noises, privately wondering why Violet had taken it out of the Amazon wrapping and put it into a padded manila envelope, of all things.

 “Open it up,” Violet commanded.

I obeyed. This is what I saw: 

“Oh, wow! You got it signed! That is … really impressive!” I squeaked. (I would have used more colorful vocabulary, but Violet’s infant daughter was sleeping in an adjoining room, and I’m trying not to teach her the fun words—at least, not by accident.)

“Open the other one!” Violet insisted.

Still astonished that Violet had somehow gotten me a signed copy of Cold Days, I did. This is what was in the other envelope:
 

And now, a word of explanation.

Dead Beat, the seventh Dresden book, is probably my favorite in the entire series. First and foremost, it’s the one with the zombie tyrannosaurus rex. If there’s anything funnier than Harry Dresden charging through the streets of Chicago on the back of a zombie dinosaur, terrorizing necromancers and National Guard troops, I don’t know what it is. But second and almost as important, my personal copy of Dead Beat was a signed souvenir of my very first Comic-Con in 2008, when I waited in line for hours to hear Jim Butcher speak and then for hours again to try very hard to act cool while he signed books and chatted with me. (I was particularly impressed with how he pretended not to notice that I was nearly hyperventilating.) Violet was there that day, utterly mystified by my willingness to spend my one con day hanging around for this one guy and his books, and she took a photo of me being very embarrassed and excited during that signing. Because I’m an arrogant so-and-so and don’t like posting photos of myself on the internet, here’s the Jim Butcher part of that image:

I was a few pixels to the right, freaking out while he talked.

Now, here’s the really important thing about the book in that envelope—

It’s not my copy of Dead Beat.

My copy was, um … let’s say “weathered.” I take very good care of my books, but I also believe that books are for reading, and my favorites don’t stay in mint condition very long. As careful as I’ve been in the last five years, that souvenir had a couple of lines down the spine, and a certain curvature to the front and back covers, and a couple of smudgy thumb-marks on particular pages. It’s well-loved, is my point.

Violet had recently borrowed my copy of Dead Beat, along with Proven Guilty. Clearly she had some explaining to do.

She got a little red in the face at this point, but showed me an email exchange she’d had with Mr. Butcher’s personal assistant, Sarah Skolaut. Apparently, sometime in late August, Violet was reading my copy of Dead Beat and juggling the baby and doing the thousand other things that mothers have to do every day, and somehow or other—the details were never clear—there was a little ripping sound and the cover of Dead Beat was not quite in its original shape anymore. It looked like this:

(Right about here Violet looked very embarrassed, and I told her then what I’ll tell you now—that sentimental significance or no, if I valued that book more than I valued her friendship, it would never have left my house. And now that I’ve seen the rip, I don’t think I’d even have bothered to notice it, except maybe to apply some tape. But I digress.)

Violet was horrified at the thought of telling me that she’d ripped my favorite Dresden book, the one I’d dragged her down to San Diego and waited in line for hours to acquire, the lucky souvenir of my first-ever convention and my first-ever encounter with one of my favorite authors. So she decided that she’d rather tell a total stranger about it instead. And not just any stranger … she rooted around on the author’s website and fired off an email to the man himself. (Or at least his PA.)

I have to assume that Jim Butcher is just as kind and generous in real life as he seems to be in his public appearances, because Sarah had no compunction whatsoever about jumping in and trying to help Violet with a situation that was the very definition of none of her business. Violet had mentioned in her desperate email that my birthday was coming up, so Sarah told Violet to send a copy of Dead Beat to a PO box in Missouri posthaste, and promised she’d try to get her boss to sign it in the narrow time window between a couple of convention appearances. Violet threw in a copy of Cold Days, apparently on the grounds that why the hell not, and the entire photo of me and Mr. Butcher at the con, and the shot of her with the ripped book.

I don’t know about you, but after one day at a convention, I feel like I’ve been hit by a train, and the feeling lasts for at least a week. And I’m not there for multiple days, signing books and talking to bazillions of people. So I have nothing but chop-fallen awe for the fact that a guy with a wife and at least one kid, with a measly couple of days of downtime between stressful travel and convention appearances, would even consider signing a book or two for a total stranger in order to get her out of hypothetical trouble with another total stranger.

I’m amazed that somebody answered the email. I’m more amazed that a box arrived shortly before my birthday—just under two weeks past that little ripping noise—containing not only a signed copy of the author’s latest and greatest but a new signed copy of my favorite with this inscription:

Friend's name blurred out to protect her secret identity.

For about five minutes after I saw that, I was making this noise, more or less constantly, only in a mezzo-soprano range:


 

So now I have two new signed Dresden books, and I’m carrying Cold Days wrapped in a bandana as I’m carefully rereading it, and I occasionally look at Dead Beat on the shelf and make little “ohmigoooood” noises to myself as I work on the last round of revisions to Teh Novel (I’m in the early 20s now, guys! Chapter 38’s comin’!). And I know two things:

1. Violet didn’t have to do that, but this is one of about a billion reasons why she’s my best friend.

2. Jim Butcher really didn’t have to do that, but he’s now got a fan for life.

I’m not kidding. The rest of the Dresden Files can suck like a Shop-Vac in overdrive, and I will still buy them for as long as their author cares to write them. Because some things are important, dammit. And some of those things are very, very human things—and this, in a silly and minor and not-at-all-relevant-to-the-grander-universe way, was the most beautifully human thing I’ve seen in quite a while. My friend, with the best of intentions, damaged a prized possession of mine, and wanted to make amends, even though I wouldn’t even have been upset. And somebody she’d met a whopping once, for maybe thirty seconds in which she mostly took photos, went out of his way to help her do that, apparently for nothing more than the warm pleasure of helping a friend be a friend.

Yeah. It was a good birthday.

Okay, just once more.

OhmiGOOOOOOOOD …