Every night my youngest, usually after his brother has gone to sleep already, insists that I tell him several chapters of a story I made up one night, desperate to get him to stop getting out of his bed, called “The Adventure Squad,” in which he and his family meet his heroes, fight bad guys, and avert an apocalypse.
This is surprisingly common in speculative fiction, I’ve noticed. Once you’re asking “what if,” you may as well ask what happens if the threat is so bad that it could mean the Return of Gozer. Superheroes are forever discovering alien threats or an invasion from Hell. Even something like Batman, which tends to be more about colorful criminals staging elaborate, small-time crimes, gets dragged into some DC crossover event multiple times in a year in which a billionaire wearing spandex and a cape is somehow able to stop Satan himself, or at least the Floronic Man and Poison Ivy from a dastardly plan to unleash a mega-cloud of super-marijuana to end all war.
Life imitates art (regrettably not in the case of the war-ending super-weed; to be honest, I think I’m sort of with Floro and Ivy on that one). It’s been just about a day since the odious hate matrix with a degenerating brain was handed the keys to The Button and he’s already signing things and barking out language that feels like it was drafted by some cheap, two-bit science fiction writer designing Baby’s First Dystopia for a Choose Your Own Adventure novel.
That should have been my career (writing cheap dystopia, I mean, not the Presidency). In The Adventure Squad, my youngest, his brother, and three of his cousins get together to celebrate holidays and are inevitably pulled into a different universe to save it from villains taking it over and blowing it up, or what have you. As they do this, they develop unique superpowers, and each chapter they gather a clue as to who the real Big Boss Bad Guy is, usually by finding one letter of his name. It lets me end things on a cliffhanger and note that he has to be good at bedtime if he wants me to continue this practice(an empty threat, of course, because it is quite difficult, at least for me, to say no a four-year-old quietly asking for a story to help him go to sleep). This means that The Adventure Squad sort of has chapters and sort of has books that are all linked to one story, sort of like The Magic Treehouse series, as far as I was able to tell back when I read that to the oldest, before it was devoured by Minecraft. So far The Squad has unveiled King K. Rool, Bowser, and Ganondorf as primary antagonists (youngest has a Nintendo focus at the moment – I have been playing a lot of old Donkey Kong and Mario at his request).
The bad guys also always are teaming up in the IP-laden, escapist fiction that will soon become the only form of entertainment produced by mass media. The Master, working with the Daleks?! Green Goblin, working with Rhino?! Warner Brothers teaming up with Discovery?! In the stories, often some squabble for power reveals that the team-up is a fake-out and it has one true person behind it all, the man behind the curtain, usually whoever the writer’s favorite is.
Life imitates art again. All the world’s worst people are out there shaking hands, patting each other on the back, and generally having a grand old time. A guy infamous for remarking that a worm ate part of his brain, a guy who’s such a loser that he bought Twitter so he could become its main character forever (and look at people’s private messages when they catch him cheating at video games), and neo-fascists from all around the globe are pledging their support for one another. Steve Bannon (Game Over! Return of Bannon) compared this capitulation of the Zuckergang to General Douglas MacArthur, but it feels more cartoonish, like Grima Wormtongue from Lord of the Rings, or whoever that guy groveling to Voldemort is in Harry Potter. Who can be bothered to remember anymore? It genuinely would not be surprising if it were revealed that the “oligarchs” have had a secret base where they hunt poor people for food, and they’ve just decided that they don’t need it to be a secret anymore. Last time, just like in the stories, they pretty quickly started knifing each other in the back faster than we could measure in Scaramuccis, but this time, they all seem to be bowing to the king(or, in at least one case, sieg heiling for him). I guess we’ll see how long that lasts, such it matters beyond the celebrity entertainment factor.
My youngest insists upon editing The Adventure Squad live as I am telling it. Bowser Jr. must be involved, or King K. Rool must use his scientist name. This can be difficult, because trying to invent a story appropriate for a four-year-old based on his own frame of reference and coming up with superhero abilities for five children is tricky enough to do on the fly without trying to remember that when King K. Rool wears the lab coat, he’s actually called Baron K. Roolenstein (something I had to look up on the Mario wiki).
These wikis are also the only way to understand who all of the villains are on TV and the movies now. Even the parodies and homages are so deep into the rogues gallery that The Boys has multiple spin-off characters being incorporated into the show and Kite Man has his own television show. We’re approaching some kind of easy-reading singularity, in which Darth Seven of Nine sues the Acme corporation for illegally transporting the Iron Throne to to the town of Derry Maine, shortly before it falls into a portal to Ravnica: City of Guilds. Likely written, drawn and acted by “artificial intelligence,” a word that has now lost all meaning except that, as it has currently been commonly employed with regard to the arts, almost every reasonable human being hates it. I suppose that at least once everything is some kind meme slurry stealing everyone’s work and likenesses, we no longer will have to discover which creator has decided to become loudly transphobic or be the subject of an exposé revealing decades of sadistic sexual abuse under their belt (the Neil Gaiman thing still hurts).
It’s a bit more fun watching the fictional, rag-tag heroes continuously avert the End of All Things, I suppose. I am not sure what power I have (despite being decidedly rag-tag and being able to conjure up a gang in a pinch) against the absolute onslaught of evil that is likely to consume this decade. While we drill-baby-drill into accelerating climate change against the wishes of most of the rest of the world and opt tell the World Health Organization to go pound sand if they think they’re going to help with the pandemics that are likely to ensue, lots of the people who could help are likely to be slaughtered in the mass deportations that are apparently starting as I type this. The villains in this situation cackle and host tacky, cringeworthy, almost unbelievable celebrations, just like the fictional ones, but nobody appears to be about to smash through a stained glass window and defeat their cynical machinations with ingenuity and the power of love and friendship.
Youngest, who picks up on adult anxiety like any child, has vowed that he will protect us from “Donald Trunk,” one of the few Bad Guys that he seems genuinely afraid of rather than wanting to emulate. I continue to rack my brain to think what on earth I can do about all this, since it seems a growing number of people are simply onboard with burning everything we’ve built over the years purely because they enjoy spite more than empathy. At the end of each Adventure Squad, the squad returns from whatever dimension they were in victorious, just as us hapless parents return from looking for them, oblivious to all the adventures they’ve been on.
Still, I’d rather that the apocalypse not be a job for the next generation, especially since it will be tough for them to do anything about it if they spend their adolescence in some kind of Mad Max hellscape. It seems like the one thing all of us should have agreed on, really, to maybe not destroy the planet. I guess the 1980s nostalgia powering all of those franchises includes a Doomsday Clock so close to midnight that we’re all perpetually lying awake waiting for the ball to drop (the ball, in this case, being the planet).
In the meantime, I can only hope that the Adventure Squad helps, in both of the possible interpretations of that sentence.
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