Creativity. It’s always shifting and constantly changing
and if you’re person with a good imagination you should easily be able to
adjust to new stories being told. Now
easily adjusting and liking are two completely different things when we’re
talking about stories that make sense or stories that are good. Being creative means that you’re capable of
imagining a great deal but only you will know if you are able to accept what
has been created. Sometimes we are given
great ideas that make us believe in the impossible. And sometimes we are given
ideas that don’t inspire us and oftentimes the consequences to those uninspired
ideas are re-writes and ret-cons that are force upon us.
Take
for instance DC comics and their “New 52” which they started over 4 years
ago. They were able to revitalize all of
their characters by giving them all new origins and it allowed new readers to
pick up and fall in love with characters that they never knew existed or could
never follow before because their history was too convoluted for them to
follow. We saw a new Superman, Wonder
Woman, and Batman emerge who had traveled different paths to where they
finally joined together as the Justice League.
Somehow the Green Lantern history was merged into the new universe and
when sales began to slip DC decided to converge all of their universes causing
another reset once again. This time they
are making all of their past restarts and crises relevant by allowing the
convergence to continue.
Marvel
has also decided to reset their own universes by having all of them die so that
something new can be born. The launch of
the Ultimates line boosted sales for Marvel which helped propel the company out
of bankruptcy. The Ultimates also helped
influence their successful movie franchise.
The Ultimates line saw a more realistic modern storytelling for comics
and also saw a fresh new look for the characters. This helped Marvel turn things around in
their main comics’ branch making the stories more modern and streamlined. Now the alternate universes that exist are
being destroyed and a free-for-all has taken place which will see a new Marvel
universe emerge when the dust finally settles.
Even
the Star Wars universe has recently been reset to only include the movies and
the Clone Wars and Rebellion television series.
Once George Lucas sold his property to Disney they found that they had
twenty years of history and back story from the “Expanded Universe” that the
fans knew and loved. With their
determination to make more movies Disney felt that the only way that they could
do this was to practically make all of that history disappear and start fresh. This move of course angered many fans such as
myself at first as I had fallen in love with the Expanded Universe and it was
there for me when I was going to through a tough time in my life. To hear that they were now saying that it was
non-canonical was shocking but afterwards I realized that this was the only way
they could make the new movie freely without tripping over everything else that
had been written before it.
So
what do you do? You accept that you
aren’t going to be able to change the minds of a multi-billion dollar company
when they already have a plan set in motion.
Or you can go back and enjoy all of the things that you made you love
the comic books and Star Wars so much and read them over again. Either way no matter what happens you have to
realize that unless you become a writer or artist who will one day effect the
creative processes for these enterprises you have no say in what’s going to
happen so you might as well enjoy the ride.
Whatever you do don’t give up on what you love. You may not like the fact that your favorite
mutant is now gay or your favorite lantern has been killed. This is the world of fantasy fiction. Enjoy it while you can.
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