Okay, so I watched Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog the other day. This video/show/movie thing is fantastic. It is a musical, but don't let that turn you off of it. Niel Patric Harris is the protagonist, Nathan Fillion is the antagonist, and the woman from that one viral video (Do You Want to Date My Avatar) that's brought up every time she's mentioned in a separate project is a major supporting cast member. For anyone who hasn't watched it yet, go do that. Now. Then come back, if you're interested.
This video (It's a short film, but video is faster) is very clearly a parody of standard super hero cliches, as told through the super villain's perspective. What's great about it is the fact that Dr. Horrible is a well thought out character with real motives and a great character arc. His motivation for being a super villain is pretty much every argument I try and fight, that "human kind has gone insane", that the system is fundamentally flawed and only a complete overhaul will do (Agree with the flaw, disagree with the complete overhaul), and the way he sees Captain Hammer is just... amazing. There are no other words for this video.
What I love about this particular story is the way it's presented. It is comedic. This is a parody. But it doesn't fall in to what a lot of other parodies stumble on. While it makes jokes at it's own expense it's never directly making fun of itself. The closest thing to an over the top stupid thing that the audience is supposed to find stupid along with the main character is Captain Hammer, but I'm fairly certain he's just cast in that light because Dr. Horrible is the protagonist. It's his view of the man.
This story is done in such a way that you know Dr. Horrible is an evil man. You empathize with that evil man. The ending was heart wrenching, and, again, a lot of reality was twisted in favour of proving Dr. Horrible's point of view, his origin, and his rise. He's a comedic character, but his origin (that's what this video is at the end of the day) is just incredible. No stops were pulled in cinematography, story telling, or script. At the end of the day this was a story about a man breaking over a long period of time. If told by the perspective of Captain Hammer this would be Spider-man fighting Doc Ock (Ock views Spidey as a buffoon who wont stop joking and keeps ruining his master schemes, the more I think about this the more similar they seem...).
Pixar has been doing this for years. The Toy Story films are great representations of mortality. The Incredibles is the story of a man's midlife crisis. Ratatouille is the story of societal pressures. And with each of these everything is, again, amazing. Every shot is beautiful in every way imaginable. The sights, the sounds, the words, the ambiance, all perfect. And not a single story is so serious that a superhuman morphing baby can't have his moment.
Here's why I bring this up. To me, no matter what I'm reading/watching/playing character is the most important damn thing about it. I'm still working my way through Mass Effect 3 because I don't like the blank slate character. I love the story, love the supporting cast, but the blank slate irritates me. Kvothe from the Kingkiller Chronicles is quite possibly my second favourite character in literature, right behind Tyrion Lannister. I love comics because all that history people complain about guarantees that these characters are incredibly well fleshed out, because even a flop has to be dealt with and fixed by someone soon. My favourite live action character outside of comic movies is Malcolm Reynolds.
What I like about these characters, these stories, is that they're never all doom and gloom. Never. Life is never all doom and gloom. Even when you're dealing with nothing but the shit of life you find time to laugh. Soldiers occasionally hop on X-box Live. The ghetto child has friends. A part of the human experience is joy, and it's a rather large part of the human experience. It doesn't detract from the drama of life, it gives the drama meaning. I hate, truly hate, these modern dark and gritty takes on things, or shows, or games where no one can twitch a corner of their mouth upwards. If that's a single character, I can deal with that. But that only works on individual characters.
What I dislike is this idea that the only way to have a deep and meaningful theme/story/message is to make the characters down and broody. The Hulk is a monster fueled on previously repressed rage from his abusive father. And he has Rick Jones, the comedic sidekick. Betty Ross. The Avengers, on those times he's in control. Spider-man is a happy go lucky character who swings around cracking jokes while he fights these colourful animal themed super villains. One of which snapped the true love of his life's neck. Who's origin started with his uncle's murder.
One doesn't have to be afraid of a smile to sell a point. One doesn't need to have the Gears of War film filter on in order to make something look realistic. The issues brought up in these "classic" films that star a ghetto child who was raped or a person who's dealing with debt or gang violence or whatever else, they're all serious. But it's hard to empathize with a character whose entire life is doom and gloom when everyone's life seems to be doom and gloom, when everything in life is lackluster at best.
Dr. Horrible's life isn't very good. But Penny and Captain Hammer are both pretty happy characters. Dr. Horrible believes that people are flawed, and those two characters do their damnedest to make the world a better place every day. The fact that there is good in this world helps emphasize Dr. Horrible's flawed logic and downward spiral. It helps give the bad meaning.
And I just pulled all of that from a parody.
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