This weekend’s shift at the store (Gatekeeper Hobbies, Huntoon and Gage, Topeka! Ask us about our blah-blah-blah-fishcakes!) consisted mostly of identifying and pricing limited variant covers of various Zenescope titles. For all the derision heaped on them, I actually enjoyed the Wonderland stories. Moreover, the last batch of Grimm Fairy Tales that I sold online came back at something like 1000% profit, proving that the demand for the comics is still strong, especially for the rarer cover versions. Still, I’m always troubled by the combination of sexuality/nudity and swift and blinding violence that so often work in concert in the Grimm Fairy Tales universe, and some truly horrifying juxtapositions of the two. While I don’t mind displays of eye-candy, and I am fine with people who want a little of the old ultra-violence (although I don’t know that I will ever recover from reading Crossed #1 without preparing myself with a drink or two), my personal preference is to absorb each on its own terms.
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) likes peanut butter AND chocolate, but doesn’t want them with brussels sprouts, asking: Are you, as a consumer/reader/viewer, uncomfortable when violence and sexuality are mixed?
5 Comments
Yes. The combination of overt sex with overt and graphic violence is disturbing to me. Game of Thrones (especially the HBO show), relishes graphic depictions of both, all too frequently at the same time. I think this is now part of the formula for many of the pay cable dramas. I remember watching the first season of True Blood and seeing this approach as well.
I think graphic sex alone, and graphic violence alone don’t have the shock value they once did so the titillation and revulsion get combined to elicit that shock to the senses in a new way.
As I find myself saying quite a bit, it often depends on various factors. If it feels organic to the story, then I have very little problem with it (although it does disturb me on a basic level). But just having it there for the sake of having it there (which seems to be semi-common) makes me pretty uncomfortable.
I’ve been wondering if it may be a subconcious hyperbolic play on some primal instinct to hunt and mate. But, I honestly think it may just be for the shock factor. And, some people are just into things that others think are weird. They say if it exists, there is a porn version of it that also exists. To each, their own, I suppose.
I tend to choose to avoid graphic depictions of either, so combining them doesn’t help. It is troublesome to trigger the arousal part of the brain when violence is part of the equation, that doesn’t seem healthy, but I admit it costs me nothing to say that either. I don’t have to stop reading a favorite book or something to take that stance. I will simply choose to continue to avoid it myself.
In most cases, I don’t really see the hyper-violence and hyper-sexuality as representing either violence or sex. Its usually there to represent some extreme. MIxing the two is almost repetitive.
Its like screamo or deathcore, a subgenre of a subgenre. Meant to express a particular message to a particular audience that can understand or appreciate it.