Atomic Robo, the Book of Mormon, and Animal Man

I’ve blogged a fair amount over the past year or so about how ethics intersect with fiction. I’ve blogged about whether one should try to live by one’s values in TTRPGs and about my discomfort with the Star Wars franchise (which I otherwise love!) when I put it in tension with my aspirations toward non-violence. I think these are valuable questions (otherwise I wouldn’t publicly write on them), but whenever I write that sort of thing, I also worry that I’m overthinking things, that there’s a way to enjoy fiction without having to think through all of its ethical and moral ramifications.

A few days ago, I started an archive binge of the Atomic Robo webcomic (and flipped through the PDF of its RPG, which I picked up in a bundle), and as I began reading through its pulp-y, weird science story, it felt like exactly that kind of guilty pleasure. It’s knowingly dumb, action-oriented, and just kind of fun. It’s Indiana Jones turned up to 11, but when I was reading it, I didn’t feel the ickiness about the pulp violence that I did when I watched Dial of Destiny back in December. To be honest, all of this was a kind of relief!

As I’ve gotten further in the webcomic, though, and it’s gotten more serious with its plotlines, some of that feeling has gone away, and I’ve gone back to some hand-wringing about whether I should be enjoying action movie-style violence, no matter how much fun it is. I’m going to keep reading it, and I’m not saying that other people shouldn’t, but I find myself still wrestling with how much I’m obligated to square the media I enjoy with the values that I strive for. Some other media that I’ve recently consumed has also touched on this tension for me, too:

For example, I listened to the most recent episode of the Proclaim Peace podcast, which looks at peace from a Mormon perspective. My friend Elray Henriksen was interviewed on the podcast, which was wonderful, but I also enjoyed a comment by host Jennifer Thomas on how people read the action-adventure-y “war chapters” of the Book of Mormon kind of like they watch Marvel movies: As a straightforward good guy vs. bad guy conflict without really thinking about the costs of the conflict. There’s a running gag in superhero fiction about not paying attention to the huge infrastructure damage that the fight scenes cause (to its credit, Atomic Robo at least makes nods in this direction), and having been a Mormon who reads those “war chapters” without thinking about the horror of war, I think the comparison is apt.

Atomic Robo is clearly a work of fiction, and I consider the Book of Mormon to be fictional as well, so thinking about both of those gets me thinking about reading Grant Morrison’s run on Animal Man last week. The second volume in particular explicitly asks questions about what it means to make fictional characters suffer for the purposes of readers’ (or viewers’ or listeners’) entertainment. At the time, I’m not sure that point really landed with me (though, to be fair, I was reading those pages while on an early morning bus and wishing desperately that I were already at my hotel), but putting it in conversation with these other stories helps it stand out a little bit more.

I don’t have answers here, just more questions! I’m going to keep reading Atomic Robo, I’m still happy about my new Biggs Darklighter print (even though that character really only exists to die), and I still suspect that I’m overthinking all of this. Yet, I’d rather do that than not think about it at all.

• macro
• Myself
• Atomic Robo
• Animal Man
• Book of Mormon
• TTRPGs
• Star Wars
• webcomics
• Mormonism
• Marvel
• Elray Henriksen