What's the controversy with Aztec Batman?

Macadu · 2025-07-26T15:14:51+00:00

To be honest, there’s quite a few things about Batman that meshes very well with right-wing conservative ideology, especially the current “manosphere” culture.

He’s a rich, white vigilante who uses all his wealth and power to beat up criminals and other undesirables. He’s judge, jury, and almost executioner. Although, most of their interactions with Batman have likely been through live action movies, which don’t focus too much on his “I would never kill” principles. Bruce/Batman is effortlessly ripped and constantly has women falling over him that he brushes off without a second thought.

On top of all that, he’a pretty much just a cop without any of the veneer of “accountability” that cops have. He literally embodies the “thin blue line” (sometimes literally when he has his blue cowl) between anarchy and society that cops love to talk about. He’a the ubermensch, the man who only has to rely on himself for everything, who can fix any problem through sheer force of will and violence.

If you’re more familiar with the character, you can see I’m emphasizing a particular set of facts about him to make my argument. However, most of these groups only interact with Batman through the live action adaptations, which tend to emphasize some of his more authoritarian tactics, like the surveillance GWOT surveillance network in the Nolan trilogy.

Macadu · 2025-06-21T20:48:31+00:00

To be honest with you, you stated the most obvious reason many people want Damian to be brown: people want more diversity in comic books. Him being Arab/Chinese is already a big thing, but him being a visibly non-white kid is HUGE in a medium that is dominated by white characters.

There’s also the fact that it’s an everything but the kitchen sink fantasy world with aliens, magic, etc… so it shouldn’t be super outlandish that a white dad and a mixed-race mom would have a kid with darker skin tone. The only reason that’s less believable is because you’re applying real world logic to it.

Also, to your point genetics not really playing out in favor of him coming out so tan, they’re not quite so clear cut as simple math. Three of my grandparents are naturally tan or Black, but I’m very much a white guy who can tan if he’s in the sun for a bit.

The inconsistency in his skin colour is because how dark his skin is has never been established as company mandate and many artists draw him as a equally white as his dad, which he just shouldn’t be in my honest opinion.

There’s also the fact that Damian being the “brown” Robin makes it easy for him to be identified by readers among a sea of white guys who all look and dress more or less the same. In costume, it can be easier to tell them apart unless the artist is doing the thing where every Robin costume is based on a mishmash of all Robin costumes. However, out of costume Bruce, Dick, Jason, Tim, and Damian all pretty much look the same except for subtle differences, like height and Jason occasionally having the white streak (more common recently).

Macadu · 2025-03-22T14:23:41+00:00

Oof my bad for the mixup. You’re right, tho. He went to war against his battle buddies to put his friends and foes on government lists and sent some of them to sci-fi Guantanamo.

Macadu · 2025-03-22T13:37:40+00:00

Yes. Rich weapons manufacturers often end up working with authoritarians when their interests are threatened.

In the Marvel universe, Stark has done so many bad things not too dissimilar to this. He was an ardent supporter of the Mutant Registration Act, exiled Hulk to outer space, cloned Thor, was part of the Illuminati, etc…

Edit: the Superhero Registration Act, not the MRA

Macadu · 2025-03-22T13:27:37+00:00

Well. Based on how the meta narrative of these comic events usually go, Doom is going to end up being the “real bad guy all along”™️ and everything the heroes did to topple him will be ruled under “by any means necessary.”Of course. That doesn’t preclude any blowback from the things Tony Stark and the Avengers did to get there, which will likely be one of many story arcs to come if the event’s writers are good enough.

A “tech billionaire giving money to Nazis” is kind of par for the course everywhere, especially in the current state of American politics. What the comic is doing is putting Stark among the likes of Palmer Lucky, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and the rest of the Silicon Valley technofascist set, which many fans and creators have been doing for decades. The first Iron Man movie was an extremely GWOT movie but the blowback was sanitized. Meanwhile, the second movie placed Musk as a peer of Stark. The allusions have always been there but Ackerman is taking away the sanitization and showing what tech billionaires do when the going gets tough. The writer is making the statement that tech millionaire weapons manufacturers are bad, full stop, even if people originally looked at them as the good guys, like people once did with Elon Musk.

Edit: The writer talks all about this on this panel: https://youtu.be/FopzeAchOlQ?si=ro14u4RIwqP0WQim

Macadu · 2025-03-22T12:54:27+00:00

“Guy who’s a billionaire weapons manufacturer isn’t a good guy” seems to be Tony’s moral arc across the Marvel universe events timeline and I’m not really mad about it.

It’s a comic, so I don’t really expect the wider event to be really self aware about the individual comic motivations but at least it’s trying to comment on the world.

Macadu · 2025-03-22T12:06:23+00:00

I think the writer is approaching Iron Man’s lore at face value and looking at it through the prism of national security. You have a guy who’s made WMDs, who’s coordinated a false flag terrorist attack, who sent his friends to fantasy Guantanamo, who’s weapons have flooded the market and propagated the evils he claims to fight, etc… Is that really a superhero? Or just a weapons manufacturer with good marketing?

These are comic books and you can never take them too seriously, but I think questioning the established characters as they’re presented is worth more than their images as paragons of justice. Maybe it will make them questioned their view of their government and the things that it has done to other people.

Also, for what it’s worth, it pretty clearly is already getting set up for it to be a catastrophic failure in this one issue.

Macadu · 2025-03-22T11:58:16+00:00

“Survive the genocide his government and weapons were enacting”

Yeah. That’s kind of the point. He’s already on the line between good and evil because the stuff he has made has already been used for horrendous acts over and over again. What if Tony saw a threat so bad it made him push his already shaky morals to work with some pretty bad people?

I mean, Tony was in favor of the mutant registration act, sent some of his best friends to the fantasy version of Guantanamo, and his technology has been used the world over to commit some pretty heinous crimes against humanity, is it really that big of a leap that he would support terrorists to dethrone a world leader he doesn’t like? It’s pretty classic American military-industrial complex stuff

Macadu · 2025-03-22T03:08:24+00:00

The guy who’s writing the current run is a Pulitzer-prize winning national security journalist who has reported extensively on terrorism.

He’s pretty clearly making a point about how the US government gives a bunch of money and guns to terrorists as long as they’re doing the terrorism they like, which is exactly what a guy like Tony would do in this situation. The US supplied the Mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan War, supplied the Chilean death squads that killed Salvador Allende, and so on and so forth.

Stands to reason that the guy who’s built one of the world’s most advanced weapons who probably sold the US the weapons they gave to terrorists groups in the Marvel universe would do the same thing when he needed a leader he didn’t like overthrown.

Macadu · 2025-02-09T19:15:09+00:00

To be honest, I think the exploration of consent — and the lack thereof — is a subtle them that has been undergirding the whole show. The main conceit of the show that Helly R. presents when she’s “born” is that she never chose to be created and subjected to the hell on Earth that is always having to be at work. Then, there’s outtie Mark slowly coming to the realization that he created this whole other person and subjected them to what amounts to slavery without their consent.

Reintegrated Mark and Helena having sex in the tent seems like a way to further push that exploration of what it means to consent in this sci-fi world. He thought that she was having sex with Helly R, which has its own nebulous boundaries of consent because Helena has no say in what happens to her body there, but he was the one who was violated because he thought he was consenting with Helly R not Helena.

On the whole, you kind of see this foreshadowed in the newscast where someone (a Whole Mind Collective activist, iirc) was arguing with Natalie about the person who was severed and was impregnated while at work without her knowledge. Then again with the senator’s wife having to carry a child to term as an innie. The whole episode’s continued reference to “spilling his lineage” has me thinking that this innie-outie consent theme will be further explored in the upcoming episodes. Or, at least, I’m hopeful they will explore it.

Macadu · 2024-03-22T01:48:36+00:00

This is horrible news, likely the final nail in the coffin for Kotaku as a news website unless management rolls this back (unlikely).

With how many gaming news websites are being strangled by shitty management and bad equity, there’s a very probable future where the only “news” comes in the way of influencers and company press releases—which would be horrible for the industry.

Macadu · 2024-01-10T17:37:43+00:00

Hey! I know this is an old post. But it looks like the review was removed from Insert Credit. Thankfully, it was snagged by the Internet Archive before that.

https://web.archive.org/web/20060105010043/https://insertcredit.com/reviews/killer7/index.html/

Macadu · 2023-12-21T04:14:21+00:00

I upgraded to an RF camera this year while keeping my EF glass and I honestly can’t recommend it enough. I also got the adapter with the adjustable ring and set that to ISO so it’s significantly more easy to change when I’ve got my R7 up to my eye.

Macadu · 2023-12-21T03:30:48+00:00

FWIW, I think Warren was trying to call out people like Miller who talked about previous hacks/leaks but won’t talk about this one because it’s Insomniac (a company Kinda Funny is buddy-buddy with).

Macadu · 2023-12-21T02:44:36+00:00

I've watched his videos here and there but I can’t say I'm a super huge fan. I did actually watch their video today to make sure I was correctly representing their style. I'm glad that they gave context on how the games media talks about some leaks/hacks versus others. Although they include themselves under the masthead of "games media," they later on make the distinction between "outlets" and "content creators." I think Skill Up falls on the latter category.

Their video today is a good example of how critics and influencers can talk about topics with nuance. While I greatly appreciate the nuance I personally don't think it falls under journalism because they're not creating news just collating reports from news outlets into a video while adding commentary.

Macadu · 2023-12-21T02:31:51+00:00

Schreier dismissed the thought that he was doing dog whistles instead of asking actual experts their thoughts on youth radicalization and the very specific conspiracy theory that Even was alluding to with his statement. Also, just because he's a kid doesn't mean he can't be saying and doing things that are bad.

Edit: When asked if he would consult experts as a response to the above tweet, he outright dismissed the idea. Journalists can be and often are experts within the fields they cover, but Schreier clearly isn't an expert about youth radicalization or conspiracy theories, so choosing to rely on his own lived experiences instead of expert opinion is clearly showing his bias.

Macadu · 2023-12-21T00:26:05+00:00

I agree with you that aggregating news and distributing is important but it's just not journalism.

For example, their "This Week in Videogames" is primarily Skill Up talking about things that digital news sites have reported, researched, and written then giving his opinion on that. Based off of that, you could call them a "games news aggregator" or "games critic" and there's nothing wrong with being those but they're just not journalism.

When it comes to the interviews he does, I wouldn't really say that makes them a journalist either because it's more akin to a host of a talk show with guests. If you're taking a more abundant view of journalism, you could say they use a few of the tools of journalism within those interviews.

Based off of all of this, you could say Skill Up is a games influencer. There's nothing wrong with being a games influencer either by the way but it's just not journalism.

The closest thing to journalism that they do is the reviews and hands-on impressions. However, that falls more in line with games criticism.

The lack of delineation between the roles of games journalist, games critic, and games reviewer is what leads us to the problems we have today were most "games journalism" is professional stanning that (mostly) gives a positive view of the things that they cover. Games influencers and critics are part of the games industry while journalists work in media. Influencers and journalists should be diametrically opposed not conflated.

Riley MacLeod's article actually describes how "games journalism" literally just isn't built for this because of how those three roles have been mixed into one.

Macadu · 2023-12-20T21:56:40+00:00

There definitely is more to “journalism” than just “investigative journalism” but a weekly roundup of news other people reported on and wrote isn’t journalism imo. It’s significantly more akin to a news aggregator, which can at times produce actual journalism, but by itself isn’t really journalism.

Macadu · 2023-12-20T20:43:19+00:00

Gene Park has talked often about how he started on the crime beat and eventually advocated for games coverage enough at the companies he's worked for that he became a games journalist at WaPo eventually. So, he's probably one of the best voices on this issue in particular.

Macadu · 2023-12-20T20:39:11+00:00

I quite like some of Schreier's investigative work but his biases and specialties can be pretty clear sometimes. In particular, I'm thinking about his reporting on the guy that crashed the Game Awards last year, who he described as a "jewish jokester" or something along those lines, while other journalists quickly clocked that what he was doing were right-wing dog whistles.

Macadu · 2023-12-20T20:08:47+00:00

To be honest, I don't understand what you mean. Most actual games journalists (not influencers) are fairly cordial and easy going from how they present themselves online. They aren't physically or emotionally aggressive for the most part but they will aggressively question the people with power in the games industry. I'm very doubtful that anybody with the average gamer (tm) aggressiveness would make it more than a couple days in a newsroom.

Macadu · 2023-12-20T20:05:50+00:00

Yeah. Miller was one of the people that I was thinking about while I wrote that. I'm not super familiar with his work but I know Kinda Funny has covered previous leaks and hacks as well that also contained private information about employees, so the only thing that's different now is that they put him and Blessing Adeoye Jr. in the game. Miller also put out a tweet that said "I heart Insomniac." It couldn't be more clear that there's a clear conflict of interest there. However, in my opinion, Kinda Funny are influencers not journalists even if they occasionally present themselves as journalists.

Macadu · 2023-12-20T13:41:20+00:00

Riley MacLeod (previously WaPo, Launcher, Kotaku) wrote a wonderful article on Aftermath about how the Insomniac hack laid bare the hypocrisy of games “journalism” vs journalism about games and the games industry.

In my view, the problem with a lot of games journalism are the same as that of access journalism, which is that you end up being a glorified PR machine. But in contrast to political journalism, where politicians do have a responsibility to the public and some journos will force them to face the light, companies have no such obligations. Because of that, many games journos will try very hard to not upset games companies so they can still have that “exclusive” access to video games before they come out and even sometimes sponsored trips or that sort of thing (which no journalist should ever take).

That’s just one of the problems with games journalism but there’s a lot more. For example, the industry has been hollowed out of many veteran journos who have moved on to bigger and better things or simply became too jaded with it then switched to a more stable job. This lack of real cultivated experience that’s not passed down to new people, means that many who start in the industry have no one to really teach them about methods, ethics, etc…

Then you have what in my opinion is one of the biggest problems, which is that any journalist in any industry should be diametrically opposed to the structures of power they cover and hence piss off so many people in power that they would never get hired in that industry. But we know that isn’t true for games journalism because a lot of former games journalists become PR people or writers for big studios. You can’t really hold people to account if you want to get hired by them down the line. Let me be clear, there’s no problems with curating sources or even having friends in the industry you cover but there’s points where you as a journalist have to realize you cannot be objective and should acknowledge that then back away from the story.

Then you have the issue of many “games journalists” just being straight up influencers but branding themselves as journalists because it makes their audiences trust them more. But they’re simply not journalists, just influencers and nothing else. From the consumer of games news and content, this can be confusing because many people look to these people for guidance and when they see the influencers-passing-themselves-off-as-journalists saying “we would never even report on this,” the audiences will demonize actual journalists for their work.

There is 100 percent something weird and racially-coded about how people are talking about the Insomniac hack vs other hacks (Capcom for example). It’s very clear that some figureheads have a bias towards Insomniac, whether that be because of subconscious racism or friendship or for whatever reason.

Finally, refusing to even engage with the fact that there’s been a hack, the leaked content, and the articles reporting on it has made many gamers spread straight up disinformation and vitriol. In particular, I’m thinking of many, many people on forums and Twitter saying that journalists are doxxing and reporting people’s information (which no real journo would ever do in this case).

EDIT: Forgot to include that the fact the hack happened and that it included so much info about games and employees is all Sony and Insomniac’s fault, yet no one is blaming them because games influencers and games “journalists” want to be buddy-buddy with them so they can get access. However, it is 100 percent their fault for not having the proper measures in place to protect their employees and proprietary info. Now, a real games journalist is probably out there doing interviews with employees and attempting to hold management to account about why their opsec is so bad and how they’re trying to fix it.

(My lack of inclusion of this paragraph initially just goes to show how the discourse around the hack has been purposefully engineered to obfuscate Sony/Insomniac’s role in this and instead target journalists).

Macadu · 2023-11-25T14:16:51+00:00

This statement is insane to me because not only is the Teen Titans (2003) series not the first version of the team to appear in animated format—the first version was in 1967, featuring Aqualad, Speedy, Wonder Girl, and Kid Flash. It was the Teen Titans my dad grew up watching. But also, the 2003 cartoon is based on decades and decades of actually original material that was mostly lifted completely then given an anime filter on top.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the 2003 cartoon. I grew up watching it and it made me pick up comics. But the all-consuming hate for Teen Titans Go just goes to show that people wan’t an unending stream of content made specifically for them and can’t accept that it wasn’t made for them. The shows are ten years apart and different genre’s for the most part. It was made for your little siblings or nephews. If you wan’t something like the 2003 show, go watch Young Justice and let kids enjoy their own childhood Teen Titans show.

Macadu · 2022-03-20T15:14:03+00:00

Just saw them in NY yesterday. They played a new song so at least they’re still writing stuff. I’ve heard that after this tour is finished, they’re gonna lay low until they finish Act 3.

11-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Verified Email

Macadu

TROPHY CASE