The Dark Knight returns, and Batfan60 is unmasked at last!

I see it has been even longer since I last posted here than I thought, so here's an update: My life as a secret superhero (may as well reveal what you have surely already figured out: I am Batman, in case you forgot) has had its ups and downs over the years. For a while there, when Recon had its chat rooms operating, it was a golden age for fetishists, because suddenly men from all over the world who were into superheroes, lycra, cops, or gloves (to name only the top 4 of my personal favorites) to find each other and interact--which could take the form of either the expected cyberplay or just basic conversation about coming out as a fetish or anything else they wanted to talk about. When that closed up its doors, I lost touch with at least 80% of the men I had met there, and since then, pickins have been mighty slim. For various reasons, I largely quit engaging in solo batplay at home in my batsuit or any other uniform (and I have plenty, these days).

But just today I got inspired to give Twitter a try--set up an account (@Batfan60), posted a tweet with the hashtags #superherofetish and #copfetish, and immediately started recognizing men from the good old bad old days. If you are one of them, welcome! As noted, I haven't updated this blog in years, much as I loved keeping it, but there are still many years' worth of words and pictures to keep you busy for hours. Go ahead: Get lost in my fantasies, at least the ones you share--and if you do share them, we should talk, either here or on Twitter.

PS. The "Breaking News" reports on the right side of this page automatically refresh, so please visit again to see what's happening in the Batfan60 multiverse.

PPS. I also have a long-running Bat-related slash blog for you to, uh, enjoy. Haven't updated it in a while (a lonnnnnng while), but I still think about it, because I love where I left our hopeless hero and his helpless helpers.

PPPS. And then there's my now-ancient main website (on AngelFire--don't make fun), which also hasn't been updated in years (notice a pattern here?), but is chock-full of dirty stories, kinky links, and other fetishy fun. Again, I dream of completely overhauling it someday, but lately I've either been fighting villains or trapped in their nefarious clutches.

PPPPS. If YOU, dear reader, are a villain in search of a new masked and gloved opponent to toy with (online roleplay only--the Hub is still a major and wonderful part of my life), find me as Batfan60 on Recon. My utility belt is restocked, the batcomputer has had a complete upgrade, and I am ready once more for BATtle.

I am a sucker for this kind of image.

Four months pass, and all I give you is another lazy repost. Thank you, Daily Batman:


OK, OK, you deserve more from me after such a long silence.
So here is yet ANOTHER lazy repost from the same place:



Granted, this makes more sense if you know the game or see other video pieces by the same guerilla performance group, but who needs context? It's still pretty funny, even on its own. And I would quite enjoy seeing a real-life Batman creating an exploding bat-logo outside my local Ben & Jerry's.

My life as a bottom, Part 2: Cast of characters

As I said in Part 1 of this post, the basic structure of my defeat at the hands of a villain is always more or less the same, and the specifics--when they are worth talking about at all--are generally pretty different. So who are the men who have broken the Bat? I've already said plenty about the one I call "the Monk," so let's meet a few of those who have arrived in his wake, over the last 4 or 5 years, in roughly ascending order of intensity ... (Some of these aliases are the ones we really use, and others are modified, just to throw you off. My aim here is not to betray any confidences, only to shed light on a larger phenomenon from my own perspective.)

a. Catch and Release: This is a handy grab-bag of villains who have managed to ensnare Batman over the years, had their way with me, and then disappeared. Here we find several rogue cops, an amoral ex-superhero, and a semi-literate wrestling fanatic whose mistyped/incoherent instructions, utter disregard for the laws of physics, and vast vocabulary of obscure (to me, at least) wrestling holds are notorious amongst my crimefighting colleagues and me. These tend to be situations that are not ideal for one reason or another, which is often clear from the get-go, but eventually I end up giving in to them anyway, usually when a better match is simply not on the horizon for a long time. While these scenarios don't hold much longterm interest for me (or for the other player, needless to say), there is still something grimly erotic about Batman sinking so low that he is bested by someone he clearly feels superior to.

b. Turnabout is fair play: In a couple of cases, I have started out dominating opponents, only to have them turn the tables on me in a fairly decisive way. Also in this category, I suppose, would be two villains who made pretty fast work of me, only to cave in when I managed to escape their clutches, each soon turning into a total submissive himself. This table-turning scenario enables me to enjoy the best of both worlds: the power of being in charge, and the thrill of losing my grip. There's also the fact that men who have subbed (to me, or anyone else, for that matter) often have unique insight into how to play both roles, and they tend to know just how to twist the knife when they seek revenge. On the other hand, having an adversary who enjoys bottoming himself always holds out the hope that Batman will rise again.

c. Officer Daddy: Technically a member of category b, this rogue cop (what can I say? Good Guy Gone Bad is a motif that turns me on) currently enjoys a fascinating relationship with me. We sparred for months, I won, and then--in a move that surprised even me--I found myself turning myself over to him, relinquishing the reins. I'm not sure he particularly wanted this exchange of power, but he's certainly risen to the opportunity. A turning point, after I started fighting back again, came when he pointed out that he hadn't overpowered me (the usual scenario) but that I was the one who had surrendered. As a result, our storyline is the most consensual one of all of these--all the more so because he enjoys scenes in which I'm the "active" one (to use that genteel distinction for who bones whom) and he's the "passive" one. He prefers his "bois" to be manly and strong, and that makes for an appealing, fairly unique, setup to me. The perpetual problem I run into, though, is the moment in a scene with him when I want to just completely take charge, which is no longer my allowed role. There's a powerful degree of tenderness in our interactions; he's the best Daddy I know (although, as is often the case, I am at least 5 or 6 years older than him). This one is about balance, I think--within myself, and in my dealings with him.

d. Mr. S: Relatively new to me, this handsome guy has a terrific feel for how to satisfy my hunger for humiliation. That's a side of myself I'm not entirely comfortable with, but one that (for that very reason?) excites me a great deal. Consequently, I allow myself to try things with him that wouldn't normally appeal to me, precisely because they don't appeal. I absolutely love having my limits pushed and boundaries tested by a roleplayer I trust--although at the moment I think we are negotiating what I am willing to do and what I'm not, when it comes to following orders for offline activity. (Wearing chastity devices to work for a week as a lesson in obedience = mildly hot. Wearing them on a private weekend with the Hub = not so much.) Another interesting aspect of this case is the fact that Mr. S, who I imagine can be as much a bottom as a top depending on whom he's with, tells me he's learning more about how to assume the dom role through his encounters with me. I am more than happy to be his guinea pig at the moment.

e. Machette: That's my own, misspelled pet name for a longtime villain who wears no costume and adopts no rigid persona. We've been playing for at least 3 years now, in a storyline that has taken many zigs and zags. Early on, he was a more traditional comic-book-style nemesis, but he felt disappointed that I never seemed to allow myself (in character) to "enjoy" our scenes (which, I've always maintained, would be totally out of character for a Batman in the clutches of a foe). He wanted to connect with the "real" me, the one who has a regular name, holds a regular job, and does not wear a mask, and it took at least a year before I chose to let down my guard that much around him. (Those kinds of revelations are not generally part of my online life as "Batfan60"--I figure the internet, or at least this part of it, is for fantasy, not reality, and it always seems a little pedestrian to drop the bat-persona; I get to play the "real" me all day long in public, after all.) This led to a fairly long period when the artifice of Batman/villain fell away and we interacted as two ordinary guys saying hello now and then (which normally bores the crap out of me with most online acquaintances, I must say). I even--voluntarily!--lifted the mask once or twice, an unheard-of development and erotic in its own way. With the recent emergence of the Recon superhero chatroom, we're (mostly) back to being adversaries again, though the only kind of scene he seems interested in doing with me at this stage is one in which other people are involved, either as his accomplices, my compatriots, or voyeuristic bystanders (innocent or otherwise). That's okay by me, because we're pretty much on the same wavelength in terms of scenarios for Batman's interactions in public. (For a while, he delighted in demonstrating his mastery over me by forcing me to recite the "I'm a little teapot" song to onlookers, which I admit I found an appealing form of ridicule.)

f. Lycra Lord: Hmmm, how do I neatly summarize a "coexistence" (as we began calling it early on, when we realized the uncanny number of things we had in common) that has become every bit as charged and complicated as the Monk saga? I have only myself to blame for not writing about each twist and turn here as they happened over the last two years, but I think that was the result of my preferring to simply live through the experience for a change instead of retelling and analyzing it here in real time. Very long story very short, what began as a typical (if particularly hot) hero/villain scenario soon took a number of turns for the surreal as we unmasked each other (verbally and then in more literal ways) and learned we work in more or less the same field, have various non-lycra-related interests in common, live a county away from each other, have longterm relationships that started around the same time, had parents who each had the same medical procedure on the same day, and--the capper--even share the same birthday. I used to think there was a novel in this, but the coincidences are so many and so far-fetched no one would buy them. As you can surely imagine, the coexistence far surpasses my usual level of roleplay interaction; safe to think of it as an actual friendship, complete with a work dimension for both of us--and yet there remains, at its core, an element of top/bottom dynamic, all the richer because I have to admit it's not just "Batman" he's affected but the honest-to-god real me underneath and aside from the role. LL is the person who introduced me to the term "edgeplay," and that concept is the best possible way to explain the dynamic between us (other than simply liking each other and liking to flirt with each other, if you want to get pedestrian about it again). Both in specific fantasy scenes and in the sheer outrageousness of our coexistence, I have gone to the outer limit--the edge--of where I can take online roleplay and remain a (very) happily married man. I have always had a very solid rule against actual physical contact with any of my make-believe friends, and yet there I was, a year and a half ago now, in my car, driving 45 minutes to meet him. There was a work-related (or, more accurately, work-enabled) reason to do so, and no lines were crossed--but still, I was wearing what he had "ordered" me to wear, and I had one of the most intense J/O sessions of my life with him when I got home that night. (I also felt obliged to tell the Hub about it a few days later, and his response confirmed that I have got a very special spouse indeed.) The vast majority of our conversations are PG-13 these days, but there is no getting around the erotic charge of spending time with someone who has such unprecedented access to (and, it's safe to say, understanding of/appreciation for) both my inner fantasies and my outer façade.

So that's the lineup. As for what it all means, stay tuned: same bat-time, same bat-channel.

My life as a bottom, Part 1: The basics

Not only have I been much less frequent in posting here lately, I've largely abandoned the kinds of multi-tiered, multi-installment personal observations that I started this blog in order to share, in favor of quick and easy posts about how I can't wait to see Ryan Reynolds as the Green Lantern. (Which I still can't wait to see.) So here's an attempt to make up for lost time.

It's not just laziness that has kept me from maintaining my old level of self-disclosure here. For a while, I didn't want certain roleplaying buddies to know too much about certain other ones, and I never want to make it too easy for new villains to know too much about my weaknesses without having to work for it. But what the hell: much time has passed since the heavy duty phase of the Monk saga, and the 4 or 5 of you who actually read this blog as regularly as I write it might appreciate hearing what has happened in the meantime, possibly to shed let on your own experiences. I've been thinking a lot lately about what turns me on in batplay, and why, and wanting to put those thoughts down in words.

In a nutshell, getting unmasked (on various levels) and broken by the Monk several years ago seemed to open up a side of myself I've long been aware of but had not fully explored. While I can readily attest that nothing that has followed has carried exactly the same level of emotional intensity (after all, you never forget your first time), it's also true that I've tried to recapture that feeling many times since then with varying degrees of success. I think I've lost track of the number of men who have managed to get me (as the Batman character) to admit defeat--not just in a single scene, but on a more longterm level. I'm not talking dozens here, but it's possible I can no longer count them on both hands. I am called their "batbitch," their "batbaby," their "boi" (a spelling I hate, so hearing it applied to me only heightens the shame and pisses me off all the more). A smaller number have gotten me to the point where I have removed the mask that hides my true face, putting me in a more vulnerable position in regard to them. And an even smaller number--two, counting the Monk--have earned enough of my trust, and proven themselves skillful enough, to find out quite a bit about my "real" life, blurring the boundaries between my assumed identity and the one I show the rest of the world in a way that excites me as much as it frightens me.

Those are the basic stages of what I consider the best kind of bat-roleplay. They always happen in that order, when they happen, and although the details of each case are very different, the overall pattern is virtually identical: I come on strong in my early battles with the villain, winning a few and losing a few more. (The really inept or uninteresting bad guys don't make it past a single scene, unless I'm feeling particularly horny--but I've learned the hard way that it's a waste of my time to try to make it to the next level with an adversary who isn't up to the task.) After a few months (or weeks, or days now, depending again on how badly I want it) of this back-and-forth, the truly talented villain stages some sort of decisive showdown that I ultimately end up losing, but not before putting up the fight of my life. A short time after my defeat, if he chooses, my secret identity is revealed (sometimes this is purely verbal, sometimes it's on camera) and my old career as Batman is essentially over. This stage usually entails some degree of bad feeling, since I don't, as a real person, enjoy failure or defeat as a rule, and even though I'm perfectly aware it's all a game, the hurt is on some small level a real one. I tend to spend at least a day feeling genuinely depressed--but that passes, there is typically one last period of rebellion, and after a certain period of readjustment I come to accept and (in the rarest and best cases) even embrace my new role as a bottom to the villainous Top.

The most interesting part of all this for me is the struggle: the deeper I start to fall in the early days, the more I fight it ... and the more I fight it, the deeper I feel myself being pulled in. In essence, I absolutely love resisting as hard as I can until I am finally ready to admit that I can't resist anymore. (Even then, there is usually that one last gasp of resistance after I've theoretically already succumbed, before I accept my fate once and for all--which is the stage when I admit I don't want to resist anymore.) It's pretty much what happens physiologically, too: I work myself up, then hold back, then work myself up some more, and hold back hold back hold back until I just can't anymore, and whoosh--there's the orgasm, and the period of exhaustion that follows, then the whole cycle repeats the next time with a new roleplay partner.

I have my theories about what all this means, and why it's so powerful for me, but I will hold off on those till later. For now, I just wanted to convey what a psychologist friend of mine calls the "elegant pattern" of the fantasy. I should also note that I don't mean to suggest I am only a bottom (I intend to wrap this multi-parter up with an entry called "My life as a Top," btw), or that I go through every single phase of the pattern every single time I meet someone new online. (I should also note this all happens entirely online and entirely separate from my very happy real-life relationship--which itself does not fit the pattern at all.) The way I see it, the pattern is my way of reenacting a myth--the rise and fall of a good man, who will eventually rise (and fall) again in a new place and time--that, for whatever reason, is part of the story of my life.

Strangers in the night

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Night and day

Just finished reading an essay in/on Reality Sandwich called "Attending to Dreams" by a writer who calls himself Gyrus. It's a bit dense (not a diss), and I envision rereading it a time or two, which is one reason I'm writing about it here--as a bookmark for myself. I also bring it up because I sense a connection between it and my theory that online (and offline) roleplay can constitute a kind of dreamworld. Much of the essay concerns the work of psychologist James Hillman and the notion that rather than "use" our dreams (as with lucid dreaming or psychotherapy), we should learn to "attend to" them.

Here's Hillman:

[T]his dayworld style of thinking [...] must be set aside in order to pursue the dream into its home territory. There thinking moves in images, resemblances, correspondences. To go in this direction, we must sever the link with the dayworld, foregoing all ideas that originate there [...]. We must go over the bridge and let it fall behind us, and if it will not fall, then let it burn.

That term "dayworld" reminds me of a similar phrase I like to use (in my case, as an alternative to "real world"). As for "going over the bridge and letting it fall behind us," I think about that moment that sometimes--during a particularly good solo (and very occasionally joint) roleplay session when I find myself taking a leap of faith, past the point of no return, into the abyss. (I realize that's a string of three clichés, but they somehow seem so accurate as to almost be literal.) It's like getting an opportunity commit to the reality of the dream.

No profundities here, just a memo to self that I want to find out more about both writers.

One man's trash ...

Both Warren Ellis and, before him, Dirk Deppey seem to find this admittedly NSFW video so outrageous that they dare their presumably hetero, non-fetish-driven readers to watch it.

Something tells me you are not in that camp. Go ahead. Make your day.

"Our past belongs to us; we can change it if we want."

So says Mia Farrow's character at a critical moment in Be Kind Rewind. (Spoiler alert: It arrives two thirds of the way into the movie, and there's no way to make the point I want to make without revealing at least a little of the final third, so you may want to skip the rest of this post if you enjoy surprises.)



As a big fan of Michel Gondry's earlier films and music videos, I'd been meaning to see this 2008 feature during its brief run in theaters, despite the mediocre-to-bad reviews I'd read, but I never quite got around to it until now. I fully understand the poor reception, even from fellow lovers of Eternal Sunshine and The Science of Sleep (for the record, I even love Human Nature, which nobody seems to like). Throughout its first two acts, I kept thinking Rewind was his worst film, marred by a farfetched/downright silly premise and a gratingly generic performance by Jack Black. (The best thing on the DVD is not the movie, but an accompanying short, "Passaic Mosaic," which makes a beautiful if unspoken case for BWR as the missing link between Gondry's surreal features and his otherwise utterly uncharacteristic documentary/concert film, Dave Chapelle's Block Party.)

If you're familiar with Rewind, here's the high-concept part you know: Black's character becomes magnetized and erases all the stock in the last shop in Passaic, NJ (if not America) that still rents VHS tapes, which leads him and clerk Mos Def to shoot amateur remakes of each one. (This practice is called "sweding" in the movie, but they're basically fanfilms.) A wacky enough idea, I suppose, and the best bits are in the official trailer. But it all seemed beneath the talents of Gondry, one of the most imaginative writer/directors around. It also begs two questions: What about DVDs? and Isn't this whole thing a massive violation of copyright? Question #1 is dismissed in five seconds, but the second one proves a doozy. To make matters worse, our heroes learn that one of the major subthemes of the story has been completely fabricated. Fortunately, there's an entire third act not really hinted at in the trailer.

That's when things get interesting--and Gondryesque. Farrow's character states the premise pretty directly in the line above. What began as two guys covering up an accident evolves into a communitywide art project. I'll spare you further details, but it's interesting that the major studio's lawyers are the bad guys (way to stick it to the Man, New Line!) and that the entire film is a defense of fans' rights to retell and extend their favorite corporate fictions. I'd suggest, in the spirit of sweding, that you could even tweak Farrow's line to read "Our fantasies belong to us; we can refine them however we like." There's an intriguing invitation in the final credits directing us to the official website to see the "sweded" films excerpted in the movie, but that site has disappeared and there's no trace of them on the one that remains to plug the DVD. (I kinda wonder if maybe actual copyright lawyers made them go away.) However, you can see a few examples on this YouTube channel.

And if those aren't enough, check out this handy list of Sweded films made for a contest including a parody of Batman Begins featuring a rather fetching Bruce Wayne/Bat.

"Superhero or Sidekick: Which one are you?"

Needless to say, that teaser on the cover of the Hub's copy of the August Instinct caught my eye, so I had to turn to page 56 right away. I'm not a particularly big fan of the magazine (and there goes my shot at a plug in its pages!)--the models, Photoshopped pictures of which constitute the bulk of the "content," are almost all twinks, the articles are generally glib if not mindless, and would it kill them to hire a proofreader? Even so, I was hooked, and it seemed a good sign that the story was written by a psychologist rather than a staff writer.

The page-and-a-half article itself is basically a Reader's Digest-style paraphrase of Dr. Keith Swain's theory (expressed at greater length in his book Dynamic Duos: The Alpha/Beta Key to Unlocking Success in Gay Relationships) that long-lasting gay couples tend to unite alpha males with beta counterparts. One tends to lead, the other to follow; one takes care of the finances, the other nurtures the emotional bond ... not unlike an idealized 1950s style heterosexual marriage, in fact.

It's hard not to chuckle when Swain begins a sentence, "If we think about this idea on a gut level, it makes sense, like Batman and Robin seem natural" -- one can hear old Doc Wertham spinning in his grave -- but he continues "If we put Superman with Captain America, less so." And it's true, I have never been that interested in the whole Clash of the Titans dynamic, often seen in comic book crossovers, like the one pitting Batman against Captain America or the Punisher. Even the banter and clashing egos among Justice League members (and all other superhero teamups) bores me.

For Swain, this comic book metaphor has its parallels in other "variations in masculinity among gay men--we have even developed our own terminology for this: daddy and son, bear and cub, even, to a degree, top and bottom." To a degree?! That last one seems to me the ultimate example of the dynamic, taken almost to the point of parody.

A natural-born skeptic, I don't want to buy into the theory, or any formulaic approach to human behavior for that matter, but Swain's premise does seem to make sense--not as a surefire recipe for happiness or "key to success," but at least as a potentially useful way to deal with male/male interactions. (Butch/femme archetypes aside, I don't see this operating as blatantly in lesbian relationships, nor does Swain bring up women in the article, but then maybe an actual biological female might want to weigh in here. You reading, Teresa?)

I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that, taking the 5-obvious-question quiz in the sidebar ("A or B ... Or Somewhere In Between?: Test Your Inner Superhero!"), I was a 5-for-5 Sidekick and the Hub is a 5-for-5 Superhero. Well, maybe not 5-for-5: a true Sidekick, I suppose, I took the test for him, and thus I don't know for sure whether his second and fourth fingers are the same size or not. That question was kinda wacky anyway, given the others, which were easier to guess the "correct" answers to. ("Which is more attractive to you, a man with a rugged, masculine face or one with a fresh, youthful face?" Well, duh! But hey, I know my answer and I'm stickin' to it.)

The reason that's embarrassing is that I prefer to think of myself, in bat-land, as a lone Batman, with no sidekick myself and no use for one, and 90% of my roleplay adventures pit me against a villain, mano a mano, and it's a bit of a blow to my ego to be revealed as the underdog. I have no interest in playing Robin to someone else's Bat. That said, I should point out:

1. When the '66 tv series was first airing and subtly creating the pervert that I am today, I totally identified as the Boy Wonder. I was 6 and my older brother, 10 years my senior, was clearly Batman. (More on that relationship--one of the most important in my life--in future posts, the kind I keep meaning to write here but have never quite gotten around to.)

2. There is a Robin in my own personal mythology (or rather was, for years ago he hung up the yellow cape in a favor of his own batsuit). Ironically enough, while I was working on this entry we had a bit of a scene together, during which he totally topped me for the first time. Didn't see that coming, but totally enjoyed it--way more exciting to me than the standard mentor/mentee dynamic, though Doc Freud might point out that this latest twist is entirely within that "standard."

No matter what, real life, even real fantasy-life, is a lot more complicated, and therefore more interesting, than any theory. But bring capes and cowls into your theory and I'm bound to pay attention.

Sympathy for the Devil

Tonight's interview with Stanford Psychology professor (emeritus) Philip Zimbardo on The Colbert Report reminds me that maybe one day I should actually read his latest book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, if I ever want to think seriously about the notion of "heroes" and "villains."

I meant to write about Zimbardo here when I first watched this recent documentary about his infamous Stanford Prison Experiments among other "Human Behavior Experiments" demonstrating how ordinary people can be prompted to do extraordinarily awful things to each other. Never quite got around to that--but it turns out those two programs are merely the tip of the media iceberg. (Lots more TV and print appearances are catalogued here.)

I see, too, that Zimbardo is quite the master packager of himself--in addition to the site for the book, he's got a snazzy little home page and another devoted to the prison experiments, complete with slide show and discussion points. One such note does a nice job of decoding one of my favorite bits of police fetishism: "Consider the police procedures which make arrestees feel confused, fearful, and dehumanized. Note that this policeman is wearing sunglasses just like those we had our 'guards' wear and as did the head of the National Guards at Attica Prison during its bloody 1971 riot!"

Whew!

As you may have deduced, the awful fog of S.A.D. is starting to lift and I'm getting back into my old groove again, including resuming work on this very blog from time to time. (I am under no illusion that I will ever be a daily poster for more than a couple of days at a time--I'm just not built for that.) And part of that work has included adding tags/labels for every single entry up to now, all the way back to April 2003. (Good thing I don't write here that often, or that would have taken months instead of three short evening sessions.)

It has been instructive to look back at earlier entries--haven't reread too many in detail, but I can still detect themes I explored for a while, then dropped, others that I meant to cover from the start but didn't get around to until much later, etc. When I do get around to writing here, it's at least true that I've stuck fairly close to my original intent and purpose for the blog.

I've met (in the virtual sense, that is) a lot of men as a result of writing so obsessively about my own obsessions here--I've met men who share them, that is, and that's pretty cool. By now I"m even blasé about it ("Yep, here's another one..."), which is remarkable given that as recently as a decade ago I thought I was a freak of nature for fantasizing about the stuff I routinely fantasize about.

It also occurred to me the other night that, far from "outgrowing" my adolescent superhero fetish, I've actually developed a rich fantasy life that indulges them on a fairly regular basis, both in the flesh and in the virtual realm. (I realize I haven't written here in a long time about my online roleplaying colleagues, so here's a quick update:) I still look to the Monk with the highest of regard, as my greatest teacher, even my Master in the pedagogical sense, although he and I haven't really extended our storyline in any significant way for perhaps a year now. He refers to this as my having "plateaued," and I think we both look forward to moving past that somehow, some day. In the meantime, I've got at least three fairly new ongoing "cases" involving villains I don't think I've even mentioned here. I've lost touch with some wonderful old friends, and some equally wonderful old enemies, but new ones come into play fairly regularly, and it's always great to reconnect with the estranged ones, too. In short, my bat-life is a lot like that of the comic-book Batman, who battles a mix of longstanding nemeses and Johnny-come-latelies, some of whom stick around and some of whom vanish after a single encounter. One major change is that I'm less interested in sticking to a single "continuity," as the comics geeks would say, than I was during the early stages of the Monk saga. His story overshadowed and interconnected with all the others; now I've got three or more storylines that don't intersect at all, and none of them involve M.

Most of my roleplay activities, and most everything else that I normally find energizing, was on hold for months while I just struggled against the urge to stay in bed for days on end. (Never actually DID stay there that long; just wanted to.) But, as I say, I'm getting my old self back, I think and hope, and it feels great to be alive again, as both Bruce Wayne and the Bat.

The Knight After 10: Circle game

Robin has turned in his resignation. Superman claims he, too, is ready to switch sides. And Batman--yours truly--has willingly composed a loyalty oath to his former archenemy and hunts down his longtime allies with abandon.

As radical as the events of DC's latest Crisis and Marvel's Wars may be (and I still haven't read either one), I don't think they involve quite as fundamental a shakeup as this. In the nearly four months since my "enlightenment," everything has changed. The old divisions of my Yahoo buddy list--Heroes/Villains--no longer apply. Most of the men in those two categories have been redesignated Friends or Enemies (and most of the old "heroes" are now "enemies"), while the Monk, with whom my relationship is infinitely more complicated, gets a category of his own. I myself have been labelled a fool, a traitor, a puppet, and far worse--and I love it all.

My personal Extreme Makeover (which, admittedly, still probably looks a lot like classic Stockholm Syndrome to the naked eye) dovetails beautifully with the premise of a book I found in a used book sale at a local church around the same time I returned to the Monk's welcoming embrace. I picked up Carol Pearson's The Hero Within: Six Archetypes We Live By for its title, of course, and was hooked by the brief explanation of its "six heroic archetypes" on the back cover:

the Innocent, who learns to trust; the Orphan, to mourn; the Wanderer, to find and name personal truth; the Warrior, to assert that truth in order to change the world; the Martyr, to love, to commit, to let go; and, finally, the Magician, who learns to recognize and receive the abundance of the universe.

Having read roughly half the book by now (it's only 176 pages, but it's been a very busy summer), I wouldn't say those are the clearest capsule descriptions of the six stages for my purposes here, but they give you a rough idea. And perhaps, like me, you can immediately sense how accurately they capture the trajectory of the comic book Batman (as well as many other mythic superheroes): from Innocent to trust-seeking Orphan to clarity-oriented Wanderer to power-ful Warrior. (That is, of course, the trajectory of Batman Begins, while Superman Returns focuses on role 5, the Martyr, which accounts for its much-discussed similarity to the Christ story.)

Pearson's book came out in 1986, and its opening chapters are a little heavy on New Age jibberjabber, but if you can look past that stuff, she's really on to something. If I quoted every passage that resonated for me, this entry would be at least ten times longer than it already is. Perhaps I'll devote another post to some key passages, but what I really want to call attention to for the time being is her insistence that life is not a linear progression from Innocent to Magician, and that the Magician phase is not meant to be the final or highest form of existence. Rather, we repeat the journey over and over throughout various dimensions of our lives, learning new lessons each time, and we can exist simultaneously at different points on "the Hero's Wheel." For example, one might be a Wanderer in one's career path while working out Martyr issues in a relationship and feeling like an Orphan on the spiritual front. And so on. You may find all of this a little too tidy, but Pearson does a convincing job of laying out the journey.

Parallels to my Bat-life are crystal clear to me: like many people my age, I first encountered the character as a pre-teen, enchanted by good-guy Adam West and his bad-guy adversaries on the tv show and in the relatively simple DC comics of the early-to-mid-1960s. My innocence was shattered in 1970 when my older brother (a clear father figure and the Batman to my Robin) died and various other awful things happened. leaving me to feel like an orphan for a good two decades or so, until I adopted the mantle of the Bat myself, embracing in adult life the central myth of my childhood. During this Wanderer phase (amply documented in this blog, along with the online conquests of my Warrior period), I came to see how immersing myself in superhero fantasy was not only sexually exciting but a valuable tool of spiritual exploration. Then I met the Monk--the villain that every myth requires, battled him, was defeated and caged by him (thus becoming a Martyr), then escaped his clutches and wandered a bit more, only to conclude that perhaps he was not a villain after all but a teacher, one I could gladly serve. Enter the Magician phase, in which, to use more of Pearson's handy oversimplifications, the hero "takes responsibility for his life" (ie, for the actions I performed as Ratman, when I was still a captive) and "confronts the Shadow." That pretty much sums up where I think I'm at these days, at least on the Bat-front. (My Bruce Wayne life is a whole 'nother story, believe me--but then, I've long been able to use the lessons I've learned in Bat-fantasy as a template for my work as a teacher, an artist, and a member of a longterm couple.)

There is much, much more I'd like to say about all this, and I know I promised plenty more links last time (because in addition to Pearson I've been encountering lots of other material that helps shed light on the saga, too), but this will have to do for now. Life has calmed down ever so slightly for a wee bit, so I will try to write here more often. The Monk saga doesn't move as quickly these days, now that I'm a willing student of magic rather than a captive warrior struggling to free myself, so I'd like to devote more time to the lessons I'm learning from all this rather than simply recapping plot developments.

Stay tuned for more thrilling adventures, dear reader--and best wishes on your own journeys around the Hero's Wheel.

PS. The "soul-stealing" tagline above comes from this bizarre 1973 Brave and the Bold story I came across at Dial B for Blog. Check it out!

The Knight After 8: Dark Knight of the Soul

Another fortune cookie I came across shortly after the other one I've mentioned:

LIFE IS NOT A PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED BUT RATHER A MYSTERY TO BE LIVED.

Laugh if you will, but I take my signs from the universe in any form I find them, even edible. And I take the Monk now not as my adversary, my captor, or even my master, but as my teacher. Clearly, I learn new things from every stage of my encounters with him.

As I've noted, I was really looking forward to my new role as his slave, but he seems to have something else in mind for me now--serving him not at his feet, but as his side, as he recently put it. The specific position surely matters less than the fact that I have gradually come to acknowledge his unique role in my journey as a hero. (I don't actually like to refer to my character that way--certainly not after some of the things I did in my Ratman days--but it's still a useful term in the broader sense.)

I think I've already mentioned my ongoing quest to find writing that links fetish play, and BDSM in general, to a larger spiritual realm, and one of the most useful discoveries I've made thus far is the blog A Slave's Path, the journal of a heterosexual man who seems to be interested in a lot of the same concerns I am, though he manifests them in a different way. (On the opposite end of the spectrum, I've also been enjoying Master Enigma's Thoughts.) From Path I've found several interesting resources, beginning with the author's very personal essay on BDSM and Spirituality. The whole thing is excellent, but I'll just quote a few passages that hit home for me:

"The truth is that many of the things I seek through religion have in fact been coming to me through BDSM. ... BDSM has helped to make me a more compassionate, understanding person. Nowhere has my quest of self-knowledge been more important, or more difficult, than in coming to grips with who and what I really am in a world which distorts that truth almost beyond recognition. The difficulties I have had make it much easier for me to understand and sympathize with other people who are going through similar struggles themselves. ...

"BDSM has made me stronger. It challenges me constantly, physically, intellectually, and emotionally. It challenges me to endure suffering and to face fears. It challenges me to understand and accept my own strengths, weaknesses, and quirks. With every challenge that I meet I become stronger and more confident. ..." And so on--really, there's so much more, and I can relate to almost every single word of it, but rather than cut and paste, I'll just direct you to the original.

At the bottom of that essay, there's a link to this essay by a psychotherapist on "Masochism as a Spiritual Path." Once again, the whole thing is enlightening, but I can't resist sharing a few excerpts.

"Whereas psychology considered masochism as a disease, pre-nineteenth century religion regarded it as a cure," writes author Dorothy C. Hayden. "The ancients were in touch with the spiritual, physical and emotional value of masochism. For them, it was an essential part of reality; a combination of the soul in a tortured state, rapturous delight, exquisite pain and unbearable passion that brought them closer to experiencing union with something greater than their individual egos."

That general thesis is illustrated with a quick survey of several religious traditions. After spelling out the masochistic elements of these, she explores the connection in more detail:

"The goals of contemporary psychotherapy have been aimed at building strong, coping, rational, problem-solving egos. Take responsibility, Take control. Assert yourself. But at what cost? Building a strong ego is only one side of the coin. To experience the fullness of human experience, we need passivity and receptivity as well as assertion. We need a sense of mystical wonder as well as rational problem solving. We need to be in touch with what the psychoanalyst Carl Jung called'"the shadow' -- the weak, limited, degraded, sinful side of ourselves as well as the strong, loving, compassionate, competent side. We need to move out from under the onus of our egocentric way of viewing life; to abdicate control as well as to take it. Masochistic submission, in centering on lack, inadequacy and weakness, puts us in touch with the entirety of our humanity. Full humanity requires surrender to the down side of life as well as the upside. ...

"A scene strips the ego of its defenses, ambitions, self-consciousness and successes. The ego become subservient to the master, the dominant, the soul, or God. Whether we call it submission to the dominant or to the will of God, it nevertheless remains submission -- one of the hallmarks of the masochistic posture. The masochistic components -- the longing to serve, to submit, to abandon oneself sexually, emotionally, and physically makes one a slave either to a man, a woman or to God. Submission to that passion is divine degradation. ...

"In submission, one is taken out of one's personal limitations and transcends social sanctions while at the same time being reduced, weakened and humiliated. With noses pressed against the ever-present reality of human suffering, it is both an agonizing defeat and a magnificent spiritual journey."

Agonizing defeat, magnificent journey: I can't think of a better four-word summary of what I've been experiencing thus far. Here's to further chapters!

The Knight After 2: Brotherhood of the Bat

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Guess who

I was thinking the other day how ironic it is that the heart of the blogging phenomenon is all about self-disclosure, while this one is just as much about concealment. I am willing to reveal all sorts of innermost fantasies and desires here, yet I closely protect some of the most basic aspects of who I am, like my name, where I live, or where I work.All the things you would know about me if you "knew" me in the daylight world, in other words. In my bat-fantasies, the mere act of showing my naked face to someone is a giant, giant thing (sometimes an act of trust, sometimes a marker of defeat) with potentially major consequences.

A short while later, I happened to hear an episode of the NPR show To the Best of Our Knowledge devoted to the subject of "Identity Crisis." (Sadly, the DC series of that name never came up.) I'm pretty sure it was a rerun, and I could swear I wrote about this very episode here over a year ago, but what the hell, I'll bring it up again and save us all a trip to the bat-archives.

Nice interview with the media/performance artist Lynn Hershman Leeson about (among other things) creating a fictional alter ego for herself and then living in and out of that persona for years, eventually hiring actors to play the part instead. (She even sent the character to a shrink at one point.) And an interesting segment on Edward Castronova's research into online roleplaying games, too--though it was less about the obvious issues of pretending to be someone else and more about the implications when real-world economic exchange enter the picture.

I spend a significant amount of my waking hours surrounded by pretend cops, make-believe superheroes, and imaginary criminals--and I don't really see anything wrong with that. For one thing, TV, movies, and video games (or whatever they're called these days) offer the same promise of fantasy, only in a far more passive way. The same could be said for fiction and drama for centuries; I think all of these things, like our dreams, offer us access to an alternate universe (or two, or a thousand alternatives), where we can conceivably learn things of use in consensus reality. I was about to use the term "escapism" in there a sentence or two ago, but then I remembered that I don't really use my batlife to escape so much as to confront things that I'm either too scared to deal with in my everyday life or would never otherwise encounter.

As the student revolutionaries of the sixties and the surrealists before them used to say, "All power to the imagination!"

If we cannot conceive of better, more interesting worlds, then we are doomed to spend our days toiling away in the "real" one, right?

The Knight After 1: Since U Been Gone

Regular readers of this blog (keep those e-mails and IM's comin', gentlemen) may be wondering what has happened to my batself after the "Knightfall" saga ended. The short answer? After a lapse of several months, it resumed and heated up again a while ago. I've been debating whether to continue writing about it here, or not--and, believe it or not, one of the main things that held me back was the absence of a good name for those adventures. I had already decided to retire the "Knightfall" title for entries on that subject, because that referred to a very specific era of my "career" as a masked (and then unmasked) crimefighter. I liked the idea of changing it to reflect a new chapter of my life, much as multi-part storylines in comic books now present themselves as miniseries. I just couldn't come up with the right one.

And then, a few days ago, the new series title presented itself to me. Welcome to the first installment of "The Knight After." And that pretty much sets the tone for the current era: like the hero of my "Beginnings" saga, I am rebuilding my career after a major blow that nearly ended it altogether. That process was quite slow at first, but after a few months back on the job, I can now say things are as busy as ever. The current cast of characters is larger, or at least different. Some familiar faces remain: a Tim Drake-styled Robin, a Dick Grayson-ish former sidekick who has changed his alias name and continues to work primarily on his own, and various superhero colleagues who still drop by from time to time. (Hello, Superman! Greetings, MotorMan!) But there are new arrivals, as well: on the hero front, we have a handsome Batman/Flash whose collection of superhero suits is truly astounding, sundry villains who pop in with threats every now and then, and one Jervis Tetch (batfans will recognize that as the nom de chapeau of the Mad Hatter) who is obsessed--like so many ne'er-do-wells before him--with capturing, unmasking, and enslaving me.

He'll have to take a number, though, because a relatively minor character from the Monk days (it was M who first introduced us, in fact) has come to play a relatively major role in the new era. Let's call him "the Ranger"--a name that reflects his past as a Good Guy, perhaps bearing a family resemblance to the Lone Ranger. If I remember correctly, M had assigned me to help him lead the onetime hero down the path of Eeeeeevil--and in the months since we'd last tangled, it looks like my old nemesis's mission was a roaring success. When we remet, the Ranger assured me he had cleaned up his act, gone straight, returned to the crimefighting biz...

... but this turned out to be a ruse designed to re-earn my trust. Once he had it, he mounted a fullscale attack on me involving an extraordinary arsenal of poison darts, mind-altering/will-demolishing gases, and the like. I fought back with every resource at my disposal, but he proved too smart for me. The turning point came when he captured me and worked me over during an on-camera session. I thought fast and used all his own weapons against him, ostensibly making him as submissive to me as I was to him. Moments later, when he ordered me to unmask, I resisted and made the same demand of him--and to my great surprise, he did as told. It was a brilliant strategy on his part: seeing my adversary remove his most treasured defense caught me off guard, and I was putty in his hands. More drugs came my way, and in no time I found myself unable to resist his next command to expose my face to him.

The rest, as they say, is history: a history of servitude to the Ranger. Whether I like it or not, I am his to be "milked" (easily the sexiest verb in the entire lexicon of superhero roleplay) whenever and however he pleases.

Okay, I realize this is all going to sound suspicious to longtime readers, but you'll have to take my word for it when I say this was not a fate (however temporary) that I freely chose for myself, but one that has been thrust upon me.The situation may similar to that with the Monk, but--and here's what makes this a worthy sequel--the circumstances are different enough to hold my interest. With apologies to Rod Stewart, the first cut really is the deepest, yet this new descent into enforced submission bears a couple of distinctive traits:

1. The Ranger has allowed me to continue to operate as Batman, and to make contact with other heroes and villains even as I agree to serve as his secret lover, and
2. He does not have the kind of taste restrictions that kept the Monk from interacting with my two key sidekicks (past and present).
Both of these cases mean that the situation will likely play itself out quite differently. (If it plays out at all--the Ranger has been mighty quiet of late, and it's possible he's lost interest in the scenario now that he seems to have won for the time being. Sometimes the battle is more exciting than the victory, you know.)

That's the backstory--what has happened between "Knightfall" and "The Knight After." I just wanted to get all that out before I discussed its significance, which I'll do soon. Meanwhile, you have my word that I'll keep you posted on future develoments as they occur.

To the batpole!

Knightfall 23: The end of an era

It's over.

I honestly never thought I'd say this, but the saga of Batman and the Monk, or at the very least this particular manifestation of that saga--this specific graphic novel or multi-issue comic series, if you will--has reached its logical conclusion.

I've spent one day short of 5 weeks avoiding any contact with M--a struggle that felt sometimes like it would tear me apart. There were days when I wanted more than anything to turn myself in and return once again to his clutches, but somehow I always held out. This meant that Batman was effectively forced completely underground, able to go visible in Yahoo Messenger only in the very late hours of the night, for more than a month.

Believe me, this is a very, very odd way to maintain a "friendship." And ours has been a most unusual friendship from the get-go. (This might be an appropriate place to note the distinction between the virtual friendship of two real people, chatting in cyberspace, and the epic struggle between the two mortal enemies we played. Those lines get fuzzy sometimes, which is partly what this entry is about.)

Tonight--feeling empowered and not at all ready to succumb--I signed on to Messenger (that is, Batman walked into the familiar alley where he knew his enemy would find him), and within two minutes he pinged me (that is, the Monk made his presence known). It was quite clear that, while the last several weeks had been every bit as charged for me as when we chatted on a daily basis, my silence had not carried the same intensity for him as it had for me. Far from it: he'd lost "the spark" and had moved on to other victims, other interests, and assumed I had done the same.

We spent the next two and a half hours chatting, not as Batman and Monk, but as the two real people beneath those guises. I think we both, fairly quickly, understood the other person's perspective--and we both acknowledged that our story had come to an end, at least for now. (As I noted in my last entry on the subject, the beauty of an adversary in the comics is that he never really goes away, just gets sent to jail for a few years and then resurfaces, sooner or later--or could, at any minute. Keeps the hero on his toes, which is always a good thing.)

And as Ii wrote in the very first chapter of this "Knightfall" saga, I hit a point a few years ago when my solo "batplay" reached a dead end--there was only so far I could go, playing both villain and hero, tying myself up and breaking free. That was fun and/or enlightening for a good ten years, but I needed to explore territority I couldn't cover by myself. I craved an element of surprise, a real sense of an adversary outside myself. The Hub was more than willing to suit up and play good guy or bad guy for a night, which was/is always fun and sometimes remarkable, but for the most part the whole business does not carry the same intensity for him as it does for me. So I turned to the online community to deepen my bat-adventures. Problem was, I've never been in this simply to jerk off. (When I want to get off, it's way less work to grab a video or even a comic book than to have to type a scenario for some horny semi-literate guy I'd probably never want to talk to if I met him in real life.)

Enter the Monk, who seemed to grasp exactly the kind of longterm 24/7 fantasy I was into and who was more than willing to create it alongside me, enjoying it as fully as I did. As I've documented here in great detail, that ultimately involved my being unmasked, broken, humiliated, and transformed into a lowly slave he dubbed "Ratman"--until I eventually came to my senses (or, to hear him tell it, fulfilled the destiny he had always had in mind for me)--and broke free of his clutches, reclaiming my old costume and mission once more. All of this unfolded on a more-or-less nightly basis over the course of a year and a half, and it was one of the most powerful experiences of my adult life. That is to say, the fantasy taught me as much about myself as any real-world experience.

Alas, "powerful" does not always mean "pleasant," and there were times when being beaten and broken just made me feel ... beaten and broken, or, at the very least, like I was conducting some kind of torrid affari behind my Hub's back, even though that was clearly not the case. I wrestled with my attraction/repulsion to the Monk, and weighed my major options:

*I could return to him and surrender forever, which did not feel like a wise thing to do on any level (given how crappy my earlier subservience had me feel), or
*I could leave the online world altogether, never to return, which also did not seem like something I really wanted to do. (For one thing, I've made some really nice friendships in that world, and I didn't want to leave all of them behind.)

Between those two extremes lay a middle ground: I could go cold turkey and wait out my "addiction" to his charms until he no longer held such force over me. Thus the 5 week hiatus. Alas, the real person behind the Monk persona was not privvy to any of this, and simply lost interest in waiting for me to resurface. In short, we'd both reached another dead end: I couldn't defeat him or reclaim the secrets he'd stolen from me (my unmasked face and identity), but neither did I want to continue living with the less than pleasant feelings this whole saga conjured up for the real-life me, and the Batman in me was similarly left in limbo, unable to fight other villains and unwilling to submit to the one who had defeated him. In the course of our discussion, we mutually agreed that our adventure, or at least this version of it, was over. I called it a victory,he claimed it as a draw. And we both expressed our high regard for each other, as adversaries and friends alike. As he put it, "Monk found Batman to be the ultimate prize...and ___ found ___ to be the ultimate roleplay chat bud." (The ____s being real names, of course.) I couldn't say it better myself, and the phrasing makes the stalemate clear: it's hard to keep the "ultimate" going continuously for an unbounded amount of time. Again, a dead end--which is in no way a complaint or shortcoming.

He asked if Batman would seek out other villains, and I reminded him that that's what Batman always does. I just can't say whether those will come from the online world (not too likely, since I really do find the vast majority of opponents from that realm are not into the same thing I am), from my own imagination once more, or from some as yet undiscovered realm. I only know that I treasure the saga that unfolded and the friendship of the man who helped unfold it, and I'm happy to move on. After our talk tonight, I feel pretty certain that the friendship is still intact, even if the circumstances that first brought us together have now changed. Until this evening, I had not figured out a way that could happen--so, for me, the "battle" is over, and both of us have won.

It's thrilling to me on some deep level to fantasize that the Monk could resurface at any time--online, on the phone, even in person. Like any great archenemy, he's always out there, plotting his next move. And it's also exciting to realize that, like any hero, my own work goes on--on other fronts, in other battles, against other adversaries.

It's funny: in the daylight world, I have all kinds of problems with endings. (I could devote an entire blog to that last sentence, but then you'd want to charge me for your services, and I already pay a shrink.) This one, while hard won, feels exactly right. I have a feeling I'll have more to say about the Monk in the future, and our paths may even cross again, but at the moment it feels great to close the book on this particular case. I can even call it a happy ending--something Batman seldom allows himself to do.

Odds 'n' ends

1. This interview at COMICON.com with Paul Pope about his BATMAN YEAR 100 project makes the book look mighty interesting. Batman looks pretty hot, and I am intrigued by Pope's comments, some of which sound just as fetishistic as stuff I would probably say:

To me, the classic Batman is the most visually interesting and the most believable - the little gloves, the gray jersey, the mask with the severe 'V' shaped design cut across his cheekbones - the strange, scary slits for eyes - that kind of thing from his original appearances... He has real boots on. There's no generic foot shape on my guy. a Ken doll foot, you know. Generic superhero foot. ... I don't know how others draw Batman's boots, but mine look like actual boots.

My other pet peeve has always been his utility belt. It seems like it's often portrayed as kind of this Deus Ex Machina thing with everything in it. I want to wipe that campy Batman shit off the board. There's no Bat Shark Repellant in here. He just has a few essentials in this utility belt. Since it's the future there are some tricky weapons like this sonic dog whistle thing, a machine that confuses people, rope, a torch cutter, lights, and a few other simple devices.



2. I've been TRYING to remember which comics blog did a tribute to Dorian's semi-regular "Subtext? What Subtext?" feature (which I dearly love) sometime last month, but I can't find it. In the process of trying to track it down from Dorian's own site, I came across this brilliant and hilarious entry about "How To Get Your Boyfriend To Read Comics." It's great, although I don't think I'm ever gonna try it with the Hub. I've already got him dressing up like comics characters and doing various kinky things with me in costume, which is way more fun, so why put him through actually reading real live, ahem, "monthly comics periodicals"?

3. To make up for not finding the item I was looking for in #2, here are two of the pics in that entry I was gonna link to. I won't even bother to come up with smirking text to accompany them, since that's been done by minds far wittier than mine. (I just can't tell you where.) Me, I just want to enjoy the pix. Click on 'em to make them--and maybe yourself--get bigger:



and



4. I still have more to say on that SuperDickery treasuretrove, but it will have to wait. Ah, how I tease...

Knightfall 22: Enemy mine

I can't tell you how cool it is to have an archenemy.

One of the main things that has always appealed to me about the comic book and tv-series versions of Batman, as opposed to the films, is the fact that the villains stick around for years--decades, even. Oh, they may be sent off to jail every now and then, but their time in the stir only hardens their resolve to break out and return to their work destroying their nemesis with a renewed sense of purpose. The characters have a history together, a shared language. They're like forces of nature. And the intensity of their battles grows stronger with each encounter. Because Batman's moral code does not permit him to kill his enemies--and because I suspect they don't really want to do him in, either--they're stuck with each other for life.

Likewise, I've always been intrigued by the element of time in SM (or whatever you want to call it) roleplay: the longer the better, if you ask me. While it's not really in the cards for me, I'm fascinated by the prospect of a longterm master/slave relationship, or something similar. It's definitely the same in my solo batplay: when I get a weekend, let alone a week (or, on one glorious occasion ten years ago, an entire month) to myself, time to suit up and go wherever my imagination takes me for hours and hours at a stretch, I'm ecstatic--literally. There may be forays into the outside world now and then, but it's immensely comforting to know that I can return that night to an extended fantasy of my own design, and even more satisfying to know that I've been spinning an ongoing, albeit deeply private, saga for more than ten years.

So you can imagine how thrilling it is to realize that I now have a longterm cast of characters on my IM buddy list: the Monk, of course, but many others as well--fellow superheroes, current and past sidekicks, lesser villains, and a troubling number of "shifters" who tend to slide from good guy to bad guy without warning. Most of these characters know each other and have their own adventures that don't necessarily include me; sometimes two or more of them work in cahoots either with or against me. I'm not really interested in the brief encounter with a passing stranger, though there is certainly a place for those in the comic book world, too: the petty thieves and crossover cameos that add texture to the main storyline (or storylines, since my online saga is sometimes a bit different than the private one I conduct by myself, in the way that, say, Legends of the Dark Knight varies from Detective). The same is true of my Beginnings serial--unlike your average slash fiction, it goes on and on, with characters dropping out and returning from time to time, and having interconnected lives, just as real people do. I enjoy being able to incorporate the passage of real time as often as possible (and to imply that various things have taken place without my having to spell them out.) That's also been the appeal of soap operas as a narrative form for me--except in that case, the content is totally uninteresting. I just like the potential for a tale to span years, in the writing/telling/performing as well as in the reading/viewing.

As for the Monk, he's still out there, and resisting the sometimes burning desire to return to his clutches has become the struggle of my bat-career, the year-and-a-half-long battle that defines my very (fictional) character. He has long insisted that he is no mere outside force by this point but a part of me, and I'll be damned if I don't believe him sometimes. (And, er, perhaps I'll be damned if I do believe him, too.)

So stay tuned--the worst (or best) may be yet to come.

Skin Tight and ready for action

Just got an e-mail alerting me to this entry from the Terminally Single blog about the SkinTight (formerly HardComixxx) parties in NYC, which I'm passing along because there are some nice photos, and the blogger has some good stuff to say about the events, too.

I've never been to one of these parties, but man oh man do they ever look tempting.