Why are we starting to see serial killers as the good guys?
Darkly Dreaming Dexter was released in 2004, and instantly became a hit. Batman Began again the following year, making Warner Brothers another mountain of money. Dexter hit cable TV in 2006, and that’s when I knew for sure that something had started swimming around in our collective unconscious. Why else would we suddenly be obsessing about dark, brooding figures that hunt and terrify the evil people who surround us?
We’ve always had myths about deadly, terrifying things that lived out in the dark, away from the light of hearth and home. But when Jack became the Ripper, the monster became urban. It became one of us – a human gone all bad and crazy, and Jack ascended to the Invisible Clergy as the Dark Stalker.
Of course, the Masterless Man got to the same place by keeping people safe from monsters and bad men. It was beyond appropriate that the two Archetypes would be eternal rivals – it was inevitable. It was right. Avatars of the Masterless Man go up against Dark Stalkers all the time, and vice-versa. They can’t really help it – it’s part of the persona they adopt. It might not be that way much longer, though.
Remember Dexter and Christian Bale in a black cape? Something must have changed. I think that in 2004 we got a new Godwalker of the Dark Stalker, and I think he’s moving into new territory. This guy (or girl – there have been a couple of successful female serial killers, so it’s not an exclusive Archetype) is reinventing the Stalker as The Killer of the Evil That Lurks Among Us And We Don’t Want To Face, or something like that. He’s probably got a very snappy name for what he thinks he is. He’s a dark, deadly figure, who nevertheless protects us from worse things.
Neither the current Dark Stalker nor the Masterless Man can be happy about this attempt to unify the two Archetypes. If I’m right (and I’m sure I am), then we’re about to see a three-way ascension war kick off, and my Lord, is it going to be a bloody one.
Watch for gruesome murders of killers and rapists. Watch for martial artists and ghetto gunfighters getting kacked in the worst ways you can imagine. Look for the Eye-Biting Man, who used to be Godwalker of the Stalker, and left a trail of bodies around the US-Canada border. And someone needs to make Jeff Lindsay cough up what he knows.
If anyone can say whether I’m right, it’ll be him.
The first time I spotted this was 2000 in the movie Pitch Black
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0134847/)
were Vin Diesel plays a very, very dangerous serial killer (Riddick) who in the end is the only one with enough drive, smarts, ruthlessness and “superpowers” to combat the alien menace effectively. And save at least a few lives.
Any earlier sightings of this type of character?
Don’t hold your breath for the war. I think it already happened, and it was even weirder than you think.
See, I have this friend–sort of clued, but only due to talking to me–who disappeared for almost a year and went to one of those weird “rooms” that reverse your personality. You’ve heard the stories. This particular guy was the most pathetic stoner Warcrack addict basement dweller you’ve ever met, and now he’s got a job, an apartment and a girlfriend a month and a half after coming back.
But the point is, the entire time I’ve known him, this guy had been a huge comic collector, especially into Batman. But when he came back and saw his old collection and started flipping through his old issues, he got really confused.
See, all his memories of life before he left are the same, except one thing: in his memory, “the Bat Man” (along with the Joker and Gotham and a bunch of related things) is real. This wasn’t exactly the comic book Batman–much less was known about him, from my friend’s description he sounds like some kind of crazy powerful Duke who set himself up as a vigilante. My friend was a Bat Man aficionado, who’d kept up with rumors about the Bat Man’s identity and powers in online communities.
Anyway, my friend said that when he returned, he was hyped to see what happened with the “Gotham war”. Apparently, according to me the Bat Man and the Joker had been throwing around so much mojo that they’d been tearing apart reality itself within Gotham. Some of the weirder stuff they were pulling was leaking into the mainstream media and the government was talking about sending the National Guard in.
You know what’s even weirder? How many notorious serial killers suddenly lost their edge and got arrested in the month after Heath Ledger died. (My friend doesn’t remember ever hearing of Heath Ledger, by the way, or any of the movies he was in.) And the “jolt” that a friend of mine who channels Fool says he got at the exact hour when Ledger was supposed to have OD’ed, before he even heard it had happened. And how creepy he’s been acting since then.
If all this adds up the way I think it does, I’m going to call the archetype we’re dealing with “the Dark Knight”. The Joker might be afoot, too. Watch any Fools you know.
The war may stranger than you think.
A serial killer who edits his own wikipedia entry…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Zodiac_Killer
http://www.opordanalytical.com/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=87
Great story, by the way.
“This guy (or girl – there have been a couple of successful female serial killers, so it’s not an exclusive Archetype)”
The thing you forget is: the really good serial killers are the ones who DON’T get caught. And all these men getting caught, but so few women … is it really all archetypes of the dark mother out there killing children or something far nastier?
This sounds more like The Punisher, than The Dark Knight. Batman has a code of never killing.
Alternatively, this may have started as a single new archetype, but then war shortly broke out, and it split into two. Puniser and Dark Knight.
I’ve said it before kiddies.. Michael Meyers ascended as the Dark Stalker back in the 70’s. No one has displaced him yet. Rumour has it that the Green River Killer was on the path before he vanished.
Just because Serial killing has gotten trendy/popular, that doesn’t mean nothing, the proof is in the pudding. Blood pudding if you will. Ascension for the Dark Stranger is about the killing, not talking about the killing or making a TV show about the killing, but breaking the eggs to do so.
don’t worry about it man your forgetting that the ideals of avatars themselves aren’t necessarily polarized by good and evil. think about it, if the masterless man and the darkstalker are always at war, and bat man is the darkstalker what does that make the Joker. heh heh see what I’m getting at? its simple role reversal.
though Dexter’s propensity to bump off other darkstalkers is a strange occurrence. I have to admit that is an anomaly