LNH: Deja Dude lnhq.info entry

Martin Phipps martinphipps2 at yahoo.com
Sat Mar 31 22:25:52 PDT 2012


http://www.lnhq.info/wiki/Deja_Dude

"Personality

"In the early stage of his career, he was an exaggeration of the Real
World Martin Phipps's annoying traits, incredibly arrogant and
gleefully tormenting his fictional playthings. His split with Psykeye
created a Deja Dude who was halfway tolerable. When Deja Dude returned
from the dead, his good and evil halves were reintegrated, though he
is now more mature(-ish) after marrying and having a son."

Okay, is this some kind of joke?  Could we please take out the
"incredibly arrogant" part seeing as how this is referring to me
personally and not the characters Deja Dude or Psykeye?  Similarly,
could we please take out the part where it says Deja Dude now spends
his time "downloading internet porn" seeing as how that is not
something I ever portrayed Deja Dude as doing.

Incidentally, "his evil side split off from him" isn't the in story
explanation for Psykeye's origin.  Psykeye was the last survivor of an
evil Mirror Looniverse where he killed everybody else.  Well, yeah.
Keep in mind that I wrote that back when I was in my twenties.  If I
were writing Psykeye today I would have made him more complex and
better motivated.  He'd have reasons for wanting to see people suffer
beyond just simply being evil.  He would probably want to start with
the person who described him as "incredibly arrogant".

 I should probably take the time to address the whole "evil twin" /
"mirror universe" trope seeing as how Adrian (I think) mentioned how
he would like to create a Mirror Looniverse for LNH20.  I think we
should try to avoid the pitfall of having evil characters evil for the
sake of being evil and instead focus on the Mirror Looniverse as an
alternative time line in which people turned out differently.  That
way we are still required to consider the motivations of characters.
I know that when Harlan Ellison originally wrote the Star Trek episode
"City on the Edge of Forever" there was a subplot about how the crew
of the Enterprise was now evil because the Nazis had won and Earth had
become a military dictatorship; some fans have wondered if that edited
out subplot was the inspiration for Mirror Mirror and if it would be
possible to reintegrate the two stories, ie claim that the time line
that McCoy created when he saved Edith Keeler still existed as a
parallel universe and didn't simply disappear when things were put
back the way they were.  In my opinion it would make a Mirror
Looniverse more fun if the "evil" versions of the characters were the
basically the same characters slightly tweaked by their environments.

In contrast, the "evil twin" who is split from the original is a
different kind of "evil twin".  We saw that too in the "Enemy Within"
Star Trek episode in which Kirk was split into two by a transporter.
The "evil" Kirk was more aggressive, easily angered and able to make
summary decisions whereas the "good" Kirk was more passive, calm and
thoughtful.  It was an interesting study of Kirk's character: as
captain, he had to make life and death decisions and he couldn't
afford to hesitate and acting without giving thought to other people's
feelings may be a good definition of "evil".  On the other hand, it is
disturbing that "evil" Kirk tried to rape Yeoman Rand.

Anyway, like I said, Psykeye was a mirror counterpart to Deja Dude and
not a split per se, although in retrospect Deja Dude did seem to like
to torment Generic Man, didn't he?  Deja Dude and Psykeye can probably
both be forgiven because they knew that their "victims" were
fictional.  A Psykeye that didn't know he was fictional and who was
"evil" for reasons other than simply being evil would have been harder
to write and would have required more introspection.  A good place to
start would be the "Matthew Almighty" series I wrote for LNHY.  What
if instead of trying to help people Matthew decided to kill God so
that God could never take back his powers and then Matthew would go on
to be the Lord of the entire LNHY Looniverse?  That's very plausible:
you suddenly have all that power so you use it for your own
gratification.  It could easily have simply been a matter of Mathew
having been in a foul mood when God showed up and not a question of
Mathew having been a bad person: you are in a bad mood and you slam
your fist down on the table.  Imagine if you had the power to really
do some damage!

Finally, there's the issue of Julie Lee's consent.  The same sort of
issue was raised when I wrote Superfreaks: society was creating clones
of celebrities and selling them off, essentially, as slaves to
"perverts" who might fantasize about banging Scarlett Johansson but
would never get a chance with the original.  Obviously the idea of
creating a person solely for the purpose of sexual gratification is
monstrous.  And yet check out Matthew Almighty #2: suddenly Matthew
has a wife.  Where did she come from?  The narration even mentioned
that Matthew could have created dozens of wives so that he could have
had a harem but that his neighbors would have become suspicious and
realized that something strange was going on.  So I see the same
themes being revisited by me again and again in different story
universes.  I wonder what that says about me. :/

Then there's the broader issue of character consent in general.  When
characters discover they are fictional, that the very words that come
out of their mouths are being written by someone else, obviously they
are not capable of consenting to anything.  I deliberately addressed
this issue with Julie Lee and Deja Dude felt bad about it... until he
got over it and simply created another plaything for himself.  Heh.
But don't forget that Julie Lee ended up happily married to Philip
Martin, the Colourblind Kid.  Before you judge me, keep in mind that
Friends also had a Chinese character named Julie (played by Lauren
Tom) who feel in love with the analytical scientist character Ross
with whom she eventually broke up only to hook up with Russ, a guy who
looked just like him.  This all happened AFTER my Julie had broken up
with Deja Dude and hooked up with the Colorblind Kid.  That has got to
be the weirdest coincidences ever.  And, yes, Julie was treated like @#
$% by Ross and he was an ass and an idiot for dumping her for Rachel
(yuk).

Martin


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