This day in Trinity Universe history: At the movies and other places

[aberrantangels]

2000
[Aberrant] The first movie to feature nova actors opens to rave reviews. Stephen Spielberg's Nova is the story of a young man who emerges [sic] as a nova, then dedicates his life to righting the wrongs of society. Various famous novas figure prominently in the cast. The movie breaks all previous sales records, staying in the top spot throughout the summer. Nova goes on to sweep the Academy Awards the next spring, winning a record 18 Oscars.

This was never exactly going to be an Aberrant Life entry. I couldn't have written it on Hugh's terms without a lot of evasion and circumlocution, because (as in the Schroer entry I planned to write) I'd have had to refer to things that may never have occurred to him.

How did N-Day change the face of the media? Specifically, what did it do to a number of things we now take for granted?

For one thing, the superhero movies of the last few years may have done even better than they did in our world. Bryan Singer's X-Men movie had (at least in OTL) an opening date just four weeks before that given for Nova, and I think the only change that would be needed to make it fit the Trinity Universe's moviegoing tastes would be changing the caption The not-too-distant future (outside Marie's family home in Meridian) to The universe next door. As a matter of fact, my idea of the Nova Age looks a lot like the X-Movies. I suspect I'm not the only one to have seen the first X-Film and said "That's what superhuman battles, and supers-vs-normals battles, would look like in the real world." X2: X-Men United only sustained the trend in my opinion.

(Not only that, but I think Sir Ian McKellen's Magneto has a lot in common with Divis Mal. I can imagine Mal and his life-partner, Jeremiah Scripture, walking out of a cinema after seeing it, amazed at the similarities. The glossary of "Fictional Characters and Organizations" at the back of both editions of Adventure! describes Donighal as "Dr. Doom to [Max] Mercer's Reed Richards", but I tend to see them as more like Erik Lehnsherr and Charles Xavier respectively, particularly after Primoris becomes an overt nova-separatist.)

But what did the presence of real superhumans in the present do to the subsequent Marvel movies set (in our world) in the present? I don't know for sure, obviously, but I think it's entirely possible that Sam Raimi's Spider-Man, Ang Lee's Hulk and Mark Steven Johnson's Daredevil were set instead in a stylized 1960s where the Nova Age came early.

On the other hand, because its characters aren't obviously novas, The Matrix may not have done as well. Which is too bad, because the Aberrant Players Guide cites it as a resource on what Mega-Dexterity looks like. It's even possible that the sequels remained on the drawing board. (Whether this is a good or a bad thing is left to the individual's judgment.)

Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies may not have been made. Filming in OTL started, after all, more than a year after the day that would have been N-Day; by that time in the TU, the writing may have already been showing up on the wall for any form of popular entertainment not related to novas. Even if the films got made, they lacked one layer of resonance, given that the TU had September 25 instead of September 11. (Not the most important one, mind you, but one I'm sure struck the main chord with a lot of people. At least, judging by the number of pundits and pundoids who view the US as the Kingdoms of the West and Iraq as Mordor.)

Hardest for us to imagine (well, for me to imagine anyway), the focus on novas and things nova-like may mean that Pottermania never happened. It may even mean that the Harry Potter series never happened, though I doubt that — the book Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in England in the summer of 1997, a number of months before N-Day. It may, however, have meant that Scholastic, when they published Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's [sic] Stone in the US about six months after N-Day, didn't recoup Rowling's advance. It may also mean that there wasn't the demand that caused Chamber of Secrets to be rushed into US print months ahead of schedule and Prisoner of Azkaban's US release to be moved up a year. The Harry Potter movies, again, may be stuck in development hell, waiting for novamania to die down. (They'll be waiting a long time; the bloom doesn't start to really come off that rose until well after 2008.)

On the other hand, being able to perk quietly along, authoress of a series best-known in England if at all, may have meant that in 2003, Book 7 came out, rather than Book 5. That's another reason I couldn't write this in Hugh's voice —, probably the biggest; I didn't care to speculate about what's still to come in the adventures of the Boy Who Lived. As a friend of mine said about Warren Ellis, the day I can predict in detail what's going to be in a Harry Potter book will proceed to be the day I put my suddenly-developed precognitive talents to work for me by playing the stock market.

And we know, from Aberrant: Fear and Loathing, that nova dominance of pop culture (like all other aspects of nova mindshare) is only going to expand for at least the next few years. Duke Rollo's first article in that mini-collection centers around his trip to Miami to co-host an MTV3 Halloween special he calls "Teenagers Hump Each Other on the Beach 2007!" His plane crashes on the runway due to a "pointless redneck brawl" between Mefistofaleez (black Muslim nova and record magnate) and the Miami Streak (licensed urban defender). Local TV stations' news crews take a few desultory shots of the plane's 30-foot bellyflop before concentrating their attention back onto the Streak getting a transformer cowling wrapped around his head.

Nearly everyone at the party itself is costumed as a nova. A handful of seasonal monsters (devils, witches, ghosts) and classical cultural figures (cowboys, martial artists, gangsters, talking cartoon dogs who solve mysteries, pre-N-Day fictional "superheroes") roam the periphery, but in general, novas are it, just as they are in every other arena. Rollo counts at least a handful each of Divis Mal, Caestus Pax and Lance "Stone Badass" Stryker.

"Have we no identities of our own any longer?" he asks. "Is everyone a minor derivation of the novas who walk at our sides? Have we become secondary to the few thousand rednecked Übermenschen who treat the planet as if it were a fire hydrant and they were dogs?" He then asks us not to answer that, but it was a rhetorical question anyway.