speedrunning the snowflake challenge, #1-2: please let me yell at you for 2000w about hugo strange.

[serpentinemalign]

hello again!

so i am annoyed and feeling creatively edged, you might say, because i was about to finish an art piece and then my tablet ran out of juice and it runs super hot when i try to charge it and draw. so we are going to tackle the snowflake challenge.

i already did challenge #1 sort of because i made a sticky post during the month with my fandom and dw information! so we are actually going to start at challenge #2, which is:

In your own space, write a promo, manifesto or primer for your fave character, ship or fandom. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

this is actually fantastic because i have been hoping to make a hugo strange shrine for my neocities and we are going to talk about him now okay okay. this is just going to be more or less freewriting/stream of consciousness that eventually gets organised into something that can go on my website permanently, accompanied with cute pictures.

if you know anything about my work at all you may know me as the person who is extremely horny for hugo strange and expresses it in many different forms. like here is my ao3. it's just fetish shit. i hate it. i hate that he was tailored for me.

i think the core of my obsession with this character is he is the perfect vessel to project the vast majority of my fantasies, because most of my fantasies centre on power and control. i like medical kink, i like characters who could feasibly be in a position of authority over me or even in charge of my life or death. thats a lot of wide open vulnerability and gaping wounds that look a lot like...

here is some recent art i did for him (i was finishing a new gross fucking self-insert piece before i came to post this journal. but it will now have to wait):

Update 18-1-23: I finished it!! Mildly nsfw/noncon touching and dollification 🥰

i like people, on the table, open

needles!

i think the main question that accompanies fucking hugo strange is why you wouldn't fuck like countless other comic book villains with similar gimmicks that are, to most people, more fuckable and interesting. i mean even for my kinks you have so many candidates - poison ivy is the biggest one probably, but i mean even mad hatter has his fans. but the thing is that the parts of mainstream/superhero comic books i like the most tend to be also the most banally evil. in worlds of wizards, gods, aliens, i end up gravitating towards regular vanilla (well, not vanilla in proclivities) humans. mobsters, CEOs, more mundane positions of authority. i like comic book characters who represent a material, societal evil in a fairly upfront way, who are responding to and navigating a world frankly too big for them to ever master or comprehend but their response to it is to try to exploit the people around them. it's a rule of thumb rather than an absolute rule, but it's why i love stories about regular humans in comic book universes. they don't have to be the boy next door, the barista, the shy classmate, awed by their superhero friends. it's messier than that. it's more fucked up than that. powerless human villains create such fascinating displays of defensiveness and envy and i am obsessed because i see that tendency towards envy and vindictiveness in myself, faced with an uncertain world i feel incapable of controlling full of people who seem to be doing better at first glance.

(at some point i need to yell about the deavor siblings from the incredibles 2 because they also fit this archetype to a t once you actually fix the plot holes in that movie, even though only one of them is actually a villain. but not today.)

i think hugo strange at his best is a vehicle to explore the oppression of medicine, psychology and incarceration as an institution. discipline and punish, etc. he does have a tremendous amount of power when he's actually in position as a psychiatrist at arkham. we only see the big names who break out. we get to follow their paths of suffering (and, i mean, a 'hugo whumps a bigger name batman rogue' story is a wonderful story. i was SPOILT in gotham. spoilt.). we don't see the hundreds, maybe thousands, of people, alive and dead, whose minds and/or bodies he has abused to advance scientific progress. (good news, medical kinksters! he's one of those characters with a practically impossible amount of medical specialisms so you can just throw any fucked up medical procedure into the mix and he will not kill the patient, but he will make them hurt for it! lobotomies, galvanism, dna splicing...) we see the people who get out from under him and i think thats one thing that canon hugo stories are kind of missing, is an actual sense of permanence. if it's not his story specifically, which it rarely is, he's usually an act one villain. i mean when we're doing a mental fuckery plot, the effects he has on the hero or the villain have to eventually wear off. he is frequently portrayed as ineffectual as a result, and when psychology is all you have on your side, it makes him kind of a damp squib.

(though it does seem like arkham is basically a paper bag, calling his authority and therapeutic capabilities into question, i do wonder if the lax security is intentional, just part of his grand study of human nature. that is another 'fave character' pattern. people who will shoot themselves in the foot to follow their ultimate drive, the pursuit that sings to them most of all. he's just like me for real.)

really, i think it's that the people who are permanently affected by him aren't the ones that get written about, at least until they're dead. the writers don't write about them and you start to get a sense that they too are colluding in these nameless victims' expendability. but it also leaves a tremendous gap for character exploration and fuckery and just... whumping the shit out of your favourite dc bastards and giving them all the bad ends you could hope and dream for. i hope that by making content for hugo i can actually ask whom he might try to overpower, in what forms could he shape and mold that person to his will, and isn't it hot that he can do that so easily because comic book psychology is a joke?

i actually think gotham struck a good balance with this, and gotham was after all my first proper exposure to the character. bd wong is an incredible hugo. his performance captures all the parts of him that spoke to me from the get-go. he made him sexy. he made him a queer icon. he was teasing on insta before his first episode aired about how hugo is a freaky guy, into gas masks and watersports. gotham hugo flirts with all his patients/projects. if you were never convinced by gotham, i would highly recommend you at least check out the latter half of season 2, where hugo is in full force. he's just a lot. he's just a fucking lot.

actually here is my favourite scene of him. he drugs jim gordon on truth serum and interrogates him. there is nothing more pleasurable than watching him work his magic on a vulnerable, open mind. i love that his way towards an interrogation is not the hard way, but it's actually more like therapy, even with the added sodium pentothal. but then you get hit with "imagine that i am god." and ugh. UGH. he is just such a fucking god complex bitch and i want nothing more than to prove him right.

and like! hugo did genuinely help jim deal with some trauma. because thats what talking about trauma does, annoyingly. (i am literally 4 hours from my very own trauma therapy appointment which is the funniest shit in the world that i am here writing this instead of going to bed to prep my mind for that.) i think that hugo probably made more sense when he was created, because sigmund freud died ONLY ONE YEAR before hugo's first debut in detective comics. now comic hugo seems spooky and funny, like 'who the fuck would want this dude as a therapist he looks like he's going to dissect you'. but i think bd wong sold him as more of an eccentric but genuinely involved and interested therapist who is good at his job, he just has, uh, unorthodox methods. i felt thoroughly enticed and convinced by him in places and it was wonderful and it's what i try to capture in my fics. he is delivering both the hard truths you need to hear and preventing you from acting upon them because he has already decided your place for you. he can do both. he's versatile.

my second choice for a brief introduction would be arkham city but he is actually barely in the game. he's mostly just in the promos and then the antagonist is a bait and switch, which is an unfortunately common occurrence for hugo appearances. but look! oh how i wish those hands could drug me. it's very fun to compare the two interrogations, gothamverse and arkhamverse, because really you get the whole gamut of vibes. both are delicious for different reasons.

my choice for a LONG introduction would be, after watching gotham, reading batman (legends of the dark knight): prey. it is a comic hugo who is disgusting, licentious, a little bit cucked. he is pathetic and he is beautiful, he gets to hypnotise people, he is homoerotically obsessed with batman and he fucks a mannequin and i think a LOT about being that mannequin. a lot. i love prey hugo because he is just so id-driven. i think this comic's portrayal of hugo grapples with that lovely contradiction of being an arbiter of the psychological norm but still being consumed by drives to which you cannot affix meaning and therefore cannot control. it is everything i want out of a hugo story and i adore it even though he is absolutely repulsive. i want to kiss him. mwah.

this is only going to make sense to a handful of people and i'm probably still getting this wrong myself. i'm not a psychologist i am a hack of a literary theorist. but i'm going to say it anyway. hugo is usually canonically a freudian because every fucking psychologist in fiction is. (this comes up in tension against the fact he is usually a hypnotherapist. freud was not a fan!) the hugo i tend to write is lacanian because i think he would certainly apply lacanian trauma theory and The Real and all that to moi because i am an ANGSTY BITCH. i think gothamverse hugo is possibly jungian, which is terrible, but i love him all the same. he is still my favourite after all. don't tell the others.

now just a couple of things about the reevesverse because i am still holding out hope somehow that we will get hugo on the big screen:

it absolutely terrifies me that matt reeves is going to sidestep everyone and actually put him in the movie but make him a jordan peterson type, the way that the riddler was an incel type. i can definitely see hugo as a self-help guru because it would fit with his desire to influence other people on a grander scale, and also to bring out grand theories about the world. so all i can pray for is that if they go that route they at least cast someone hot. my personal movie/reevesverse fancast for hugo is giancarlo esposito. i think he would perfectly encapsulate hugo's vibes of calm menace.

okay i think thats all. thank you for bearing with me through that. you did it. i did it. i used my journal for its intended purpose. wow. that felt pretty good. off to go sleep for the two hours i have left before therapy. good night