Think maybe you're becoming (Apokolips… Now!)

Near Apocalpyse of '09 Logo
It’s February 7 and 14, 1998. The top songs this week are Janet Jackson’s “Together Again” and Usher’s “Nice & Slow”–in that order on the 7th, and swapping places by the 14th. The top movie remains Titanic throughout.
In the news since last November, the Kyoto Protocol was adopted on December 11, two days after sales of the Toyota Prius, the first mass-production hybrid car, began. On January 12, nearly 20 European nations agree to ban human cloning for some reason, and on the 17th the right-wing tabloid site Drudge Report breaks the Lewinsky scandal, about which more in a later post. And on the day part one of this story aired, the Nagano Winter Olympics began.
In Superman: The Animated Series, we have something that feels very much like a season finale, even though it actually isn’t–that’s the next two episodes, which aired in May after another brief hiatus. Nonetheless, “Apokolips… Now!” feels more like a season-ending event than “Little Girl Lost”: the former wraps up plot threads from prior episodes in a way that leads naturally into a new story, while the latter is entirely about introducing a new plot thread–and not the one created by “Apokolips… Now!.”
That thread–the war between Darkseid and Superman–will end up continuing throughout the entire DCAU, and ultimately end it, ending universes being what Apokolipses are for. Its creation involves the closing out of past threads: the end of the “Intergang uses alien weapons” thread that appeared in a couple of prior STAS episodes, the (heavily implied) death of Intergang leader Bruno Mannheim, and the (outright shown) death of Dan Turpin.
This is a shocking event, and not just for the diegetic audience that witnesses Darkseid’s casual murder of Turpin as he flees in the face of a freed Superman, defiant humanity, and Orion-led New Genesis army. The DCAU has strongly implied deaths before, as with Mannheim in this episode, and it has depicted off-screen deaths and deaths of non-human creatures, but this is an outright killing of a human being on screen, in a children’s cartoon.
In that, Turpin’s death near the end of the second part reflects a similarly shocking (in the “I can’t believe they got away with showing that” sense) moment early in the first part: after she is injured in an Intergang attack, we see Maggie Sawyer in a hospital bed holding hands with her girlfriend; the episode admittedly never explicitly states their relationship, so a viewer could infer they are sisters given they both have Timm’s default Adult Young Woman face and body. However, allowing for stylistic differences between the two media, it is nonetheless clearly Toby Reynes, established as Sawyer’s partner in the comics a decade before this episode aired.
That the two moments–one an expression of love and support, the other heart-breaking and violent–are mirrors of one another is confirmed by Turpin’s funeral scene that ends the episode: specifically, a Jewish funeral. Confirming a cartoon character to not be Christian is only slightly less surprising than confirming them to be queer–remember, this is a medium that habitually depicts Christmas (under one name or another) as something celebrated on alien planets and in fantasy visions of the ancient past. Openly Jewish cartoon characters were not as unheard of as openly queer ones even in 1998, but it was still quite rare, and even rarer to see a Jewish ceremonial rite like a wedding or, in this case, funeral.
Here we see is the advantage of the outward turn STAS represents: the expansion of the space of the possible. To face the weird is to encounter the non-normative, which creates the possibility of accepting it. There is room here!
We dismissed Harley Quinn’s apocalypse as a failure, as creating the wrong new world, but here we see that it succeeded. She made a world where lesbians can just exist, just be, just love each other, without having to be monsters or supervillains. She even made room for her religion as well–remember, prior to this, she was the only major supporting character depicted as being Jewish, too. The revolution has farther to go, and injustices remain, but it succeeded in changing the injustice it started in response to. Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy won.
But victory comes at a price, as Darkseid made sure to remind us. In gaining representation of lesbianism and Judaism as normative things “normal” characters can be, as opposed to only found in the monstrous, the bizarre, and the outcast, we have expanded the circles of normativity. Maggie Sawyer and Dan Turpin are, after all, both cops, the front-line troops of normativity in its war against difference. We see that here: masked and armored cops, faceless stormtroopers gunning down equally faceless parademons.
Yes, the parademons are agents of evil, trying to destroy the world and replace it with a hellish landscape of fire, but then of course they are: apocalypse is revolution viewed from above. Darkseid is just another conqueror, but that’s the point: like Mala and Jax-Ur, he is emblematic of the fact that the general American experience of fascism was, until recently, that it was something that started elsewhere. But the cops are indistinguishable just as the parademons are indistinguishable: they represent the erasure of human difference, human diversity, human life just as much as Darkseid’s forces do.
And herein lies the problem of the simplistic binary this episode presents of Apokolips and New Genesis: Apokolips is a world of slavery and bondage, yes, but New Genesis merely opposes their evil. That is a necessary condition for goodness to be sure, but it does not mean that New Genesis is good–the most visually obvious distinction between the two, after all, is that Apokoliptians are ugly and New Gods beautiful according to conventional (read: white) standards. In other words, New Genesis’ opposition to Apokolips is not good against evil, but normalcy–the maintenance of the status quo and the extant structures of power–against transgression and the grotesque.
New Genesis, in other words, is a planet of superheroes, and Apokolips a planet of supervillains: not good against evil, but cops against criminals. And the more things that get accepted as normal without challenging normativity itself, the greater the pool from which to draw cops, and the fewer to oppose them.
But, we might ask, isn’t that a good thing? Don’t we want people of all backgrounds, all orientations and genders, all religions and ethnicities, to be considered normal?
And the answer is, no we don’t. No one is normal; what we want is to smash the very idea of normalcy. So long as deviance from an arbitrary norm is the standard by which we judge others, rather than harm, there will always be some people on the outside who aren’t hurting anyone, some people denied acceptance and treated as threats solely for failing to fit arbitrary standards, as opposed to actually demonstrably posing a threat of harm–and there will always be harmful, toxic people on the inside who remain accepted because they fit those same arbitrary standards. In other words, so long as we value normalcy, privilege and marginalization will continue to exist. We can stop subjecting Asians to unfair immigration standards and internment camps, but we’ll just be doing the same to Latin@s a generation later; if it isn’t Jews being marginalized, it’s Muslims; if it isn’t lesbians, it’s trans people; if it isn’t black people, it’s–well, we’ve never stopped marginalizing black people. Which is not to say that we’ve stopped marginalizing any of the other groups, either–but they’ve all taken strides toward normalization, and the result has been that some of them have taken to defending that normalization by attacking the “next group out,” so to speak. Hence, for example, conservative Jews and transphobic lesbians aligning themselves with the Christian right out of shared Islamophobia and transphobia, respectively.*
But there is time yet for more apocalypses, and we can still hope for a future where everyone accepts everyone else, where everything save nonconsensual harm is permitted. A world where everything is tolerated except intolerance; that is the new genesis we want, and it can only happen after apocalypse.
In the meantime, improvement is improvement. For now, as we close out this chapter of our search, we can simply enjoy Harley Quinn’s brave new world–destroying it, revolutionizing it, making it better, those are all things we can worry about tomorrow. For now, let us simply celebrate that this world has room for as much variety as it does–not just a hero who flies, but a black superhero who built himself skin of steel. Not just Space Moses, but an actual Jewish man. Not just the Man of Tomorrow who loves and protects mankind, but women loving each other.
We celebrate them all–but even as we do, we know we must go further.
.*Not to single out anyone in particular. I chose Jews and lesbians for this example simply because I’m a Jewish lesbian.
End of The Near-Apocalypse of ’09 Volume 3: That Has Such People In It. Volume 4 is titled Childhood’s End.

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