What Do You Meme?

Since I'm back in my Batman Beyond era (apparently), I shared snippets of a crossover that I once wrote with... well, a lot of things, but mostly L. Frank Baum's Oz books.

Artie and I had such a great time watching Young Justice together – largely because of its mind control storylines – that, a couple of months ago, I decided to show them an episode of another DC superhero series that I remembered loving for similar reasons: Batman Beyond’s “Spellbound.” They seemed to like it, so we agreed to start the series from the beginning, and are now finished with Season 1. I always enjoy hearing Artie’s media criticism, even – sometimes especially – when they’re criticizing media that has nostalgic value for me. We’ve already had some chewy conversations about how this show addresses gender, among other topics (I can appreciate a high school plotline in which The Real Supervillain Is Toxic Masculinity, which could apply to both “Golem” and “The Winning Edge”), and groaned about how much the cars on the show resemble Cybertrucks.

But, in a twist which will surprise absolutely nobody, “Spellbound” remains my favorite episode of the first season. Not all storylines in Batman Beyond take the Buffy the Vampire Slayer route of exploring adolescent drama through the fantastical, but some of them do, and I think this episode is among the ones that does it best… although, it must be said, I might be biased. In both this Tumblr post and this Tuesday Top Five list, I talked about the formative impact of a story in which teenagers were mentally manipulated by an adult whom they should have been able to trust. I can blame this episode, partially if not entirely, for the grip that this narrative premise had on my imagination from my own teenage years – when I deeply resented authority figures’ attempts to get inside my head – to the present day.

Ira Billings, a.k.a. Spellbinder, isn’t dangerous only because he has access to science fiction technology that traps people in illusions of giant bugs. He’s dangerous because he works in a high school and has positioned himself as someone whom young people can trust with their secrets, and someone whose authority and insights other adults trust in turn. The opening sequence, in which he lures a teenage girl to the edge of a cliff, is scary. The subsequent scene, in which he tells the police that Chelsea fabricated that encounter for attention, is scarier.

Spellbinder does return in future episodes, but he’s no longer the school counselor, and I told Artie recently that I wish previous episodes had given us a glimpse of his civilian identity – perhaps even as a somewhat sympathetic figure – before we saw him in costume. We talked about how he might have approached various teens who made Questionable Decisions in earlier episodes, and then I asked, “Am I going to have to write a Five Things fic [featuring different students’ sessions with Dr. Billings]?” and Artie said “HELL YEAH” and I admitted that I did not have “return to Batman Beyond fanfic” on my 2025 Bingo card. The last time I wrote about any of these characters, I didn’t even know that “fanfic” was a term that existed. At least, if I pursue this story idea, there’s a chance that more than two people will read it… but I might be tempted to pursue it even without that possibility.

Recently, and very coincidentally, I read two books about Video Games That Brainwash The Youth. One of them was End of Watch, the final book in Stephen King’s Bill Hodges trilogy. I started the series because one of the supporting characters is the star of a later book that I enjoyed a lot, even though I don’t usually gravitate toward crime fiction. End of Watch – in ways that I suspect might alienate fans of that genre – leans much harder into speculative fiction than its predecessors. I’m not sure whether it’s a good book, but I can tell you that I devoured all nearly-500 pages of it within a few days, because it gave me exactly what I needed from a story about possession and mind control. (Possibly, it appealed to my inner 13-year-old, who would totally have written a story about a handheld video game that brainwashes people.)

The other book was Collin Armstrong’s Polybius, which is based on an urban legend about an arcade game that appeared in the 1980s and had a sinister effect on its players before vanishing just as quickly. In Armstrong’s novel, the game mesmerizes anybody who plays or even looks at it too long, reducing them to their most violent and/or paranoid impulses. Andi, an engineering nerd who is largely immune due to her colorblindness, and her classmate and love interest, Ro, have to figure out how to destroy the game and reverse its effects before it destroys their small town entirely.

I picked up this book because the urban legend at its center fascinates me, and although some of the marketing referenced The Walking Dead as well as Stranger Things – so I can’t pretend that I didn’t know what I was getting into – I hoped that the story would be as much about the mythology around the game as what it does to players in this fictional world. Since I’m not a fan of zombie media or other stories that consist mostly of human beings going feral and trying to attack each other, I am probably not the target audience for the story that we actually did get. I was much more interested in the revelation about why the game was created. ( Which I suppose is a spoiler. )

If you’re interested in the Polybius myth as a myth, this video essay delves into the rumors about the game and the videographer’s attempts to discover whether there was any truth to them.