Nocterra #2

▼Jump To Full Review Summary

As I mentioned in my review of Nocterra 1, when it first was published in 2021 there was already this talk of “woke” and how there was an “angry female” as the lead in this story and far too many black women etc. I didn’t pay too much attention back then because it was just in the few cracks and crevices, not everywhere and dominating the conversation like it is in 2025. Back then it was just a handful of brainwashed racist misogynists whereas now every white male who reads comics is this way.

Every comic book purist is a racist, and every white male is an incel comic fan, and any comic artist who draws women accurately is accused of making them purposely ugly or undesirable for all the aforementioned incels who prefer their women drawn the Japanese way with gravity defying breasts and impossible proportions.

In 2025 comics are fantasy, fetish, nostalgia and delusional escapism for the majority of white males who read them and there is no room for complex women, women of the global majority, or socio-political messaging that doesn’t fit their narrative of a Perfect White World For Super Masculine Men Who Always Get The Girl.

In 2025 nearly every “geek hobby” fandom has been taken over by angry white males who want to claim the space for their own because no other spaces will accept them and they can’t relate to the way the world has been changing. As they lose power, as they become the minority, they fight back by claiming small, niche spaces as their own and bullying, harassing, or engaging in structured hate campaigns against anything considered “other”.

2025 is not a great time to be a fan of comics, video games, anime, or anything else that is usually a white male magnet unless you have your own community or you just keep to yourself.

That said … reading Nocterra in 2025 I am understanding even more why there was so much hate for Val. I understand a bit better why there was this collective male murmur of “unlikeable bitch” building up as the series went on … honestly even just after issue 1.

I understand the dislike of Val because I like her. When I like someone that a lot of other people hate it’s easy to know the reason for the discordance.

In issue 1 we are just beginning to understand who Val is, what her relationships with people around her are and how she fits into the wider world itself. We get a lot of her inner voice because she is our narrator. We are along for this ride WITH her, BECAUSE OF HER, and we see the world through her eyes and even indirectly through the reflection on her distinct helmet. We have no choice but to give control to, in a way, Val herself. Regardless how we experience each frame on each page with our own eyes, it will be Val’s voice and Val’s perspective that we’re going to get as well. Val’s actions and Val’s decisions shape the direction the story takes whether we like it or not.

In Media Therapy, which studies transference between viewers and fictional characters in media, something that often comes up is the sense of hatred and disgust for someone who does something on screen that we wouldn’t do. It’s not just about seeing someone do things they disagree with, because anti-heroes are very popular, as are anarchists and people who do things that we can’t do but probably wish we could subconsciously. The deepest amount of conflicting or negative feelings surface often when people see someone do something that they wouldn’t do themselves, something that makes them feel that the character is stupid or below them and allows them to reinforce their own ego.

“Oh that character is so stupid. I would never do that. Who would do that? Their stupidity is ruining the show for me …”

On examination of the transference it, more often than not, comes up that the character is weak or not as intelligent, not as intuitive, not as agreeable … as the viewer would prefer them to be. Further examination of this tendency for emotional projection comes from places of misogyny, self-hatred, colonialist brainwashing, societal grooming, and other manipulative tactics that people have absorbed and allowed to become the foundation from which they determine other people’s value. What’s even wilder to realize is that these feelings towards fictional characters are the same for real people in their lives.

I have said that I can tell almost everything I need to know about a person by watching them watch media and seeing how they respond to it and I’ve yet to be proven wrong.

Val is disliked or disagreeable to the majority of white male dominated fandom (WMDF) because she’s a very strong, very independent, very headstrong, and very capable woman of color. She makes her own decisions, she doesn’t listen to men, she’s not controlled by fear, she’s not intimidated by anything more powerful than she is, she is confident, she is the one charge, and what she says goes. She handles her business, she demands answers, she pushes through, she makes decisions based on instinct and her own moral code.

The WMDF translation of all that is “what a bitch”, “so annoying”, “not likeable”, “not feminine enough”, “too emotional”, “not a good leader”, “too angry” and on and on. If Val was a guy named Rick and had the same characteristics, no one would have anything to say except “so cool”, “hero”, “badass”, “don’t mess with him”, “no nonsense” and on and on.

So, as I said at the beginning … I like Val.

She reminds me of me and I am disliked for a lot of the same reasons. Val is someone who I can understand the “why” of how she makes decisions. Val is someone who uses their pain and trauma to guide them in their decision making process for better or for worse. Everything she has experienced in her life has shaped the infrastructure of who she has become as a person before The Big PM and after. When men use their trauma to shape their decisions to become vigilantes they are “admired anti-heroes”, when women do it they are “damaged and unlikeable”.

I love getting Val’s narrative thoughts. I think those red caption boxes that tell me exactly how her pain, fear, and anger are figuring into how and why she makes decisions are the best part of the media experience for me.

Do I agree with everything Val does? Of course not. Would I make the decisions she makes even though we share a lot of similar traits? Absolutely not. But Val is a COMIC BOOK CHARACTER created by some WHITE GUY and what she does or doesn’t do isn’t why I’m reading the comic. I choose to experience different kinds of media – comics, anime, books, movies, tv – because I’m interested in the story or because I like an actor’s work or I like the writer etc, not because I wanna see someone behave exactly how I would or how I think they should. I want to experience someone else’s story, someone else’s perspective, someone else’s world. That’s the wonderful thing about art … it allows us to do exactly that.

You don’t play DnD because you wanna be yourself in a fantasy world, you create a character who isn’t you, who may not have your skills, your background, your life. You roleplay in someone else’s campaign; someone else’s story.

Art isn’t about YOU, but it can absolutely affect you. It can traumatize, influence, change, and depress you. It can bring things out of you that you didn’t know where there including empathy or even misogyny.

Whenever I see a fanboy responding negatively to something a woman does but that he would celebrate and even desire to emulate if he saw a man do it, I know that not only are they emotionally dysregulated, but that they are also operating with an affected mentally.

How you choose, view, experience, and interpret art says everything about you and it SHOULD because art is ENTIRELY SUBJECTIVE and the artistic experience – as a consumer or as a creator – is what we put into it, NOT what we take out of it.

Remember ⬇️

I continue to love the art and especially in the guided/cinematic view. Going from narrow to wide view creates a wonderfully dramatic effect that adds to my enjoyment of the story. And while I know the framing style of comics is meant to create that exactly effect, due to limitations in how much information I can take in, I don’t always get that effect when I read comics and have take in an entire page visually at once.

Those caption boxes, the way they are drawn, also gives a kind of visual representation on Val’s thoughts. The red color gives a different feel to Val’s words than if those boxes had a white or off white background color. Color psychology effects people more than they realize as much of it is happening in your subconscious. How you respond to colors and even fonts isn’t something you are always going to be aware of.

What is particularly powerful is how the caption boxes roll into the action. You get this seamless transition from how Val is feeling and thinking, to whatever her next action is. You can see those connections happening on the page very clearly and it makes for, again, a very dramatic conversion of inner voice to outer expression. It makes Val feel even more real and reactive even though she’s just simply a drawing on a page. This is the very thing that makes comics so wonderful and exciting to read.

I love how this issue ends.

I love the cross cutting between Val, Blacktop Bill, Emory and the professor in the back of the truck. I love how that whole ending scene plays out. I love that I can feel and understand everything that is screaming in Val’s head “Nope. Nope. Not doing this” and I can understand that moment she decides definitively what she’s going to do.

Val doesn’t spend to much time deliberating. Her decision window is SMALL once she gets the evidence she needs to push forward to action. I LOVE that about her. She’s getting all the information she needs and she is also telling us, from her past, all the things that lead to her becoming the kind of person she is and how she makes decisions in the present. We have all the knowledge to understand her in these final pages and she let’s us know … this is me, this is my journey.

She’s not asking for sympathy and any point in her narrative, even when you learn about her past. She’s not playing the “Poor Me” card. She’s not asking for your understanding or your consent. She’s telling you her facts, she’s simple sharing her reality.

“I won’t sing or clap. I won’t tell you maybe. I’m the one who will smash the window and pull you right out into the fucking dark.“

We are OBSERVERS. We are GUESTS. We are RIDERS in her transport and SHE is OUR ferryman.

You’re along for the ride like it or not. It’s your choice whether or not you want to continue on this journey with Val leading the charge and, from what I read back then (and still see sometimes now) are a bunch of people saying essentially, “I won’t go anywhere with this bossy bitch”.

That tells me everything I need to know about them.