Does anyone else wonder why some people end being pretentious?

I love comic books. It's a medium that allows to tell the most fantastic, impressive and most importantly, creative stories that any person can think of. Whenever I see the envelope being pushed I feel a huge level of satisfaction by knowing that the industry is moving forward.

But what happens when people try to pretend that they're telling something more grandiose than what they are actually telling? Well, this happens:

"Pretentiousness: an exaggerated sense of one's importance that shows itself in the making of excessive or unjustified claims <everyone took her ingrained pretentiousness into account when considering her statements>"

Again, this is a wonderful medium that benefits whenever an author tries to exploit it to produce some of the most fascinating tales that couldn't be recreated in any other format. However, some writers tend to cross the line that separates "smart" from "pretentious" too many times.

And yes, I understand that this is a kind of delicate subject due that a lot of persons believe that the word in question is used just as an excuse to make others accept mediocrity whenever they see it and while the word itself is sometimes used miscorrectly by many, there's also a reason why is so frequently brought to.

I'm not against trying to say something meaningful about each kind of story since God knows there are already a lot of generic tales out there, especially speaking of superhero comics since many people believe that their premises should be only about superpowered beings punching one another.

Fortunately there have been a lot of authors that have known how to make the genre move forward, one of them is Grant Morrison who not only has an unique and complex way of storytelling but also has a huge love for superheroes and has written some of the most influential books in the industry, Flex Mentallo, Doom Patrol, All-Star Superman, these are the kind of works that not only tell an entertaining story but also know how to have a deeper meaning connected to the narrative to make it a much stronger work.

And then there's also Final Crisis.

For the record, I liked Final Crisis (didn't love it though), the reason why I'm using it as an example for the topic is because half-way (more especifically, in the final issue) it seemed like it wanted to tell a completely different story with a deeper angle focusing on stories themselves which were quite distanct from the original concept about Darkseid trying to rule over life. Apparently, Morrison wanted to put all the ideas he had in his head at the time but he didn't have a coherent enough way to implement them and for that reason the book ends being pretty disjointed. This is one of the cases were the concepts tend to overtake the narrative and thus the final product ends being flawed.

Another more recent case I can think of is Ales Kot's run on Suicide Squad. It started interesting enough with a good script and execution but Kot tended to make his characters express themselves in quite unnatural ways ("I don't want to be resurrected again, dying hurts", "I want to know what love is, I want you to show me", etc.), stuff that you would never see an actual human being say. Of course, you could come with the argument that he wanted to make his writing more distinctive but you soonly realize that these lines don't actually complement the plot that he's developing and in fact most of the plot points he created for the series will probably never be explored due that he left the title in August from this same year for unknown reasons. At the end, they didn't mean anything.

But why people like to go for this route? Well, everybody has different reasons, some of them want their stories to get above from what you usually see which is understandable, all of us want to create something truly unique and special that will be remembered fondly by others.

And then there's the other more selfish reason, to simply be admired by the rest.

You know what kind of people I'm talking about, that guy/girl who usually likes to proclaim how smart he/she is, the kind of person who enjoys using long and recondite words just so people can gaze his/her supposed knowledge, the hipster who likes to brag about how the favorite entertainment medium of others is too "mainstream", the douchebag who usually likes to correct others whenever they make a mistake, again, not to help them to actually learn something but just so they can demonstrate how intelligent they are.

Not trying to insinuate that someone like Grant Morrison falls into those categories since from what I could gather about him, he seems to be a pretty sincere and humble person actually so most of the cases when he ends being pretentious is probably just due to, at the worst, poor execution.

Sadly, a lot of people still show these tropes and in fact, they have been recognized by popular mediums. I'm not going to use that clip from the Simpsons where a guy tells Krusty the Clown and his associate "Excuse me, but "proactive" and "paradigm"? Aren't these just buzzwords that dumb people use to sound important?" since I don't think these people are truly dumb. However, I will put this picture that helps to illustrate the context better from the excellent and no longer ongoing webcomic called "1930 Nightmare Theatre" created by the talented artist Ricky Garduno who sadly passed away in 2011:

This encompasses perfectly why people decide to behave like this as well as the reaction from others. Still, I must say that I haven't seen many (if any) cases like this in real life, just on the internet.

Why does this happen? Well, I suppose that just like trolling, being unknown allows some people to start acting in a different way to try to impress others and thus creating a new persona where they can be admired and appreciated.

I understand that there must be people like that in real life but unless they manage to mix this attitude with a huge sense of humour and personality, I don't see how they would be able to be accepted by others. However, I think I'm fixating too much on regular people so I will get back to the authors.

How to explain this behavior? Some have been accustomed to it for so long that they don't even seem to want to go back and it happens a lot in the comic industry where for some strange reason it's rewarded as something unique, intelligent and creative when in fact it's simply not telling anything valuable or if it tries it just tells a poor executed story due that these persons don't know how to connect their themes to their main plot in a coherent way.

So as I said, if authors want to construct something special, that's fine, actually it's wonderful. We need more distinctive works and ideas but they should be implemented in a way that impulses their tales and complements the narrative.

Well, that's all from me and I still have so many questions about the topic. Meh, live and learn I guess.

I also just realized that this has made me look petty and pedantic. Funny how thinks works out at the end!