Issue 1: Cold and Calculating
Calculating Villains, Cursive, and Crime Thrillers
Letter From the Editor
Dearest Reader,
I’ve been having a difficult time carving out what I want to publish on Substack.
I view it similarly to the way I viewed Wattpad back in 2019: a seemingly endless world of possibilities. And yet, I feel so utterly left out of it. Trends are the only thing present when I scroll on here, like the new “whimsical” 2026, the death of smartphones, and the eventual dissolution of social media. In the beginning, I tried to write like this. I wrote a piece about my failing attention span, wanting to relearn cursive, and trying to listen to the radio. Despite trying to mimic what has been done before, I learned nothing and I was left wholly unsatisfied with my writing. So why am I trying to write like other people? Do I want engagement? Do I want someone to finally look at something I’ve done and laud me on how impressive I am? I’m still not quite sure, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be. I think what I truly need to do is to be myself and try and make something of my own that is holistically me.
This is my promise to the readers of Substack. I promise to be diligent in representing myself to the world through one of the things I love most of all: writing.
This issue is called Cold and Calculating for January for obvious reasons: it’s cold outside. In this one, I talk about the calculating villains, an experiment that results in an inability to calculate anything, and a media list filled with some of the most vile villains known to mankind (not really.) Hope you enjoy this inaugural issue of 23.7 FM!
Overanalyzing Fiction
January’s fictional character to overanalyze is The Scarecrow from Batman.
If you look me in the eye and ask me who I think the greatest character in all of Batman is, I would immediately respond with the Scarecrow aka Jonathan Crane. There is some unspoken understanding between myself and Crane’s character. I understand him, why he does what he does, and that is what makes him so special to me personally. It’s hard to place exactly where this miniature obsession began, although it probably started when Christopher Nolan decided to cast Cillian Murphy as Crane and then give him the sexiest, sluttiest pair of glasses to ever exist. This infatuation with Murphy led me to do lots of research on Jonathan Crane, which has changed my life in a myriad of ways (one of them resulted in me being initially exposed to Gotham, another led to a flirtation with Psychology). Crane is cold, calculated, and focused on his work. He does what he does not for the enjoyment (although it can be inferred that that naturally bloomed over time), but to experiment. What lengths wouldn’t one driven scientist take to prove that he’s right? Crane assumes the identity of the Scarecrow for his crimes to get back at the people who tormented him, which directly interferes with any preconceptions of him not having emotions in his work. He is a walking enigma (pun sort of intended) and an oxymoron of himself. He’s a trauma victim who uses his stereotypical identity of a calculated strategist and scientist to make decisions that he tries to convince himself are for science, but are really a way that he’s fighting back at everyone who has wronged him in the past. He’s a brilliant character, and one that I cannot recommend researching enough.
Because there are so many versions of these characters, I also decided to tell you my favorite version of them. For Jonathan Crane, Vincent Kartheiser’s portrayal in Titans is my favorite. I feel like not many incarnations of Crane focus on how emotional he truly is, except for Titans. In the show, he is painfully aware of his own situation due to his previous work as a psychiatrist, and yet seeks out other people (his mother and Batman) to diagnose him in a feeble attempt to convince himself that he is not ultimately flawed himself. He is surprisingly charming, and is not treated like a joke when he walks into a room (cough, Arkham Asylum, cough, the Animated Series, cough, most Batman media) all while being ultimately likeable to the audience (sorry, that might be just me). I just think he is the star of the third season because of how unassumingly complex he is under the surface. Have you ever paused to look at his cell in Arkham? Probably not, but the guy has cat photos above his desk. What does that say about him? More importantly, what does that say about him that previous incarnations of his character have been unable to come close to saying about him? All in all, Kartheiser’s Jonathan Crane is spectacular and he’s my favorite version of Jonathan Crane because he actually feels like a person instead of a facsimile of some kind of calculated scientist.
Experiment
This month’s challenge was to write in cursive.
Supposedly it only takes (at a minimum) 18 days for a habit to form. Also supposedly, I think it’s funny to trick my brain into doing weird things. I was scrolling one day and I saw a video where a woman was trying to convince the viewer to write in cursive for a few reasons, but only one really stuck out to me: no one can read cursive anymore, so if you journal in cursive no one can read it. I, unlike most of the world, remember cursive and I write all of the time in my sketchbook. So I figured why not write in cursive for these 18 days and see how fast it takes root in my brain?
I started simple with writing just like I remembered from back in 2nd grade. Writing took me a million years and I kept itching to go back to writing like I normally do in print. My cursive was so utterly atrocious that I can barely read what I wrote the first day I started taking it seriously. I also wrote super big, something that we will see changes by the end of the experiment. If you are beginning to write in cursive again for funsies like I did, make sure you have big pages. My sketchbook is bigger than what I normally write on, so I had lots of room to remember the flourishes of cursive. Handwriting, in my mind, is like an accent. No matter what accent (cursive/”British”, print/”American”) you have, you still have the same voice. My handwriting style from print is starting to show up in my cursive a couple of days later. I still have to really think about how I’m going to write words and commonly have to go back and spell words correctly, but overall it’s not too shabby.
Well into week 2, I started writing much quicker than before, but don’t have any time to stop and think about how a word is spelled. When I normally write big words, I can stop mid-sentence and think about the letters that come next. With cursive, I feel rushed to finish the word because I cannot keep up with the speed of my mind or the speed of my hand. By the time a week and a half had passed, I completely stopped being able to write in print. I had started college back up again and was handed a sheet of paper to write on, to which I instinctively started writing cursive on. I tried to write in print several times, but I would have to exert the same effort it initially took me to write in cursive.
After my 18 days were up, I started to unnaturally flip back and forth between print and cursive. All of a sudden, I would write a cursive letter in the middle of a print word or I would have to actively decide which way I was going to write something. I started to freak out. Was I starting to think in cursive? Am I destined to forever write in cursive because I thought I could mess around with my brain? So, I started writing in print again. You know how people with non-American accents think that Americans talk super slowly? Yeah, that was me when I changed to print. All of a sudden, I was writing in slow motion, unable to keep up with how quickly I was thinking. I have a page of notes for a class written in print and I genuinely thought I was going to die while writing that page because it all felt so incredibly slow.
Even now after almost a month of recovering from this stupid experiment, I am still getting my sea legs back. I used to be able to write whole pages of notes with no problem, and now writing half of a page is exhausting.
Please never do this.