Making my usual rounds of the Internet, I happened upon this article in The Morning News. Now, I'm not political at all, but I still thought the author raised an interesting point:


I was probably six or seven years old when He-Man became popular, and it became requisite among my peer group to own the toys. If you didn't have them all, you had to at least have the Man Himself, preferably the one with the battle armor that spun around with a punch, and Orko too because he had a rip cord that would make him spin around and dive off the lunch table. Of course, most of my peer group had wealthy parents, new to the area that mine had moved to when it was still cheap due to its location in the middle of nowhere. Add to that the low opinion my mom had of merchandised cartoon characters, and I came out with just one He-Man action figure. Not He-Man, not even a good guy -- I had Hordak. Nobody wanted to play with you if all you could bring was a bad guy who wasn't even the leader. Especially if you were the quiet kid who liked to make up his own stories.

There was one kid on my block in particular who had a reputation for having every He-Man toy ever made. Well, he also had a reputation for being a sociopath, but as a second-grader I had no place for large words in my vocabulary. I just wanted to play with He-Man. So every day I'd end up at this kid's house (let's call him "Eric" because that was his name) and every day I'd let him bully me around and shrink my self-worth a little more, just so I could play with his toys.

And to my sensibilities at the time, it was totally worth it, because Eric had more than just He-Man. Yes, the Castle Greyskull play set was the centerpiece of his toy shelf, but that shelf took up an entire towering wall of his room, and was filled to overflowing with Transformers, squirt guns, GI Joes, Nerf footballs, games that required batteries and made loud noises, Muscle wrestlers, Archie comics, and (nearest and dearest to my heart, though forgotten to everyone else) the MASK vehicles that switched from car to plane with a simple button press. Toys R Us had nothing on this shelf, and I haven't even gotten into the stuff in his closet and under his bed. If a seven-year-old boy could have multiple orgasms, it would look like Eric's bedroom.

And Eric knew that as long as he had the toys, he didn't have to be nice to us because we'd keep coming over to his house. He knew we'd eventually get bored with his collection, too, but he knew how to convince his parents to get him the new great thing that would bring us running back. By the time I was nine, I'd almost successfully extricated myself from his talons, but then his parents bought him a Nintendo and I was back in. I knew my relationship with Eric was an unhealthy one, but I just had to have a hit of that sweet, sweet pixelated pleasure. When my brother and I got our own NES, I finally broke free -- try as he might to lure me back with heavy metal iconography, Eric no longer had anything I desired that I couldn't get for myself.

Reading the article brought all of this flooding back, with the sudden realization that just as He-Man was considered the good guy because he had the castle, so too did Eric consider himself for the same reason. His toys were a form of evangelism, trying to get us to join his side, to disregard his bullying tactics and instead consider the stuff as collateral for his hero candidacy. But no matter the benefits, I couldn't stay behind someone who treated me like something that had come out of his. I paid the price for my defection in school, but my mental state was a lot better for it.

I've long thanked my mom for not buying into the forced morality of my childhood TV shows. It would have been really easy to let me obey the same black-and-white, good-versus-evil mantra my peers were following, rather than forcing me to use my imagination and think for myself. So if Eric, in his head-on, hard-line ways, was a bullying He-Man, did that make me Skeletor? I don't think so ... but maybe sometimes, what we think is evil really is just shy, complacent, and misunderstood.