Why the American System of Government Is the Way It Is, and Why It Works

Politics are a little like tabletop game design. Never try to change a rule until you understand why it's there in the first place.


After every election, no matter what the year, there's always talk about two problems in the American system: a two-party system of "too-similar candidates that prevent anything from getting done," and how the Electoral College is a pointless barrier that should be scrapped and replaced with direct popular vote.

Both those things, two-party system and the Electoral College, exist for a very real reason: the American system of democracy is designed for stability and moderation.

As we've never had a totalitarian dictatorship, and the American system is the oldest democracy in the world, continuing uninterrupted for 236 years, it's obvious it succeeds at this job in a way you can't really argue with. In that same amount of time France, another affluent Western democracy culturally and financially comparable to the USA, had 5 constitutions.

The obvious critique here is a lack of self-awareness. Everybody thinks their culture has (for instance) the best attitude to sexuality and everyone else are either libertines/perverts on the one hand, or uptight prudes on the other. Ask the Red Chinese, and they'll tell you the Red Chinese system is the best for them. Nonetheless, I don't think enough people understand WHY the American system is set up this way enough to say why it should be changed.

Every election year someone yells the Electoral College needs to be scrapped, a barrier to direct popular voting that ensures only a minority of people in swing states actually matter.

But why do we have an electoral college at all?

In order to be President you have to have a majority of the Electoral College, right now 270. This is the major factor in why the American system only has two political parties, since it's nearly impossible to win a majority with three or more viable candidates.

This prevents situations in parliamentary systems like (for instance) Turkey, where one political party achieves a majority by 24% of the vote. By contrast, remember that even on his worst days at the end, the Nixon-level unpopular George W. Bush always had at least a 27% approval rating. It's hard to imagine a position so weird that it won't get a modest percentage of the vote.

Because a majority is needed, moderates win every time. If your goal is stability, moderate views aren't a bug, they're a feature. National politics has to be played "in the 30 yard lines," ignoring the fringes on either side. In short, politics becomes a game for pragmatists, moderates, and "grown-ups."

No single region, not even the South or Northeast, has enough electoral votes to reach 270. This means a candidate can't just do well in a single part of the country, but has to have broad appeal. This was a big issue especially in the era before Civil War, where different parts of the country had different markets, from the industrial and trade oriented Northeast to the rural, agrarian South.

"Swing states" have more power in our system for a reason: in order to be in play at all, they're typically a microcosm of the American system. Ohio, for instance, typically has a combination of rural, urban, immigrants, natives, the working class, with both farmers and agrarian interests and heavy industry.

And contrary to popular belief, the electoral system does make minority views more significant in a way that would not be possible in a winner-take-all national popular vote. The reason, both for good and for ill (mostly for ill) that Cuban-American exile lobbyists have such power over Cuba policy is because Florida is a swing state, and a community of about 500,000 does matter. The result is surreal local weirdness like Barry Obama, maybe the most powerful man in the world, eating at El Mago de la Frita on Calle Ocho.

Another advantage to the electoral system is it keeps votes compartmentalized. Florida in 2000 was bad enough. Can you imagine the chaos of a national recount?

Does the Electoral College system depress voter turnout in non-swing states? I don't care. Neither should anybody else, because democracy is only for those who choose to participate. No system should ever take into account meeting the needs of people who choose not to vote.

Here's a scenario for both Republicans and Democrats. Imagine we have a it's 1994, and the US has a parliamentary system. Republicans sweep elections on the "Contract With America" platform. Who becomes Prime Minister? Newt Gingrich. Or in 2006, when Democrats win back the House and Senate, the US head of state becomes Nancy Pelosi.

If you think it's a weakness that more fringe views can't achieve much in our system, just imagine what it would be like when the shoe is on the other foot and people on the fringe with views opposite from yours are voted into power.

Which brings me to the Third Party Candidates.

The greatest advertisement for the two-party system are the third party candidates. Marginal candidates typically are marginal for a reason.

But Julian, you say, aren't the two political parties too similar?

First, the two main political parties are not that similar at all. It's hard to imagine a third term for Bush would be exactly the same as what Barry Obama did. If it seems that way to you, there are two possibilities: 1) you're not very informed on the issues and the political positions of candidates, or 2) you're on the fringe.

That said, do I think the current American system is perfect? No, I don't. Because of their impact on fundraising, there is no reason presidential primaries should happen first in New Hampshire and Iowa. Primary systems work to the advantage of incumbents even at the best of times; David Wong once called them a game of "monkey shit dodgeball." It's not clear to me why these contests should be viewed as representative of voters as opposed to say, Virginia, Florida, or Ohio. The Florida primary moving up is a step in the right direction.

In conclusion, the Electoral College, together with the two-party system, are not flaws but consciously made decisions by a conservative system that values stability, which can be very, very frustrating to people both on the left and right who want to remake society. All successful changes, the ones that last, have been incremental, and in that sense the durable American system understands this.

Casadastraphobia – the Fear of Being Sucked into the Sky, and How That Can Label You

Why are some people eccentric, nonconformist types?

A big answer, for a lot of human behavior, is labeling.

There was a great Bruce Coville (My Teacher is an Alien) kids' book called Space Brat, which had that as the theme. If you say someone's a "brat" over and over, how are they going to act? How are they going to think of themselves?

In "Space Brat," an alien kid in a very impersonal mechanistic society, at birth got a bit of egg behind an ear, which made him cry with irritation. As a result, a caretaker robot stamped BRAT on his forehead, and that stuck with him until he really did live up to it. Like all of Coville's work, it's heavy stuff for a kids' book with a silly name.

With that in mind, I think part of the reason (not the only one) I became an eccentric noncomformist is because I got that label due to lots of people around me not understanding my reactions, because I had a fear I didn't even know was a real thing: Casadastraphobia.

Casadastraphobia is the fear of being sucked up into the sky. 

Okay, done laughing? It's a variation on agoraphobia. It was much worse when I was a kid, where I often got extremely nervous looking up after a long time especially on clear days, but what's interesting is, I don't even have a severe case of it: some people can't even go out to open air spaces like football fields, and some are so terrified they can't even go outside for fear of being sucked into the sky. Compared that poor soul, I'm pretty functional with a high ability to "deal."

In the hopes of preserving my now forever shattered reputation as a rational, levelheaded "down to earth" (no pun intended) guy with the ability to deal, I should point out the last time I had a very serious attack of this, a few months ago at a MetroRail station on a disturbingly clear, cloudless day, I fought off my anxiety about the situation by reminding myself in the billions of years of earth's history gravity has never reversed itself, and indeed, that would go against all the laws of universal gravitation, where the force of gravity is proportional to the product of the two masses involved and inversely proportioned to the the square of the distance. If you think I kept my mind busy by doing the math for two diagrams attracting each other, you obviously know me very well, except who the hell can remember the gravitational constant off the top of their head, even physicists?

Moral of the story: if a fear is not rational, you can fight it with rationality.

At my elementary school's weekly open field assemblies, kids used to regularly get helium filled balloons on their birthdays. Being fumbly fingered kids, we sometimes let them go until they floated into the sky. And boy, would I ever freak out. Watching balloons disappear into the sky in an open field is terrible for someone afraid of getting sucked into the sky, so there's no surprise I'd have a pretty major freakout.

I got a reputation in the First Grade as "that kid who's scared of balloons." People in other grades and classes heard of me. I was labeled a "weirdo" for having an uncommonly known phobia. Eventually, I had to leave that school for a variety of reasons, but the one they gave my parents was along the lines of, "hey, it's not him, it's us."

It's funny how some things can stick with you. Recently, I was reading the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, maybe the funniest and most readable book ever written by a president. What's absolutely strange is, there was this weird interlude where he talks about how, with obvious pain, as a nine year old he was tricked into buying a blind horse and became the laughingstock of the town. Here was a man who won the Civil War, defeated Robert E. Lee, and became president of the United States...who was still thinking about how people laughed at him for buying a blind horse from a sharpie.

Learning about casadastraphobia was an incredibly liberating experience. It's always a source of relief and courage to learn something you've always dealt with you assume is unique to you, actually has a name, and is something other people have.

It's also a source of incredible anger, too. The first time anybody ever called me an "odd duck" was when I became "that kid who was scared of balloons." And if people call you a weirdo over and over, how are you going to act? How do you think about yourself?

In the meantime, I'll take the advice some wiseass gave a lady asking for tips on dealing with their Casadastraphobia:

"Wear a ten gallon hat so you don't look up, and put glue on the soles of your shoes." 

The 1988 Taito Arcade Game Version of Superman

 

Coming soon to a dive Italian take-out pizza and subs joint near you!

Isn't it enraging that the only good Superman game ever made was never, ever released for home consoles?

Not only that, it's the only Superman game ever made that used the trademark John Williams music from the movies. Just listen to it. There's even a hilariously "action-y" up-tempo version of the dopey love scene music on one stage.

Though it doesn't use any known Superman bad guys, it nonetheless feels like a Superman story: a fiendish green warlord leads a global alien invasion, one that apparently is only interested in attacking America's most scenic locations like the Las Vegas strip and San Francisco's Chinatown.

 The aliens include a giant loincloth wearing Harryhausen cyclops,

 Jumping bunny women;

 Spider-monsters that trap you in a web;

 Apparently the one thing the aliens all have in common is, when defeated they break up into the into the Outer Limits horizontal lines that Unicron used to create Galvatron.

 So far, so good: you have a science fiction themed global alien menace, an element of travel. Everything you need for a good Superman game.

 This looks like a job…for Superman! And red Superman!

Wait! Who the heck is this guy? Is this possibly a reference to Superman-Red and Superman-Blue, the Imaginary Story from 1967?

If so, kudos. But I doubt it, since it's traditional for beat 'em up games to have a co-op mode, with a second player created by a palette swap (see also: Double Dragon, Altered Beast). The presence of a Red Superman may just be an especially chutzpah filled example of video game adaptations' greatest motto: "to hell with it, nobody will notice." 

This reminds me of how, when you were a kid, you'd play Superman on the playground and everybody wanted to be Superman. If Superman comics were like our playground games, there would be approximately 500 Supermans flying around out there arguing who hit who.

 But it gets more interesting, because have a look:

 Unused sprites left in the game show a second playable female character. Possibly Supergirl? There might have been an idea to make Player 2 Supergirl, but palette swaps were easier. And besides, in an era of zero female game characters, some chauvinistic boys might not have liked playing a girl - even Supergirl.

 (FYI, or those unaware, it's actually easier to leave in unused or unfinished content in a game rather than eliminate it totally, because if you yank something out it might create problems with programming it's "attached" to. So it's usually easier to just block something out. But those who get their hands on the game code can sift through it line by line like bread crumbs and find all kinds of surprises. There are many interesting examples, like an unused, incomplete level in Sonic 3, or like the fact Legend of Zelda: the Ocarina of Time, a fantasy game, has a futuristic tiny starfighter Arwing from "Starfox" that was added in to test the flight physics.)

 The game doesn't stiff you when it comes to Superman's powers, and doesn't cheaply dole them out in ways like putting them on limited uses, or linking them to power ups. It's possible to lift and throw cars, and the game is even built around the element of flight, with it going vertical instead of the weird 3-D perspective seen in brawler games like Double Dragon, which means your punches end up hitting only air because of an error in depth perception.

 There are levels that become flying stages where you soar upwards, which is a downright revolutionary use of space in a genre defined by The Eternal Quest to Go Right. There are even some Gradius or Lifeforce style 2-D "schmup" stages where you blast enemies with laser vision.

 The game is a lot like the movies in ways other than the music, especially in the sense that Superman, instead of having his traditional powers, is basically like a genie, given additional bizarre powers for budget reasons. In the movies he could appear in several places simultaneously, use telekinesis, throw his S-shield as a cellophane trap…not to mention "Great Wall of China Vision" from Superman IV.

   

 In the tradition of the movies, Superman can apparently also either throw his fists (like Voltron?) or his fists can create charged up fireballs in the shape of a fist. Not entirely sure what's going on there.

In general, the game is worth trying if you can find a cabinet, even if it doesn't have any of the Superman enemies, supporting cast, or even Kryptonite, though the last one is annoyingly overused. The fact it is unavailable is a crime, and a sign of how totally possible it is to "lose" video game culture. Like movies in the silent era, they just weren't seen as important enough to preserve or keep in circulation.

Explaining Fan Behavior: Why some things get devotion

Here's a question: why do some fictional worlds and properties attract incredibly devoted fans? I mean, some do, and others don't.

There are many, many reasons a fandom becomes big or assumes the form it ultimately does, including a combination of luck and visibility...although that's not quite what I asked. What is it about the properties themselves? What do they all have in common?

According to the unofficial history of Star Trek by Bob Justman, the first Star Trek convention was far from a spontaneous gathering. It was run by Gene Roddenberry himself and he rustled people in from all over. In other words, part of the reason Trek fans are so big and organized is (partially) because of talented huckster Gene Roddenberry's talent for self-promotion.

Lord of the Rings was a low seller in a niche genre that didn't even have a name yet for an entire decade, released at the same time as now-forgotten Thomas Burnett Swann's Minotaur books or Mervyn Peake... until LotR was rediscovered by the 1960s counterculture. The hippies found the story's themes of hostility to modernism, love of nature, and longing for an imaginary past were all right up their style.

Star Wars had the good luck to be a big studio distributed movie, so millions of butts were going to be in chairs to watch it no matter what. But it success is not just because of that. Part of the reason it was a big hit, a phenom we're still talking about now, was it was the right story at the right time. The Western was now passé, previously the #1 action genre and the single greatest American source of stories about ourselves and our self-concept as a country, as well as our battles of good versus evil. The entire 1970s were filled with grim, adult, director driven movies. Star Wars was a battle of good versus evil not seen since Errol Flynn stopped swashbuckling, with fairytale characters like a wizard and pirate. It was, in short, the right kind of story at the right moment.

And on a lighter note, part of the reason furry fandom is so oddly sex crazed and gay friendly, is because the first furry conventions in the early 1980s were put together by a flamboyantly gay swinger/S&M lover who actually invited just released prisoners from jail to show up! This jailhouse gay and S&M attracted others into the same scene, repulsed others that didn't care for it, and in general set the tone for years later.

Okay, okay, back to my original question: why do some fictional worlds inspire so much devotion and others don't? What do they all have in common that get people to still think about them?  After all, the hippies came and went, but Lord of the Rings is still around, and there are still kids in high schools today writing notes in Dwarf runes.

If you look at the really BIG fan groups out there, like Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, and the Marvel and DC Universes, you find that people are so obsessive about them because these worlds have built up enough detail that it's possible they're engrossing and "full" enough to capture the attention.

The more real a story feels, the more engaged you are. Just like significant descriptive details in a book bring a scene to life, the richer and more developed a world is, the more minutiae fans can collect like stamps, the more devoted your fans will be.

Here's a secret: hardcore fans like their world and devote so much time to it because they think it's real. 

…Okay, that's obviously not literally true, except for a tiny handful of seriously mentally ill people.

But really involving worlds and stories are set in places that make you FEEL like they're real, have verisimilitude, that the stories don't end the instant the book is closed or the movie ends. There's plenty going on to make you think about it later on, or talk about it with friends aneven have fights over nitpick details, and curiosity over some of its unexplained mysteries. This is why fictional worlds can be such an engrossing diversion. This is why people get very curious and so very passionate.

We fans do this not because we think the story is literally real, but because we like suspension of disbelief. Because when people tell us a story, we want to believe it. That's the difference between a liar and a storyteller: people are by default suspicious of liars, but want to believe a story.

This is also why adaptations can sometimes be frustrating for fans. Because we believe there is a reality behind these characters and worlds that do not vary or change. A reality that is independent of the free market, cultural, and business forces that take place in our own world.

Even disagreements and fights between fans are based on the idea characters are independent of us readers/viewers, solid and concrete. People have disagreements about whether Spider-Man would or wouldn't behave a certain way. This disagreement is only possible at all because everyone agrees there is a "correct" way for Spider-Man to act.

Okay, now, here, we've reached the first of definition of continuity:

Continuity (or canon) is just another word for verisimilitude, a consistency that makes the world feel more real, by making the world feel as if it continues beyond the boundary of the specific narrow focus of any one single story.

An individual story, by definition, have a laser pinprick focus and economy. Stories can't be "about" everything. Look at a map of Middle Earth and see how much of the place our heroes actually DIDN'T go, even in a story as sprawling as Lord of the Rings.

The purpose of continuity and consistent canon is to dispel the artifice of stories, that a world is not just a series of empty plywood "Potemkin villages" that live when tourists pass by and are yanked down just behind us when we leave.

This is why Sherlock Holmes fans are so fascinated by the tantalizing hints Sir Conan Doyle dropped about cases only mentioned in passing we never got to actually read about. Because it implies Sherlock Holmes and Watson are alive, are doing things when we're not looking. They have a reality independent of what they're doing when the "camera" is on them.

"It's just a story"

Contrary to popular belief, being a fan, even a detail oriented one, is a good thing for the same reason any hobby not pursued to the exclusion of responsibilities is a good thing: because you get out what you put in. Cool detachment eliminates the entire point of a whole story, where you want to be passionate and care about what's going on.

That's why I've always thought there's something oddly inhuman, so defeating to the entire purpose of fiction of any kind, with people who respond to certain kinds of criticisms with, "who cares, it's just a story. Consistency doesn't matter because it's all fictional in the end." It shows a kind of brutal cynicism I don't like, that whoever said it doesn't feel the world is real. It's all a put up job. If it isn't real, why get engrossed or involved?

Why care?

I don't get that argument. If you don't care, why read a story at all? Why read a series long term?

This is also why fans find continuity glitches so galling. They tatter and undermine the suspension of disbelief fiction needs and imply something doesn't have verisimilitude. They create a "trust" issue.

This is also why fans are fascinated by cross-overs. The fact that Spider-Man can swing on the rooftops of Marvel Manhattan and cross paths with Daredevil going the other way makes the Marvel Universe feel more real.

Why Do Fans Like the Obscure?

This is also why fans get tickled pink when obscure characters and minutiae show up, why Star Trek fans smile a bit when a Next Generation episode mentions the Tholians in passing, or when people are delighted to see a minor character like Stingray or D-Man in the background of an Avengers mission.

Those of us that aren't children know, but only at an intellectual level, that stories aren't real, and are artifices with a very narrow focus, that the Tholians were just created to be bad guys for one episode way back when in the old show, and Stingray was an Avenger only used in one story that needed an underwater guy, and that a good portion of super-villains, especially unpopular ones, will never be seen much again after their first story.

Mentioning obscuros again dispels that artifice we're intellectually aware is there ("this is just a story"), and reminds us, to our joy, that the world is real, that these characters are still around and doing something even when we're not looking. The Tholians are out there, somewhere, up to mischief. Stingray can be called up at any time by the Avengers when needed.

In short, the world goes from something we like to something we believe. 

And that's the difference between just liking something, and being a fan.

How She-Hulk became the character we know her as today

It's interesting to read the David Anthony Kraft original, introductory Savage She-Hulk series, because the earliest take on the character is almost totally unrecognizable to how we know the character of She-Hulk today. When we think of She-Hulk, we see her as  confident, exhibitionist, aggressive, lives-life-with-gusto, who loves getting attention and being superstrong, and despite her shocking giant size and green skin is endearingly normal, an everywoman doing things like watching TV in bunny slippers while eating cheesecake.

She-Hulk, at least as we know her today, has whacked-out outer space adventures featuring beloved, eccentric, weird Marvel comics obscuros like the Toad Men, Mahkizmo, the return of the Living Eraser, Xemnu the Titan ("I have no mouth and I am mean"), and bizarre supporting characters like the space diner from forgotten space-trucker series US-1 (like the gimmicky Matter-Eater Lad from Legion of Super-Heroes, mentioning and using the canon of US-1 is the whole joke).

With Shulkie there's always a sense of humor involved. When Steve Gerber's writing, it's the kind of surreal, occasionally dark comedy we associate with Howard the Duck (in fact, not only was Howard the Duck a side character, but so was Gerber's Dr. Bong).

With John Byrne, there's broad comic plots like how he-man woman hater Mahkizmo's sinister plot to kill the female population stops when someone explains to him where babies come from. Not to mention some clever fourth wall breaking sight gags.

(I always figured the "in-universe" explanation for Shulkie at times believing she's a comic character is, she has an extremely weird sense of humor and talks to herself sometimes.)

In fact, the earliest series featuring the character is almost shocking compared to the character we know today. The biggest difference between the modern take on She-Hulk, and the "savage" She Hulk is that in her early stories, She-Hulk is a really a mean, intimidating, impolite person, who is very intense and scares people like the gray "Mr. Fixit" version of the Hulk, and constantly has to struggle against her own terrible, savage temper. Her instinct is brutality, but unlike the Hulk, who's just a creature of rage, her emotions and brutal instincts are something she has control over and can resist.

Just look at the image at the corner of her comics. That's a scary Grace Jones face of a lady you wouldn't mess around with, and who certainly wouldn't wear bunny slippers while eating cheesecake.

The Savage She-Hulk, unlike the Hulk, has to remind herself that she's no killer, and that killing would make her as bad as the enemies she fights. This is an illuminating insight into Jennifer Walters' psychology because, as all Hulk fans know by now, the Hulk could never kill because Bruce Banner could never kill.

Another difference is, when She-Hulk sees the cops, she runs away. Like the original Hulk and to a lesser extent Spider-Man, she was misunderstood and framed as a murderer, and when people see her they figure she's up to no good.

If I were to go for a no-prize explanation for She-Hulk's transformation, it would be as she received her powers from a blood transfusion from the Hulk, her initial transformations were similar to the Hulk: defined by Bruce Banner's anger, outrage, and alienation.

Finally, to someone used to the surreal Gerber take on the character, or the fanciful early Marvel silver age-inspired Byrne years, it can be shocking to discover how downright normal the first She-Hulk book's plots are. She-Hulk has a Spider-Man style supporting cast of perfectly normal people, from her Dad the sherriff who believes the She-Hulk is a public menace, unaware the She-Hulk is her own daughter. The standout, at least to Gerber Man-Thing fans, is Richard Rory, a Roy Thomas look alike who is easily the most unlucky guy in the world. This lends credence to my idea, incidentally, that David Kraft was a Gerber disciple: notice how similar the Scorpio arc in Defenders #48-50 is to Gerber's preceding work.

Most of the stories are about the emotions of perfectly ordinary people like Gerber's Man-Thing, and with She-Hulk's tube-friendly law background playing a huge role and the absence of real super-villains, make me suspect the original Savage She-Hulk seriesmight have originally been meant as a bionic-woman style television series instead of a comic book.

I wonder how the transformation of She-Hulk from Grace Jones "Ms. Hyde" to sex-bomb "everywoman" took place.

There are many examples of characters who get sexier, younger, and slimmer when nobody's watching (Miss Piggy and the Wicked Witch of the West come to mind), but what's unique about She-Hulk is what happened in popular culture between She-Hulk's first series in 1979, and what happened by the time she came back to her own series in the late-1980s: namely, the rise of female bodybuilding as a sport, advertised by very alluring cover girls, pushed by the Weiders as the "face" of a new industry like Rachel McLish and Gladys Portugues.

Ask most Baby Boomers about female bodybuilders and they'd probably tell you it isn't biologically possible. After all, Superman had both superstrength and a super-physique, whereas Supergirl was just superstrong.

\

In 1981, the same year the original version of She-Hulk was canceled, the Weiders started the first significant female bodybuilding contest, the Ms. Olympia. Bodybuilding as a sport exists as a promotional venture for the Weiders' fitness supplement and magazine empire, so the creation of female bodybuilding was an attempt to spread to a whole new "product demographic." Therefore, the women featured had to be glamorous, attractive girls…or else who'd want to be a bodybuilder and buy the Weiders' products?

Muscular women were not new (check out Abbye Stockton from the golden age of muscle beach!) but the importance of them as alluring cover model types was new. Bodybuilder Kike Elomaa, the only woman to ever beat Rachel McLish back in 1982, became a pop star in her native Finland and is currently a member of the Finnish Parliament. (I am NOT making that up.)

Female bodybuilders as models designed to sell the product of fitness came to a high point in the early to mid 1990s with Sharon Bruneau, a half-French, half-Canadian Indian who actually, literally was a former fashion model who switched to weightlifting for kicks.

Female bodybuilders were basically sex-sells advertisements for the Weider empire, and it's a funny thing about advertising: it creates demand where there wasn't any before. After all, the entire idea of halitosis was created to sell Listerine.

What was that line from Mad Men? "What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons."

Come 1984, pro competitor Anita Gandol posed nude for Playboy magazine. The very year John Byrne brought back She-Hulk, 1989, the TV show American Gladiators debuted, and one of the selling points and most memorable trait were the foxy lady bodybuilders.

The fun, cheesecake-y Marvel Swimsuit Illustrated had a great text piece about Shulkie written just like a female bodybuilder physique piece in Flex or Muscle & Fitness.

And didn't anybody else notice most covers of Shulkie from 1981 on basically have her in a pose and build that looks like it was traced from a Rachel McLish magazine cover?

To be clear, in the telephone game that is superhero comics, no one single person is responsible for the change-over to the "funny exhibitionist" She-Hulk, which is my point: the change in thinking about the character was gradual as pop culture changed around them. Typically, Roger Stern gets credit in his Avengers run for the modern She-Hulk as a glamour gal who enjoys having superstrength and isn’t an antisocial outcast (a take Byrne and Gerber inherited and rolled with) but even by the end of the David Kraft version, She-Hulk did occasional things like have fun at the beach with her powers, and described being the She-Hulk as addicting.

In conclusion, the principal reason She-Hulk went from an intense and oddly Grace Jones-like asexual character to being a much more popular sex bomb over time was because after the original series ended, advertising forces made female bodybuilders attractive and glamorous figures in order to sell products, a marketing force for which Shulkie was an accidental beneficiary. For the first time ever, a character like She-Hulk could have sex appeal as a major part of her character.

The surest way to cure yourself of naivete is to read up on the history of marketing. Don't think you can be manipulated by advertising? Great. That just means you don't know how it works and can be played like a fiddle by it.