I was cruising through the net, following the cold trail of one of the periodic “Is or is not Fanfic the Ultimate Literary Evil?” arguments that crop up regularly, and I’m now bursting to make a point that I never see made by fic defenders.
We’re all familiar with the normal defenses of fic: it’s done out of love, it’s training, it’s for fun. Those are all good and valid defenses!
But they miss something. They damn with faint praise. Because the thing is, when you commit this particular Ultimate Literary Evil you’ve now told a story. And stories are powerful. The fact that it wasn’t in an original world or with original characters doesn’t necessarily make it less powerful to any given reader.
I would never have made this argument a few years ago. A few years ago I hadn’t received messages from people who were deeply touched by something I wrote in fanfic. So what if it’s only two or three or four people, and I used someone else’s world and characters? For those two or three or four people, I wrote something fucking important. You cannot tell me that isn’t a valid use of my time and expect me to feel chastened. I don’t buy it. I won’t feel ashamed. I will laugh when you call something that touches other people ‘literary masturbation.’ Apparently you’re not too up on your sex terminology.
Someone could argue that if I’d managed the same thing with original characters in an original world, it could’ve touched more people. They might be right! On the other hand, it might never have been accepted for publication, or found a market if self published, and more importantly I would never have written it because I didn’t realize I could write. The story wouldn’t have happened. Instead, thanks to fanfic being a thing, it did. And for two or three or four people it mattered. When we talk about defending fanfic, can we occasionally talk about that?
I once had an active serviceman who told me that my FF7 and FF8 fic helped get him through the war. That’ll humble you. People have told me my fanfic helped get them through long nights, through grief, through hard times. It was a solace to people who needed solace. And because it was fanfic, it was easier to reach the people who needed it. They knew those people already. That world was dear to them already. They were being comforted by friends, not strangers.
Stories are like swords. Even if you’ve borrowed the sword, even if you didn’t forge it yourself from ore and fire, it’s still your body and your skill that makes use of it. It can still draw blood, it can strike down things that attack you, it can still defend something you hold dear. Don’t get me wrong, a sword you’ve made yourself is powerful. You know it down to its very molecules, are intimate with its heft and its reach. It is part of your own arm. But that can make you hesitate to use it sometimes, if you’re afraid that swinging it too recklessly will notch the blade. Is it strong enough, you think. Will it stand this? I worked so hard to make it. A blade you snatched up because you needed a weapon in your hand is not prey to such fears. You will use it to beat against your foes until it either saves you or it shatters.
But whether you made that sword yourself or picked it up from someone who fell on the field, the fight you fight with it is always yours.
Literary critics who sneer at fanfic are so infuriatingly shortsighted, because they all totally ignore how their precious literature, as in individual stories that are created, disseminated, and protected as commercial products, are a totally modern industrial capitalist thing and honestly not how humans have ever done it before like a couple centuries ago. Plus like, who benefits most from literature? Same dudes who benefit most from capitalism: the people in power, the people with privilege. There’s a reason literary canon is composed of fucking white straight dudes who write about white straight dudes fucking.
Fanfiction is a modern expression of the oral tradition—for the rest of us, by the rest of us, about the rest of us—and I think that’s fucking wonderful and speaks to a need that absolutely isn’t being met by the publishing industry. The need to come together as a close community, I think, and take the characters of our mythology and tell them getting drunk and married and tricked and left behind and sent to war and comforted and found again and learning the lessons that every generation learns over and over. It’s wonderful. I love it. I’m always going to love it.
Languages animate objects by giving them names, making them noticeable when we might not otherwise be aware of them. Tuvan has a word iy (pronounced like the letter e), which indicates the short side of a hill.
I had never noticed that hills had a short side. But once I learned the word, I began to study the contours of hills, trying to identify the iy. It turns out that hills are asymmetrical, never perfectly conical, and indeed one of their sides tends to be steeper and shorter than the others.
If you are riding a horse, carrying firewood, or herding goats on foot, this is a highly salient concept. You never want to mount a hill from the iy side, as it takes more energy to ascend, and an iy descent is more treacherous as well. Once you know about the iy, you see it in every hill and identify it automatically, directing your horse, sheep, or footsteps accordingly.
This is a perfect example of how language adapts to local environment, by packaging knowledge into ecologically relevant bits. Once you know that there is an iy, you don’t really have to be told to notice it or avoid it. You just do. The language has taught you useful information in a covert fashion, without explicit instruction.
The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense. Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers.
Among the works were, for example, a paper published as a proceeding from the 2013 International Conference on Quality, Reliability, Risk, Maintenance, and Safety Engineering, held in Chengdu, China. (The conference website says that all manuscripts are “reviewed for merits and contents”.) The authors of the paper, entitled ‘TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce’, write in the abstract that they “concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact”. (Nature News has attempted to contact the conference organizers and named authors of the paper but received no reply; however at least some of the names belong to real people. The IEEE has now removed the paper).
If you are wondering how this happens, it is because academic jargon echolalic, and phrases become stock phrases, hat computer programs can replicate things that sound enough like the real near nonsense articles that take hours to decipher. Because understanding all the jargon and insider phrasing is supposed to be a sign of aptitude and experience in the field, no one on these journals dares voice the idea that these technobabble articles are actually nonsense for fear of being seen as just not knowledgeable enough to “get” all the complicated insular language. As a result every just kind of glances at these things, sees the words that look right, and nods it along.
Non-peer reviewed journals are of course more susceptible, but because of the culture of jargon and drivel and fear of sounding not in the know enough, even supposedly peer reviewed journals fall pray to these revealing hoaxes.
At least they were removed before some professor assigned them to their students to analyze for class.
“I adore the way fan fiction writers engage with and critique source texts, but manipulating them and breaking their rules. Some of it is straight-up homage, but a lot of [fan fiction] is really aggressive towards the source text. One tends to think of it as written by total fanboys and fangirls as a kind of worshipful act, but a lot of times you’ll read these stories and it’ll be like ‘What if Star Trek had an openly gay character on the bridge?’ And of course the point is that they don’t, and they wouldn’t, because they don’t have the balls, or they are beholden to their advertisers, or whatever. There’s a powerful critique, almost punk-like anger, being expressed there—which I find fascinating and interesting and cool.”—Lev Grossman (via mycrofts)
protip if a nerd dude tries to give you a pop quiz about the fandom on your shirt/bag/cosplay by asking you to answer a banal and obscure trivia question to prove you’re a Real Gamer, turn the question back on him. ask him about the thematic implications that bit of trivia has on the actual story. ask him about the character development and motivations of the minor characters he’s making you list. ask him if he thinks the major in-universe event he’s testing you on was successful in carrying forward the underlying tone and intent of the work itself. ask him about fucking literary devices. you know that one super tough and intimidating lit teacher everyone encounters at least once in their lifetime? become that teacher. make him sweat.
Cicero: would put multi-paragraph rants without page breaks and piss everyone off
Catullus: would run one of those arty blogs that periodically startles you with hardcore gay porn on your dash
Vergil: would have a successful ongoing webcomic or blog and would constantly reblog and be reblogged by Horace
Horace: would post a ton of Instagram photos of wine and houses in the countryside and would constantly reblog and be reblogged by Vergil
Pliny the Elder: would post a bunch of photos of flowers, nature, and astronomical facts, and would die while attempting to liveblog the Vesuvius eruption
Lucretius: would be a nightblogger who would always post stuff like “what if when we die we become atoms and float away in the wind? Like you could be inhaling and exhaling your dead ancestors right now!”
Ovid: Would post a mixture of porn and reblogs of nature and portrait photos and would ultimately engage in massive flame wars and get banned for violating the Terms of Service
If Ancient Greeks had Tumblrs
Plato would have an RPG blog, blogging as Socrates, and it would be one of those ones that’s practically all responses to asks, but the asks would be written by other RPG blogs that he was also running.
(Socrates would not be on Tumblr, he would be on Twitter, and would be more interested in stirring up drama over controversial issues than defending any one position himself.)
Thales would have a photo blog full of pictures of water: waterfalls, rivers, the sea. Heraclitus would sometimes reblog the river ones.
Heraclitus - total night-blogger. Reblogged by just about everyone, but for some reason no one ever remembers to reblog as text, so as you scroll down your feed all you ever see are fragments from linked posts.
Pythagoras - Posts a lot of gifs of cool natural phenomena followed by the comment: ‘MATHS!’. LOTS of followers, but tells a lot of in jokes you don’t really get if you haven’t been with him from the beginning.
Homer - just gets reblogged EVERYWHERE, frequently without a link to the source. Frequently accused of reposting stuff that’s actually his own work someone else has stolen.
Sophocles - very popular, writes a lot of fanfic. Into incest kinks. Big in Game of Thrones fandom.
Aristotle - follows Plato. Massive following extending onto other social networking platforms. Always a bit Serious. You will not find kittens being adorably incompetent here. Lot of meta about what blogging SHOULD be for.
Herodotus - lots of really interesting posts on history, the kind of stuff that really makes you go ‘huh, that’s cool’… not always particularly well researched.
If Renaissance Dramatists had Tumblr…
Jonson: endless Instagram photos of whatever he’s currently reading. Lots of followers who are mostly too intimidated to speak to him.
Shakespeare: writes tons of fanfiction, most of it AU. Gets a lot of anons complaining about his spelling, grammar, and (lack of) adherence to canon. All of them are Jonson.
Marlowe: veers wildly between giant flame wars over religion and/or gay rights and suddenly going on hiatus for weeks, only to return with a variety of bizarre and improbable stories. Runs a ‘secret’ side blog full of love poetry.
Beaumont and Fletcher: mostly just reblog Shakespeare- and their own weird injokes, even though they live in the same flat.
Dekker: posts a lot from the queue, but is hardly ever actually there because he never pays his internet bill and keeps getting cut off
Greene: hates everyone and everything and eventually ragequits after nobody agrees with his now-infamous rant about Shakespeare and Marlowe.
Nashe: trolls Marlowe’s inbox. Runs a ‘dick jokes’ blog with Shakespeare. Neither of them is ashamed of or sorry about it. They probably should be.
Middleton: instagrams random stuff in London and reblogs Financial Times articles with snarky commentary. Once in a while he reblogs something Shakespeare posted and it gets like a billion notes. Also Dekker posts on his account a lot when his internet is cut off.
Milton: posts incredibly wordy rants that confuse everyone because they’re both politically and religiously radical. Everyone reblogs them but nobody quite understands what they mean.
Spenser: mostly posts Mary Sue fanfic, but it’s beautifully written.
If you ever feel bad about your own writing, just remember that one of the world’s most well-known works of classic literature is self-insert fanfiction where the author hangs out with his favorite poet and is guided on his journey of discovery by a Manic Pixie Dream Girl version of a woman he met twice.
sometimes i think post-modernism looks remarkably like pre-modernism
During the act of reading engaging fiction, we can lose all sense of time. By the final chapter of the right book, we feel changed in our own lives, even if what we’ve read is entirely made up.
Research says that’s because while you’re engaged in fiction—unlike nonfiction—you’re given a safe arena to experience emotions without the need for self-protection. Since the events you’re reading about do not follow you into your own life, you can feel strong emotions freely.
[…]
The key metric the researchers used is “emotionally transported,” or how deeply connected we are to the story. Previous research has shown that when we read stories about people experiencing specific emotions or events it triggers activity in our brains as if we were right there in the thick of the action.
”—
New study by Dutch researchers confirms previoustheories that reading fiction makes you a better person by expanding your capacity for empathy.
I would be interested in seeing a similar study done with other narrative media. Graphic novels, manga, and comic books, seem to follow the description of an empathic work that does not follow your life and allows you to experience the emotions of others.“ And it is still a reading experience. But I feel like taking it further into television and movies might be bordering on poor scholarship. By the same token, what of short stories? Short short stories? Flash fiction? Fan fiction drabbles? (For the purposes of fiction prose, a fan fiction that is 200k words would, I assume, be no different than original fiction of the same sort…)
I would be really interested to see this kind of work replicated with video games - particularly video games of different levels of linearity and plot. Does having your choices impacting the story change the level of empathy or immersion? In which direction? Certainly even a running around and chasing butterflies in skyrim or building houses in the Sims can make us "lose all sense of time,” but what of the claim of empathy?
I feel like the study almost demands to be done with different types of games, what with the claims out there in the news that video games cause the opposite of empathetic growth.
I just worry about researchers outside of the gaming community lumping something relatively freeform, or prized for its freeform play with a more story and character driven game.
I suppose I am similarly curious if the study found the increase in empathy for fiction to be true regardless of the material. Does Lolita and American Psycho produce the same increased empathic skills as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or even something more mainstream like Harry Potter?
If we are going to apply something designed for precision like the scientific method to something as vague and hand-wavy as “fiction” and “empathy” then we might as well go all the way, no?
So I was driving home and something occurred to me that I want to write about real fast, because i am apparently incapable of experiencing moments of learning and NOT sharing it here.
I have been, over time, fond of making jokes about Kieron Gillen killing off Kate Bishop. To me, it’s a joke about cavalierly spoiling another writer’s work and filling that writer’s inbox up with concerned emails and asks. I do this because I love Kieron. He’s one of my dearest friends in comics and out and I am on any given day at any given time in awe of something he’s said or written somewhere. And because Actually Feeling Stuff is hard this is how I show affection. Or at least it was.
For whatever reason I was chewing it over in my head and I started to feel like Lucy with the football. I dunno about you or who you are or what you like but I don’t like feeling like Lucy with the football.
It doesn’t matter what I thought the joke was, it occurs to me that because Kate is Kate and not, say, Karl, it occurs to me that there’s another angle from which to view that joke from that makes it seem… well, mean-spirited. Because this is a thing that comics does to Kates. Frequently.
Which, uh, which is bullshit. And I’m sorry for not sensing that sooner.
So I’m not going to make that joke any more. And I promise nobody’s gonna off Kate so Clint can feel bad about it and do what needs to be done.
Not right now, I mean. Not while she’s carrying that baby.
KIDDING! KIDDING!
Okay, that was the last joke like that. I promise.
For those who don’t know, Kate Bishop aka Hawkeye (not to be confused with Clint Barton aka Hawkeye aka Hawkguy) has been featured pretty prominently in two popular marvel titles. One of them is Hawkeye which Matt Fraction (the OP) writes, which is about Kate and Clint being Hawkeye and what that title and role means (and also about pizza dogs and adorable things) and the other is Young Avengers, written by Kieron Gillen, which is about a group of young super heroes (and gay love).
What Mr. Fraction is saying here that is so awesome and so wonderfully insightful into the medium he is writing in, is that the jokes he makes about Kate being killed off in the other series she is in are far too reminiscent of a real problem in comics - the killing off of women for the pain and motivation of men - as he puts it, “so Clint can feel bad about it and do what needs to be done.”
The next line is a lovely jab at both plot twists and conservative politics, because Mr. Fraction is a wonderful man.
Even if death in Marvel comics doesn’t mean much, the idea that female characters, and the violence enacted on them are tools to further the plot of male characters is a problem, and it is one that Mr. Fraction clearly understands.
It just makes me really happy when people show awareness of the problematic tropes of their medium, and vow to work against them. Also of course that Kate will be around for a while longer.
“Episode 4 saw the words Bad Wolf appear for the first time. I just made it up on a whim, cos I liked the idea of the TARDIS being graffiti’d. But then I spent the rest of the episode idly wondering who that kid was, why he wrote those odd words. And, having dismissed notions of Evil Super Villain Kid, a plan began to form, in mid-production. Knowing that Rose would become the Time Goddess at the end of the series, I wondered if a Time Goddess would imprint herself on the universe, creating things in her image, like the face of Jesus in a bagel. Better still, these signs would actually summon her into existence. That’s the sort of thing you think about in this job, late at night. And then I worked backwards, inserting Bad Wolf references into almost every script. Funnily enough, I never told anyone what I was doing, in case it didn’t work, but the design department picked up on it—they didn’t even ask what it meant, they just offered to stencil it on Captain Jack’s bomb, in German. The idea spread without anyone knowing what it meant. Which is very Bad Wolf in itself.”—Russell T Davies, Doctor Who: The Shooting Scripts (via timelordsandladies)
“never use this word because it’s common, instead use all of these things that i’ll call synonyms even though they carry different connotations and will change the meaning of your dialogue if you use them” — very bad and unfortunately very common writing advice
fortunately, only on tumblr. Intro fiction/poetry day one basically says the opposite. Then they make you read enough Hemingway to long for ANYTHING ELSE.
Teen Wolf is often under fire around Tumblr for being as casually misogynistic as they come. The central women are all love interests or mothers. The female villains die horribly, where the male villains get backstories and development. Sometimes women seem to be gratuitously murdered just because. These accusations all may be true, but I think to call the show as a whole misogynistic is to miss one of the central themes of the show: matriarchy.
Teen Wolf, as far as I can tell, is about matriarchies. Specifically, it’s about matriarchy as an ideal and about the problems that arise when men grab for power that belongs by right to women. Which is to say, all the problems in the show.
“We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.”—Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (via dracarysh)
This actually explains a lot. Everyone who’s raved about Frozen should read this.
Oh my god, this article. The writer of this article seems legit disappointed that the two mains of Frozen are not the Kate Beatonian “Strong Female Character.” While it doesn’t send me into belching globs of rage like I thought it might, I am tempted to waste the afternoon writing a strongly-worded rebuttal.
…but I won’t. Because today is sportsball.
Female characters that make mistakes = anti-feminist, ladies!
A good portion of what she writes is true about Frozen, but her strikes against it doesn’t have much to do with why I like that film. I like the film because, to me, it’s about escaping from your dumb well-intentioned-but-actually-friggin’-abusive biological parents and putting yourself in a place that you can heal. I don’t especially care if any other Disney movie managed to do that first. I like the way this movie did it, and it speaks to me and makes me feel stronger and less alone as a person.
Sometimes you just have to run away from everything, hide yourself in an ice castle, and learn that what you are isn’t terrible. Seeing this reinforced has made me a better, happier adult. The rest of the movie is just details.
Complaining that Elsa is a bad character because she doesn’t “take responsibility” both dramatically misses the point of her character arc completely and suggests to me a certain disturbing lack of empathy for people who actually deal with severe anxiety…
And saying that for Anna fixing her relationship with Elsa is a secondary goal because her second song is about love is… I mean… wow. Just. Wow.
Okay, kudos to everyone who got to the end of this piece of crap article. Wow.
This author, on top of whatever everyone else here said, clearly has no idea what theme and contrast are. What is Anna clumsy? because Elsa is too contained. They are contrasts. Duh? Like. What movie was this person watching?
Elsa doesn’t take responsibility? What - did she have to say those words on camera? Or does this author not know how to read emotion, motivation, or anything that isn’t stated.
External image
And um. Love being Anna’s primary objective? Maybe this author was busy checking her watch when the conflict was resolved, what with the “true love” in the film being that between sisters.
But yeah, nothing outgrosses the fact that this author needs women to be perfect idealized “strong” characters with no flaws or actual traits.
Look at me, I am not a good female character (gender shit aside).
Oh, and the fact that they don’t think that showing that a male love interest can be predatory is important and a feminist message? Psh. John Smith was shown as nonpredatory. And Naveen, who came looking for money, ended up being a god guy after all.
“More than half the questions I am asked are about the politics of the way I look. What it feels like to be not skinny/dark-skinned/a minority/not conventionally pretty/female/etc. It’s not very interesting to me, but I know it’s interesting to people reading an interview. Sometimes I get jealous of white male showrunners when 90 percent of their questions are about characters, story structure, creative inspiration, or, hell, even the business of getting a show on the air. Because as a result the interview of me reads like I’m interested only in talking about my outward appearance and the politics of being a minority and how I fit into Hollywood, blah blah blah. I want to shout, “Those were the only questions they asked!?”—Mindy Kaling (interviewed by Lena Dunham) on the politics of the way she looks (via heidisaman)
revisionist lay criticism for shakespeare is so popular both as like, word-of-mouth truisms — “romeo and juliet isn’t REALLY about love, everyone gets it ALL WRONG, what it’s REALLY about is—” (which is like the literary equivalent of urban legends about hidden legendary pokemon in pokemon red) — and well-meaning but ill-advised attempts to make the supposed canon ‘edgy’ and ‘relatable,’ no shakespeare’s not dry and irrelevant he’s REALLY relevant he’s SUPER relevant! and entertaining too! it comes off as kind of a fearful tryhard bleat, ineffectual flailing in the face of losing kids to paranormal ya and video games. which. the works of william shakespeare are many things but strictly textually relevant to the life of the average american teenager is not one of them. so good luck with that
actually what gets on me more is the common (in fandom and some starry-eyed lit departments) and hopeful claim that shakespeare is or was ~SUBVERSIVE~: usually pointing to the obvious and common elements of tongue-in-cheek homoeroticism and genderbending/crossdressing in his plays. which. uh, again, values dissonance. it’s not that he was flouting taboo, it’s that sociohistorical ‘progression’ even within the same or related cultures is, well, fictitious, but moreover is not actually a linear march from some nebulous state of conservatism to some nebulous state of progressivism with a few setbacks and regressions; the sexual morals of london of shakespeare’s time weren’t the sexual morals of today’s london, and they certainly weren’t the sexual morals of today’s united states. there’s a big difference between asserting that the staging of shakespeare’s work can be harnessed to some progressive purpose in the present day US against our particular shades of puritanical morals and asserting that they were radical purely on grounds that they might make rick santorum uncomfortable.
one can’t just decide that the things one likes and finds personally empowering are intrinsically radical and subversive on a macro, historical level because one wants them to be
… well, one certainly can, as evidenced by the vast majority of tumblr. but. but it’d make me PEEVISH ok
There are definitely valid concerns in this post. For one, assuming that society is inevitably marching from some more primitive state to some more advanced and enlightened state, and that all things can me placed somewhere on this path is not only simplistic and wrong, but rooted in racism and imperialism and very problematic.
The idea that the mores of one era and place can be at all mapped on to those of another is also a really problematic thing, and is an issue in both lay and academic criticisms - don’t think folks in ivory towers are immune from the inability to see the times so differently.
This comment interests me on a meta critical level, though, because that at least since the Romantics, every single movement I can think of has found a way to claim Shakespeare as if not the first of their canon, as a fore runner, or predictor of it - I have read naturalist claiming Shakespeare was a revolutionary in naturalism. Modernists and existentialists were fond of calling him the first modernist or the first true tragedian since the Greeks and thus the founder of their movement. Looking for a foundation in Shakespeare is practically a requirement at this point for a new field of theory and criticism or a new school of play writing. Everyone tries to stage Shakespeare as per the dictates of their favorite school of drama.
So this is very far from either new or lay.
Before I continue, I should note I am by no means very well studied in Elizabethan England nor do I claim to have read, let alone studied, all of Shakespeare’s writing.
But to claim that Shakespeare wasn’t at all subversive is something I question. Yes, it is very true that gender bending would have not been seen as something at all subversive - rather as a kind of sly bit of comedy for a theatre where all parts are played by men anyway. Plays were subject to censor, and Shakespeare’s own family were subject to arrest for religious and/or political reasons. So he was very much aware of the politics of the age. Plays were also “vulgar” entertainment - they were specifically made to appeal to the non-elite as well as the educated. In that sense alone, the Marxist readings of Shakespeare have grounding. In a sense, his play’s contemporary success means he had a good finger on the pulse of his contemporary politics of the “masses” and the elite.
His plays are also noted for breaking with the “standards of drama” of the day. Someone more versed in Elizabethan drama can tell you more, but some contemporary critics noted that he seemed to want for knowledge of convention and knowledge of the canon. That alone can be taken as subversive. People often called him a “natural, unlearned genius” though that comment probably gained popularity due to the Romantics love of that kind of thing.
But it is also important to remember that when a piece of literary criticism mentions “Shakespeare” they might be referring to the canon of Shakespeare’s writing, rather than the man himself. And any arguments they make about the text thus no longer depend one bit on the man himself, and become very easy to divorce from time and place. The gender bending in Shakespeare might not have been subversive for the Globe stage in the 1500’s, but if an all women’s Shakespeare troop preforms the Twelfth Night for an AIDS benefit, suddenly the genderbending becomes very subversive. It’s part of what happens when you allow for Death of the Author - it also kind of kills the original context. (OP did touch on this)
Which takes me to the part I take issue with the most in the original post.
Of COURSE Shakespeare’s canon is relevant to today’s youth. How could it be relevant and critical to every art movement up through the 20th century and suddenly stop?
How are two teenagers, restricted by their parents generations war, stuck in a city plagued by gang violence, caught up in a youthful passion turned tragic NOT relevant to inner city kids? Did you miss West Side Story?
How is Othello and Merchant of Venice not important to students facing discrimination today? Are there no more young women whose lives are controlled and constrained by men?
I mean, here, have a screenshot from a mid 1990’s cartoon from a franchise still making millions in the box office.
He does the whole quotation, but I am not going to subject anyone to more of that animation style. I mean, you’ll be pretty hard pressed to find a Jewish High School in this country that doesn’t make it’s students read that play and discuss it on length. Or HERE is a link to a Key and Peele sketch from this year on Othello, for that perspective.
By the way, OP, I mean you no ill will, if you even read this - this post was stuck in my drafts for who knows how long basically until I had the brain power to get around to typing until I had an excuse to make everyone look at 1990’s animated Hank McCoy.
As one of those weirdo’s not in the Harry Potter maelstrom, I am confused.
Has someone explained Death of the Author to this supposedly great writer of our (postmodern) time?
Because I am getting a serious Night of the Living Dead vibe from this. As in maybe (figurative) shotguns should be more involved.
wish fulfillment is publicly recanting your published novel plot years later
And yes I know Dickens tried to do it in Great Expectations, but does anyone remember how that worked out? Badly. It worked out badly and was not taken well.
If you’re at all familiar with me and my personal thoughts on comicverse Tony Stark, you probably already know that I believe Tony is at least semi-canonically bisexual. There are a lot of reasons for this, most of which I plan to address at some point in the future, but this post is only tangentially related to that viewpoint. This post is mainly about how Tony Stark is sexualized/has his virility or manhood mocked or questioned by villains and antagonists in the comics. At the end, I vaguely describe why I feel this adds fuel to the fire of my theory about his sexual orientation, but in this context that’s more for my personal justification than anything else. In the 1998 Iron Man and Captain America Annual, upon first meeting Tony psychically, Metallo immediately calls into question Tony’s playboy status.
This innuendo, while obviously intended to be a throwaway insult to Tony, is interesting because it presents Tony’s sexual promiscuity as something which weakens Tony, thus questioning his power and subverting the typical societal view of a promiscuous male (one that equates male power with sexuality). According to Metallo, because he is suddenly able to resist Metallo psychologically (he intends to mentally stop him from using mind control), his sexual strength must be diminished through his own will, making power and sexuality mutually exclusive. This then calls into question to power of Iron Man, whose identity is still a secret to everyone at this point. Iron Man’s power is clearly non-sexual in nature, but Tony’s reputation has allowed for questioning of his agency and virility on the part of Metallo, subverting traditional views of male sexual prowess.
“Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care.”—Vladimir Nabokov on Sigmund Freud
killing of women for a man’s pain is so lazy though, like it’s the easiest “character development jump starter” out there. it’s so formulaic. the woman—a daughter, a sister, a lover—dies. The man who loves her, be it her father or her brother or her husband or boyfriend, undergoes intense pain and radical change. Boring.
Instead of killing women, let them live.
Let Jennifer Blake survive Peter Hale and burn Beacon Hills down around them, forcing Derek to chose where his loyalties lie. Let her grow even stronger among the magic in Beacon Hills and slaughter anyone who would dare take what’s hers.
Let Andrea Harrison make it through Woodbury colder and harder and still stunningly compassionate; she won’t make the mistake of trusting a stranger again but she’ll also become a symbol, the woman who won a war with kindness and understanding rather than bullets.
Let Tara Knowles survive Gemma and fight again for her sons, and her husband, and her own life; force her husband to chose between his mother and the club that’s killed his fathers and his friends or his wife who will leave him and his sons. Let Tara live and put her life back together; let her raise her boys right, to be good and proud and strong.
Let Debra Parker outlive Joe Carroll and dismantle his cult by pieces; let her rescue the ones he’s taken and go out into the world and do it again and again and again.
Let Shmi Skywalker walk out of the desert unbroken; let her kindness save her son and spare the galaxy 25 years of darkness.
Let Padme Amidala rise from the ashes of Mustafar; let her fight a war with as much strength and fervor as her fallen husband; let her raise her children to be good and just and true but to never forget where they came from; let her triumph over the Sith and see her Republic returned to her.
Let Frigga slip past Malekith’s blade; let her see through Loki’s illusions and take her son in hand again; let her keep the nine realms safe and balanced through her wisdom and cleverness and magic.
Let Mary Winchester shove a magic knife through Azazel’s chest in their bedroom; let her drive away the hellhounds; let her raise her boys to normal, happy lives.
Let all the women who are murdered for their crime-fighting husbands live; let them defeat their would-be killers and put their angsty husbands to same.
Let all the superheroes’ girlfriends escape a villain’s revenge; let them dodge bullets and death rays and assassin’s knives; let them unmask those villains, let them talk those villains down, let them trample those villains to dust so they never, ever rise again.
Stop cutting women into pieces for a man’s tears. Stop hacking us apart to spur men into action. Stop choking us, stop beating us, stop slitting our throats in our sleep.
Be interesting. Let the woman live. Give her her own strengths and weaknesses and flaws and motivations instead of a knife in the back.
Just think, how much more interesting is the story if the woman’s out on the battlefield instead of stuck inside the refrigerator?
“Much like fairy tales, there are two facets of horror. One is pro-institution, which is the most reprehensible type of fairy tale: Don’t wander into the woods, and always obey your parents. The other type of fairy tale is completely anarchic and antiestablishment.”—Guillermo del Toro on how horror is inherently political as a genre, Time Magazine (x)
Think of a book special to you, and how much bleaker and poorer your life would be if that one writer had not existed—if that one writer had not, a hundred times or a thousand, made the choice to write.
You’re going to be that one writer, one day, for somebody you may never meet. Nobody can write that book you’re going to write—that book that will light up and change up a life—but you.
“The written word is all that stands between memory and oblivion. Without books as our anchors, we are cast adrift, neither teaching nor learning. They are windows on the past, mirrors on the present, and prisms reflecting all possible futures. Books are lighthouses erected in the dark sea of time.”—
Mothafreakin’ Disney’s Gargoyles, Season 2, Episode 4, “A Lighthouse In The Sea of Time.”
sometime I just think about how easy it would be to market superheroes toward little girls and I am filled with rage
like do these people not realize how fucking easy this shit would be
there’s the dazzler she’s like a popstar and a superhero do you know how many 4-12 year old girls would dig that shit
there’s the wasp and her superpowers are seriously like zapping jerks, flying, and being cuter than everybody else. also she’s a famous fashion designer. and she’s better than you. (like she shrinks and stuff too but mainly her power is being better than you)
she-hulk is like this nerdy chick with the power to get bigger and greener and be spontaneously tougher than everybody in the vicinity like I don’t even know a little girl who wouldn’t slit someone’s throat for the ability to be stronger than all the boys when they pissed her off
little girl likes magic? scarlet witch
little girl likes science? invisible woman
little girl likes spies? black widow
little girl likes aliens? karolina dean
little girl likes bionic arms? misty knight
little girl likes flying horses? wow. guess who has one of those? valkyrie. valkyrie does.
My point is that’s it’s so fucking easy so chop-chop, Marvel, get on it. Seriously, I went ten years of my life thinking superheroes were boys. That’s ten years of you not profiting off of my inability to refrain from buying even the crappiest merchandise you offer if it has a character I love on it. Little girls are an enormous market; they will buy all your shit if you just suggest to them that maybe they’d like to.
or you could just keep on not profiting when you could be making money selling literally any object that has enough space to plaster a female superhero’s face on it. that’s cool too.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”—Joan Didion, “The White Album” (via lifeinpoetry)
how can you complain about “mary sue” characters when 90% of mainstream male characters are perfect strong heroes who save the day and “get the girl” but you can’t let a female character be the same without being mocked or having something fucking horrible happen to her you whiny fucking babies
I’m allowed to complain about Mary Sues because 1) I complain about those male characters all the time 2) those male characters are giving unequal depth to the female ones I’m complain about 3) Gary Stus are called out ALL the time - Batman’s Gary Stu-ness is an IN CANON JOKE 4) asking for well-written female characters is not anti-feminist like I can’t believe I even have to say this and insisting that we treat badly written women characters as equally awesome as well-written male ones will not help the cause.
Scientific explanations of witch hunts/trials tho. Like, yeah, no, none of these weird, specific signs and symptoms have any cultural relevance worth uncovering and studying, we can just attribute it all to molds and ticks. You figured it out, science. Great job.
I can’t speak more broadly to like, all witch trials ever, but like, Reginald Scot in the 1500’s basically was like “witches are either nuts, have convinced themselves of lies, catholic and thus stupid, or scammers. I am now going to go undercover and learn how to do every street magic known in england to prove it.” It resulted in a really cool first book of stage and street magic, but also, more relevant - people were totally saying it was BS from way back.
But- but like. Again, I have only really read up on Salem, but, some of that shit sounds just like modern UFO encounter stuff. Bright lights descending from the sky, slowly drawing people in, people feeling stuck in place, glowing balls of light that zoom into peoples bodies, floating cows… I mean, it was uncanny reading it because it was the same stuff that in the 1960’s people were like “this is obvious cold war paranoia”.
So I mean, I am not saying it is aliens, I actually think it is more likely to be this science stuff.
Which is not to say that science explains any of the little yellow birds or specific narratives from black slave traditions that got corrupted by a gaggle of girls or any possible folk or witchcraft that may or may not have been happening, or the sexualization of women’s bodies and the assumption that any abnormality on a women’s body was satanic and evil. Or the fact that a lot of the complaints sound like sexual fantasies/fears or illicit affairs or jealousies - that there is some element of Enlightenment masculine fear over the unknown working itself out here… these are probably still things worth looking at critically.
Like it is really a very shallow reading of social history to think that humans can’t be pushed by just social pressures to do something like this. I mean, even if maybe one or two cases in one or two places had something to do with ergot or something, that wasn’t the case in salem - where if you look at the documents is all about grievances and vengeance and a community that was all into knowing everyone’s business and also remaining all prim and proper about it.
I think things like sleep paralysis and migraine aura and maybe some fear hallucinations and the occasional bad wheat stalk might have added to the fury of it all or even been the spark in some places, but racism and religious passion and national fervor were more than enough kindling. I mean. The testimonies in Salem talk constantly about a “Black Man” in place of the word Devil, and the Black Man is also sometimes said to look like an Indian, and then the Witches fly off with the slaves to a pow wow in the woods. That is not ergot.
All that being said, farmers’ reporting seeing weird shit* at night has sounded very similar for over 300 years and maybe there is science causes in there to.
Or aliens. Don’t despair Mulder, it could still be aliens.
*here is a sample, from Cotton Mathers contemporaneous reporting in Wonders of the Invisible World -
“John Pressy testify’d, That being one Evening very unaccountably Bewildred, near a field of Martins, and several times, as one under an Enchantment, returning to the place he had left, at length he saw a marvellous Light, about the Bigness of an Half-Bushel, near two Rod out of the way. He went, and struck at it with a Stick, and laid it on with all his might. He gave it near forty blows; and felt it a palpable substance. But going from it, his Heels were struck up, and he was laid with his Back on the Ground, Sliding, as he thought, into a Pit; from whence he recover’d, by taking hold on the Bush; altho’ afterwards he could find no such Pit in the place.”
Hello! This is a side blog I am trying to run about Art. Capital A, broad range Art. It will dip into all kinds of media, probably including news, because journalism is a kind of writing and all stories are political. It will deal with all kinds of visual art, including things that not everyone likes to call art. Probably. It will definitely be dealing with pop culture.
As you can tell, there are already some posts here! That is because I have been attempting to get this blog up for a while. And not doing a great job of it.
Most of the reason was because I was trying to come up with a consistent and reliable tagging system. Yeah, I am terrible at those things. I am still going to keep a page where you can browse the tags, and I am still going to be throwing a lot of tags under each post, but like, clicking on the tag “movies” is not going to get you every post about movies because some of them I will just not have tagged that way (try “film” or “cinema”)? I figured content is more important that a perfectly indexed tag system. Anyone who disagrees is free to co-run this blog as tag editor. Please. That would be wonderful.
Oh, and sometimes I might seem like I am taking myself very seriously. That is because Art is totally serious business. But also it totally isn’t. And so those times are just artifacts from me caring a lot about things and that being filtered through having to write English papers for a long time.
Please, enjoy, reblog, submit, share with friends, whatever. Questions are always welcome!
i’ve been reading a book of award winning literary short stories and a book of kinda trashy post-apocalyptic speculative fiction short stories and guess which book displays more jaded contempt for humanity hint it’s not the one with all the nuclear fallout
My 5-year-old insists that Bilbo Baggins is a girl.
The first time she made this claim, I protested. Part of the fun of reading to your kids, after all, is in sharing the stories you loved as a child. And in the story I knew, Bilbo was a boy. A boy hobbit. (Whatever that entails.)
But my daughter was determined. She liked the story pretty well so far, but Bilbo was definitely a girl. So would I please start reading the book the right way? I hesitated. I imagined Tolkien spinning in his grave. I imagined mean letters from his testy estate. I imagined the story getting as lost in gender distinctions as dwarves in the Mirkwood.
Then I thought: What the hell, it’s just a pronoun. My daughter wants Bilbo to be a girl, so a girl she will be. And you know what? The switch was easy. Bilbo, it turns out, makes a terrific heroine. She’s tough, resourceful, humble, funny, and uses her wits to make off with a spectacular piece of jewelry. Perhaps most importantly, she never makes an issue of her gender—and neither does anyone else.
“Consider the the rival powers in Westeros. The Starks are fatalistic, duty-bound, honorable but kind of unsophisticated. The Lannisters are appetite-driven plutocrats. The Baratheons were markedly varied, but the surviving one is driven and joyless, having perhaps inherited the Stark “hat” now that there’s not a Stark head left to wear it. The Martells are given to plotting and sexual license. We know less about the Tyrells, but they seem to value chivalry and court culture: consider Loras’ prowess, consider the splendor of Margaery’s entourage and weddings, consider how much more talented the Tyrell fool Butterbumps is than any of the other fools we’ve met.
Now, consider the rival powers among the Dothraki. Was it Khal Jommo’s khalasar that valued chivalry? Were Khal Ogo’s people the least trustworthy? Did Khal Drogo’s have a unique worldview shaped from their long tradition of cultural exchange with the Free Cities? Or are all the khalasars exactly freaking the same, because that’s how it works when you’re an oriental other in speculative fiction?
This is something of a dead horse, but while we are posting our definitive opinion on things, we might as well have at it. This issue is not just important to me, it’s a necessary step towards creating good narrative, so it really must be covered. It would be an understatement to say I feel passionately about this. Women and storytelling is pretty much all I care about, because “female characters” and “characters” are one and the same thing.
A lot of people are in a lot of disagreement about what the fuck Gamzee is actually saying and what we’re supposed to take away from it. I’m here to help shed some light on the issue. My credentials to do so? Well, I’ve been a juggalo for thirty years.
Not really, but I’ve been doing a lot of research and I’m an Amurrcan that grew up around the sort of low-income troublekids that ICP markets itself too, I had a friend show me some of their music when I was a kid! And of course nowadays I’ve done my extensive journeying through juggalo lore to learn more about everybody’s least favorite sodaclown.
So basically you’re just gonna have to take my word for this one, right? Or not!! I am not your earth human mother.
GAMZEE: MOTHER FUCK WHO’S ALL THIS FRESH PIMP RYDA I GOT MY WICKED PEEP ON FOR SUDDENLY? IT’S A MOTHER FUCKIN NINJALICIOUS HO-TITTY MIRACLE JACKED UP IN THIS BITCH ASS MOTHER FU—
Okay just look at this, just look at it, for one! It’s fucking ridiculous. It doesn’t actually sound much like anything gamzee’s ever said before? It’s hyperbolic to the extreme, I’m sure it’s meant to be “look at how funny he talks” more than anything. Narratively this is a hugely awkward place to be putting in weird jokes about how hot aranea is or whatever.
Most people are hung up on “Ninjalicious Ho-Titty” but with this sentence structure he’s not even calling her “ninjalicious ho-titty.” Let’s break this shit down.
MOTHER FUCK WHO’S ALL THIS FRESH PIMP RYDA I GOT MY WICKED PEEP ON FOR SUDDENLY?
Pretty basic. “MOTHER FUCK” (expletive) WHO (subject) ‘S ALL (auxiliary verb) THIS FRESH PIMP RYDA (person, this is just, another way to say person, i promise you it means nothing? Not that hussie is going to be anywhere near using urban/rap lingo as anything other than a big joke but yeah “fresh pimp ryda” is basically just a way to say person.) I GOT MY WICKED PEEP ON FOR SUDDENLY (saw)
Translation
WHO ARE YOU?
Not wow who’s this hot lady!!! no. A “pimp ryda” is not a term for a hot lady. A fresh pimp ryda is not actually a phrase anyone really recognizes at all. Hussie is just slamming a bunch of perceived lower-class words together to make gamzee look kind of stupid and incoherent and well??? Checking the fandom response, it’s working?? blugh.
IT’S A MOTHER FUCKIN NINJALICIOUS HO-TITTY MIRACLE JACKED UP IN THIS BITCH ASS MOTHER FU—
Here’s where the contestion is. What’s he saying??
The subject here is not Aranea. The subject is “It,” and gamzee messes up his grammatical references, sure, but he’s never referred to a person as “it” before. What’s he talking about? Literally, “It!” What’s going on, what’s happening, the situation, man, which is all up and being “A MOTHER FUCKIN (expletive) NINJALICIOUS (Very ninja, ninja being ‘homie’ or relevant to the posse but I don’t actually think. It’s intended to really be hinting at anything) HO-TITTY (same tone as “wicked bitchtits) MIRACLE JACKED UP IN THIS (here in this) BITCH ASS MOTHERFUCKER (where I am currently)”
What he’s saying is
WHAT’S HAPPENING??? THIS IS STRANGE AND I DO NOT UNDERSTAND. ALSO I AM A JUGGALO, IN CASE YOU FORGOT?
Like I’m not hugely surprised people are having a hard time pulling what he says apart or are making fun of him or are immediately interpreting everything he says as objectifying/misogynist because it’s hip hop lingo and what has anyone ever ELSE done about black music and its propagations and its vernacular am I fucking right??? haha
But the point here is that Gamzee doesn’t talk like everyone else, he’s very confused, he’s very upset, he spills a bunch of jargon, it sounds funny, Aranea talks about how disgusting he is and then mind controlls him. Gamzee always had difficulty communicating and this was undoubtedly related to his upbringing. he’s always spoke sort of wrong, his dialect being a mashup between highblood scripture and lowblood vocabulary. Linguistically, he walks a line a lot of real people do on earth when they grow up in low-income/urban places and then to have a bunch of middle-class people call them “uneducated” sooo. Come on, people, don’t miss that you’re doing that here, and don’t miss that hussie is playing off this lower-class social phenomenon and speech patterns to make a big joke out of them.
Either way? This is the wrong time to be vilifying Gamzee for how he speaks because it’s exactly the justification Aranea is using to remove his speaking privledges, which is an absolutely concerning thing for her to be doing. Do not repeat the whole Tavris debacle, fandom, I’m begging you.
And that’s Clown Essay part 1.
This is a good analysis. I honestly assumed that body language alone was enough to convey that Gamzee was upset and freaking out over being mind controlled, but apparently that’s not something people pick up on? I don’t know, sometimes Homestuck fans confuse me a little.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a joke about low class language alone necessarily, even. We know that quirks get more pronounced and text gets less readable the more upset people are. The more upset Karkat is, the more lurid his metaphors become, the more upset Vriska is the more letters turn into 8s, and so on. Gamzee is just following that pattern here, and as usual the comic is setting up a funny situation with a darker undercurrent to it—that long string of incoherent text and Aranea’s reaction is funny, but also disturbing the more you think about it. The comic is extremely good at setting up those uncomfortable laughter moments, really.
Unlike a reader who can pass on a script after the first awkwardly constructed page, a competition reader must read on, deeply, in order to provide feedback to the writer. You want this reader on your side immediately.
Dialogue can help. Even how it looks on the page helps.
BALANCED WHITE SPACE IS YOUR BEST FRIEND - The ratio of dialogue to action lines on your pages may seem cosmetic. You may have read the Oscar-winning screenplay ofDjango Unchained and feel that your voice and vision belong in that category, or you may offer the rebuttal that filmmaking is a visual medium so action lines should be as densely luxurious as a neckbeard. However.
When you submit your script to a competition, you have to get a yes from the first wall of readers, who are under tough deadlines on a next-to-volunteer basis. Crisp and balanced white space on your pages is like good foreplay, it tells the reader you are serious about making this a wonderful experience for them. You want the reader to approach your script with hope in her heart.
So your dialogue and your action lines should look accessible.
Because…
BAD DIALOGUE LOOKS BAD ON THE PAGE - The ways to make your dialogue look bad before it’s even read are legion.
Pages full of long speeches look bad. Speeches in films are often the ONLY speech in that film, which has taken the entire film to set up. They look like tedious reading.
Pages full of very short lines of dialogue unbroken by action lines look bad. They look like they can’t possibly justify the space, and are generally full of greetings and pleasantries, the enemies of getting in to your scene late and exiting early.
Pages full of dialogue in which an action line interpreting the dialogue precedes each line of dialogue look terrible. “He squints, confused.” “She averts her eyes playfully.” They double the read time, and if they are all necessary, the dialogue doesn’t speak for itself.
Talking head scenes that go on for pages look bad. Do some scenework. If you need people to talk to each other at great length, put the scene somewhere with some visual interest, preferably somewhere that tells part of the story for you, or while they are doing something important to the plot.
So now that you have your white space looking inviting, the actual words you write in the dialogue must live up to their promise of professional-level punch-packing.
It basically comes down to one thing.
EXPOSITORY DIALOGUE IS DEATH - Most of what kills your dialogue is an expository style. In short, telling me what’s going on. This reaches far beyond backstory and repetition, it is a style of dialogue that habitually states the obvious.
The greatest joy in dialogue is the unexpected. A reveal, a dropped bomb, a reversal, a threat, a lie. That kind of dialogue sizzles and excites. Expository dialogue is everything else. Explanations, indications, illustrations.
Good dialogue reveals and develops characters with what they don’t say and when they don’t say it more often than not. The last thing you want to waste dialogue on is what we already know, or what we are already looking at, or what we are about to look at. Subtext is more interesting to read.
Then there are pet peeves.
DIALECT SHOULD NOT BE VISIBLE - No extra apostrophes or words spelled to reflect a pronunciation, please. It takes time to solve dialogue like an acrostic.
DON’T INTRODUCE YOUR CHARACTER FIFTEEN TIMES - Special Agent Catherine Clay, FBI. This is Special Agent Catherine Clay, FBI. I’d like you to meet Special Agent Catherine Clay, all the way from the FBI in the big city. Catherine Clay, Special Agent, FBI, she’ll be working with us.
DIALOGUE IS NOT FOR DOGMA - The writer’s position on a given issue can be revealed in a lot of ways, but it falls flat on the page when it’s spoken aloud by a character whose sole function is to educate the reader about it.
PROOFREAD FIFTEEN TIMES - There is a well-known phenomenon that writers are blind to their own typing errors. In dialogue, it’s especially important to proof relentlessly, because that’s where the errors jump out at readers. Missing words, misspelled words, extra words, wrong character names. Readers may skim action lines to get the gist, but the dialogue gets more scrutiny.
Put that entry fee to good use! Get a yes. Move on to the next round.