The Tradëscan Codex

Consider some texts, all of which count as fannish on my flist (if nowhere else):

• Veronica Mars: A sixteen-year-old girl defies parental authority in many ways including, but not limited to, having sexual relations with three different individuals. (Admittedly this behavior led to her death, but the show consistently portrayed Lilly Kane in a mostly positive light.) After her death, her best friend defies parental and civil authorities by engaging in a series of investigations bringing many things to light. Ultimately, these authorities learn that the best course of action is to let Veronica run her course: upon finding his daughter in a coat closet, Keith remarks, "Yep, that's mine," and upon her graduation Van Clemens admits that he doesn't know if her absence will make his life easier or harder.
• Matilda: A six-year-old (in bookverse) girl defies parental authority by playing a series of practical jokes on her parents and, when they are forced to flee the country, convincing them to sign over guardianship to a Miss Jennifer Honey, with whom in movieverse Matilda has a relationship of equals.
• The Secret Garden: Defying the parental authority of her uncle and guardian Archibald Craven, as well as his surrogates Mrs. Medlock and Dr. Craven, Mary Lennox enters a forbidden girl garden and carries on a secret relationship with her cousin Colin, effecting his cure in the process.
• A Little Princess: Even before Sarah Crewe is forced to withstand the authority of Miss Minchin, the text takes pains to underscore the girl's adult nature and the egalitarian character of her relationship with her father, who treats her as a miniature adult. It also uses the word "queer" a lot.
  
• The Chronicles of Narnia: Four children defy the authority of the parental surrogates by hiding in a wardrobe, where they wage a war against the evil witch Jadis and save a magical world, becoming Kings and Queens in the process.
• The Parent Trap: Two twin eleven-year-old girls defy parental authority by secretly switching places and living each others' lives. In the process, they manipulate their parents into meeting and falling in love again.
• As You Like It: Two cousins defy parental and civil authority when they enter the forest to escape the rule of the evil Duke Frederick.
• Harry Potter: Not that I've ever read the books, but a twelve-year-old boy defies the parental authority of his aunt and uncle by becoming a wizard. At the school of wizardry, three children operate outside of the school authority, continually disobeying the explicit directives of their professors, and in the process triumph again and again, presumably culminating in the defeat of the Dark Lord. While what the professors were thinking is debated, one theory is that it was their plan from the beginning to let these children run loose, recognizing they would be able to succeed where adults would fail. In any event, the disobedience of these children is celebrated by the professors as the children win the House Cup year after year.
• Robert A. Heinlein: Where to begin? From Podkayne to Peewee to Laz and Lor, this is a multiverse chock full of supercompetent teenagers who either operate outside the bounds of, or are forced to defy, parental authority.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Another case of "Do I really need to say anything here?"

All of these texts act out a specific type of wish-fulfillment fantasy: the usurpation of parental authority by a child who is revealed to be more intellectually mature than her adult counterparts. It is a fantasy that pings powerfully for me (as well as many others), even now that I am no longer quite a teenager. It is an especially potent expression of the will to power, being beyond all authorities because one is just that good, ubermensch.

It is no coincidence that Sunnydale and Neptune each has one good parent, Joyce Summers and Keith Mars respectively. (Actually Neptune, while including a huge number of bad parents, isn't quite so bad as Sunnydale. Both Wallace and Jackie have parents who all, in the whole, good parents, and the Mackenzies and Sinclairs are not really bad parents despite their inability to meaningfully engage their respective [adopted] daughters.) Parents in this type of fantasy are like governments: King Log is to be preferred to King Stork, and the parent who parents least parents best.

This is the context in which fictional incest thrives. While "in the real world" (how I loathe that phrase!) incest, cross-gen, and mentor/teacher relationships all are problematic due to issues of consent, these difficulties disappear in the face of the radically autonomous children of the adolescent fantasy. Of course Lilly, Veronica, Matilda, Mary, Sara, Susan, Annie, Hallie, Rosalind, Celia, Hermione, Podkayne, Peewee, Laz, Lor, Dawn, and all the rest are capable of consent--the very nature of the fantastic world in which they exist assures they are capable of anything.

Keith/Veronica, Matilda/Jenny, Mary/Neville, Crewecest, Peter/Susan, Annie/Hallie, Rosalind/Celia, Hermione/McGonagall, Laz/Lor, Dawn/Giles: these are not pairings that Ari and I invented in our minds. For me (I won't speak for anyone else), the sexualization of these relationships is a response to--and a reaffirmation of--the fantastic element which attracted me to these texts in the first place: the radical autonomy of the pre/teen characters.

*

And I really should finish that "Buffy as Nietzschean Ubermensch" essay.

Apparently, this year--i.e. the first year I've signed up for 3_ships--is the first year that 3_ships will be disallowing incest. Which means that Simon/Kaylee/River threesome I was so looking forward to requesting is out. Sad.

Luckily, Mac/Madison is not technically incest. And there are loads of other interesting potential threesomes, and while I did keep on going, "No, wait, that's incest," I did finally manage to pick four, three f/f/m and one f/f/f.

Speaking of incest, I watched Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (the film, obviously, I didn't sit staring at the books) trusting it to be 'cestastic, and it mostly was, but that was a pretty certain conclusion seeing as I brought my trusty 'cest goggles. ( Spoilers start here )

Otherwise, I wonder if they committed the cardinal sin of adapting children's stuff which is funny: they made it a comedy. Now, I get the feeling that maybe the source books don't really take themselves too seriously, as I'm assuming Jude Law's narration was suppose to capture the whimsy of the original. But I know of plenty of other movies which have committed this sin (it's a common mistake, for reasons I don't pretend to understand). The original texts of Scooby Doo, Inspector Gadget, or what have you are not comedies. They are funny, yes, just like Buffy was often funny, but they took their premises seriously--or at least I, as a young viewer, did so. Inspector Gadget is a thrilling action-adventure series about a teenaged girl with a really cool book, and the way the movie version wasted Michelle Trachtenberg was a crime. (Doing Inspector Gadget as a movie right would so hit so many of my kinks!) I saw the cartoon series Men in Black first and was sorely disappointed when I saw the movie which inspired it--a mere Will Smith comedy that didn't take its science fiction premise seriously.

Speaking of adaptation, I also a version of Jane Eyre that had Anna Paquin in it, and there I think the film was harmed by overly slavish devotion to the original, as if the filmmakers felt they had to tell the same exact story that Charlotte Bronte had hundreds of pages to tell in under two hours. It seemed clear that what they thought the book was about was (or at least that the story they wanted to tell, or thought would sell, was) a love story, making that Jane's central character arc, but if that is the case then all of Paquin's scenes--despite being the best scenes in the movie--were completely superfluous and took away time from developing the story they really wanted to be telling, so that ( probably gratuitous spoiler cut ) seems completely pasted on.

Seriously, dudes: figure out what story you (you, not the original source) are telling, and then tell it. Skipping step #1 is so not optional.

Except in Hollywood it seems it kinda is.

Gilmore Girls

I really liked it. Plot stuff was good, nice developments, dialogue was fun, Alexis is still hot. Two thumbs up.

Although what was up with those act breaks? I mean, I know, "fade out on scary monster" isn't so much an option in this genre, but still.

Veronica Mars

Honestly, only look under the cut if you're really bored. Short story is I enjoyed it. Under the cut is random impression recorded as I watched.

( spoilers, sorta )

Masochist, noun. A canon whore in X-Men movieverse fandom.

1. How old is Kitty Pryde? What does she look like? And why the frell is she an X-Man? (In the sense of being on the team, that is. I love Kitty, but there is absolutely no explanation given.)

2. Since we see Hank with non-blue skin in X2, the secondary stage of his mutation must have set in some time while Jean was dead, right? So his reaction to his response to Leach is one to being returned to a state he very recently held, right? Which raises the question, when did he become in charge of Mutant Affairs? I had the impression he was "closeted" during X2, but that might not be canon--we don't see him long enough to base many conclusions upon his scene (if you can call it that).

3. In X3, we have four distinct "times." If I remember correctly, they are: thirty years "ago", twenty years "ago", the not-too-distant "future", and the narrative "now" against which the other times are being measured ("our" past, "our" future). So Jean's age is her age in the flashback (early teens?) + twenty/thirty years (I forget which flashback was which) + the difference between "now" and the not-too distant future. Warren's age, same deal. Right?

Anyone who has been following this LJ knows I am a defender of seriality. I (in theory if not always in practice) wait until a work is finished to start posting but still serial post it anyway, and always use the same anecdote about my brother complaining about how shows on DVD are missing something without the commercials. It's an intellectual position designed to give the author as many tools in their toolbox as possible, because most of my flist are talented writers whom I trust to use those tools effectively. The anticipation, the frustration, the withdrawal: these emotions, while not always pleasant, are sometimes what we need even if they aren't what we want. (Yes, I will go to the grave defending Joss for that quote.)

But don't think for a moment that I'm immune to the pleasure of inhaling an entire chaptered fic or season on TV. There's something wonderful about being so caught up in a fictional universe that one loses track of the soi-disant "real world" (which makes me think about how it has been way too long since I've read a novel, especially a long one).

Of course, the simple truth is that for the most part, the only practical mechanism for producing such detailed worldbuilding and depth of story is a serial one. So we have a paradox; we must embrace seriality in order to eschew it.

Which is a (characteristically, for me) long-winded way of saying that I've spent the last week or so mainlining episodes of The 4400. I watched season 1 (such as it is) last Saturday, and watched season 2 (again, such as it is) Thursday and Friday.

The 4400, while excellently done science-fiction, isn't nearly will-to-powery enough (which is one of its strengths, actually) for it to earn the sort of love I have for Buffy or Veronica Mars. (When they start the spin-off series Tess of the 4400, on the other hand....) But I think it'll settle in comfortably with my other minor fandoms.

( Vaguely spoilerish? )

International Blog Against Racism Week is coming to a close. I like to think that every week is International Blog Against Sexism week in my journal, but race doesn't get mentioned all that often. I can't post with any particularly appropriate icons, for all the eight people who appear in my six icons are all white. While I think we are agreed that's deeply problematic, it is not as if going and getting an icon of a character I don't really like would solve anything. The issue is deeper, systemic, and blaming the individual never solves anything. (Not that I should be absolved of responsibility, either.) Changing my icons won't change anything; changing whatever made me not as interested in the non-white characters will, alongside an honest attempt to understand and appreciate the characters I might not "get."

(Honestly, this is how I see affirmative action most of the time. I don't oppose it anymore, because I think the restrictions on it by the Supreme Court are extremely fair, but I don't see it working particularly well, either.)

The closest character to a character of color whom I really loved is Kennedy, and she (and/or Iyari?) passed for white to me for the entire time I watched the show. I even sort of remember the "Really? Hmm" moment when I learned that Iyari Limon was Latina--and of course there are photo shoots of her that I've seen since which really accentuate it.(And there was a really great post about that and how problematic it is on my flist a couple days ago. Let me finish my thought and I'll hunt down the link.) Class issues intersect here--it was clearly established that Kennedy was at least upper-middle class, with a vacation house on Long Island, and there seems to be a weird (or not-so-weird, really, when one thinks about it) way that "upward" mobility requires a much greater enculturation in white culture (i.e., patriarchal hegemony) so that we would expect an upper-class Latina to pass for white better than a lower-class one.

Part of it is to whom I'm attracted; with the exception of the Mesektet/Dark Champions icon, all of my icons contain at least one character to whom I'm attracted. Why do I tend not to be attracted to people who are non-white (and when I do find such a person attractive, it is typically on "white" standards of beauty)? Well, "socialization" is the easy and obvious answer there, but I think the damage has been pretty much done by this point. Any suggestions as to how I can save future generations from this? (Of course, any evaluation of a person based on appearance is problematic from a feminist viewpoint, but it is not a practice from which we can very easily escape.)

Okay, so I wanted to use this time to revisit the question of whether texts can speak with moral voices, because that's part of what is at stake when we look at racism/sexism/classism in texts. There is nothing outside the text, so by definition every act of racism/sexism/classism is carried out via texts. And structural raceism/sexism/classism is built into the very language in which we create the texts, which presents those constructing the text with an interesting dilemma--we must work within the language so as to be communicative, but outside it so as to be liberatory. Twas brilig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.

Sunnydale is a white, upper-middle-class community. Now there's some worldbuilding issues here, admittedly. We know that Sunnydale has people moving in and out a lot, and the property values are low, and I'm not an economics major so I don't know what it would take to keep up the upper-middle-class lifestyle that the residents of Sunnydale have. And it's been argued that geographically, there's no way a Californian suburb with that level of moving in and out could keep the level of racial homogeneity that it does. I don't know enough about California to speak to that issue. What I do know that here on the East Coast, there are plenty of towns just like Sunnydale.

To say that because Sunnydale is a white community that there is something oppressive with Buffy is ludicrous (and I'm not accusing anyone of making such an argument, just working through a train of thought.) Otherwise, only shows taking place in the Feminist Utopia would be proper, and I'm not sure that such a show would at all be entertaining. Instead, we must look at what function Sunnydale's whiteness performs. Insofar as Buffy is a subversive attack on the complacency of white middle class Americans, Sunnydale's whiteness is a suitably progressive source of satire. We know that the show called attention to the lack of diversity at least once, when Mr. Trick first entered Sunnydale.

If you're not convinced by this reading of Buffy I could go on, drawing on more details and whatnot. But as a result of various meta discussions, I'm not sure whether there is any correct reading. Buffy is a floating signifier, and as a result it says nothing and everything about race. A racist moving picture from the late 19th century might be the most powerful message against racism in the contemporary moment: it self-satirizes.

So what is a radical feminist to do, other than throw their hands up in despair? Nothing is forbidden, everything is permitted? Well, this is where the switch from theory to praxis comes in. (Although the way we conceptualize praxis--which is, of course, another type of text--is ultimately dependent on theory.) In this world, are people of color empowered or disempowered by the Buffy text? This is an empirical question that cannot be answered by watching Buffy alone, and as such, I have no idea what the answer is. And while I think censorship is always an evil, and that people have a responsibility to their Muses, there is no responsibility to go out of our way to disseminate damaging (i.e. damaging in the specific here/now of a sociohistorical location) texts.

An it harm none, do what thou will.

(To recognize "harm" as such, of course, we need a theoretical apparatus already in place--in this case, my radical feminist convictions.)

This is why, as I've said before in this journal, there is no such thing as a feminist text, and the flipside of the argument is that there is no such thing as a racist text: because texts don't speak with a moral voice. They don't speak with any voice at all; they need to be interpreted.

Okay, it's actually today today. Saturday. So that's good and all.

Spent the day listening to Dr. Who audiobooks, and I'm now ready to have Tennant's mpreg babies.

His Rose impersonation seemed a little off, didn't quite capture her spunk, and his Doctor was curiously understated compared to the way he plays him on TV, but he nailed Jackie and Mickey. Is that because they have more distinctive accents? And some of the other voices were just amazing. And hearing him switch between the Scottish accent (for narration) and the English one (for the Doctor) was so much fun.

And the dialogue given to the Doctor by the book writers was so perfect. It was as if you could hear the Doctor saying it. Well, you could hear the Doctor saying it, which was the beauty of it all.

Listening to the Doctor Who/Treaure Island fusion and comparing it to fanfic was particularly interesting especially since the debt to Robert Louis Stevenson wasn't disclaimed.

Speaking of the Tenth Doctor, let me say I'm overall satisfied with the way "Doomsday" panned out. I agree with all the opinions of the people on my flist. This includes the people who hated, those who loved it, and those in between--I agree with you all.

( spoiler )

I recognize that it's the nature of Who that ( slightly spoilerish about something everyone knows now anyway ) but I like shows with continuity and continuing story arcs so I hope we will continue to see some of the recurring cast. I'd especially like to see Harriet Jones again. In some ways, my concern is similar to my concerns about the directions Veronica Mars will be going next season. (I better get to see Madison Sinclair again. Preferably as much as we saw her in the first two seasons, but short of making her a vampire I don't know how to make that work.)

Memes that have been going around my flist, the first of which being answered in excruciating detail (includes visited countries, visited states, and combat card):

(Click here to post your own answers for this meme.)

✓ I miss somebody right now.  ("I miss my girlfriend" is sort of a mental catchphrase for me. Then again, I have a lot of mental catchphrases, inluding "What day is it?" "What's for dinner?" "Where am I going?" and "Clothing is discouraged but not forbidden." They're just random lines that pop into my head when I'm not really thinking about anything.)	✓ I don't watch much TV these days.  (I watch more than I used to, though, between Who and Veronica Mars and random other things.)	✓ I own lots of books.
✓ I wear glasses or contact lenses.  (Glasses are hot.)	× I love to play video games.	× I've tried marijuana.
× I've watched porn movies.  (I still remember the time in high school when, after class, I found what I can only assume was a pornographic video. When Brother Jim, the Dean of Students, walked by I immediately flagged him down and informed him of what happened, and he destroyed the video in front of me.)	× I have been the psycho-ex in a past relationship.  (I've had no past relationships. Unless you count various relationships that weren't.)	✓ I believe honesty is usually the best policy.
× I curse sometimes.  (My expletives include "WTF?" "Zut alors!" and "Expletive!" I've never said the F-word. This might surprise those of you whom have only read my fic--I do NOT talk/think the way my characters talk/think.)	✓ I have changed a lot mentally over the last year.	× I carry my knife/razor everywhere with me.  (I really feel like I should, though. And that I should have a cigarette lighter at all times even though I don't speak. After all, I was a Boy Scout once.)

( it goes on... )

I was reading a fic in a fandom in which I don't do all that much reading, and hit the back button halfway through the first paragraph. Then, intrigued, I went back (i.e. forward) and checked myself. And, yes, the exposition-y nature of the opening kept up throughout.

I thought about it. Those opening sentences signalled to me two things: 1) that the POV was either 3rd person omniscient, 3rd person objective, or a 3rd person limited which didn't deeply penetrate at all, and 2) the author wasn't able to use the POV effectively.

There's no wrong POV in which to write (although one might be a wise or bad choice for a particular story), but 3rd person objective is a very tricky perspective. The actions in the stories have to speak for themselves. It's a particularly poor choice for a fic where the emphasis is romance and sex, in my opinion, because we don't care how much how it happens as to what effect it has on the charcaters.

For the other varieties of 3rd, omniscient and limited, it comes down to voice. I don't care if the narrative voice is that of the POV character or that of an omniscient narrator (wisdomeagle has done some great things with language using an omniscient narrator), but it needs to be distinctive, engaging--there has to be a personality behind it. There's a pretty significant difference between an objective recounting of what happened in the two years leading up to a fic and Faith remembering what happened in those two years. Faith is going to give it her own spin, make us care about it.

So I went through my own recent first lines to see how well I stand up to these standards.

From R3 2.3.16:

“They’re lying to us.”

This isn't really the actual first line, but the first paragraph is lifted straight from Orson Scott Card and italicized. So karabair's recent advice not to use dialogue to start a story doesn't really apply, I suppose. Although it does apply--because right above what I consider to be the first paragraph, there is an epigraph-ish thing which consists only of dialogue lifted from Card's novel. Now part of the intended effect is to recreate the feel of Ender's Game, because that's how he introduces the chapters in that book, with these giant chunks of disembodied conversation.

But karabair defends her choice to start a story with dialogue by claiming its "deliberately disorienting," which strikes me as one hell of a loophole. I like to start scenes and chapters with dialogue in part because of the disorienting effect: it throws you into a scene running, in media res. It's the literary equivalent of a fast cut. Which I suppose isn't a good idea when you're just fading in from black (indeed, the cinematic metphor doesn't even make sense), but as a transition I enjoy it.

And the fact is that in fanfiction there are no fade ins the way there are in original fiction. We are all already familiar with the universe, so a line like

"Jayne, if you don't put that down and get back on this ship right now we'll leave without you, so help me."

isn't really all that disorienting, is it?

From Five Views on Breaking and Entering:

It had been six years since Faith had seen the inside of a police station.

( Read more... )

My point being . . . well, I don't really have a point. I just like, like any writer(?), to talk about my writing. But, as everyone knows but some people still seem to haven't figured to apply, first lines count. So I try to make them as interesting, as do all of you on my flist. (Well, maybe you don't try. But you do it anyway.)