beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

Today I am grrr about stories where people treat people like animals
which, duh, is the basic point of the story as far as I can see
that everyone else sees a Beast and the protagonist sees a someone
but it's enraging
and I keep being mad at the imaginary people
like they asked a veterinarian what to do
they'd have got a different answer if they'd asked someone who works with traumatised people with intellectual or cognitive impairments
but people in stories seldom do.

It's reminding me of the chained in a basement phase of Sara Lance's story on Arrow
where we're supposed to ever like her family again after they thought that was a good idea.
Even when someone is scared and confused and lashing out, that is not a helpful way.

These are not new problems, but story people treat them like they're new and shameful.
grrrrr.

I get kind of worried when every struggle is phrased in terms of a fight.
I mean, I get it, feeling endangered and attacked means fight.
But we kind of more need the after fight parts?

Like, it's struggle, but it's a work. Many together work. Build and grow and make sure everyone gets what is needed.
Necessary is the part with sitting down together and coming to agreement and making good law.

I mean, that's the bit the fight is manuevering for.
The getting on and living well bit.

So it bothers me, when everything is fight.


Like Star Trek being whoosh booms and not diplomacy, it seems to reflect problem, not solution.



But sometimes there is fight.

Still, I'm finding I'm more a build a wall person than build a jaeger
even knowing how that worked out.
You'd have nice walls still, after.

And this is definitely not me saying not to be angry, have all the feelings, but maybe like Granny Weatherwax, walled up except the stream that drives the turbines.


But I'm the D&D player who really looked forward to building a fortified abbey. All that adventurong all very well, but wanted food place to go home to and all the benefits of peace.

sometimes I get bored and try and find clothes for my characters.
this sometimes involves using the dollmaker sites, but other times I'll browse catalogues.
I have a whole folder full of things from goth websites that'll do for my dystopic futures, including some very sharp pseudo militaria that'll suit for uniforms for starfleets.

it'd be fun to do this sort of thing as a collaborative challenge, but DW isn't really the platform for pictures. I don't know where is because I'm rarely in a picture mood.

it's weird thinking about how much detail we can get out of small changes in costume. like today I'm looking at workwear websites, checking out tunics. The distinctions between a chef's tunic and a dentist's are small yet easily read. http://www.matrixuniforms.co.uk/index.php was where I was looking. they've got some tunics in the Beauty section that'll do lovely for SF uniforms. http://www.matrixuniforms.co.uk/Beauty.51/Ladies_Beauty_Tunics.146/ , particularly http://www.matrixuniforms.co.uk/Beauty.51/Ladies_Beauty_Tunics.146/Jasmine_Long_Sleeve_Tunic__BZ35_.1129.html . The Gents versions don't have half the variety though, and you can't make them match. *sulks*

Other clothes it's more fun to wonder who exactly would wear those. Voluntarily. I do have a character who'd love the Unisex Harlequin pants but ze also wears a patchwork tale coat and makes a living out of being the centre of attention. There's matching hats and neckerchiefs. I have visions of rooms full of chefs wearing these things and just wonder what they'd be cooking.

I reckon I can make my post apocalyptic people wear this stuff because if it's polyester then it'll be around forever. Non-biodegradable. They'd have to grow their own cotton or wool or whatever, but some of these synthetics they could dig out of landfills in later centuries and just scrub up a bit. If it was a sudden apocalypse there'd be warehouses full of such things. Future people wearing a lot of cheap supermarket uniforms because those things will never rot isn't a vision I've read elsewhere, but really, it makes sense.

Really, what is it that makes a bold trim healthcare tunic visually distinct from the tunics of other disciplines? Or the other sorts that are less scifi on account of having collars. I don't understand collars. I mean, why? I know some of them are for ties, but we're back to why very swiftly. If they function as slings or garottes then that at least makes some sense but mostly they just sit there or possibly flash and sing christmas tunes. How many futures still wear ties? But if they don't wear ties, that's a whole source of subtle coding gone.

Humans. We make signals out of all sorts. Considering it's all basically variations on being the monkey with the brightest backside it's ridiculously complex.

The fun with the sci fi challenge is to retain as much of the complexity we've already learned to read as possible, whilst making it recognisably SF. Doing fancy design stuff that you'd have to get a costume department to sew up is one way to do that, but having to buy all the parts from high street stores would be another. I keep seeing stuff that strikes me as perfect for B7 cosplay without technically being something ever seen on B7. So the trick to SF costuming would be to take the easily available but combine it in a way you get a coherent look that is just unfamiliar enough.

And then preferably do it in a mix and match way that works for multiple extras, in a slightly more nuanced way for guest characters, and in ways with depth and range for the core characters.

Costume design is hard, and I don't think I'd get the hang of it even if I studied more.
Is fun though.

That essay I was highlighting this afternoon, where the myth reference nagged at me?
Had probably got Promethean and Protean mixed up.
The Doctor as Promethean figure actually kind of fits, but it was in a paragraph talking about the very changeable nature of both the character and the show, so probably it meant the other P.


also in this afternoon's reading: social moors. Probably means mores.
less amusing than the sexual morays I have previously read of.

I am cranky, coughing, and nauseous, and I had to go back to bed in the middle of trying to make notes because I felt too ill. This is highly inconvenient. I don't have the time for this. So then I get more cranky, and aim it at texts.

I have been reading

Garner, Beattie and Mc Cormack (2010) Impossible Worlds, Impossible Things : Cultural Perspectives on Doctor Who, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures
Cambridge Scholars publishing.

The Regeneration Game: Doctor Who and the Changing Faces of Heroism
John Paul Green

This chapter focuses on the articulation and rearticulation of masculinity and British heroism through the use of 'regeneration' in the popular science fiction series Doctor Who.

I'm very glad to have got hold of this book because it gives me something to argue with, ( Read more... )

Each of the Doctor’s regenerations offers a performance of masculinity, although rarely does the Doctor fulfil (thankfully) dominant images of masculinity. It is still a case of intellect over might, although throughout the series the Doctor has aligned himself with male companions who have been, or are, in active military service.

This is the bit I want to poke quite a lot. Because at first glance I felt like agreeing, but then I had a think about it. Because by what definition is the Doctor's masculinity not the dominant model?
( Read more... )

I feel, since the rise of the Detective, the triumph of intellect over might is the standard model. And the dominant model of masculinity, at least in a ton of the media.

( Read more... )



So the flaw in this argument is once again the thing where women are also doing the same things. If and when they are. Women are being detectives, but are they being this kind of cranky intellect detective? I don't watch detectives (unless they're steampunk RDJr ) so I don't have a great deal to draw on.

but I'm going to bet they are, even if you need to watch the numbers carefully before making an argument about the 'rise of' or the 'era of'. Because most things, lately, women get to do. They even on occasion get to do them in networks of other women that talk to each other. Which is pretty cool.


Gender is a stupid game I don't wish to play, so it irritates me when so many things do. ( Read more... )


I'm not saying there's equality. Just counting and Bechdel consistently shows actually there's less women and they don't get to talk to each other about the same range of things. But the borders of possibility are nice and wide now, and I reckon numbers is most of the remaining difference.

plus how things get seen. where's my stereotypes icon... nope, doesn't seem to be here... well it wasn't very good anyway. But, stereotypes: People can see the exact same things done by a man and a woman and they'll read them differently through the filters of pre-existing stereotypes. ( Read more... )



... the cake jumping thing could not be called stereotypically masculine. And while both RDJr's Sherlock Holmes and the Doctor dress up as women that one time, that's not exactly part of the standard model either. So there's quirky bits.

Plus the times gender as a discourse gets raised within the text it's all about how bad the Doctor is at performing it. Trying to be a 'normal bloke' with Craig in The Lodger? Hilarity ensues. But what you really see there is the masculine version of how gender performance is always class specific. ( Read more... )


So what I've been arguing I guess is that the Doctor is a particular stereotype of masculinity, and a socially and culturally dominant type. Not even getting into the 'Time Lord' / Lords Temporal House of Lords hence aristocracy connection, he's a knowledge professional of independent means who never has to worry where the next meal is coming from. He assumes the right to talk to Monarchs, is friends with Prime Ministers, and his best mate is a Brigadier (not a Sergeant he also spent time with). He acts like he owns the place and backs up that authority by knowing more than you do. His intellect is the boss of, well, everyone. And that's a kind of masculinity. Compared to the Sherlockian detective, it's a very common kind of masculinity that is the boss of all it surveys. And he's friends with people in military service because he's being the kind of person who traditionally aims them.




Thoughts? Discussion? Telling me I'm wrongity wrong wrong?

I'm likely to get in an argue with myself later anyway.


... quite a lot later. I'd rather like to go back to bed again. Or at least get another paracetamol.

M1058 (1112) National Cinema 10 Credits
Essay (Essay): 80% Pass (Provisional)

80%
!

(The grade boundary to get a First is 70%. A 2:1 is 60%, etc etc. So I'm doing quite a lot well to get 80%.)

My essay on the significance of Dr Caligari's glasses was a resounding success.

In a semester that also saw my worst mark ever, both for a single assignment and a unit, this is somewhat of a relief. Have not lost brain. *phew*

(I have had this window open half an hour while I poke the page with my grades on just to be sure it hasn't changed.)

okays, happy dance time, :-D

I have finally watched the last ten minutes of Vertigo, when he figures it out and reacts.
bit awesome, bit shiny, bit make you jump
:-D
I liked how there were a whole bunch of possible endings right up until the last second, and then once the ending happened, click, it was The ending, the only inevitable one.
I must watch again, maybe with a commentary on or something.

Now I am watching The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.
( Read more... )
That was quite fun. Now we get to study it in class until it's not fun at all.



Today I did the laundry, did the dishwashering, hung up the laundry, let the cleaner in and out, remembered the bins, and ate soup for lunch.
I feel this makes up for yesterday, where I messed around on the internet, slept between 7am and 7pm, stayed awake until 0300 mixing a bit of the college reading with the internet some more, and then slept from 0300 to 0900.
Now I have to stay awake until 2100 because that's the last minute my food can arrive.
... am hoping it arrives at 1900 instead. Sleepy now.

I still have a bazillion pages of reading.
And all the lessons are on the same day so it's hard to prioritise.
There's a gap before the cinema lesson though. I should do short story first and risk last minute library use for the cinema stuff.

I got my (provisional) marks back for Contemporary Narrative:

76%
'excellent essay'
!
:-D
*happy dance*

That's well into being a First.
And brings my current final marks up to 72.25%

I still have at least 60 credits left to do that'll count towards that final total, including 40 from my dissertation, but that's still doing pretty well.

My highest mark so far was 77 in the Renaissance, so this is now my second highest.

Not bad for a unit I kind of hated every minute of.
Now I never have to think about it again!

So in class at the moment we're studying the Victorian period, and specifically the shift from colonialism to imperialism, from business going out there to get stuff for Britain to Britain going out there and saying it's all ours. Last lesson was about legitimation and the stories the white guys told themselves that made them think it was the right thing to do. Mostly, they reckoned they were the only civilized and rational beings on the planet, so it was their responsibility to go out and educate the rest of the world. ( Read more... )

So from the not-the-boss point of view you could just keep doing what you were doing, keep trying to ignore boss culture as worthless, get punished and get held up as an example of why people need to be stomped on for their own good; or you could try and copy and know that the boss people would never, ever, ever admit the mimicry was successful, because then the boss justification goes boom.

From the boss point of view, of course everyone is trying to copy the boss, it's the only worthwhile way. They just need instructing on how they're doing it wrong.

Reading about the Occupy protests lately, I've read a lot of people saying they should get organised, get a message, get a leader. Basically saying they should play the game the way everyone already in charge is playing it. Mimic. ( Read more... )

I've read a few cultural studies types trying to read Occupy, or just read the Guy Fawkes masks, with insufficient context. It's all ink blots. You learn a lot about the writer, maybe nothing about Occupy or Anonymous. I think there's a problem with a discipline that bangs on about the death of the author and how the reader makes the meaning, that makes it irrelevant what the author was trying to do. Sure, applied to books by dead dudes, you can get at some possible reasons why people are still reading them, what people get out of them. But applied to a bunch of people doing politics? Problem. They're busy trying to write themselves, not be read. Can maybe say something about the media writing about the protesters, but is on much shakier ground talking about what the protesters are communicating, let alone what they mean.

... and now I'm one step away from trying to do cultural studies stuff on the cultural studies dudes, and then we have a tail eating competition...

What I mean is though, I don't know what Occupy is doing, I know only that this is the stuff I thought up having read some newspapers, some critics, some blogs, and some postcolonial theorists in lit lessons on Friday. So I write it down and go play computer games.

I'm trying to read something set for homework for Contemporary Narrative, a big long essay on Jimmy Corrigan. So far it is utter and complete rubbish. It is the kind of review of a graphic novel that obviously hasn't read any other graphic novels, at least in the last thirty years. It talks about the dominance of the superhero comic, except it adds 'perceived', so whenever you point out it's talking utter rubbish it can argue it's talking about how people 'perceive' superhero comics, and since this one person doing the writing perceives them that way, it is clearly talking accurately about perception. Drives me nuts. It's arguing based on rubbish. Its quote about comics is from Umberto Eco in 1979. Now if Corrigan was written around that time, that would work. But no. It's from (1995 to) 2000. And comics have changed just a teensy bit since 1979. Its talking about 'the frozen temporality of many superhero narratives' a 'timeless state' where 'what has happened before and what has happened after appear extremely hazy'. Do you recognise that as comics since Crisis? It's not comics the way I read them. 'characters like Superman and Batman never age and always eventually return to a kind of fundamental narrative stasis no matter what happens in a given story'. Well, no, Batman and Superman rarely change, but everyone around them does. Actually even Batman changes, in ways you can chart vs costume colors and ear length. Lone! Dark! Vengeance! ... or having fun with Robins. Whatever. 'Histories of change, development, and evolution are thereby suppressed, contributing to the image of the superhero genre - and its readers - as trapped in perpetual adolescence.' How much is wrong with that? And you see again 'image', which allows them to talk bollocks and not back it up, because if somebody somewhere sees it that way, tada, the statement is true. *grrr* Okay, so, there's a cycle of depower/repower/re-establish/waver/depower. That's a true thing. Lots of characters do that. But that doesn't mean they stay still. Batman? Look at the Robins. If the man is in stasis, how does he have a, what, ten year old biological son conceived after he became the Batman? He's at least ten years older than when he started. Characters around him are on sliding ageing scales but they do age. Robins grow up to be Nightwing, Red Hood, Red Robin, Batgirl. Batgirl grows up to be Oracle. Everybody grows and changes. Batman the least, but, comics change.

... if it had stuck with Superman it would have been more relevant to its point (since there's a Superman reference in Corrigan) and I would have been less able to poke big holes in it, because I don't read Superman. Does he change? Is he changeless?

am I just annoyed because of the reader perpetual adolescence bit? no, I own that. I'm still in college, surrounded by teenagers, and left to myself I watch U rated kids television. I'm not a model of maturity, here.

It's just this stupid thing we're meant to be reading is talking rubbish like it never reads the things it's crit about, and really, what's the point?

And then it goes on to talk about 'primal scene' and 'mirror stage' and name check Lacan, and honestly, my expectations of the thing could not get lower. I'm double checking all the quotes to see if it's accurate, that's how much I'm expecting from it. (It's adding words in [brackets] that are from different pages when other characters speak. Is that accurate? *sigh*)

So we're reading this stupid rubbish graphic novel and then reading these essays that are all about how it's real serious bizness yo, proper big thinking!!! and not like them other graphic novels what are really kid stuff.

Could we not study Batman? Surely something that has remained popular, a cultural icon, for this length of time, could reward a little study? Or if you want to go classier, try Sandman, everyone likes Sandman. And it's of finite length, which is less intimidating than trying to get an overview or context for any Batman reading. But noooo, we have to read stuff nobody outside of lit lessons ever bothers with. I am so tired of that. It's like saying nothing's smart unless it's calling everyone else stupid. :-p to that. :-p to the lot of it.

... damn, I've still got 6 A4 pages of this one and a whole other one to read.

I could try just failing instead. But there's the outside chance I could get a first in this degree, right now, which would be a nice reward for ten years of study, so I should probably actually try doing quite well.

*uses Delirium icon*
:-)

I've been thinking that a lot of stories lately are about telling ourselves we're the plucky rebels. We're the tiny little humans fighting the forces of hell and heaven both, and never mind that the fighting mostly consists of saying I Don't Wanna And You Can't Make Me and then maybe trying to shoot everything, which isn't terribly angelic in the first place. Or we're the tiny band of heroes trying to fight off the aliens, the terrible no good very bad aliens with the biology that means we're never going to get along, and oh dear, oops, we did it again, they're all dead. But hey, humans are alive, so clearly we're still the heroes! Even though exterminating whole races is, you know, evil. They're always moving on to the next bunch of intractably evil aliens without really stopping to think about that part. Always the evil enemy is the huge great scary force over there trying to kill us, and our tiny little group is by definition heroic, even with all the killing.

The thing is, just by being born where most people sitting at their computers reading this were born, just by living in these huge capitalist giants of countries, we are not the rebels. We're the bloody Empire. And I do not think our stories really deal with that, except by telling us its secretly okay because secretly we're the tiny persecuted ones anyway.

( Read more... )

I don't know what the kind of hero I'm looking for would look like, but they do not look at aliens or even demons and see monsters instead of people. They do not go around eliminating those others. They don't turn every other person into part of their weapon. They don't witch hunt the one person that's secretly an outsider pulling all the strings, especially in situations where everyone is just trying to get their needs met. And they don't blame the alien-demon-others for their own violence or call it necessary or be in stories where There Should Have Been Another Way because, damn it, there always already was.

I don't know how to do those stories. Or, indeed, live them.

or, why adaptation to movies lets the zing out of genre work

all stories, all art, all work, exists as part of a conversation, massively multivocal and with strands going back to the beginning of humans. some stories, some art, some works, stand out, and say something new, something that pushes the limits you maybe weren't even aware were there, something that says, this is what we can do, this is what the genre can be. This is the power in it.

Fan works can do that, working in tension with the source text and the grab bag of tropes fans have been using and the general background of cultures. I have been reading from the voting long list on spec fic work, and watching the vids, and I keep on going back to the list to change my vote, usually away from some novel I've read years ago to some fan thing I just read or watched today. Because the novel, that was great when I read it, that did the brain flip thing, the new thought, the new way of looking at the world. But the fan works, those are the ones that show me a new angle here and now about the works I've spent the most time with for years. And they stand up as SF, and the really satisfying ones simply would not work with the serial numbers filed off or if you tried to detangle them from the fan discourses.

( Read more... )