Woke up in a foul mood

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.

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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.

(no subject)

Homework is 36 pages of marxist psychoanalytic reading of Goblin Market that keeps on talking about how other readers are Doing It Wrong by reading the text and thinking it makes sense. I keep wanting to pat the writer on the head and suggest maybe there's another way of looking at that, ie, if everyone can make sense of it except them, then maybe just possibly it's because it does in fact make sense? *sigh*

At the moment I'm on page six and it's treating it as a vast mystery that Lizzie resists eating the fruit.
Why is someone's ability to say no a mystery?
Within the terms of the poem the vast majority of humanity says no, and you can tell on account of they don't die of goblin fruit.
Lizzie is only odd because she's saying no to their face and sticking to it.

Drat it, I have to summarise this thing out loud in class tomorrow. If I can even be awake in class tomorrow.
I suppose I can get in an argument with it as long as it's a coherent argument that presents clearly what I'm calling daft.

and at this point I really regret this essay isn't printed out...

... because I cannot throw it across the room on the laptop.

"if held to a mirror - that is if read backwards - the body of the word golden might be seen as the imperfect reversal of goblin"

*blinks and gapes*

This, we study for university?
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(no subject)

That essay thing? It concludes by analysing the illustration that goes with the poem to prove that the sisters subconsciously wanted the goblin men to go away. (a) The illustration, to analyse the poem. and (b) characters DO NOT HAVE A SUBCONSCIOUS. Plus (c) of course they wanted the goblin men to go away at the end of the poem, and to come to them at the beginning and middle.
And the best bit is this whole analysis is based on the picture showing goblins walking towards them.
Because in the poem it says goblins walk "Backwards up the mossy glen"
so clearly goblins facing towards them mean they're actually going away.

... there is not enough head desk in the world