beccaelizabeth: When you say words a lot they don't mean anything.  Or maybe they don't mean anything anyway and we just think they do. (literature)
[personal profile] beccaelizabeth
I think I managed six hours of reading today. Punctuated by being ill. Because clearly I can't just have a cold and then stop having a cold and get on with things.
Annoyance.
ANYway, about six hours, ish, with my usual degree of attention. Sort of finished one book, as in skimmed all the interesting looking bits, read a chapter of the other, which will take longer on account of all looking interesting. Neither book got any more relevant, since learning about gender in 80s and 90s action movies does not help talk about Doctor Who, but they are the books I happen to have, and until I can get my act together and go get more, I may as well read the things.
Also they keep talking about films I actually know, like Point Break and Near Dark and Strange Days. Also Predator and sequel. And every book about gender in movies I've picked up so far goes back to Terminator, T2, and Alien & Aliens. This one even noticed that the liquid metal terminator is the actual enemy.
I guess when the book tells me things I already thought it feels a bit more useless to have spent all those hours reading it. On the other hand, I thought most of the same things they just put in a book, at least about those movies I'd actually watched. So my brain is not entirely useless. Yaay.
I still disagree enough to have a nice argument with it.
Maybe I should just decide to write about Aliens and Terminator and... no, that would be a waste of all the Doctor Who reading I did already too, and also I wouldn't have much to say. I'd want to talk about the Terminator TV show and then I'd run out of words and it would just skim all the cool stuff.
The meta about how the show is really about mothering and abused kids growing up violent and how learning to be a good parent can save the world could probably turn into an actual theory paper if I just threw a few psychoanalysis words at the page. Stupid things don't mean properly anyway.

I'm really bored with my subject. Cultural Studies can look at the world and its texts and say, basically, 'yep, that still sucks'. Except then it complicates it. So it sucks, but it don't, but it do, and then again it might not. And then you're at the end of the paper and what the hell was the point we all know stuff sucks bored now bored now bored bored bored.

If I do this one (really huge) assignment I can spend the rest of my life never reading psychoanalytic criticism again.

And I can start writing stories that maybe suck less.
... okay, suck different.

I have this whole stack of stories that are kind of about experiences of disability as filtered through reading a ton of fanfic and the eroticisation of the good master/servant in at least half the fic I read.
But they aren't fanfic.
Except for that one that's RPF that I'd kind of like to find another way to write but too many aspects of the guy's career and star image are tangled up with the story as it is.

I always have a whole stack of stories and most of them I talk myself out of on the basis that nobody wants to read a Mary Sue and it's damn near impossible to write someone that won't be called a Mary Sue. I've been trained out of writing girls. It's annoying.
No, it's an excuse, I've mostly just not been writing.

I'm bored and cranky and tired and it's time to go sleep now and everything will still be here to be worked on tomorrow.
... the face I am making right now does not have a smiley to go with it as far as I know but kind of feels like when something in the food is emphatically not food like. Ew.

Okay. Promise to self: Tomorrow I can watch lots of Doctor Who, including episodes I am not writing about, and call it research. And I don't have to read a single page of book if I don't want to.

But on Monday I have to take them back to the library and swap them for something useful.
*big sigh*
Has two weeks to write something. Anything. A beginning of a thing.
I can write a whole bunch of words about why everything I've read so far is stupid. I'm sure the teacher will be amused. :eyeroll:

Date: 2013-01-15 06:30 am (UTC)
From: [personal profile] philippos42
Equating female characters to Mary Sue really really offends me.

Not the same thing.

Mary Sue is an incredibly overused term at this point, used to mock a protagonist just for being a wish-fulfillment hero, which is an awful lot of characters if you're consistent.

The original use was for over-the-top characters inserted into fanfic. Being an original character does not make one a Mary Sue. Being a wish-fulfillment character doesn't make one a Mary Sue. Being dropped into someone else's property with a crude attempt at out-awesoming all the characters in the source material in multiple ways--that's pretty close to the original sense, though there's often more to it than that, like making your character the relative and/or love interest of favorite characters.

Sorry, you know this, I'm just ranty tonight.

Profile

beccaelizabeth: my Watcher tattoo in blue, plus Be in red Buffy style font (Default)
beccaelizabeth

July 2025

S M T W T F S
  1 2 3 45
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 5th, 2025 12:33 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios