Power fantasies
Sep. 2nd, 2019 04:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethLately my happy place fantasy has basically been
win all the moneys
buy maximum bedrooms
give maximum bedrooms
which does not much resemble the superhero happy place of yore
though it actually has a lot in common with the space colony or castles ones.
Though if I just give away the housing that is not maximum housing, rent could pay for more mortgages.
Either way is just shuffling deck chairs compared to the housing crisis though.
Really there needs to be BUILD maximum bedrooms.
Which would have to start with land and plumbing and roads and suchlike.
It's ridiculous though how much a six bedroom house can cost.
... I was looking up how much Harry Potter's house would cost at the moment.
... about two and a half million? ish? with a lot of assumptions thrown in, obviously.
https://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/property/london/claremont-square/ was the filming location apparently.
ANYway, that's already A Lot, but in a different postcode you could add another zero.
London prices are the kind of stupendous money that could in other parts of Britain buy you a castle. And possibly several.
But if you start with selling a house in London I think you can get quite a long way to model village on the proceeds.
I'd like to build a new town. I'd need several more degrees to be any good at it, or a team who wouldn't need me, but I have Opinions on what we really need out of towns: ground floor flats, accessability, places like coffee shops but for friendly gatherings not maximum coffee, village halls with dance lessons and tai chi and yoga and meditation, design with sensory needs in mind, quiet and calm, lots of green man crossings, design for blind people built in, someone to wander around being short and fixing the sight lines from down there, towns people can actually live in without being some standardised designer person.
Also just a lot of bedrooms. A lot. Because enough to go around is a lot more than this.
I keep reading about these supernatural masquerade type settings and just being deeply offended that they are being denied their basic rights as part of civilised society. I mean okay they might be werewolves, but they clearly need a social worker and some benefits and emergency housing adapted to their needs. Nobody should be living in caves, crypts, or burnt out buildings, and industrial chic is for designers not for living in the corners of warehouses. There are structures and institutions built up to cover the gaps caused by horrible trauma, like there's a police force whose job it is to stop the hunters too. The systems might have infelicities already, but gaping great holes are not on. Everyone should be supported.
But the stories do not go there, mostly. There's just a whole lot which are... either defamiliarisations that present the gaps in the safety net from new and interesting angles or some kind of weird pocket post apocalypse?
Because there are a lot of unifying threads around the idea of small groups of people setting up and enforcing their own rules, and some of it is found family stuff about going beyond the nuclear family to build pack or tribe or something, but a whole big thread is the same appeal as those zombie movies
you know, the ones where zombies can't talk or be negotiated with
so now there's just ultra violence.
It's like some people like hanging out in stories which say
if you just ignore all the things humans do to make the world any good at all
look at how red in tooth and claw we'd be.
Like that's the fantasy.
And the horror, obviously. Like that bit in Buffy where Glory has Tara, alone in the crowd, no help to be had even surrounded by humans. Because they wouldn't understand and couldn't do anything about it anyway.
Except that's wrong, because we're all sitting here stretching our empathy to understand, the average RPG has systematised approaches to all the weird that break it down to what in fact can be done about it, and humans on the whole bump along.
Together.
So what is the draw of these stories where we are drawn away from the light
just this once?
... I don't know, I'm not much loving it just at the minute, especially the part where the only mental health care is either a horror story itself or execution. Pretty big problem there, especially since the horror is like, look at this crazy person what shall we do about him, or sometimes imagine what if going crazy. The actual horror they're painting is what if society just ignored mental illness and treatment. Which, you know, very skinny if there.
So I keep turning up in these genres where not having the social support structures is to some degree the point
and wanting to build them back in.
No bloody point having all these dominance fights with demons if everyone's just going to sit around in the woods after. Got to build something decent.
Lost Girl very nearly almost went there, in the politics episodes
and treating the needs of all the different peoples as, you know, needs to be worked with
but
still some gaps there.
And it's why I'm fed up with vigilante superheroes.
They're inherently criticising existing law enforcement structures
but they seem to mostly come down on the side of needing more violence and less oversight
which is the nightmare.
... watch me be a fan of villains, cause the heroes went too far.
... an honest villain just after the bank shinies who spends it all fast is so much less damage than, for instance, disappearing people without trial and sticking them with the pointy end on one man's opinion.
... I dream of new towns and new laws
... and then stay in bed a lot rather than engaging with politics.
Not best helpful there.
... I think I understand werewolf needs better than humans, at this point...
*sigh*
win all the moneys
buy maximum bedrooms
give maximum bedrooms
which does not much resemble the superhero happy place of yore
though it actually has a lot in common with the space colony or castles ones.
Though if I just give away the housing that is not maximum housing, rent could pay for more mortgages.
Either way is just shuffling deck chairs compared to the housing crisis though.
Really there needs to be BUILD maximum bedrooms.
Which would have to start with land and plumbing and roads and suchlike.
It's ridiculous though how much a six bedroom house can cost.
... I was looking up how much Harry Potter's house would cost at the moment.
... about two and a half million? ish? with a lot of assumptions thrown in, obviously.
https://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/property/london/claremont-square/ was the filming location apparently.
ANYway, that's already A Lot, but in a different postcode you could add another zero.
London prices are the kind of stupendous money that could in other parts of Britain buy you a castle. And possibly several.
But if you start with selling a house in London I think you can get quite a long way to model village on the proceeds.
I'd like to build a new town. I'd need several more degrees to be any good at it, or a team who wouldn't need me, but I have Opinions on what we really need out of towns: ground floor flats, accessability, places like coffee shops but for friendly gatherings not maximum coffee, village halls with dance lessons and tai chi and yoga and meditation, design with sensory needs in mind, quiet and calm, lots of green man crossings, design for blind people built in, someone to wander around being short and fixing the sight lines from down there, towns people can actually live in without being some standardised designer person.
Also just a lot of bedrooms. A lot. Because enough to go around is a lot more than this.
I keep reading about these supernatural masquerade type settings and just being deeply offended that they are being denied their basic rights as part of civilised society. I mean okay they might be werewolves, but they clearly need a social worker and some benefits and emergency housing adapted to their needs. Nobody should be living in caves, crypts, or burnt out buildings, and industrial chic is for designers not for living in the corners of warehouses. There are structures and institutions built up to cover the gaps caused by horrible trauma, like there's a police force whose job it is to stop the hunters too. The systems might have infelicities already, but gaping great holes are not on. Everyone should be supported.
But the stories do not go there, mostly. There's just a whole lot which are... either defamiliarisations that present the gaps in the safety net from new and interesting angles or some kind of weird pocket post apocalypse?
Because there are a lot of unifying threads around the idea of small groups of people setting up and enforcing their own rules, and some of it is found family stuff about going beyond the nuclear family to build pack or tribe or something, but a whole big thread is the same appeal as those zombie movies
you know, the ones where zombies can't talk or be negotiated with
so now there's just ultra violence.
It's like some people like hanging out in stories which say
if you just ignore all the things humans do to make the world any good at all
look at how red in tooth and claw we'd be.
Like that's the fantasy.
And the horror, obviously. Like that bit in Buffy where Glory has Tara, alone in the crowd, no help to be had even surrounded by humans. Because they wouldn't understand and couldn't do anything about it anyway.
Except that's wrong, because we're all sitting here stretching our empathy to understand, the average RPG has systematised approaches to all the weird that break it down to what in fact can be done about it, and humans on the whole bump along.
Together.
So what is the draw of these stories where we are drawn away from the light
just this once?
... I don't know, I'm not much loving it just at the minute, especially the part where the only mental health care is either a horror story itself or execution. Pretty big problem there, especially since the horror is like, look at this crazy person what shall we do about him, or sometimes imagine what if going crazy. The actual horror they're painting is what if society just ignored mental illness and treatment. Which, you know, very skinny if there.
So I keep turning up in these genres where not having the social support structures is to some degree the point
and wanting to build them back in.
No bloody point having all these dominance fights with demons if everyone's just going to sit around in the woods after. Got to build something decent.
Lost Girl very nearly almost went there, in the politics episodes
and treating the needs of all the different peoples as, you know, needs to be worked with
but
still some gaps there.
And it's why I'm fed up with vigilante superheroes.
They're inherently criticising existing law enforcement structures
but they seem to mostly come down on the side of needing more violence and less oversight
which is the nightmare.
... watch me be a fan of villains, cause the heroes went too far.
... an honest villain just after the bank shinies who spends it all fast is so much less damage than, for instance, disappearing people without trial and sticking them with the pointy end on one man's opinion.
... I dream of new towns and new laws
... and then stay in bed a lot rather than engaging with politics.
Not best helpful there.
... I think I understand werewolf needs better than humans, at this point...
*sigh*
no subject
Date: 2019-09-02 10:32 pm (UTC)