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beccaelizabethI am still rereading the InCryptid books.
I think I read some of the writing is a response to Supernatural treating a particular character badly
and I have read the author was in Buffy fandom
and the stories seem very much in dialogue with that too
but that keeps meaning I keep staring into space imagining giving Giles these books to read, or telling the Initiative what they're doing wrong in small words, or, you know, taking the whole political reframing back to the source text I'm familiar with and letting it make the good guys somewhat less than shiny.
I also kind of want to rewatch Lost Girl.
The thing is BtVS and many others make monsters by making metaphor literal. Wrestling with your demons, now with bonus action sequences. And that can tell a powerful set of stories.
But it also leaves this ugly angle where it is possible to look like a person, act like a person, have been a person up until very recently, but still not count as a person any more today.
Vampires as a metaphor for sexual assault or vampirism for addiction or whatever the metaphor is today, solid story mileage.
The part where the story then just solves it with a stake... oh, so many layers of problem.
And Seanan knows this. The whole thing with this series is people treating non humans as people, just as deserving of life and capable of building societies. Which reminds me of several other texts, but usually they do the secret world thing, where it all happens out of sight so the whole deciding of things comes down to, generally, the protagonist and a bunch of sharp things. Maybe some magic.
Or there's a different, parallel, society, run by different laws.
... it's probably a side effect of my preferred genres that this doesn't tend to involve democracy and still does come down to swords.
There's a question of scale. Like, Agents of SHIELD: I was wondering how the writers would go telling the story of a large organisation and how to set it up so it genuinely protects people without being actually secretly scary. But they did not. It turned into a plucky band of rebels real fast, after showing the large scale organisation as, you know, pretty dark.
And that makes sense of a story with only such and so of series regulars and a need to interface with a larger universe they werent writing. Keeps it nimble. But.
It doesnt answer many questions about what ethical law enforcement looks like.
Or deal with the fact the world exists at scale.
Like I keep watching the Arrowverse shows but they seldom answer questions like that in the way I would. Supergirl did a bunch of interesting and tried with the political stuff. But then Flash comes in with seperate laws for some sets of people and apparently arguing illegal things are okay when the good guys do them. Vigilante shows have some... specific ideas about the efficacy of violence, but the cyclical nature of them means nothing ever properly works or gets better, so there's a level to read them where it's illustrating the problem, even via good guys.
But what set of answers do I want the shows to come up with?
What set of challenges can be set up to present these answers as a solution?
And how can a show tell them while keeping a consistent point of view and a limited set of characters for a viewer to form relationships with?
... I'm bouncing around thinking these big structural things rather than reading the next chapter on the stories I do like.
I get why the characters in the InCryptid books keep opting for secrecy.
They make it clear over and over that it only takes one human reacting poorly to end people, and there are a lot of humans.
But there are also supposed to be laws? That protect people? So it's taking a pessimistic view on the pervasiveness of hate crimes right there.
But if I was writing...
I keep circling around a few different topics. Like, these stories are about people with fundamentally different biological needs. Reasonable adjustments can be made. But they've got clashing access needs.
And some of them have the kind of biological needs that are going to be tricky to meet by relying on donors.
I mean vampires can only use donor blood in universes where donor blood works for the story they're writing, but, lots of ways to set it up allow for willing cooperation.
Even the universes where vampires have to kill can land you in a story about judicial consequences and executions, rather than vigilante or freelance murder.
But why are we setting up stories where one set of people need to kill another? That's... a choice. A model to explore. What is it mapping to?
So the map that interests me is more like, some people have medical needs that they can't meet within existing rules due to a combination of stigmatised requirements and being shut out of the usual processes of civilisation. Can't afford their medical treatment if they can't get a day job, even if the reason they can't get a day job is they've been declared legally dead.
... I read there's an increasing problem of people who are existing sans paperwork, including ones who have been declared dead, and would like to present some evidence to the contrary. Didn't used to be so much a problem. The more the systems talk to each other, the more gigo leads to computer says no. So what do you do with the people the paperwork reckons are some sort of revenants?
I've got an rpg sourcebook about Horror, that tries to suggest what kind of fears assorted monsters could present. I guess a lot of the horror or fantasy shows I watch present the fear in being attacked by the monster. I'm more worried about the fear of being seen as a monster. How do you leave that label behind, and if you cannot, how are people and systems going to treat you?
Seems a lot more relevant.
But I also like these stories because a regular person in a world with superpowers is looking at a disparity in ability somewhat like a disabled person trying to get along in regular world.
And the fear people will turn out to be secretly vampires sure does seem relatable, given the kind of damage free willed beings can do.
... a lot of stories set them up to not be free willed. Biology becomes alignment, and alignment becomes something to be discovered or revealed, not created one act at a time. Ugly mapping to any real world argument. Yet it sets up some cathartic action sequences, so I who watch the cathartic action sequences genres see a lot of it.
... stories that involve people sitting down and working through their differences may not be ones I know how to write. I mean, I know how to do thesis, antithesis, swordfight, but I'm not so sure how to get to synthesis, except maybe in romance. Which can be a bit of a problem.
Also, I know this is a bit of an SF geek argument, but I feel we are running out of time before these arguments cross into the real world. The more we learn about biology, the more we have the practical ability to tweak it, the more likely it becomes that people will turn themselves into elves. Or orcs. Or whatever. Or, potentially, will figure a way to turn each other.
... needing a vaccine against the latest advancements in biotechnology or becoming something that needs very specific substances to survive is a basic SF plot, but it dont take much tweaking to use the same words as old horror tropes.
But the more chances people have for really spectacular levels of body modification, the closer we get to people making fantasy a reality, and the closer we get to real world decision making on if it is possible to leave 'being a human' behind. Or what the legal consequences are for those that do.
Add to that all the old cyberpunk arguments about how it's a tad problematic to have corporations own your body parts, which are already very much relevant to disabled people trying to get their prostheses repaired... someone's going to biopunk it.
Being a genetically modified organism will come slightly after depending on them for your survival, and problems will come long before anyone truly elfs out.
But it's a plausible tech path, and if, when we get there, the only genres talking about it are sorts of horror and cathartic violence shows... oh that's going to be messy.
But already there are problems without the metaphor layer. Some superhero shows can get very ablist. ... the Flash, actually, I am thinking about it and so many examples, ffs a wheelchair shouldn't signify evil, what are they doing...
So it feels like a problem to present traditional horror monsters as people dealing with disabilities, but people dealing with disabilities have already been presented as the horrors.
I guess I want a story where
even if monster
still we treat them well.
I have no conclusions, just vague themes and some pondering.
I took that thought for a wander for like an hour.
But it bothers me. I don't know how to design a story that tells things the way I want to see them. I seem to have programmed me wrong, somewhere.
shall think on it.
I think I read some of the writing is a response to Supernatural treating a particular character badly
and I have read the author was in Buffy fandom
and the stories seem very much in dialogue with that too
but that keeps meaning I keep staring into space imagining giving Giles these books to read, or telling the Initiative what they're doing wrong in small words, or, you know, taking the whole political reframing back to the source text I'm familiar with and letting it make the good guys somewhat less than shiny.
I also kind of want to rewatch Lost Girl.
The thing is BtVS and many others make monsters by making metaphor literal. Wrestling with your demons, now with bonus action sequences. And that can tell a powerful set of stories.
But it also leaves this ugly angle where it is possible to look like a person, act like a person, have been a person up until very recently, but still not count as a person any more today.
Vampires as a metaphor for sexual assault or vampirism for addiction or whatever the metaphor is today, solid story mileage.
The part where the story then just solves it with a stake... oh, so many layers of problem.
And Seanan knows this. The whole thing with this series is people treating non humans as people, just as deserving of life and capable of building societies. Which reminds me of several other texts, but usually they do the secret world thing, where it all happens out of sight so the whole deciding of things comes down to, generally, the protagonist and a bunch of sharp things. Maybe some magic.
Or there's a different, parallel, society, run by different laws.
... it's probably a side effect of my preferred genres that this doesn't tend to involve democracy and still does come down to swords.
There's a question of scale. Like, Agents of SHIELD: I was wondering how the writers would go telling the story of a large organisation and how to set it up so it genuinely protects people without being actually secretly scary. But they did not. It turned into a plucky band of rebels real fast, after showing the large scale organisation as, you know, pretty dark.
And that makes sense of a story with only such and so of series regulars and a need to interface with a larger universe they werent writing. Keeps it nimble. But.
It doesnt answer many questions about what ethical law enforcement looks like.
Or deal with the fact the world exists at scale.
Like I keep watching the Arrowverse shows but they seldom answer questions like that in the way I would. Supergirl did a bunch of interesting and tried with the political stuff. But then Flash comes in with seperate laws for some sets of people and apparently arguing illegal things are okay when the good guys do them. Vigilante shows have some... specific ideas about the efficacy of violence, but the cyclical nature of them means nothing ever properly works or gets better, so there's a level to read them where it's illustrating the problem, even via good guys.
But what set of answers do I want the shows to come up with?
What set of challenges can be set up to present these answers as a solution?
And how can a show tell them while keeping a consistent point of view and a limited set of characters for a viewer to form relationships with?
... I'm bouncing around thinking these big structural things rather than reading the next chapter on the stories I do like.
I get why the characters in the InCryptid books keep opting for secrecy.
They make it clear over and over that it only takes one human reacting poorly to end people, and there are a lot of humans.
But there are also supposed to be laws? That protect people? So it's taking a pessimistic view on the pervasiveness of hate crimes right there.
But if I was writing...
I keep circling around a few different topics. Like, these stories are about people with fundamentally different biological needs. Reasonable adjustments can be made. But they've got clashing access needs.
And some of them have the kind of biological needs that are going to be tricky to meet by relying on donors.
I mean vampires can only use donor blood in universes where donor blood works for the story they're writing, but, lots of ways to set it up allow for willing cooperation.
Even the universes where vampires have to kill can land you in a story about judicial consequences and executions, rather than vigilante or freelance murder.
But why are we setting up stories where one set of people need to kill another? That's... a choice. A model to explore. What is it mapping to?
So the map that interests me is more like, some people have medical needs that they can't meet within existing rules due to a combination of stigmatised requirements and being shut out of the usual processes of civilisation. Can't afford their medical treatment if they can't get a day job, even if the reason they can't get a day job is they've been declared legally dead.
... I read there's an increasing problem of people who are existing sans paperwork, including ones who have been declared dead, and would like to present some evidence to the contrary. Didn't used to be so much a problem. The more the systems talk to each other, the more gigo leads to computer says no. So what do you do with the people the paperwork reckons are some sort of revenants?
I've got an rpg sourcebook about Horror, that tries to suggest what kind of fears assorted monsters could present. I guess a lot of the horror or fantasy shows I watch present the fear in being attacked by the monster. I'm more worried about the fear of being seen as a monster. How do you leave that label behind, and if you cannot, how are people and systems going to treat you?
Seems a lot more relevant.
But I also like these stories because a regular person in a world with superpowers is looking at a disparity in ability somewhat like a disabled person trying to get along in regular world.
And the fear people will turn out to be secretly vampires sure does seem relatable, given the kind of damage free willed beings can do.
... a lot of stories set them up to not be free willed. Biology becomes alignment, and alignment becomes something to be discovered or revealed, not created one act at a time. Ugly mapping to any real world argument. Yet it sets up some cathartic action sequences, so I who watch the cathartic action sequences genres see a lot of it.
... stories that involve people sitting down and working through their differences may not be ones I know how to write. I mean, I know how to do thesis, antithesis, swordfight, but I'm not so sure how to get to synthesis, except maybe in romance. Which can be a bit of a problem.
Also, I know this is a bit of an SF geek argument, but I feel we are running out of time before these arguments cross into the real world. The more we learn about biology, the more we have the practical ability to tweak it, the more likely it becomes that people will turn themselves into elves. Or orcs. Or whatever. Or, potentially, will figure a way to turn each other.
... needing a vaccine against the latest advancements in biotechnology or becoming something that needs very specific substances to survive is a basic SF plot, but it dont take much tweaking to use the same words as old horror tropes.
But the more chances people have for really spectacular levels of body modification, the closer we get to people making fantasy a reality, and the closer we get to real world decision making on if it is possible to leave 'being a human' behind. Or what the legal consequences are for those that do.
Add to that all the old cyberpunk arguments about how it's a tad problematic to have corporations own your body parts, which are already very much relevant to disabled people trying to get their prostheses repaired... someone's going to biopunk it.
Being a genetically modified organism will come slightly after depending on them for your survival, and problems will come long before anyone truly elfs out.
But it's a plausible tech path, and if, when we get there, the only genres talking about it are sorts of horror and cathartic violence shows... oh that's going to be messy.
But already there are problems without the metaphor layer. Some superhero shows can get very ablist. ... the Flash, actually, I am thinking about it and so many examples, ffs a wheelchair shouldn't signify evil, what are they doing...
So it feels like a problem to present traditional horror monsters as people dealing with disabilities, but people dealing with disabilities have already been presented as the horrors.
I guess I want a story where
even if monster
still we treat them well.
I have no conclusions, just vague themes and some pondering.
I took that thought for a wander for like an hour.
But it bothers me. I don't know how to design a story that tells things the way I want to see them. I seem to have programmed me wrong, somewhere.
shall think on it.