beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I just woke up.
That is a whole lot of news going on there.

*hugs*
to anyone that needs them.

I hope things go safe.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/15/hulk-actor-smashes-pms-attempt-at-incredible-metaphor


I am spending so many hours a day lately reading the news
and my ability to do a damn thing about it has not expanded
so this is not in fact fun.



But finding out our prime minister thinks it's good to be the Hulk
kind of explains a lot.

I have spent the night thinking on villainy, and heroism, and how absolutely necessary it is to be kind.

For some reason this seemed timely.

I've been reading a lot of hero/villain slash recently.

... partly because a truly unreasonable proportion of characters my age or older seem to be villains now. I'd say WTF but politically and demographically I can see why the more powerful opposing forces are frequently older. I'm just getting a bit weary of how outnumbered the good guy versions are, even though that's always the way on TV because you keep the heroes but need new villains with every story arc. There are always more villains.

But I always get hung up on that kind of pairing. It's nice when two heroes work everything out and head off to happily ever after, but all they generally need to work out is that they fancy each other, and maybe some self confidence issues. Two characters from across some great divide, two people whose basic approaches to life are somehow antithetical... work those two out and you've solved some corner of the grand scale puzzle. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Get two opponents into bed together and you have, in some small way, figured out how humanity can get along.

Possibly very briefly, but if the sex is just the first attraction and you have to really work on their happily ever after... well...

How do you work with someone you've been fighting? How do you get along with people who've been blocking your every plan? How can you find common ground with someone who simply doesn't believe humans work the way you think they do?

A story gets to decide how humans work. Do we need a Vandal Savage to make humanity great again? Is the only way to win to destroy all opposition and lead the chosen few up from the ashes? Can a hero learn from villains and yet still be a hero? All worked out in an hour or two, maybe a season or five, when it starts as words on a page.

But it's a bit higher stakes than that when you take it beyond the theoretical.

Buffy staked vampires and her enemies disappeared in a handful of dust. Yet there were always more enemies, because unrestrained hunger is kind of a perennial problem. So you end up wondering, what if you don't stake this one? What if you chain him up and feed him until he plays better with others? What does he really need out of life anyway? And it turns out he needs pretty much what anyone does, regular eats, work he can get his teeth into, and someone to care about. Love the enemy instead, and you end up with an ally powerful enough to save the world. Even after everything he's done. That just means he understands better those still in the darkness.

And what if it's always that way?

Make it a fight, and both sides get ground down by grief and losses, until whoever is left standing gets to be king of dust and ashes.

Keep reaching out though... yeah there'll be pain and grief and no small amount of backstabbing, but there's a chance instead to grow stronger together.

It might be very satisfying to punch your enemies until they stay down and then put them in little boxes underground, but there's always more where they came from, and all they need is one good day.

Better instead to go recruiting, even if at first it's a mixed alignment crew. The basic business of staying alive is what you're all here for. Even if they see you as a score, or a happy meal on legs, you've still got that much of a start.

And it's hard, reaching out even knowing you'll get slapped down. There's no single big boss fight to be won, that way. It's every day, and it's grinding, and there is no finish line.

But there can still be some visceral satisfactions. See also why I read slash.

And more drama should end in weddings.

So. There are villains. And as long as hate and greed and ignorance are around, there will always be villains. But. How to handle that has many possibilities.

And some of them are much more fun than others.

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.