Things I am enjoying right now

[trinityvixen]

Happy Halloween every one! I'm having a goodish sort of day. I've received lots of compliments on my violently orange and black-striped tights, so I feel pretty good. I saw a little boy dressed as Indiana Jones cracking his fake whip and I melted a little. (Stupid fucking ovaries! Die!) So I hope all are enjoying their day before the Day of the Dead.

I'm bored at work (surprise) so I'm just going to talk about stuff. Here goes.

Television!


Pushing Daisies: How are you simulataneously the most VULGAR show ever and the cutest? This show could make anything seem twee and adorable and do so with the most winking nod at the vulgarity AND GET AWAY WITH IT. Oh, and Ned is so wonderful. I like exploring his vulnerabilities outside of his insecurity vis a vis Chuck. Because Ned has become Ned not because of what happened with Chuck but because of what happened to him. It's long past time for this to be brought into the light.

True Blood: This show is about 50/50 where I am either repulsed and angry or totally in love and tweeeee-ing. I love the following people without reservation on that show: Rene, Lafayette, and Tara. I like Sam with major reservations, Arlene with even more reservations, and that's it. I hate like absolutely everyone else, Anna Paquin probably most of all. I'm suckered into it because it's the kind of good where you don't always enjoy it but it definitely provokes you.

Dexter: Not as much a fan this season if only because it feels like a retread of last season. Dexter literally JUST went through the whole Lilah brou-ha-ha. What the shit is he doing making those mistakes again? The problem is that Michael C Hall made him too likeable. Dexter from the books is a monster, full-stop. Now he's being unbearably cute but still aloof and I don't know where any of it is going.

Prison Break: Ha ha ha, I think the stress is finally going to KILL Michael Scofield. That only took a few months (in the show's timeline). Yes, I still find him hot. Especially when shouting. ::shiver::

Daria: I've been re-watching this show and it strikes me both as profound and profoundly sad that this show is still relevant. Not only to teenage life but to like my life. Arrested development or timeless show? Let us pray for my sake that it is the latter.

Smallville: I am really liking this season. I still get pissed off at Clark being right all the goddamned time, but I am digging the season so far for the most part. Clark and Lois are freakin' adorable all the fucking time, I can't stand it.

Supernatural: I have my reservations about the future of this show--once you get to the Apocalypse, what do you do after that?--but I do like where it's going anyway. I feel bad that this show is supported 99% by people who watch it either entirely for the incest fanfic or the RPF because it honestly deserves better than that. A lot of what I like about the show is entirely based on the concept of family being allowed to show more or less affection depending on the rules of each relationship. Without any of the Winchesters wanting to OMG DOOOOOOO EACH OTHER.

I exaggerate. Many people I know who dig the incest/RPF love the show for its very fluid style and adaptable story line. (This is because the people I know who are into that are intelligent people who don't push porn buttons without pushing thinky ones, too.) It feels rather like this was all plotted out from the beginning, probably because it builds on its own mythology very capably. It helps that I watched a lot of that myth-building in solid chunks.

Doctor Who: I am not sorry that David Tennant is leaving because I never liked him as much as I did Christopher Eccleston. I'm also not pleased that people think his Doctor-on-speed schtick makes him a worthy heir of Tom Baker. Screw that, Tom Baker could be twice as crazy with one roll of the buggy eyeballs for all the jumping and shouting David Tennant does.

That said, I am really melancholy over the idea of the Doctor dying again. To me, it feels as though this Doctor is a drifter, not an explorer. Maybe it's the melancholy of the last season getting to me, but it always felt as if he was a dying, desperate man. As if he were fighting constantly to just stay ahead of death. And he's so immature that he thought he could. The next Doctor should be a sober one, who has learned his lesson. Should be more like Nine, in other words. In general, I am just bummed by the idea of losing another regeneration forever. If I could, I would make sure that the show ended forever with the Thirteenth Doctor, just so that the point is made--there is only one Doctor, and he only gets what everyone gets. (A lifetime. Thank you for that, Neil Gaiman.) I will cry if the show ever ends ends ends, but it should.

Movies!

I want to see Max Payne still. And feiran and I need to go see Saw V. Why? Because. That's my only reason.

Oh, and I finally saw The Iron Giant and it was adorable. I love Brad Bird.

Books!

It will take me forever to get through Nixonland, but the eerie similarities to politics nowadays is making it hard to get through at any speed. I get chills and have to put it down. It's also a little densely written.

I finished My Lobotomy which was a horror show in slow motion. A quick read if you want something to make you be glad that mental health medicine has progressed even as far as it has.

Comments

[viridian.livejournal.com]

I agree that Dexter is being sort of retread-y, but I like it much better than last season. Maybe because Jimmy Smits' character is better than Lila turned out to be. Maybe because the Rita stuff has won me over more than I wanted it to. Maybe because Deb is getting a decent plotline for once that has nothing to do with her brother. Whatever the reason, I'm enjoying it.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Deb is fucking adorable. I don't know what's up with her she's up/she's down thing with Quinn, or what his game is, but she's still awesome at least.

Jimmy Smits is way better than Lila, but she was there first, so this all feels re-hashed, which is a shame. Also, I thought after last season Dexter was going his own way, no longer beholden to Harry or the code. Apparently not. I thought maybe killing an innocent dude would make him interested in branching out more. Still no, even though that's not very realistic. I also want to know how f'ed up Jimmy Smits is really that he can set Dex out to kill and be happy about it. Harry friggin' trained Dexter to kill, and it still repulsed him enough to make him down pills. We gotta get to that.

[fairest.livejournal.com]

Damn. I was hoping you'd forgotten about Saw V. :(

Meanwhile, yeah, I'm really surprised at Smallville this season. I think it's so appealing at the moment because he's in prime Superman stage--working at the Planet, quasi-flirting with Lois, one step away from the costume, with sightings starting to happen. It's at Lois and Clark stage (or a little past), and man, did I ever love me some Lois and Clark. Bizarre frog-eating arcs aside.

Although I'm sure my rampant attraction to men who've played Superman (less George Reeves--sorry, George!) is helping, now that Clark is in a suit and officially Growned-Up. Rrrwrr.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I think that's a major part of why I'm liking it. It's also a bit like early seasons--we're seeing how he becomes Superman. We got the background and now we're in transition. But he can't become Superman, and they still want to make more show, so it could just end up floundering forever. I hope not, but it's a possibility.

And yes, it's very Lois and Clark, now that Lois is off to find out who the super hero is. And yes, Clark being a dead looker in a suit helps. :)

And yes some more: Saw V!!!

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

You realize that slashers are less than 1% of any show's audience, right?

Mea culpa here: the most I spend in SPN fandom is reading Fandom Secrets posts. Meaning that 99% of what I'm getting the everlong back-and-forth over slashers and the rest. (I being in that rest.)

Also, I object to this view that a slasher can't see the show through multiple lenses. It deserves better than to have wincesters watching it? Fuck you too!

Absolutely fuck me, too. I'm laughing that you thought this would sound meaner than it should (so mean as to delete the post), seeing as I thought I was equally harsh. Basically, as I said, I give the slashers I know personally far more credit than I do slashers generally because slashers tend to annoy the fuck out of me (and I like my friends so they get leeway general slashers do not). Slashers take away exactly what I enjoy about fictional relationships between same-sex characters and trivialize in so doing the same-sex romance advances as far as I'm concerned because they make it seem like they're breaking some taboo by having same-sex attractions front-and-center and that's obnoxious. (It's only exotic if you don't think it's perfectly normal and common.)

But something I really enjoy is homosociality. It's so frequently denied in mainstream fiction, to say nothing of mainstream reality. Men don't hardly hug other men. Women's deep friendships seem to be over sex and men more than common interests and attitudes. So I get really annoyed when any work that shows dudes/ladies being able to be full-range-of-human-emotion-with-each-other = hot for each other. And the better a work of fiction is at showing love is important regardless of how it "looks" to others, the more slashing tends to piss me off.

So, I guess what I'm trying to defend here is that my disliking slashing for this show so much is out of the fact that I think Supernatural does a pretty phenomenal job of showing these complex issues--which, demons and witches and vampires (oh my!) aside, are entirely ordinary. I love the humanity, the way that despite some weird, f'ed up experience, these people are all family. And I can occasionally "go there" with the incest, I just generally prefer not to because it dyes all the layers into one--sexual--that I had been enjoying in many different flavors. I liked your story with the Sam-attracted-to-Dean thing mostly because it acknowledged upfront how not-cool that was. Most slashers don't bother to confront normality, shall we say, when they write. Incest slashers generally have to, but they don't always.

But yeah, no, not offended or nothing. I make an antagonistic generalized statement, I get challenged. ::shrugs:: It's happened before.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

The problem here is that you are starting the old argument of [insert group here] are ruining fandom and my experience of the show! But this is complete bull, really. What you're complaining about is that people in a community are discussing the show in a way you don't like, to which the proper response always is don't engage. And if no one is discussing the show the way you'd like to (or writing the fic you want), the answer is, always, then start discussing the show (or writing the fic) the way you want and hopefully similarly minded people will gravitate to you. The answer is never to try to shut up the other group.

What you are also saying is that you have a uniquely privileged and "right" reading of the show that no one else has, to which I say absolutely BULL. SHIT. A number 1 – you are assuming a consensus reading from a group that not only doesn't have a consensus reading but that you are not a part of, so you wouldn't know if they did. B number 2 – you are assuming that there is a right reading of the show and you're the only one that gets it. That is so against how I choose to interact with texts I can't even tell you.

The only circumstance in which I would accept the first argument is in the cases where a subset of crazy fans interacting with the actors/writers/producers has poisoned those people against fandom in a way that has a profound effect on their future interaction with fans and, in some cases, the content they produce. (I'm looking at you, sex toy box to Michael Rosenbaum people.) Then you could legitimately say that they are "ruining fandom." If all they're doing is discussing…? Then, no. They're not.

And there is no circumstance in which I'd buy the second argument.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way…

I have seen some rather interesting discussions of how slash could be potentially damaging by contributing to the culture-wide presumption that closeness between men is inherently sexual. It's an interesting idea, but I wouldn't put slash down as a cause—it is still such a tiny, tiny minority that I can't really believe it actually has any effect on societal mores at all. I'd look instead to the culture-wide tendency to read homoeroticism into a lot of things. I'm just looking back at my high school English teachers who seemed to take special glee in reading homoerotic subtext into everything from Moby Dick to Bringing Up Baby.

I get what you're saying about slash flattening out the dynamic between two characters. The reason I think why most of fanfic tends to be romantic (other than the obvious porn reason) is that romance is the only genre where the relationship is the story. It alone concerns itself with the development and changing of the relationship between two characters, and it provides an artificial arc and ending point to that development. This is why there is a sub-genre of stories called "smarm" (most common in Sentinel fandom, though I don't recommend searching for them, I don't think you'd like them) that are gen but follow a romantic arc with the friendship of the characters.

Romance is also the only framework that privileges one relationship between two characters above all their other relationships—the ideal of romantic love is that these two people are the most important in each other's lives. It's for this reason that I think that many writers who are drawn to the power of a particular relationship tend to romanticize it, because along with the romance comes a promise of supremacy.

OMG comment too long! Continued...

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

This is one of the reasons I like Boston Legal so much. (I've been cogitating on a post about it for a while, but haven't written it yet.) In that, Alan Shore and Denny Crane are clearly soulmates (they call each other that). Their friendship comes with most of the trappings of a romance, including jealousy over attention paid to other men. The show has made it absolutely, completely, undeniably clear that they are lifemates and that they love each other (both of which they've said on the show). The show has also made absolutely clear that they don't have sex and don't find each other sexually attractive at all. This relationship is often shown as in some way tragic or incomplete. So my question is, is it a tragedy because they are soulmates but, because they are both straight, are doomed to spend their entire lives pursuing meaningless sexual flings because they could never give to a woman what they have with each other (there's even an episode where Crane's paramour forces him to choose between her and Alan and Crane chooses Alan), or is it a tragedy because society views this relationship as not enough? (I think I know which one you'd lean towards.)

As for me, with the wincest, I don't know if you saw my posts when I first started watching, but I tried to resist. I did. But the show was so damn blatant. Season one is full of red freaking flags for slashers. Wincest, I think, also provides an alternative but compelling reason for Sam's initial break from his family. Though many stories do treat wincest as if it was just another romance and ignore the rest of Sam and Dean's complicated relationship, many stories address that complexity head on.

I liked your story with the Sam-attracted-to-Dean thing mostly because it acknowledged upfront how not-cool that was.
I've gotten several comments to this effect (one in particular going "thank god! Finally a story by someone who hates wincest as much as I do!"), to which my answer is usually, uh… I don't hate wincest. I've actually written wincest. "Morning in the Evening" isn't wincest hatemail. You accuse wincest of not confronting reality as if wincesters are unaware of it, but I think it is a more deliberate choice to not address reality because the reality of an incestuous relationship is inherently tragic. So wincesters as a group have a certain number of assumptions that create a fictional bubble in which you can tell these stories and still have happy endings. I wrote "Morning in the Evening" because I hadn't seen a story that did not make one of these assumptions—namely, that both of them, deep down, are attracted to each other. In "Crazy Faith," I was deliberately not making another one—that there will be no reasonable outside perspective that points out how the real world would view such a relationship. I didn't do this to invalidate such assumptions, just because I wanted to play around with them in a way I hadn't seen anyone else do.

All slash exists within a certain fictional bubble—I've seen essays (notably by cathexys) linking this with the popularity of the "Canadian shack" story trope. The idea being that the slash story has to isolate the characters from reality to some degree with certain implicit assumptions, metaphorically sticking them in a Canadian shack, to allow the development of the relationship. The appeal of slash, I think, in large part is due to the desire to view the relationship between two characters as so important in itself that no other relationships, whether with friends or family, can ever rival it. Especially with Supernatural, a show that canonically has isolated Sam and Dean completely from any ancillary relationships, with the exception of Bobby, there is a tendency to want to view the primary relationship as sufficient in itself to sustain these two people.

In reality, we know that's never the case, no matter how in love two people are. In fact, we know that two people so wrapped up in each other they've isolated themselves completely, is really troubling.

At this point I think I've meandered really far from the point, so I'm just going to post this and get back to my actual job.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Also, if you are wondering why I deleted the post, it was because of the "fuck you," which I meant in that cute way jethrien says "Fuck you!" when there isn't really any animosity, she's just pointing out you're being a dick. And then I realized that such a subtle interpretation was not at all apparent in a text-based medium. So then I freaked out that you would think I hated you and get pissed at me for always harshing your Supernatural squee and then I deleted it.

But really, I pimp you into a fandom I've been in for several years and you come in and completely invalidate my appreciation of the show? You had to know you'd get a smackdown for that.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I didn't completely invalidate it. I questioned some of it, sure, and expressed my opinion that slashers seem to suck a lot of the depth out of things they are fannish about. I never said it was invalid, just that it was a shallow reading on the show. That's insulting, sure, but I'm not saying you're not allowed to have that thought. I never said I was right, they were wrong, just that I don't agree and that's not what I get out of it. I deliver my opinions absolutely, but I don't weigh them with anything more than the force of "I think."

You have a point about not interacting, and, unfortunately, that's what I'm doing. I don't interact. I used to, more, and part of that is just not being interested enough in being fanfic-y fannish any more. But another part is that, coming to it years after fandom is established, the lines are already drawn, and the weight is against my opinion so strongly, I don't want to get into it because I'd start out having to defend my opinion against what I'd unflinchingly estimate was the super-majority of fans' opinion on the subject. So I don't interact or impose my view on people, I just talk about shit on my LJ, like I do everything else.

Really, what I'm saying is, can't we heal this divided fandom? Stop the rampant polarization between those who enjoy the pathos of the show and those who want to believe the main characters are picking out China patterns?

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

No, what you said was that a class of fans of which I am a member can't properly appreciate the show and I am only exempt from that status insofar as I am not a real member of that class. Which is definitely insulting.

I also disagree with your assumption that seeing the show through one lens precludes seeing the show through any other. I usually see shows through many possible lenses, and then just stick to the one that I think the most interesting. It's Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle for fiction—until something is shown definitively in canon, all possible interpretations exist simultaneously.

For me, also, my preference in fic is almost exclusively romantic, but that doesn't mean that I'm only watching the show to back up that reading. I'm looking for different things in canon and fanfic.

If you want to fight the gen vs. wincest war… Go talk to dotfic. :) That argument has been going non-stop since the beginning of the show. There are gen only communities, though, and one of my favorite supernatural fic recs comms crack_impala has gen Mondays and het Thursdays.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

No, what you said was that a class of fans of which I am a member can't properly appreciate the show and I am only exempt from that status insofar as I am not a real member of that class. Which is definitely insulting.

What I said was that 99% of fans seemed to support it entirely, solely for the incest (from what I've seen, which I admitted was limited) and that it was good enough to stand without that support, not that slashers = people made of fail. In fact, what I said originally in the post was I have friends who like that part of it but also give a shit about the rest of it, so nyah nyah to this "only one lens stuff." (Which I also didn't say! I said I dislike people who ONLY see it through one lens and used incest as my example.)

And I don't want to fight a fandom war because I don't have any interest in stoking one since I'm not in fandom.

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

Daria -- I sure hope it's one of those "timeless observations about life" cases rather than continued arrested development, because heck, I didn't even watch the whole thing until I was out of college, and darned if it didn't speak to me then. Although a fair amount of that is the nostalgia factor.

But I think that at least part of the timelessness has to do with its continued relevance to our generation, even as we age and develop; the past remains a part of you, and the show was very formative for a lot of the humor and attitude styles that we've carried into today, so that even if it won't be relevant for new watchers, it could remain relevant for us, even as we mature and age. Call it a culturally-defining moment or something that is a unique identifier of our particular cultural place...?

Or maybe I just continue to heart persistently-pervasive sarcasm.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Nostalgia is definitely a key player in watching Daria, although I'm discovering whole seasons I seem to have never seen. I watched almost all of the first two seasons to the point of almost having them memorized, and I saw some of the end stuff, but I missed a lot in between. It will be nice to have a completed experience.

The sarcasm definitely helps, as does the intelligence. Daria could be a hipster template--she shuns your pop culture and enjoys it only ironically!--but she isn't. She is a constant conqueror of all bullshit, even bullshit that falls along her interests (like the episode where she takes down the smarter-than-thou kids at a private school, kids who, like she, enjoy learning and take pride in their smarts). It's really about everyone being full of themselves and not being able to see their defects because they're too busy trying to fix defects in others. Daria, by not trying to fix anybody, escapes her own critical standards most of the time by default. Gotta love that.