Beyond Selidor

I seem to be on a bit of a blogging roll right now, so here's a post about three things I've been musing about in relation to various things I've been reading in recent times.

1. I still find Buffy empowering, in spite of everything

Let's get this out of the way. Buffy fails on numerous occasions in matters of race, sexuality and even the feminism which its creator, Joss Whedon, claims. I personally think its storytelling is excellent, but I know numerous people who find it deeply problematic and even hurtful, with good reason. It is, to me, an example of a flawed story that nonetheless never fails to speak to me, and I know that I have in the past excused or failed to recognise its flaws due to ignorance.

Chief among these flaws is one that feminists often raise in relation to all of Whedon's work: he ostensibly writes stories about 'empowered' women whose source of empowerment is overcoming some kind of trauma, usually a literal or metaphorical rape.

And yet, for me, as a teenager and young woman, I found that particular story, especially as it was told in Buffy, extremely empowering. Despite having a relatively calm adolescence, with nothing worse than low-level bullying, I always felt broken (and indeed in my early 20s actually sought out situations that would give me an excuse for this brokenness). As such, the idea that out of brokenness came strength was incredibly empowering for me. I know now that we need stories about women whose strength is not simply an act of revenge, a side-effect of abuse or destruction, but back then, Buffy's was a story I needed to be told.*

2. Leave Twihards alone!
On a related note, I think the bashing of Twilight fans needs to stop. This is not because I think Twilight is a wonderful story, or that it's a terrible story but this somehow doesn't matter because it's 'light, fluffy entertainment' (nothing is 'just a story', and nothing is above criticism). It's because if I had been twelve, or fourteen or even eighteen when Twilight came out, hell, I would've been a fan too, and I think those of us who were introverted and 'only ever fell in love with fictional men' need to show a bit more empathy and compassion.

You know how I said I felt 'broken' as a teenager? Well, I used to think the solution to that 'brokenness' was an all-consuming, all-sacrificing, transformative love. I read just the kinds of books to feed my rescue fantasy, and I thought if the right guy (always someone 'dangerous' and 'damaged') would walk through the door, all my troubles and angst would be over. As a fifteen-year-old girl, it's a powerful idea: that true love is obsessive and dramatic and will cause you to change completely, and Twilight simply taps into that idea. As a teenager I was reading Cecilia Dart-Thornton and Sara Douglass and Juliet Marillier and a whole host of other female romantic fantasy writers who fell under the umbrella of 'Celtic-inflected historical fantasy', and who am I to say that they were any less damaging to my ideas about romance and relationships than Twilight?

I'm not saying that we should throw our hands in the air and give up criticising Twilight. No, we should criticise it until Stephenie Meyer is no more than a distant spot on the horizon of the YA corpus. But we should stop thinking of Twilight fandom as a new phenomenon and recognise that many of us read equally problematic books as teenagers, and gained equally disturbing beliefs about relationships because of them.

3. Hufflepuff and proud
I'm a self-sorted Hufflepuff, and actually only want to join Pottermore so that I can have this sort of officially confirmed. (I'm sad, I know, I know.) And while I know I'm overinvesting, it does make me sad (even though I know it's all done in humour), when people like The Last Muggle persistently bash my beloved house and the qualities that it epitomises.

This criticism does have some validity. After all, loyalty - the key Hufflepuff trait - does have a dark side, as one may be blindly loyal and supportive where he or she should be constructively critical or antagonistic. But I think that kindness, compassion, hard work, fairness and loyalty are unjustly underrated, and that these are qualities (kindness in particular) that we ought to demonstrate, not mock or belittle.

In any case, it seems to me that the whole Potter series is, in fact, arguing for a less rigid separation into houses, since people don't tend to only embody the traits of one House, but rather possess them all in varying proportions. Ultimately it takes representatives of all Houses, and the utilisation of the myriad traits they embody, to destroy the Horcruxes, not Gryffindor bravery alone. We are composite beings.

But then that's probably just me being earnest like the Hufflepuff I am.

_________________________
*Also, I rewatched Season 6 - not a fan favourite - at a time in my life when I really needed it, and I seem to be alone among fans in thinking that it was a well-executed season whose story perfectly matched where the characters were in their lives. (I do recognise, however, that many queer fans found the Willow/Tara storyline distressing and a betrayal, and, though they don't need my validation, I think they have a valid point.)

I wrote a Longvision chapter commentary post. It's about Romanitas chapter 2, 'Green Thames'.

In response to a variety of things, I wrote an impassioned defence of J. K. Rowling and Roald Dahl. Against what charges was I defending them? The charge of encouraging children to challenge authority. Oddly enough, on the same day, Neil Gaiman linked to a New York Times article about absent and bumbling parents in children's literature, which is sort of what I was discussing.

Scalzi, as usual, has some good stuff on his blog, including this (conservative US senator Tom Coburn tells conservatives to get their news and current affairs from a wider range of sources than Faux News, which is stating the bleeding obvious, but welcome nonetheless), and his thoughts on this year's Hugo nominees. Abigail Nussbaum's opinions on the matter, are, as usual, worthwhile.

Here's a GREAT post by Justine Larbalestier about teenagers and reading, which I urge you all to read. She makes the sensible point that a lot of the panicking seems to be that teenagers aren't reading the right kind of books, that is, not novels. But, as she notes, teenagers are reading, so stop panicking. She's also got an interesting post about how most US readers seem to be interpreting Karen Healey's book Guardian of the Dead as being set in Australia, when it is, in fact, set in New Zealand - and very clearly stated to be set there.

This Boing Boing post about a ramen connoisseur is pretty cool. So is this article in The Independent about John Oliver, a British comedian who's been a very successful addition to The Daily Show line up.

Despite my strong resistance to becoming British, it seems to have rubbed off somewhat. In case you didn't realise, the general election's been called for 6th May. While I can't vote in it, I've found myself getting caught up in it, and read the election coverage in three papers from cover to cover today. I actually quite enjoy elections. The US one in 2008 I spent watching with three American housemates, celebrating ecstatically as the night wore on. For my last Australian one, I was working for a newspaper, and there's something very special about being in the media during an election year. There's a sense of knowing camaraderie that you don't find elsewhere, with everyone dropping everything to stand transfixed in front of the office televisions whenever an important speech comes on and so on.

As a foreigner, the British election won't have a huge impact on my life (unless the government decides to kick out all foreign students or limit our ability to work or something), but as a passionate participant in several other elections (and a person from a country where voting is compulsory), I urge all my British friends to register to vote, if they haven't already, and to vote.

(Amusingly, when I was in Southport with my cousins, I learnt that British elections are always on Thursdays. Australian ones are always on Saturdays, so as to allow everyone to vote. My cousin remarked that the British ones were held on weekdays to keep people from voting. However, every election I've ever voted in has required me to duck out of work in the cake shop because, as a student, I had been working part-time on Saturdays...)

The other example of rubbed-off Britishness is a bit sillier. I was reading a book published in the US, and found myself flinching every time the author used the word 'pants' to mean 'trousers'. Somehow, although this is a perfectly acceptable Australian usage, the British meaning of 'pants' seems to have lodged in my brain. It's only 'pants'. I still happily say 'chips' to mean both 'crisps' and 'hot chips', 'swimmers' for 'swimming costume' and so on. But 'pants' for 'trousers' looks wrong.

One final piece of ephemera before I leave you to cook dinner. While running today, I had the best seamless transition from one song to another:

'I'm totally addicted to -' 'Bass in the place, London!'

It kind of made my day. Which is kind of pathetic.

So, it's a linkspam post. Yay?

The Last Muggle has finally finished reading the whole Harry Potter series. I've linked to the last of her 'Finished!' posts; there are ten, plus an epilogue and prologue. I've absolutely adored reading her blog. It reminds me so much of what it felt like to read the series for the first time, when everything was so fresh and desperate and mysterious.

I love Scalzi's post about what he would do if he had the power to rewrite the US constitution.

I also love grrm's post in response the passing of the US healthcare bill:

'I find it telling that virtually ALL the posters from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, France, Italy, Spain, and other countries that have a single payer national health care service LIKE their national health plan, and would NOT trade it for the American model. Meanwhile, here in the US, we are clearly split right down the middle. (Probably along the usual Blue State/ Red State lines, I suspect). Speaking for myself, I would gladly trade our present health care system -- even with the Obama fixes -- for a Canadian or Australian model. I'd do it tomorrow, without hesitation. So would millions of other Americans.

Now I ask you: if there are two restaurants, one where 99% of the customers are satisfied and happy, and one where half the customers are happy and the other half profoundly unhappy with the food and service, which would you rather eat at? '

Quite.

This post by the Intern made me fall off my chair laughing, while this interview with her was very informative.

The last link, which I hesitate to put in with all these other links to wonderful things, is to one of my own blog posts. It's about my favourite fictional couples. I'd love it if people would comment about their own, as I've noticed a weird trend with mine: they're ALL (with one or two exceptions) from YA books. Why? I don't really know. Perhaps I find adult romantic relationships boring? (That's a terrifying thought.)

I wrote a yay! life! post over on Wordpress. I've also got the first of my (spoilerific) commentary posts for Romanitas. It's on the first chapter, 'Embalmed'.

I've been reading a lot of post-Deathly Hallows, 'next generation' Harry Potter fanfic. Serious Harry Potter fans on my flist are probably horrified (one of them has been known to remark that since we don't know anything about Harry, Ginny, Ron, Hermione etc's children, writing fic about them is like writing about original characters). For me, that's part of the appeal, I suspect. I don't know about you, but one of my favourite things to do as a child was imagining what happened to characters after the last page was turned (Presh, Leeward, Allyman, Fenja, Eduardo and Mariam ended up working for Cirque du Soleil, dammit!), and that's exactly what the better next-gen fic-writers are doing.

I like fanfic in such a qualified way. I can't read it for things that I truly adore (cereswunderkind aside, I'm incapable of reading HDM fanfic, and I wouldn't dream of reading Buffy or Firefly fic either), and I'm much more interested in reading longer, novel-length fic where the focus is less on pairings and more on the story itself. (That's not to say I'm anti-shipping, more that for me, the point of fic is the same as in any other storytelling medium - telling a story. I certainly don't say this out of any perceived superiority, just that it is a matter of taste, and my taste falls much more on the gen side of things.) Then again, I'd never want to read fic for something I don't care about at all. Harry Potter is one of the few texts that sits comfortably in the centre of the divide between 'I adore it without qualification' and 'I couldn't care less about it': I like HP more for what it symbolised than what it actually was, more for how it brought my friends and me together to talk about books than for what the books themselves actually said.

We all have particular stories that we can hear told again and again, same same but different. (For me, it used to be a particularly Montague-and-Capulety across the barricades love story.) Next gen fic, with its emphasis on the Potter/Weasley and Malfoy offspring tends to appeal to a particular favourite story of mine: people who detest/fear one another being forced to work together despite mutual dislike. It's gone beyond any Romeo and Juliet trappings it once used to possess. I'm interested in compromises: who makes them, why, and what it does to them. That, for me, is the appeal of the best next-gen stuff. At the moment, I've been enjoying jenwryn_fic's novel-length story 'Black is the Colour'. I suspect it won't appeal to the Potter purists, but I like it quite a lot.

thelxiepia has been keeping me very entertained tonight with some wonderful links.

First, there's 'Damn Demented Demons', a gen Harry Potter/Supernatural crossover fic by hells_half_acre. It's quite long, but very worth reading. It really captures the nuances of both series, and in particular the links and similarities between various characters.

Then, we've got a great Canon vs Fanon Snape (highlights include '200% latex' and 'obligatory chibis') by Zorm.

Finally, enjoy this great youtube parody called 'Vampires'.



Thanks, thelxiepia

I can see this post getting quite long, so I'll put most of it behind a cut, but the first bit is the most important, and so I'm keeping it out of the cut.

Request
I've had a (*gasp* *faint*) idea for a multifandom fanfic sitting in the back of my mind for quite a while, but I haven't been able to write it because I can't think of the final character I need for the idea to work. So I'm asking you to help me, flist! Basically, I need you to think of a character who:
Died in the late 90s (1997 or 1998 would be ideal); and
Died with 'unfinished business'. To take an example from the Tomorrow series
( spoiler )
However, I don't want to use Tomorrow series characters because I'd prefer the fandoms to have supernatural elements if possible.

If anyone can think of characters that fit these characteristics, PM me, don't comment, as I wouldn't want any other readers to be inadvertently spoiled.

( 500 Days of Summer, Harry Potter, some life stuff and a link. There will be spoilers. )

Well, that's it from me for now.

I'm meant to be packing for my trip to Ireland, but, guess what, I'm online, flinging links at you.

First up, I've been blogging epically. The release of the new Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, sparked a bit of discussion on the 'Pub. I came to the conclusion that I read the books not for the magic, but for their theme of overcoming one's history. This caused me to blog at length on Geata Póeg na Déanainn.

Then I posted my weekly post on Longvision. It's about genre, and whether it's necessary.

A couple of things have caught my eye on the internet recently. The first is an absolutely excellent post by Justine Larbalestier. She is speaking out about her anger that although her latest book, Liar, has a black protagonist, her US publisher's marketing department insisted on a cover with a white girl on it. It's a particularly timely post, and shows that the publishing world, like society at large, still has far to go with issues of race.

This is a New York Times article about Pottermania and nostalgia among Gen Y. I've been talking about my generation's early-onset nostalgia for months now, but I disagree with the author of the article that this nostalgia was brought about by September 11. Real, ordinary mundane life is the culprit.

Speaking of Gen Y's nostalgia, ellevee has a great post of all the wonderful things that future generations will miss out on. Scroll down a bit to find this. I remember being aware of this when I took a photo of my (then) four-year-old cousin, and he turned over my camera to see the photo. My camera wasn't digital, and it was beyond his comprehension that it didn't have a little screen where he could check out all the photos I'd taken.

A while ago, I planned to write a rantpost about how bad Season 3 of Robin Hood was. Now, I don't have to because ravenya03 has done it for me.

A lot of people are asking if I've had a chance to watch 'Epitaph One', the Dollhouse season finale, and the answer is, so far, no. I will eventually get around to it, but I'll be away from the internet all next week while I'm in Ireland, so I won't be able to see it for a little while.

Inspired by catherine_clare, I read Harry, A History by Melissa Anelli. I'm not, and never have been, a member of the Harry Potter fandom, and although I was dimly aware of Anelli's identity as webmistress of The Leaky Cauldron, I'd never visited the site. What I am, however, is an internet addict, and a big believer in online community, and I was very interested to hear about the history of the Harry Potter online community.

Harry, A History is an intriguing little book. I've been involved in online fandom long enough now to know that it probably was written with a strong bias, as Anelli sought to justify her own interpretations of, and reactions to, the inevitable wank and debates that plague most online fandoms. As long as you understand this, though, Harry, A History is a pretty good account of the growth of the Harry Potter fandom and Anelli's own experiences of that fandom.

But for me, what shone through most clearly was how fandom had saved Anelli. This is a view with which I have great sympathy, as, two years ago, fandom - or, more specifically, online community did the same for me.

( My angst, let me show it to you )