Quick thinkies
I'm another person who's not been posting much, and it's partly because I'm not sure where to start or what to write about. From a fannish angle, I have assorted thinkies about shows I've watched recently, and I'll include a short summary of the ones that should be long posts, at least.
I'm quite a fan of Mad Men and I should really start writing stuff about it. Both the recent season finale (poor Faye!) and also waaaay back to my season 1 reaction to Betty Draper. I did write some general thoughts about the show over at jae's.
I still watch House although it can get rather faily at times. My recent outrage was the episode with the birthing mother (not spoilery as this all happens before the credits and is totally irrelevant to the story itself): most women in the real world do not experience their waters breaking before they're well into labour, only on TV/media do waters always break early because it is Dramatic. And since it was totally irrelevant in this case (she's already in hospital, far into labour, and the waters breaking are referred to retrospectively), it makes it look like the scriptwriters only know about labour from other TV/media. Secondly, any woman in 2010 who can be earnestly talking about how much research she's done into pregnancy and labour while she's uncomfortably labouring on her back must be in a TV show, there's no way I can believe that of a real 2010 woman. You do not need to do very much research into pregnancy and labour before coming across the idea that labouring on one's back is a bad idea for most women, and one should try different positions. Altogether, this stank badly of scriptwriters who didn't think they needed to learn anything about real labour and birth, just what they'd seen in other shows. And I definitely expected better from a show that puts itself forward as being interested in medicine.
I'm still keeping half an eye on Warehouse 13, for the Awesome Secondary Female Characters. I'm also very amused at the irony around the premise: Warehouse 13 is full of artifacts, solid magical-historical objects that do things that often are remarkably similar to things we can now do with computers and electronics. The show seems to me to express a nostalgia for a "real world" before computers and electronics and thus a need to invent these more material objects (similar to steampunk) - but of course to show the artifacts in action, the show relies heavily on CGI.
Warehouse 13, together with Stargate Atlantis, have led to the discovery of another factoid about me and how at odds I feel with "mainstream" fandom - "mainstream" being full of male slash, and an unpleasant amount of hate on awesome female characters. You see, my life experience has included a significant number of awesome women who didn't self-promote much, and a sadly much larger number of not at all awesome men who self-promoted endlessly, and who, because of sexism, were rarely informed that they weren't nearly as awesome as they thought (the genuinely awesome men don't seem to need to self-promote as much in my experience). So when I see a male character on a show, who I am told by the show is awesome, without much showing of anything I consider awesome, I dump him straight into the "no interest or respect from me" bin. Two very notable examples being Artie from W13 and McKay on SGA (okay, McKay is sort of shown doing awesome things but they are so implausible, so far outside my experience of science, I can't take them seriously and just put them down as more "being told, not shown"). So I find these characters extremely unattractive and would rather fangirl anyone else on either show - and yet both seem to have attracted the majority of fanfiction for that show. (Curiously, I can't think of many female characters where I am told rather than shown awesomeness - maybe even scriptwriters don't know how? - and I'm wondering if some of the fannish reaction against them is precisely because they're shown doing, taking screen time away from the boyz, although I personally appreciate it.)
In fact, having finally seen SGA so long after being aware of the dominance of McKay/Sheppard slash, I spent a large amount of time while watching just boggling that these two, to me extremely unpleasant, self-centred, boringly white male stereotypes, had got so many women so worked up to write so many passionate words about. It may be dismissive of me but I'm very reluctant now to think of slash about them as meaningfully feminist. Even the fail-y script writing of Dr Weir (did the writers ever meet a woman competent at bureaucracy? Wasn't that kind of a minimum requirement in order to write such a character?) was more deserving of some fanfiction fixing than they were, in my opinion. Let alone Teyla and Ronon.
I've long had "how do they do that?" reactions to mashups, but today for the first time I heard a song that I thought was a mashup potential with another: Rihanna's Only girl (in the world) with Kelly Rowland's Commander. Although now I've listened to them one immediately after the other I'm not sure they can be mashed up because I get the sense they're actually the same song - no wonder I made a connection. I am charmed by a song with a title like Only girl (in the world) expressing the sentiment that she'd like to feel like that, and similarly that she'd like to feel like she's the only woman he'll ever love, as though that's just as unreasonable an expectation of the real world (I mean, I think it is, but pop songs don't often). But Commander will remain my preferred version of this song-complex[1], not least because I can see the Alice in Wonderland vid to go with it in my mind's eye.
[1] Science geek - when biologists aren't sure if they're dealing with one or several species, as is entirely reasonable, they may talk about a species complex.
This entry is originally published at http://aquaeri.dreamwidth.org/81241.html. Please go here to read comments; here to leave a comment (you can use your LJ OpenID).
comments so far.
I'm quite a fan of Mad Men and I should really start writing stuff about it. Both the recent season finale (poor Faye!) and also waaaay back to my season 1 reaction to Betty Draper. I did write some general thoughts about the show over at jae's.
I still watch House although it can get rather faily at times. My recent outrage was the episode with the birthing mother (not spoilery as this all happens before the credits and is totally irrelevant to the story itself): most women in the real world do not experience their waters breaking before they're well into labour, only on TV/media do waters always break early because it is Dramatic. And since it was totally irrelevant in this case (she's already in hospital, far into labour, and the waters breaking are referred to retrospectively), it makes it look like the scriptwriters only know about labour from other TV/media. Secondly, any woman in 2010 who can be earnestly talking about how much research she's done into pregnancy and labour while she's uncomfortably labouring on her back must be in a TV show, there's no way I can believe that of a real 2010 woman. You do not need to do very much research into pregnancy and labour before coming across the idea that labouring on one's back is a bad idea for most women, and one should try different positions. Altogether, this stank badly of scriptwriters who didn't think they needed to learn anything about real labour and birth, just what they'd seen in other shows. And I definitely expected better from a show that puts itself forward as being interested in medicine.
I'm still keeping half an eye on Warehouse 13, for the Awesome Secondary Female Characters. I'm also very amused at the irony around the premise: Warehouse 13 is full of artifacts, solid magical-historical objects that do things that often are remarkably similar to things we can now do with computers and electronics. The show seems to me to express a nostalgia for a "real world" before computers and electronics and thus a need to invent these more material objects (similar to steampunk) - but of course to show the artifacts in action, the show relies heavily on CGI.
Warehouse 13, together with Stargate Atlantis, have led to the discovery of another factoid about me and how at odds I feel with "mainstream" fandom - "mainstream" being full of male slash, and an unpleasant amount of hate on awesome female characters. You see, my life experience has included a significant number of awesome women who didn't self-promote much, and a sadly much larger number of not at all awesome men who self-promoted endlessly, and who, because of sexism, were rarely informed that they weren't nearly as awesome as they thought (the genuinely awesome men don't seem to need to self-promote as much in my experience). So when I see a male character on a show, who I am told by the show is awesome, without much showing of anything I consider awesome, I dump him straight into the "no interest or respect from me" bin. Two very notable examples being Artie from W13 and McKay on SGA (okay, McKay is sort of shown doing awesome things but they are so implausible, so far outside my experience of science, I can't take them seriously and just put them down as more "being told, not shown"). So I find these characters extremely unattractive and would rather fangirl anyone else on either show - and yet both seem to have attracted the majority of fanfiction for that show. (Curiously, I can't think of many female characters where I am told rather than shown awesomeness - maybe even scriptwriters don't know how? - and I'm wondering if some of the fannish reaction against them is precisely because they're shown doing, taking screen time away from the boyz, although I personally appreciate it.)
In fact, having finally seen SGA so long after being aware of the dominance of McKay/Sheppard slash, I spent a large amount of time while watching just boggling that these two, to me extremely unpleasant, self-centred, boringly white male stereotypes, had got so many women so worked up to write so many passionate words about. It may be dismissive of me but I'm very reluctant now to think of slash about them as meaningfully feminist. Even the fail-y script writing of Dr Weir (did the writers ever meet a woman competent at bureaucracy? Wasn't that kind of a minimum requirement in order to write such a character?) was more deserving of some fanfiction fixing than they were, in my opinion. Let alone Teyla and Ronon.
I've long had "how do they do that?" reactions to mashups, but today for the first time I heard a song that I thought was a mashup potential with another: Rihanna's Only girl (in the world) with Kelly Rowland's Commander. Although now I've listened to them one immediately after the other I'm not sure they can be mashed up because I get the sense they're actually the same song - no wonder I made a connection. I am charmed by a song with a title like Only girl (in the world) expressing the sentiment that she'd like to feel like that, and similarly that she'd like to feel like she's the only woman he'll ever love, as though that's just as unreasonable an expectation of the real world (I mean, I think it is, but pop songs don't often). But Commander will remain my preferred version of this song-complex[1], not least because I can see the Alice in Wonderland vid to go with it in my mind's eye.
[1] Science geek - when biologists aren't sure if they're dealing with one or several species, as is entirely reasonable, they may talk about a species complex.
This entry is originally published at http://aquaeri.dreamwidth.org/81241.html. Please go here to read comments; here to leave a comment (you can use your LJ OpenID).
comments so far.