Squee Fatigue
I was once a raver; this is the metaphor I'm working with. Bear with me.
Fandom's a giant non-stop party, where every two minutes the track morphs into something new, but the beat never lets up. Random strangers come over to put sparkly stickers on your cheeks and express their love for you. There's lots of candy. Everyone's REALLY EXCITED and the whole place is bouncing bouncing bouncing.
Well, I want to find the chill-out tent, with the beanbags and that one guy in the corner playing a didgeridoo. Where you can stop dancing and maybe take off your giant striped plush top hat for a little while because wow, Big Big Hyperfun Happytime can really wear a body out.
And how unfortunate that I have no icon expressing ennui, just my default RELENTLESS GLEE. (Unfortunate or perhaps ironic. Or perhaps fitting. I don't know.)
I fall in and out of love with my fandoms periodically. For those of you watching this journal for the goofy Harry Potter drawings... I'm sorry there hasn't been much of that lately. Apparently HP and I are on a break. I am looking forward to doing an excerpt from The Tales of Beedle the Bard, though. [ETA: Except now I see that JKR's actually doing this, so I'm no longer interested.]
And now I'm becoming disenchanted with SPN as well. Maybe it's a good old fashioned consciousness raisin'. Maybe it's a combination of things, coming together. Whatever it is, the shiny's wearing off of my show. All those unsavory issues that I've always been able to overlook before -- they're rapidly becoming less and less overlookable. It's sad and it's tiresome to face evidence that something you're so fond of does not hold you in the same esteem.
Vids are a neat tool for deconstruction, I think. For bringing to light themes that maybe aren't obvious in canon -- either because they're so subtle or because they're so pervasive as to be invisible. Because after watching a barrage of clips showing you the same idea over and over and over, you can't deny that yes, that idea IS present in canon. And then you can't unknow that, or at least I can't. Afterwards, that new idea jumps out in canon like a pulled thread.
There are a couple of vids that have stuck in my mind lately, and planted ideas that have changed the way I see the show. Many of you will have seen sisabet & sockkpuppett's Women's Work (SPN, streamable), which addresses eroticized violence towards women. It made me look more critically at, among other things, Lust's drowning (3.01), and the apparent need which comatose patients have for skimpy nightgowns (3.05).
Strange Little Girl (multifandom [SPN, Silent Hill, Kingdom Hospital], streamable) is a vid that's disturbing in a similar way. It focuses on one actor playing three characters of the same type, all creepy little girls. As I understand it, the vidder's intention was a tribute to the actor, but I'm reading it as much broader than that. The "creepy little girl" is such a common idea in this culture, so common that this kid's making a career off of it. And 3.05 illustrates it again with Callie. I remember being a teenager and having creep-out wars with my best friend, telling each other stories about how the scary little girls would come for us at night. I don't really know where I'm going with this, except that as a theme, it's pretty wack. It rankles. The fascination with feminine innocence and the perversion of feminine innocence... What is it about that idea, that makes it so menacing?
Then there's all the cosmic destiny going on in the show. I've always preferred monsters-of-the-week to the mytharc episodes, so I'm finding it tedious, how myth-heavy it is these days. And really, the antichrist? Seriously? Seriously, show? Do you think that I require epic sparklypoo in order to respond to the characters? Epic sparklypoo is not the way to my heart.
And then there was a thing that happened in 3.05 Bedtime Stories, a particularly fucked thing, which offended me and threw me out of the show harder than anything had before. Dean's response to Sam's exposition of the Cinderella story is, "Dude, could you be more gay?" I don't find that cute. I don't find it charming. I find it very disappointing. And because that statement went unchallenged, by Sam or by anyone, or by any other idea present in the story, it seemed to me that that changed the tone of it. It became not just Dean's message, but the show's message.
I'm not all that thoughtful or coherent on the subject -- mostly I'm just having a visceral DO NOT WANT -- so I'll point you towards these smart people saying smart things: yourlibrarian talks about misogyny and fairy tales, and missyjack talks about Dean's masculinity.
When I say I love the show, what it mostly boils down to is that I love Dean. And I don't want him to be that person. That sucks. Disillusionment sucks. I was having trouble at first even believing that he would say that, because the fanon!Dean that I enjoy reading is not that guy. He is just not an ass in that particular way, bless him. I'm so glad that fic writers give us Deans which are -- both euphemistically and sometimes literally -- a whole lot "more gay" than canon sees fit.
Fandom's a giant non-stop party, where every two minutes the track morphs into something new, but the beat never lets up. Random strangers come over to put sparkly stickers on your cheeks and express their love for you. There's lots of candy. Everyone's REALLY EXCITED and the whole place is bouncing bouncing bouncing.
Well, I want to find the chill-out tent, with the beanbags and that one guy in the corner playing a didgeridoo. Where you can stop dancing and maybe take off your giant striped plush top hat for a little while because wow, Big Big Hyperfun Happytime can really wear a body out.
And how unfortunate that I have no icon expressing ennui, just my default RELENTLESS GLEE. (Unfortunate or perhaps ironic. Or perhaps fitting. I don't know.)
I fall in and out of love with my fandoms periodically. For those of you watching this journal for the goofy Harry Potter drawings... I'm sorry there hasn't been much of that lately. Apparently HP and I are on a break. I am looking forward to doing an excerpt from The Tales of Beedle the Bard, though. [ETA: Except now I see that JKR's actually doing this, so I'm no longer interested.]
And now I'm becoming disenchanted with SPN as well. Maybe it's a good old fashioned consciousness raisin'. Maybe it's a combination of things, coming together. Whatever it is, the shiny's wearing off of my show. All those unsavory issues that I've always been able to overlook before -- they're rapidly becoming less and less overlookable. It's sad and it's tiresome to face evidence that something you're so fond of does not hold you in the same esteem.
Vids are a neat tool for deconstruction, I think. For bringing to light themes that maybe aren't obvious in canon -- either because they're so subtle or because they're so pervasive as to be invisible. Because after watching a barrage of clips showing you the same idea over and over and over, you can't deny that yes, that idea IS present in canon. And then you can't unknow that, or at least I can't. Afterwards, that new idea jumps out in canon like a pulled thread.
There are a couple of vids that have stuck in my mind lately, and planted ideas that have changed the way I see the show. Many of you will have seen sisabet & sockkpuppett's Women's Work (SPN, streamable), which addresses eroticized violence towards women. It made me look more critically at, among other things, Lust's drowning (3.01), and the apparent need which comatose patients have for skimpy nightgowns (3.05).
Strange Little Girl (multifandom [SPN, Silent Hill, Kingdom Hospital], streamable) is a vid that's disturbing in a similar way. It focuses on one actor playing three characters of the same type, all creepy little girls. As I understand it, the vidder's intention was a tribute to the actor, but I'm reading it as much broader than that. The "creepy little girl" is such a common idea in this culture, so common that this kid's making a career off of it. And 3.05 illustrates it again with Callie. I remember being a teenager and having creep-out wars with my best friend, telling each other stories about how the scary little girls would come for us at night. I don't really know where I'm going with this, except that as a theme, it's pretty wack. It rankles. The fascination with feminine innocence and the perversion of feminine innocence... What is it about that idea, that makes it so menacing?
Then there's all the cosmic destiny going on in the show. I've always preferred monsters-of-the-week to the mytharc episodes, so I'm finding it tedious, how myth-heavy it is these days. And really, the antichrist? Seriously? Seriously, show? Do you think that I require epic sparklypoo in order to respond to the characters? Epic sparklypoo is not the way to my heart.
And then there was a thing that happened in 3.05 Bedtime Stories, a particularly fucked thing, which offended me and threw me out of the show harder than anything had before. Dean's response to Sam's exposition of the Cinderella story is, "Dude, could you be more gay?" I don't find that cute. I don't find it charming. I find it very disappointing. And because that statement went unchallenged, by Sam or by anyone, or by any other idea present in the story, it seemed to me that that changed the tone of it. It became not just Dean's message, but the show's message.
I'm not all that thoughtful or coherent on the subject -- mostly I'm just having a visceral DO NOT WANT -- so I'll point you towards these smart people saying smart things: yourlibrarian talks about misogyny and fairy tales, and missyjack talks about Dean's masculinity.
When I say I love the show, what it mostly boils down to is that I love Dean. And I don't want him to be that person. That sucks. Disillusionment sucks. I was having trouble at first even believing that he would say that, because the fanon!Dean that I enjoy reading is not that guy. He is just not an ass in that particular way, bless him. I'm so glad that fic writers give us Deans which are -- both euphemistically and sometimes literally -- a whole lot "more gay" than canon sees fit.