this is about to go off!, a.k.a. fuck yeah!
At io9 there's a fun little what-it-says-on-the-can article, "Good Character Development Includes The All-Important "F*@% Yeah" Moment." I enjoyed reading this - I think everyone knows exactly what is meant by a "fuck yeah" moment, even if (like me) you don't know most of the examples cited. The article says, "It's harder to root for characters who don't have [fuck yeah moments]. In fact, I'd say it's hard even to identify with characters who don't ever make you go "fuck yeah."" But y'know, the more I thought about it, the more I came up with exceptions to the religion of Fuck Yeah.
(I'm going to just go ahead and talk about things where I know what I'm talking about, and stay away from say, American comics, which dominate the io9 article)
1. DBZ is like 70% Fuck Yeah moments, yes? And when I was in middle school this was obviously A for Awesome, but when I re-read in late high school I started noticing how sad a lot of these moments are. In particular, there's the moment the article calls "Outnumbered or totally pwned, but the hero still won't give up" - these moments ceased to be awesome for me. You start getting into the territory of Martyrdom Culture (warning: tvtropes) and then it becomes straight-up depressing: intense, yes, obviously, but harrowing. Kind of sick. I had discovered Radiohead by then and I remember acutely just how much "I Will" shifted my paradigms, so to speak. And now what I notice is all the stuff in between Fuck Yeah moments, and it's like, wow, I am actually reading social horror!
2. The best Fuck Yeah moment in the X-Files, for my money, does not belong to Mulder or Scully. It belongs to Skinner. After spending the entire series up to this point kowtowing to the Cigarette-Smoking Man, Skinner reveals in "Paper Clip" that he's not just a middle-manager drone, and he actually has the drop on CSM. Though the smoking gun cassette has been stolen from him in a mugging, he reveals that he's had codetalker Albert Hosteen and his buddies memorize its contents. CSM says, indignant, "What the hell is this?" and Skinner replies, "This is where you pucker up and kiss my ass." Oh, fuck yeah! This moment made Skinner one of my favorite characters right down to the end. But this is a moment that only Skinner the Bureaucrat could have had, especially because it shows he cares for and believes in Mulder and Scully after all. Mulder, by contrast, does the Middle Finger to the Lord pose all the time, but he became a character I rooted for in "One Breath." Scully is comatose in the hospital after being abducted "by aliens," and Mulder is waiting for bad guys to show up at his apartment so he can kill them in revenge. Her sister shows up and convinces him to go see Scully - when he returns, he finds his apartment trashed. He sits down and cries, for many reasons. Hardly Fuck Yeah. Better than Fuck Yeah. In other words, Fuck Yeah =/= Rooting for a Character. And Fuck Yeah only works when it's characteristically appropriate. Oh and, Fuck Yeah =/= Violence, in case that needed to be said. Skinner's moment would have been a joke if his "big surprise" was punching CSM instead.
3. I can think of no Fuck Yeah moments in my favorite books. There may be some late in Catch-22, but they made no impression on me. What cut to the quick in that book was: Snowden dying in the plane, saying, "I'm cold"; Yossarian realizing that the world is just mobs with sticks; the preceding conversation with Aarfy where Yossarian can neither get Aarfy to understand that raping and killing a hotel maid is wrong, nor get the army to arrest Aarfy. Sad, enraging moments - the last one made me so angry I had to put the book down. The Sound and the Fury enters the sublime during Jason Compton's chapter, because Jason is such a total piece of utter fucking shit. Just thinking about it makes my blood run - with rage. My mother and I call this reaction "puke sneeze," because my mother used to get this really hilarious nasal tone in her voice when she was talking about things she read in the paper that pissed her off. In terms of adrenaline and passion, let's not forget the power of the Fuck You! moment.
All that said: as an adrenaline junkie raised on kung fu movies, I of course appreciate a good Fuck Yeah moment, sometimes in spite of myself. I loved the second half of Hot Fuzz (though mostly because of the Midsomer Murders in Hell angle). And one of my top-played songs on iTunes is "Iche Will" (which does not mean "I Will"!), which gives an adrenaline boost while still noting: what the fuck is really going on here? Good old Rammstein.
p.s. My icon was made for this post.
(I'm going to just go ahead and talk about things where I know what I'm talking about, and stay away from say, American comics, which dominate the io9 article)
1. DBZ is like 70% Fuck Yeah moments, yes? And when I was in middle school this was obviously A for Awesome, but when I re-read in late high school I started noticing how sad a lot of these moments are. In particular, there's the moment the article calls "Outnumbered or totally pwned, but the hero still won't give up" - these moments ceased to be awesome for me. You start getting into the territory of Martyrdom Culture (warning: tvtropes) and then it becomes straight-up depressing: intense, yes, obviously, but harrowing. Kind of sick. I had discovered Radiohead by then and I remember acutely just how much "I Will" shifted my paradigms, so to speak. And now what I notice is all the stuff in between Fuck Yeah moments, and it's like, wow, I am actually reading social horror!
2. The best Fuck Yeah moment in the X-Files, for my money, does not belong to Mulder or Scully. It belongs to Skinner. After spending the entire series up to this point kowtowing to the Cigarette-Smoking Man, Skinner reveals in "Paper Clip" that he's not just a middle-manager drone, and he actually has the drop on CSM. Though the smoking gun cassette has been stolen from him in a mugging, he reveals that he's had codetalker Albert Hosteen and his buddies memorize its contents. CSM says, indignant, "What the hell is this?" and Skinner replies, "This is where you pucker up and kiss my ass." Oh, fuck yeah! This moment made Skinner one of my favorite characters right down to the end. But this is a moment that only Skinner the Bureaucrat could have had, especially because it shows he cares for and believes in Mulder and Scully after all. Mulder, by contrast, does the Middle Finger to the Lord pose all the time, but he became a character I rooted for in "One Breath." Scully is comatose in the hospital after being abducted "by aliens," and Mulder is waiting for bad guys to show up at his apartment so he can kill them in revenge. Her sister shows up and convinces him to go see Scully - when he returns, he finds his apartment trashed. He sits down and cries, for many reasons. Hardly Fuck Yeah. Better than Fuck Yeah. In other words, Fuck Yeah =/= Rooting for a Character. And Fuck Yeah only works when it's characteristically appropriate. Oh and, Fuck Yeah =/= Violence, in case that needed to be said. Skinner's moment would have been a joke if his "big surprise" was punching CSM instead.
3. I can think of no Fuck Yeah moments in my favorite books. There may be some late in Catch-22, but they made no impression on me. What cut to the quick in that book was: Snowden dying in the plane, saying, "I'm cold"; Yossarian realizing that the world is just mobs with sticks; the preceding conversation with Aarfy where Yossarian can neither get Aarfy to understand that raping and killing a hotel maid is wrong, nor get the army to arrest Aarfy. Sad, enraging moments - the last one made me so angry I had to put the book down. The Sound and the Fury enters the sublime during Jason Compton's chapter, because Jason is such a total piece of utter fucking shit. Just thinking about it makes my blood run - with rage. My mother and I call this reaction "puke sneeze," because my mother used to get this really hilarious nasal tone in her voice when she was talking about things she read in the paper that pissed her off. In terms of adrenaline and passion, let's not forget the power of the Fuck You! moment.
All that said: as an adrenaline junkie raised on kung fu movies, I of course appreciate a good Fuck Yeah moment, sometimes in spite of myself. I loved the second half of Hot Fuzz (though mostly because of the Midsomer Murders in Hell angle). And one of my top-played songs on iTunes is "Iche Will" (which does not mean "I Will"!), which gives an adrenaline boost while still noting: what the fuck is really going on here? Good old Rammstein.
Click to viewp.s. My icon was made for this post.