linking and thinking. like picking and grinning, only less Hee-Haw.

[jlh]

Two big links that lead me to two big thoughts on two big issues, but really really, if you care about either issue please follow the links.

First, my pal kalichan wrote an amazing post about a week ago: What's Love Got To Do With It: My Thoughts on *fail that everyone who's interested in such matters, especially in the way social justice is interacting

Comments

[sistermagpie]

Arrrgh! I can't listen to NPR podcasts at work and I really want to hear that! Must try to listen to it at home if I remember. But I already agree with what you're saying there--it's ridiculous. Especially since comics now don't even spin out a story over however many months in one book, they're all about crossovers so you have to be issues of every book for a long time and it's a ridiculous amount of money. It's like movies--surely there was a time when this was *cheap* entertainment. Jacking up the price to something significant changes how people are able to relate to them!

Love the other post you linked to. I was thinking of writing a post on something sort of related a while ago, on how fiction and meta are two different things, and some of the SJ talk almost wants fiction to be meta. Because meta says a thing straight out while fiction by design doesn't say anything straight out. Like that Holiday Inn scene--you can't look at that and say "this says this." It's just showing you things happening and there's many ways you can look at it. Or like when somebody did that big poll where people voted on how they felt about a lot of Harry Potter moments and there just wasn't one interpretation of them.

Which gets into the love that was talked about in that post too, becuase fiction doesn't come down to its meta.

[jlh]

Have you listened to the podcast yet? This is your reminder to do so at home!

Yeah, they didn't even get into the crossovers because the comics guy didn't want to get into all the drama about entertainment value, but when he went into the comic store to get the issues for his fellow podcasters they were sold out of something he'd wanted to get that was Marvel, and the lady at the store advised him to go DC because Marvel is so intertwined these days.

some of the SJ talk almost wants fiction to be meta
I think that some of the metafandom crowd very much think of fanfiction, at least, as being meta, or that fic being meta is a sign of a really good fic (see Take Off Clothes As Directed, which I think is not a good fic at all taken out of its meta context as a comment on a series of BDSM SGA fics, that trope of BDSM 'verses where instead of sexuality working along gender lines it works along dom/sub lines and whether they really work at all, etc) or at least a fic that other people will want to write a lot of meta about. I think fanfic ends up being meta-ish in some ways, or there are little jokes that are mostly meta, but I don't think that the better fic is, the more it's meta. I mean, it's the same with non-fic fiction: Yes, Beloved has a lot to say about being a black American woman, but it's also a coming of age story. Yes, Huck Finn has a lot to say about race in the US, but it's also a boy's adventure tale and really, really funny.

Which might be why the meta people don't pick up on the funnier or less dour, depressing, "it will rip you apart" sorts of fics because they're more interested in obvious intellectualism. Also I think many of them don't actually have a functioning sense of humor. I don't say this because I'm like, "can't they take a joke" but rather, they don't seem to find humor to be important, to be a selling point, to be worth talking about. My god, a humorous novel won the Booker this year, people. Comic romances have won Oscars. It's not a critical consensus that drama > humor. TV critics certainly take the sitcom form seriously--much more than fandom, where I keep running into the "all sitcoms suck" sentiment.

And I think that gets down to love, too, come to think of it.