Persepolis, The Immutability Of War, And Blistering Cynicism

[krinndnz]

Violence is not a way of getting where you want to go, only more quickly. Its existence changes your destination. If you use it, you had better be prepared to find yourself in the kind of place it takes you to

Comments

[krinndnz]

(Largely because it's usually not a matter of avoiding violence but displacing it on others.)

I think that that's a very important point. It's part of the mythical "away" that we First Worlders tend to send our problems to.

As for the sci-fi angle, it reminds me of Le Guin's critique of the SciFi Channel's adaptation of A Wizard Of Earthsea. Blockquotes again! The idea is taken from A Wizard of Earthsea, but in that book we know how Ged came to have a shadow following him, and we know why, and in the end, we know who that shadow is. The darkness within us can't be done away with by swinging a magic sword. But in the film, evil has been comfortably externalized in a villain, the wizard Kumo/Cob, who can simply be killed, thus solving all problems. In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil. My books are not conceived in terms of such a war, and offer no simple answers to simplistic questions.

This is part of why I'm such a cranky media hermit (bossgoji is the patient sufferer of many of my rants on the subject). Life is far too short to sit through shitty media.

[bossgoji]

My personal opinion is that entertainment is what we MAKE of a work, not what the author/creator intends. I'm not just 'sitting through' a bad piece of media, I'm making jokes, analyzing WHY it's flawed and/or total pants, I'm ENGAGING with it. In this sense the only bad media, to me, is something so stupid or dull that you can't make your own fun with it.

The value of a work is not in execution, tone, or even message. It's in what you get out of it.