stumbling toward normalcy

[pellucid]

In a few short hours, I'm going CLIMBING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! For the first time in six months (and it's been longer than that since I was climbing regularly). I'm kind of terrified by how out of shape I'll be but mostly SO EXCITED

Comments

[de23]

Interesting "dirty secrets" list, although it appears that I disagree with you on all of them!

1. I can see and understand that pov, although it's definitely not me. Maybe it comes from most women characters I saw growing up drawn as uninteresting add-ons whose only function was to motivate the main male character. I enjoy "real" women characters, but in stories like Sherlock Holmes, I actually rather resent modern insistence on inserting female characters when they really don't fit. (Laurie King's Mary Russell novels are an exception, because Holmes is part of *her* story, not the other way around).

2. I don't read that much fic, except that written by my really close friends.

3. Maybe not starting at the beginning of Buffy is the key? I started watching round about Season 3 or 4, and I never have watched all of the first few seasons.

4. Have you seen Dr. Horrible? Nice bit of Whedonesque juxtaposition of the ridiculously funny with the dark side, and it's only a 45 minute investment.

5. Yeah, Jack is my favorite, at least early on. I do love everyone else though!

Interesting what you said about Ellison. I didn't watch that much of TSCC, but I'm glad to hear about a positive portrayal of a person of faith (Christian?). So much of the media portrays all religous people as crazy, or tortured by guilt or something. Hello? We're normal people!

[pellucid]

Re: #1, I was referring primarily to fic, but as I think about it, it absolutely applies to pretty much everything I've ever read. My favorite character in Hamlet is Ophelia, and in Macbeth it was Lady Macbeth, and I didn't like Julius Caesar much at all because there were no women. I loved Penelope and Dido far more than Odysseus or Aeneas. Stories that either lack a female character entirely--Robinson Crusoe, say--or whose sole female character is so difficult to redeem from the sexism with which she was written without having to entirely reimagine her--Paradise Lost comes to mind--go pretty emphatically on the "boring" list. Since you mention Sherlock Holmes: my favorite Holmes story--by far--is the one with Irene Adler, whom I found much more interesting than Holmes or Watson (which doesn't mean I necessarily condone the new movie version of Adler--but not having seen it, I can't say for sure). Basically, as I've read the Western canon-worth of male-focused stories (not that I've read the entire Western canon--but I've read a lot of it), I've been instinctively gravitating toward the women, whether they were the point of the story or not. And I started doing this long before I realized consciously I was doing it. So...yeah. :)

As for Whedon and Buffy, no, I haven't seen Dr. Horrible. I probably should, but I seem to remember watching the reactions on my flist go from elated to disappointed because of something that happened at the end (to the main female character, perhaps?). But yeah, it's only 45 minutes long, and I've probably missed a joke or two on Castle because I haven't seen it. And I'm sure Buffy is great; it's not like I've seen it and didn't like it. I've seen perhaps two episodes, and those were not representative. It's just that the premise doesn't appeal to me at all, and no amount of people talking about its awesomeness seems to be able to overcome that.

I think you'd like Ellison, yes. He's a sincere Christian (and it's been driving me a little crazy to know what kind, because I think it matters a lot whether he's an Arminian or a Calvinist!), but he's not crazy, dogmatic, or looked at as though he's stupid. TSCC actually does quite a lot with questions of faith and comes at them from a variety of angles, and they handle it very well throughout, I thought.