December Talking Meme, 12/7
So....it looks like this may morph into the December-January Talking Meme, because I'm taking way too many interesting prompts to want to turn any of them down. If yours is late, it hasn't been forgotten.
For @obsessive-a101: Your angels (SPN) and cylons (BSG) thoughts - please? You've hinted in some of our comments exchange that watching the angels in SPN helped you to resolve some of your issues/thoughts on the cylons in BSG, but I would love a fleshed-out post.
(So, much of the first few paragraphs of this I wrote about two years ago when I was finding my feet in SPN fandom, but I never posted it because I wasn’t sure how I felt? Digging it out of my drafts I still agree with myself, so I guess there wasn’t really any reason to hold off, lol, but I went a little bit longer to in order to pick through the expansion of angel mythology during the current act of Supernatural.)
It's odd, because the way I think intellectually about the angels and what's interesting about them as a group is almost exactly what I think about the cylons. They're this totally other, alien group with little to no visceral attachment to the idea of human life having value; still, their world revolves around humanity as this concept. They're entities that know they were created for a purpose, and a huge part of their stories is what that purpose means to them. They at least all start out as true believers. They have no conscious concept of individuality, and their storyline during the time period we know them is all about watching them splinter into individuality in these painful ways. That, taken in tandem with the ways "mind" and "matter" are so separate to them that their consciousnesses can body-surf with relative ease, means they are fascinating identity studies.
In short, both angels and cylons are:
And yet, I respond to them so differently. I adore the angels as a group, and whenever we meet a new one it's simply a question of how much I'm going to love them and why they are going to be my special genocidal snowflake. Whereas I only really feel attached to 3/12 of the Cylon models, and two of them were sleepers; then there's another three models I like fine, 1.5 of whom were sleepers. I have zero sympathy for the cylons as a group, or for any of their ideological or emotional conflicts.
Maybe it really is a lizard-bran thing, where "robot" is bad and "angel" is good on some level for me? Or maybe it's a first impressions thing. The cylons are introduced as a threat, while Heaven's true agenda doesn't really come through until they've been around for a season. But I think it's more about how their respective narratives treat them. The Winchesters are allowed to have their resentment of the angels. They're not vilified for fighting back, or for being angry at the angels. Whereas BSG is all "if you're angry at the fucking lunatics who have spent the last five years trying to fucking kill you....RACIST!!! see, you're just as bad and you TOTALLY DESERVE IT!!" Victim-blaming is gross enough on its own, self-congratulation over victim-blaming makes me ill. I never feel like there's an attempt to manipulate and guilt me into liking the angels.
Perhaps it’s precisely because Supernatural doesn’t concern itself with humanizing the angels that it can keep them within what strikes me as being a less monstrous than the cylons. I know I’ve gone into this at great and tiresome length before, but BSG was so insistent on the CYLONS! ARE! PEOPLE! TOO! Aesop that it completely lost sight of how with personhood comes agency and therefore accountability. If the “toasters” construct had some truth to it, then the development of the Cylons could’ve built upward; as it shook out, all increased exposure to them did was to convince me further that vilifying them was perfectly fair because they chose - not merely democratically, but unanimously - to be villains. This, of course, is the opposite of what happens with Supernatural’s angels: they appear to be indestructible and in perfect agreement, but as we get to know them better we realize that the hierarchy of angels meant that most of them were plenty vulnerable to harm and did not have anything resembling a meaningful choice in the apocalypse. Their ability to make choices, as it seems to develop through S6-7, is hard-won for them and disastrous for the humans. S8+ have tracked the angelic acquisition of genuine free will and just….let it be complicated. It’s not clear who knew what when; the human collateral damage is always a part of the story. We’re not told how to feel about it, and I think this acceptance of ambiguity is a strength.
And I’m not sure about the implications of my own reactions to this. Both of these narratives, American shows starting in 2003 and 2005, could not help but be cultural responses to 9/11. BSG was hyper-conscious of this metanarrative, and that led to some of the show’s great triumphs and some of its rather embarrassing failures. One of these problems was the show’s positioning of Cylons as The Other, in order to perform the function of critiquing Colonial (ie, American) attitudes toward The Other. And this is a laudable goal. The problem is, the analogy is terrible. The way America behaved toward the rest of the world in the wake of 9/11 was and is unconscionable. The way Colonials respond to the Cylons was, as a rule, perfectly justified. (Cain and her crew are the exception, rather than the rule: they are a distinct group from the Colonial fleet as the audience knows it, and their torture of Gina is first among numerous sins that mark them as immoral.) It’s an admirable attempt on the Doylist level to engage in a challenge of the audience, but it falls apart in-universe. And I think Supernatural has the opposite problem wrt monsters generally and the angels specifically, in that the in-universe beats ring very true, but the why of this particular story appealed the way it did at the time it did is deeply discomfiting. Americans imaging ourselves as the special snowflakes, the most vulnerable little gang besieged by monsters much more powerful than and totally distinct from ourselves….may have been the national perception at the time, but it was not an accurate assessment of our place in the world. Our Family Values ™ assumption of in-group sameness and demonization of difference did not need glorifying as The Thing That Saved The World, it was hateful and shameful and utterly pathetic. I stand by my aesthetic preference for the post-Kripke seasons of the show and don’t believe it needs ~righteous justification, but if we’re being honest here, I do think the maturation of the show’s understanding of Otherness helped.
Or maybe it's that the angels really did have a plan. TAKE THAT.
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/339694.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.
For @obsessive-a101: Your angels (SPN) and cylons (BSG) thoughts - please? You've hinted in some of our comments exchange that watching the angels in SPN helped you to resolve some of your issues/thoughts on the cylons in BSG, but I would love a fleshed-out post.
(So, much of the first few paragraphs of this I wrote about two years ago when I was finding my feet in SPN fandom, but I never posted it because I wasn’t sure how I felt? Digging it out of my drafts I still agree with myself, so I guess there wasn’t really any reason to hold off, lol, but I went a little bit longer to in order to pick through the expansion of angel mythology during the current act of Supernatural.)
It's odd, because the way I think intellectually about the angels and what's interesting about them as a group is almost exactly what I think about the cylons. They're this totally other, alien group with little to no visceral attachment to the idea of human life having value; still, their world revolves around humanity as this concept. They're entities that know they were created for a purpose, and a huge part of their stories is what that purpose means to them. They at least all start out as true believers. They have no conscious concept of individuality, and their storyline during the time period we know them is all about watching them splinter into individuality in these painful ways. That, taken in tandem with the ways "mind" and "matter" are so separate to them that their consciousnesses can body-surf with relative ease, means they are fascinating identity studies.
In short, both angels and cylons are:
- highly communitarian monotheist zealots who officially live in a society where they are entirely united by their shared purpose and sense of righteousness
- who are deeply cognizant of themselves as being created by their One True God
- interacting with humanity while they are On An Apocalyptic Mission
- leading some of them to develop a sense of themselves as individuals and relating to humans in wildly divergent ways.
And yet, I respond to them so differently. I adore the angels as a group, and whenever we meet a new one it's simply a question of how much I'm going to love them and why they are going to be my special genocidal snowflake. Whereas I only really feel attached to 3/12 of the Cylon models, and two of them were sleepers; then there's another three models I like fine, 1.5 of whom were sleepers. I have zero sympathy for the cylons as a group, or for any of their ideological or emotional conflicts.
Maybe it really is a lizard-bran thing, where "robot" is bad and "angel" is good on some level for me? Or maybe it's a first impressions thing. The cylons are introduced as a threat, while Heaven's true agenda doesn't really come through until they've been around for a season. But I think it's more about how their respective narratives treat them. The Winchesters are allowed to have their resentment of the angels. They're not vilified for fighting back, or for being angry at the angels. Whereas BSG is all "if you're angry at the fucking lunatics who have spent the last five years trying to fucking kill you....RACIST!!! see, you're just as bad and you TOTALLY DESERVE IT!!" Victim-blaming is gross enough on its own, self-congratulation over victim-blaming makes me ill. I never feel like there's an attempt to manipulate and guilt me into liking the angels.
Perhaps it’s precisely because Supernatural doesn’t concern itself with humanizing the angels that it can keep them within what strikes me as being a less monstrous than the cylons. I know I’ve gone into this at great and tiresome length before, but BSG was so insistent on the CYLONS! ARE! PEOPLE! TOO! Aesop that it completely lost sight of how with personhood comes agency and therefore accountability. If the “toasters” construct had some truth to it, then the development of the Cylons could’ve built upward; as it shook out, all increased exposure to them did was to convince me further that vilifying them was perfectly fair because they chose - not merely democratically, but unanimously - to be villains. This, of course, is the opposite of what happens with Supernatural’s angels: they appear to be indestructible and in perfect agreement, but as we get to know them better we realize that the hierarchy of angels meant that most of them were plenty vulnerable to harm and did not have anything resembling a meaningful choice in the apocalypse. Their ability to make choices, as it seems to develop through S6-7, is hard-won for them and disastrous for the humans. S8+ have tracked the angelic acquisition of genuine free will and just….let it be complicated. It’s not clear who knew what when; the human collateral damage is always a part of the story. We’re not told how to feel about it, and I think this acceptance of ambiguity is a strength.
And I’m not sure about the implications of my own reactions to this. Both of these narratives, American shows starting in 2003 and 2005, could not help but be cultural responses to 9/11. BSG was hyper-conscious of this metanarrative, and that led to some of the show’s great triumphs and some of its rather embarrassing failures. One of these problems was the show’s positioning of Cylons as The Other, in order to perform the function of critiquing Colonial (ie, American) attitudes toward The Other. And this is a laudable goal. The problem is, the analogy is terrible. The way America behaved toward the rest of the world in the wake of 9/11 was and is unconscionable. The way Colonials respond to the Cylons was, as a rule, perfectly justified. (Cain and her crew are the exception, rather than the rule: they are a distinct group from the Colonial fleet as the audience knows it, and their torture of Gina is first among numerous sins that mark them as immoral.) It’s an admirable attempt on the Doylist level to engage in a challenge of the audience, but it falls apart in-universe. And I think Supernatural has the opposite problem wrt monsters generally and the angels specifically, in that the in-universe beats ring very true, but the why of this particular story appealed the way it did at the time it did is deeply discomfiting. Americans imaging ourselves as the special snowflakes, the most vulnerable little gang besieged by monsters much more powerful than and totally distinct from ourselves….may have been the national perception at the time, but it was not an accurate assessment of our place in the world. Our Family Values ™ assumption of in-group sameness and demonization of difference did not need glorifying as The Thing That Saved The World, it was hateful and shameful and utterly pathetic. I stand by my aesthetic preference for the post-Kripke seasons of the show and don’t believe it needs ~righteous justification, but if we’re being honest here, I do think the maturation of the show’s understanding of Otherness helped.
Or maybe it's that the angels really did have a plan. TAKE THAT.
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/339694.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.