Thoughts on women's fiction/narratives, horror, and romance. Also, on Dollhouse.

[prozacpark]

I've been thinking about women's fiction, and women's genres lately, specifically in the context of horror and romance. I was initially surprised to find out that horror was considered to be a women's genre, but then it clicked that of course it was. It has two features that seem to be common to women's fiction: 1). It actually has women as

Comments

[sorrelchestnut]

here via metafandom, with my two cents on Dollhouse. And, admittedly, am also fresh from watching the finale, which certainly changes my interpretation a little, so I'll avoid any Alpha/Echo/Caroline things and focus on the events of "Briar Rose."

I keep running into this wall, where people say "but there is rape and power abuse and bad things" and I say, "but it's clearly being shown as those things being horribly, horribly wrong" and the response I usually get is that it's negative just to have it on the screen at all, especially when shown in such a complicated light, admittedly. And, okay, that's vastly simplifying the entire conversation, but...

I guess I can't help but look at the things Ballard did to Mellie (not November but to Mellie) and feel as if they were wrong. Not just because, as a viewer, I see them as wrong (which they so, so were, there is no disputing that at all), but also because in the context of the show they are presented as being wrong. I mean, I can't possibly think we were expected to sympathize with Ballard in that moment, and in fact we haven't been supposed to sympathize with him for a while. His obsession with "Caroline" (a girl who's just a construct in his head, really) was pointed out to him by a Dollhouse customer in... I can't remember the episode, it was Patton Oswald- and he was told, pretty much point-blank, that he's no better than any of the Dollhouse customers. And I think that they've been working along that point for a while, culminating in some of the really, deeply, horrible things that he did to Mellie- because he didn't see her as human anymore. And that was reflective of his own humanity, and hypocrisy when he seems to insist that they're all still human.

I won't touch the thing about princes, because personally, I feel as if the finale resolved that for me and then some. Except to say that she did have two "heroes" fighting over who got to save her... and ultimately, neither of them did. Boyd won, but he left here there, waiting to get "woken up" by Alpha's decisions. Which is another area of creepitude in and of itself, which again I feel was resolved in the finale.

However, all of this is my viewing experience, and I certainly do realize that everyone gets vastly different things out of their media, especially on a show like this. Which is one of the reasons I've been enjoying it- even when it fails, in a big way, and I'm left shouting at the screen, it still makes me *think.* Even in just the last couple months I've been thinking more and more about gender issues, and power issues, and all sorts of other issues that I was aware of previously, but that didn't really cross my mind all that often. And I can't believe that a show that makes me question everything I read and watch (to the point of making me be deeply creeped out by a book I'm sure I would have enjoyed not so very long ago), that makes me *aware* of things on a deeper level, should be dismissed out of hand because it doesn't always get it right. (Not that I'm saying that there isn't a need for criticism, because a big HELL YES it does, in a lot of ways.)

And I just realized that I came here to your journal and got on my soapbox, for which I deeply apologize.