Birthday ponderings and what comes after the happily
The Nordic festival of Yule took place in midwinter. The Swedish spelling is Jul. I was named after the season in which I was born, so I feel it's fair to say that I am the reason for the season. Or will be, tomorrow.
I'm a woman who likes fairy tales, so for my birthday I've been checking out what that looks like in modern prime-time U.S. TV land. Top two contenders this season are Grimm and Once Upon a Time. Now Grimm is what you get when TPTB decide that what the world of speculative entertainment really needs is a show about the Winchesters' law-abiding cop cousin. It's got race and gender issues that are squarely aimed at getting worse. It's got something of a noirish aesthetic, and it very clearly desperately wants to be one of the Cool Kids, which makes it rather embarrassing to watch in a variety of ways. And that doesn't even address the flat-out sucktastic faux!German names of most of the critters.
An interesting meta case could be made that the series is doing precisely what the Brothers Grimm were doing when they initially collected the märchen: they took the raw materials of those stories and fashioned into them a particular sense of nationalism and culture, often by cutting out the bits that involved the agency of any character who could be read as female, young, disabled, or Othered in any way. This show is doing that, and paying lip service to the idea of "rehabilitating" some of the "villains" of the tales. It's just not a thing I'm convinced needed doing.
Once Upon a Time, on the other hand, seems to have laid claim to all the works of Disney as its source material and it's less interested in continuing in Disney's footsteps than in challenging how those footsteps stomped all over the magpied folklore of Western and Northern Europe to come up with some uniquely USian bowdlerizations. It's not as stylishly stylized as Grimm, and it can be almost too earnest to bear, but there are several types of excellent and strong female characters who interact with each other about things other than men all the time, the Savior character is a woman, and I myself dig both the music and the aesthetic, and more and more the characters are just growing on me. So I think I may be pretty done with Grimm, but Once Upon a Time still has me turning the page.
I'm a woman who likes fairy tales, so for my birthday I've been checking out what that looks like in modern prime-time U.S. TV land. Top two contenders this season are Grimm and Once Upon a Time. Now Grimm is what you get when TPTB decide that what the world of speculative entertainment really needs is a show about the Winchesters' law-abiding cop cousin. It's got race and gender issues that are squarely aimed at getting worse. It's got something of a noirish aesthetic, and it very clearly desperately wants to be one of the Cool Kids, which makes it rather embarrassing to watch in a variety of ways. And that doesn't even address the flat-out sucktastic faux!German names of most of the critters.
An interesting meta case could be made that the series is doing precisely what the Brothers Grimm were doing when they initially collected the märchen: they took the raw materials of those stories and fashioned into them a particular sense of nationalism and culture, often by cutting out the bits that involved the agency of any character who could be read as female, young, disabled, or Othered in any way. This show is doing that, and paying lip service to the idea of "rehabilitating" some of the "villains" of the tales. It's just not a thing I'm convinced needed doing.
Once Upon a Time, on the other hand, seems to have laid claim to all the works of Disney as its source material and it's less interested in continuing in Disney's footsteps than in challenging how those footsteps stomped all over the magpied folklore of Western and Northern Europe to come up with some uniquely USian bowdlerizations. It's not as stylishly stylized as Grimm, and it can be almost too earnest to bear, but there are several types of excellent and strong female characters who interact with each other about things other than men all the time, the Savior character is a woman, and I myself dig both the music and the aesthetic, and more and more the characters are just growing on me. So I think I may be pretty done with Grimm, but Once Upon a Time still has me turning the page.