Okay, frak you, too
Ugh, I need to stay away from message boards. They are veritable swamps of stupidity. I tried to bring up the problematic representations of women in BSG on the TWoP message board, and I got "Bitchez is so sensitive" and fuck-all else as a response. Not in those words, of course; that would be a flagged/delete-worthy sort of comment. But that was the gist: I'm just a grumpy and unsatisfied fan and there's nothing this show could do to make me think it was representing women in a good light.
Which? Misses the fucking point. I don't want women represented in a good light, I want them represented in a fair one. I want women to succeed and fail and be rewarded and punished in some sort of parity to men. Because we are all human, and that means we all mess up and we all do good some of the time. Some people get the shit end of the stick, that's life. Could some of those "some people" ever be men? Like, ever? That's all I'm asking. Could some of the female characters be stable, non-hyper-sexualized, sane people? (And could the ones that were be less dead now?) Thanks so much.
Totally unrelated to tonight's BSG, too, this pointless argument. Either you go, "whatever, it's not that bad" and blow me off, or you agree and I'm preaching to the converted. I just feel that it's legitimate to criticize any work of fiction when it aspires to represent an ethos that does not exist in our world and fails to do so. If you call yourself something and then repeatedly prove you're not that thing at all, I have a right to call bullshit. And it doesn't mean I'm being a reactionary, pms-riding femi-Nazi. I'm a person who looks at this post-sexist fictional society and counts the female casualties (living and dead) and goes, "Yeah, right."
It's a major problem in fiction when you create a world with a different value system from your own. If you want them to be so different, you have to betray your own ideas of what is right and wrong and go, "What would Person X living in World Y think about this Action Z?" The better you are able to separate your own value judgments from that system, the more successful it will be. It's fine to go, "I'll create a world where they think nothing of murdering the second baby in a set of twins!" That's a good challenge to our sense that baby-murdering is wrong, and if you can write it such that the people in your work of fiction can be still entirely sympathetic despite this baby-killing thing, you've written yourself an amazing story. If instead you pull a BSG and write characters such that all the baby-killers end up miserable or dead, you pass judgment on them as the author and your readers/audience will pick up on that. It invalidates the system you set up, and your world breaks a little. (If the point of the story is that people wake up to the fact that this isn't such a great moral thing to do, it's another story. But you can't go "Oh yeah, everybody does this, it's not shocking" and then brutalize the people who do it without invalidating that assumption.)
This is what I mean when I say authorial intent isn't always the final word in a work of fiction. Maybe the author really intended their world of twin-killing people to seem totally normal. But their own moral judgments sabotaged their work. I think it's perfectly fair to call them out on it. This is what workshopping is about, is it not? "Hey, listen, this is totally awesome as a concept, but I don't think you actually believe it. If that's the case, you should reconsider how hard you sell this value in your fictional world." A good author would go, "Hmm, you're right. I need to commit to it more or show that my people are actually ambivalent about it." Because when the author doesn't know how to sculpt a part of his/her world, you can always tell. It's lazy to hand-wave away criticism. And fucking annoying to the audience to go, "Fuck off, you over-sensitive pricks. We're totally sensitive to your minority views. We told you to go climb a tree instead of calling you a bunch of whining pussies, didn't we?
Which? Misses the fucking point. I don't want women represented in a good light, I want them represented in a fair one. I want women to succeed and fail and be rewarded and punished in some sort of parity to men. Because we are all human, and that means we all mess up and we all do good some of the time. Some people get the shit end of the stick, that's life. Could some of those "some people" ever be men? Like, ever? That's all I'm asking. Could some of the female characters be stable, non-hyper-sexualized, sane people? (And could the ones that were be less dead now?) Thanks so much.
Totally unrelated to tonight's BSG, too, this pointless argument. Either you go, "whatever, it's not that bad" and blow me off, or you agree and I'm preaching to the converted. I just feel that it's legitimate to criticize any work of fiction when it aspires to represent an ethos that does not exist in our world and fails to do so. If you call yourself something and then repeatedly prove you're not that thing at all, I have a right to call bullshit. And it doesn't mean I'm being a reactionary, pms-riding femi-Nazi. I'm a person who looks at this post-sexist fictional society and counts the female casualties (living and dead) and goes, "Yeah, right."
It's a major problem in fiction when you create a world with a different value system from your own. If you want them to be so different, you have to betray your own ideas of what is right and wrong and go, "What would Person X living in World Y think about this Action Z?" The better you are able to separate your own value judgments from that system, the more successful it will be. It's fine to go, "I'll create a world where they think nothing of murdering the second baby in a set of twins!" That's a good challenge to our sense that baby-murdering is wrong, and if you can write it such that the people in your work of fiction can be still entirely sympathetic despite this baby-killing thing, you've written yourself an amazing story. If instead you pull a BSG and write characters such that all the baby-killers end up miserable or dead, you pass judgment on them as the author and your readers/audience will pick up on that. It invalidates the system you set up, and your world breaks a little. (If the point of the story is that people wake up to the fact that this isn't such a great moral thing to do, it's another story. But you can't go "Oh yeah, everybody does this, it's not shocking" and then brutalize the people who do it without invalidating that assumption.)
This is what I mean when I say authorial intent isn't always the final word in a work of fiction. Maybe the author really intended their world of twin-killing people to seem totally normal. But their own moral judgments sabotaged their work. I think it's perfectly fair to call them out on it. This is what workshopping is about, is it not? "Hey, listen, this is totally awesome as a concept, but I don't think you actually believe it. If that's the case, you should reconsider how hard you sell this value in your fictional world." A good author would go, "Hmm, you're right. I need to commit to it more or show that my people are actually ambivalent about it." Because when the author doesn't know how to sculpt a part of his/her world, you can always tell. It's lazy to hand-wave away criticism. And fucking annoying to the audience to go, "Fuck off, you over-sensitive pricks. We're totally sensitive to your minority views. We told you to go climb a tree instead of calling you a bunch of whining pussies, didn't we?