I be watchin' stuff.

[xandratheblue]

 Well, I've been consuming a lot of TV recently, between dipping, or rather, diving headlong, into "Wolverine, Essentials Vol. 1" in which I've been asking whether Chris Claremont is a brilliance before his time, or really needs to learn when to shut up. I think the answer is somewhere between the two, but the man can certainly write! More on that

Comments

[chains_of_irony]

I've had Essential Wolverine 1 since I was very small. My copy is so tattered now! My dad picked it up from a guy selling importing comics and things at a local car boot sale! I loved him for it - comics used to be so difficult to get!

Claremont MADE the X-Men. Therefore although he is made of crack sometimes, I'll always <3 him.

Wolverine running around Madripoor wearing an eyepatch and calling himself 'Patch'? Made of crack. XD

[barrysarll]

Claremont's biggest problem, way beyond the inability to shut up, is the tendency to repeatedly plot around mind control, and specifically, heroines mind controlled into evil dominatrices. Mercifully, it's rather more difficul to get that into a Wolverine solo story.

[chains_of_irony]

Except that's exactly what happens to Jessica drew at the beginning of this volume!

[barrysarll]

Oh, Claremont!

Though of course she may already have been a Skrull at that point, in which case it's OK. Right?

[xandratheblue]

Only women seemed to have in-depth interviews in the programme, though there was an amusingly "oh Dear" bit where she said, "in this group, even some boys self harm!"

She said she was making the programme because large numbers of South Asian women are self harming and didn't understand why. I was a bit annoyed at that, but this programme was always going to annoy me :(

[xandratheblue]

Better information on them has recently emerged, plus they're her "special interest group" as it were. However, considering this, only about half of the people/women she interviewed were white and she didn't do much more than scratch the surface on what special stresses asian women might have over, say, white women due to culture and so forth. I feel that she refused to properly indulge in dialogue about the problem because she found the initial premise so abhorrent, leaving the programme somewhat hollow.

[retro_geek]

Did Syal focus on, or even just mention, any self-harmers who were using methods other than cutting? While I appreciate it's almost certainly the most common form of s-h, it does frustrate me when the media seems oblivious to people who bruise, burn, etc.
xx

[xandratheblue]

It's on Iplayer if you've got a spare hour, but she mentions other forms of self-harm very briefly at the beginning but doesn't explore them. Also, other forms of self harm are less visually horrifying/exploitable than cutting.