juushika

Spoilers! also character death and suicide and existential horror; but what you should really worry about is some aggressive spoilers for a good game.


( A Machine for Pigs sidenote )


( SOMA isn't horror (and that's good!) )


( SOMA timeline )


( Responses to Catherine in other people's LPs )

Further adventure in crossposts, books (and meta-media) edition

( Mental illness as plot twist )


( Disability as metaphor )


( Witch, Please and disability in Harry Potter )


( Transhumanist narratives and disability )


( First-person narratives )


( Immigration in speculative narratives )


( Books about cats (and why they all suck) )


( James Tiptree Jr. and Joanna Russ )


( Why is to hard to review the best books? )

I've been thinking a lot about missing stairs and culpability and productive responses in light of Nick Robinson's suspension from Polygon.

I don't think I have the capacity for surprise anymore when a likable man is accused of sexual harassment/assault; yet this particular one has hit me hard, because Polygon-as-brand works proactively to be a safe space—which doesn't make them free from error, but does lead me to give the benefit of the doubt and expect better than average. Like, what do I do when I'm stressed, I watch Polygon videos, because they're funny and I trust them; and now the thing causing stress is ... Polygon.... It feels more like a betrayal than this sort of thing usually does, even when *cough Johnny Depp* it's someone I like or had emotional investment in.

(Car Boys is deeply, hugely important to me, on an existential/is-this-what-religion-is/emergent narrative scale; as trope, as concept, as art, also as funny.)

It especially does not surprise me in the now to discover a man's problematic behavior, nothing surprises me in the now, in this era of political and cultural crisis. I think it does surprise me to see it reacted to immediately and compassionately; to see a company take action and keep proceedings private, and for that company and independent outsiders to insist, rightly, that "it is not on anyone who has been hurt to provide detailed receipts of their trauma for your entertainment."

Missing stairs operate as a cultural phenomenon—the whole coming to light of this has felt like a thing that "everyone" knew and "no one" talked about, and also something that caught people by complete surprise; it makes me have conflicted feelings about what knowledge is within this phenomenon; about what some people experience and some people know and some people, because of their privilege, never see or never recognize. What culpability is there in that position of not noticing? when clearly it is noticeable, to those that need to or know how; even I feel like some of my "ehhhh" reactions to some things he's said have been given context. But that there are people apologizing if their involvement or position of power compelled others to be silent—and that Polygon/Vox Media is literally doing anything at all, but especially via clear, thoughtful communication....

Cumulatively: a personal betrayal in a way that's not awfully valid, because I wasn't directly effected, but I liked and wanted to like this especial person & didn't want these issues to invade that space—and a knowledge that this issues invade every space, that that's literally what the issue is: pervasive—and gratitude that this is the best possible initial reaction and response. Insofar as any of this is cogent, it's only because I turned it into a rambling narrative for Devon last night; these feelings of mine, while Very Much and A Lot, have effectively been resolved now. (Except that an actual investigation will take time, and while I don't want this to occur in internet time or internet space as a trial-by-popular-vote overnight phenomenon, I do want it to be resolved overnight and forgotten by the next so that it isn't on my mind anymore—not feasible, not desirable, but I still feel cheated for not having it.) But it was Very Much; also: A Lot, in a particular time when I've approximately 2.5 spoons and would in any other circumstances! be watching Polygon videos! for escapism and distraction!

Title: The Beauty
Author: Aliya Whiteley
Published: London: Unsung Stories, 2014
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 100
Total Page Count: 178,525
Text Number: 525
Read Because: reviewed by BookishThoughts, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: All the women of the world are dead, and the men of the Group face a bleak future. And then the graves of the dead women begin to sprout mushrooms that grow into human shape. The Beauty is a strange little book, intentionally so. Whiteley's voice is sparse, almost distant; she slides from dream into nightmare, the atmosphere hazy but the speculative elements growing increasingly grotesque and detailed. The obvious metaphor is gender: its determining factors, the function of gender roles in heteronormative relationships, the relationship between gender and procreation. It leans gender essentialist, and there's something circumspect about eliding horror and ( small spoiler ). But it's also complex, intimate, and cast in compelling speculative terms. It's not a flawless effort, but I admire how far Whiteley takes such a short work.

Thinkin' a lot about sexism in Hemlock Grove. Serious spoilers for the entirety of season 1; warning for discussion of gendered violence/rape.

The narrative is sexist, of course. Letha's rape/mythical pregnancy/friding is straight up ick. Ashley Valentine's rape is slightly more complex: it's a by the book example of rape as cheap antihero/antagonist characterization, perpetuated by Roman for precisely that effect: he wants a quick and easy way to paint himself, to himself, as a Bad Guy—interesting to see a character as well as a narrative view the act in this way.

But what interests me most is Christina.

That the parade of female victims with sexualized deaths are killed by a young woman consumed by internalized sexism is fascinating. Inexperienced, shy Christina intentionally turns herself into a werewolf in order to be "free;" she identifies her physical transformation as sexual, and simultaneously desires (and provokes) it and is terrified of it and its effects; she believes the beast she becomes, her metaphorical growth and sexual awakening, is hunting her; she targets women she sees as sexually overt and murders them by first consuming their genitals, punishing them for their sexuality, enjoying their victimhood. The twins in particular she targets because, she says, their personal and memetic sexuality made her terrified of her own, "all the things they expected of her but filled her with so much fear she couldn't even dream about them."

Werewolf as metaphor for adolescence/sexual awakening is pretty common, even for female characters (see: Ginger Snaps); misogyny in female characters is pretty common, but that's largely the result of misogyny in media creators. Such an explicit exploration of the relationship between female adolescence and internalized misogyny is less common, and this is the whole cycle: the conflicting and numerous expectations of female gender identity and performance that are internalized as fear, desire, envy, intimidation, and self-loathing, and also externalized as misogyny and various forms of violence directed towards women—here, obviously, blown up to an exaggerated scale. It's not an unproblematic representation, but it's surprisingly nuanced and resonant; Christina is every misguided, frightened, hurtful girl that doesn't want to be like other girls because everything she knows about being a girl scares her—but Christina grows teeth.

* * *

Hemlock Grove season 2 spoilers this time~

In fiction, men have interesting relationships with other men and normative relationships with women. Men are protagonists, they're better written, more complex; they grow because of one another, they provide each other with conflict and plot; their relationships are intimate. Women are supporting characters, objects rather than subjects, romantic subplots, burdened with all the baggage of heteronormativity. This is the fault of bad writing and bad society, and it's not the only reason that fandom ships male leads while sidelining female characters, but it seems to me that there's an obvious logic in focusing on the interesting relationship while ignoring the boring one.

Peter and Roman are an extreme example of this phenomenon, and Hemlock Grove does some interesting things with it. It does gross things, too, like using female characters to progress the relationship—I love Letha, but you have to admit she's treated more as plot point than person. But while the homoerotic tension is obvious, rather than using it as queerbaiting it spins it out into an actual sexual relationship in S2. The triad with Mirada isn't flawless—like Letha, she's more a function of their relationship than her own person. But: a polyamorous relationship? in my tv show? It indicates a surprising self-awareness. Intimacy doesn't always mean sex, but neither are they unrelated; and with this trope, sex is the great debate, the unresolved conflict between compulsory heteronormativity and the desire to make interesting characters and dynamics in fiction which results in queerbaiting and fandom's warped views—but here resolves in the pair instead discarding at least some of the restrictions of heteronormativity; still a little queerbaity and restrained, but better than most.

So, yanno. That's neat.


( Shelly and disability in s2 )


( The flaws of s3 )


( S3 is just! so bad! )

I make a fair bit of noise about my hatred of series both because I feel as if they've become as much a financial decision as a creative one, and because I often dislike them as a creative decision: I have no desire for sprawling, near-endless epics, but I can appreciate scope, depth, or story more than a single volume can contain. As such, I tend towards two sorts of series: limited runs, often duologies or trilogies (see His Dark Materials, The Orphan's Tales), that are essentially a single story; and series in which each book is complete unto itself, i.e. has an ending, regardless of whether the books must be read in order (see: Harry Potter), or more or less can be read in any order although their effects may be cumulative (see: Redwall, The Chronicles of Narnia).

I like endings, and generally I like them best in a single book. But I can appreciate the role of a series: sometimes in creating in a larger, more complex, more meaningful ending than a single volume can muster, sometimes in the additions, in layers and references and growth, that wouldn't be achievable in a single volume.

I've been thinking a lot about Elizabeth A. Lynn's social justice and The Chronicles of Tornor.

( Spoilers for all books in the series. )

When I call it disorientating, it's because every time a character uses "she" as a default and neutral pronoun, every time a character passes a female guard on the street and doesn't do a double-take and/or fetishize her bravery at trespassing into a male realm, I notice—more than anything about that society—the limits of my own. In many ways, by Northern Girl Lynn has created a social justice fantasy: multiple female protagonist eating the Bechdel test for breakfast, a multicultural/majority POC setting and cast (somewhat complicated by the fact that the protagonist in each books in white), and a society much more progressive and less sexist than both its predecessors and our own. Nor does it seem artificial—it's not a leap but a journey, a slow progress conveyed in multiple novels; nor is it conscious banner-waving self-aggrandizing: this isn't about Lynn and how we should applaud her open-mindedness; it's about what should be the progression of things. Our world may be moving in that direction, too—but our pronoun is still "he," and so there is a constant reminder of how far we have not come.

The series was published in 1979/1980.

I've been watching a ridiculous amount of Supernatural lately. Stop! Hold your fangirling! I do not actually like it that much. I've been going through a rough time—a few solid months now of back pain and comorbid depression; mindless distraction is about all I'm good for, and Supernatural is plentiful and precisely mindless. I nearly gave up during the first season (as I liveblogged at the time: "Yup, women in Supernatural are like Bond girls: all the appearances of power and autonomy and competence, except that they're all traditionally attractive (and white) and replaceable/interchangeable. It's as much chick of the week as it is monster of the week. Super classy guys, nice going."), but stuck with it because I liked the aesthetic (so much better in the first few seasons, when it's a Sleepy Hollow ever-autumn of midwestern forest and desaturated color) and it eventually developed a plot.

I started season six yesterday, and I'm still here mostly because it's there: with a few exceptions the plot works for me, but I've yet to develop an emotional attachment to almost anything. The "almost" is Castiel, who is perfect. Misha Collins is a superb actor; he pulls off the possession/multiple character aspect with a skill that the rest of the cast should envy, and brings enough depth and humor to his character that I actually give a damn. I don't give a damn about much else—the stakes should be huge, and the characters claim to suffer so much; eventually it even pulls away from women in refrigerators, a small blessing. But so help me, even when bad things are happening directly to the boys themselves do not pass go do not collect $200, it all reeks of manpain. Look, I wouldn't want to be in your shoes either, but you have family, biological and otherwise, to love you (so please put away the goddamn brotherly angst) and at least be thankful you're impervious to actual death or bodily harm—unlike the hundreds and thousand of civilians who suffer in the course of the show. It's not bad, a few specific episodes (5.9 "The Real Ghostbusters" goddamn) aside; it's perfectly watchable, an increasingly strong balance of episodic and overarching; I've yet to find either Sam or Dean attractive but that's okay because Cas and I will get married soon and have awkward angel babies.

But then some new films went up on Netflix instant, some of which were on my physical disc queue, so I took a break and watched them.

Did you know it's possible to tell compelling stories about female characters? To cast and costume women not as a decorated, sexualized Other, but rather as a diverse group of unique individuals? (Supernatural does subtle, natural makeup and grooming on men, but women must look made up, with visual makeup atop their traditionally attractive appearance—it's not just about being appealing, but about the cultural demand on women to make themselves appealing.) To have multiple women in a scene, having conversations among themselves, perhaps with no men present? Maybe even to explore the same aspects, like objectification and gender roles, which make Supernatural so innocuous but so troubling? See, I had forgotten.

I watched St. Trinian's—a group of students save a wacky private school for strange, erstwhile unschoolable girls. It's not meters deep but it's just what I expected, and delightful as such: colorful, silly, with some fantastic character design (amid plenty that's just okay) and an encouraging, if not entirely unproblematic, assumption that women can dress, speak, and do just about anything they want with any possible motivation. Who would have thought!

I watched Sleeping Beauty, which stars Emily Browning and is a fascinating inverse companion to Sucker Punch: Sucker Punch tries to have its cake and eat it too, exploring the issues of women's objectification and sexual exploitation while objectifying and sexually exploiting its cast, yet nonetheless creating a somehow fantastic exploration of sexual violence and dissociation (well discussed here). Sleeping Beauty is more about the desperate search for dissociation, prompted not by distinct sexual trauma but rather by an insidious prolonged culture of female objectification; it's explicitly sexual, but cold, almost sterile, and only once remotely titillating and there in the strangest way. It's almost too oblique and perhaps too cold to be completely successful, but it captivated me.

I watched Sister My Sister, a dramatization of the Papin murder case which is good but on the whole a poor cousin to Heavenly Creatures (read my nattering about that film here): same basis in true crime, where an unusually intimate relationship leads to murder, but Sister My Sister is less vibrant and more absurd in its mundanity, and so less memorable despite offering an compelling glimpse into class and family relationships. But it grabbed me in the opening credits, because nearly every name is female: producers, director, writer, and every actor (there are two male voiceovers, but no men seen in the entire production). Supernatural's credits are a predictable but depressing inverse.

I recommend all three films, by the way.

It's not that Supernatural is a horrible awful no-good egregious example of misogyny in media. It's that it's dead-center normal. It's that I would really like to watch something which is accessible and consumable enough for my addled brain, but has strong female characters or queer relationships or just about anything non-heteronormative and empowered which actually made me feel okay about being a living breathing human being, and my options for such range between limited and nonexistent: this run of good films is as miserable as it is refreshing, because I know too well that they're the exception to the general rule—a rule so general, so pervasive, that even when I see and know that it's being followed I may forget that it could ever be broken.

And then I just had the best possible conversation about rape culture that I could expect right now, and I feel better—and somewhat calmer, if only because I'm exhausted—as a result.

I need to write a post about this sometime—about becoming intellectually aware of rape culture, about becoming emotionally aware of rape culture, about how I use the later to internalize the former generally to my own harm, about both the guilt and justification associated with that self-centered response, about how recognizing, repeating, and explaining this cycle has made it a little easier to deal with each time, about how the end point is sadness and fear, but not depression and terror, although I haven't reached a solution yet either.

But for right now, I need some Pokémon time.

Yes, all this from just a catcall. Because it never is just a catcall.

I'm trying to read this book which has an industrial strength spine. Slim volume, standard mass market paperback, published by HarperCollins, and so I appreciate that they've glued the binding to last but I swear, you damn near need industrial machinery to pry the thing open. All that prying has yet to break the spine, so there's that—but it's wearing on my hands.

The real issue I'm taking with the book is that 75 pages in I'm looking at a rape threat on the naked female protagonist presented to show that the world she lives in is all dark and gritty (because, given that she's a cop, it would be impossible to illustrate that via the crimes and murders which surround her, to say nothing of the murder of her mother which drove her to this line or work) and that she is both strong and vulnerable: she can handle herself, and is a trained and skilled cop, but she is also just a normal human being capable of being scared and threatened (because just building a complex, nuanced, and realistic character would never be enough to illustrate that point). And let's not kid around: she's also capable of being victimized, that's the point here.

No, it's not the worst-ever example of rape in a cheap little crime thriller. Hardly. But that's just it. It's cheap and dirty and banal, so banal as to be unremarkable. It's just one more rape threat because rape is happens to tough female protagonists, don't'cha know? It builds their character while displaying their humanity! Oh, come on now. I don't pick up a book like this expecting a work of art or even remarkable skill, but I wish it weren't too much to ask that it take the higher road, do actual work, and build setting and character without relying on that amorphous danger of a dark shadowy criminal threatening our brave (but vulnerable!) female protagonist with the big bad of rape.

I'm just tired of this. I'm tired of all of this.

Two nights of sleep made up of horrible, violent, terrifying nightmares, and I slept just fine. I was chased and abused and stalked and humiliated and ignored but for whatever reason—Devon posits that I knew I was dreaming, and that's possible; somehow I felt enough distance, enough remove, that even though the dream was happening to me, even thought I was objectively horrified, I could just shrug it off. I slept long and hard, and woke well-rested.

Last night began without dreams but I was up, uncomfortable, restless, and depressed, every hour or three. Eventually I just got up and watched a movie; when I went back to bed I had a dream about going back to school which was so stressful that my heart was pounding when Dev woke me up when he got up. He was able to calm me down a bit, but when I got to sleep again I had another stressful dream about going to a three-day political rally that mirrored a speech and debate event or a con—until I finally stopped attending events, went back to my dorm, and ended up adopting the animals that I found there—a kitten, an adolescent cat, a ferret, a small rodent, and two guinea pigs. Dink was one of them, although his fur was spotted black and white (but I knew it was him) and I woke up miserable and missing him.

Things with the other pigs just haven't been the same since Dink died.

I just don't get it, really—what circumstances and content it is that makes dreams into nightmares for me. Or perhaps I do. I think all of the bad stuff used to get to me, but I've grown inured to some of it by now. Desensitized by repetition. Being stalked and humiliated by an abusive ex-boyfriend? No big deal! It doesn't target my own personal fears and memories and experiences. Objectively, I know it's awful; personally, I have some distance. But man, send me back to school and I turn into a shaking mass of anxiety, because in dreams and out of dreams that is my nightmare. I toss around the idea of finishing my degree one credit at a time at a public school, because the one class I took at PSU actually did me a world of good, it got me out and working but it wasn't stressful—either by being a difficult course, or by immersing me in the college atmosphere—and so, all good things forfend, I was actually able to complete the damn thing. Doing more of that tempts me, under similar circumstances. But college—the people, the culture, the schedules, getting myself on campus, being on campus, doing homework, receiving assignments, trying to complete assignments that require me to work with others and/or come on campus even more, every bit of it adds up, it even seems to multiply, exponential growth that builds a stress greater than I can completely imagine or hope to bear.

And I dream of it, I fear it, all the damn time. I wish that I'd discovered Reed earlier, before Whitman crushed me, I wish I had completed my degree, but I wouldn't be a fulltime student again for my life. I can't.

I have more to say about why I'm thinking about college again, about the death of a Rutgers freshman and how much of all of this anxiety comes from Whitman, not just started there but was born and bred there. But I'm only just starting to realize that I'm not looking objectively at that suicide. I'm taking too personal an angle on it—this happens, I hate it, it's useless. High school for me wasn't fun but it was no big deal, socially, and I still don't understand what made it into living hell for so many people; but college, the social abandonment and ostracization in a society so isolated that when pushed out of it you had nowhere to be, and mine was only a case of that, of rejection rather than ridicule, and I can't even imagine how much worse the latter would be. But I know it happens. I want to warn people that it doesn't get better, like some magical turning point—that depending on person and circumstance it may get quickly, remarkably worse. And what do you do that when they promise you that the day after you leave high school it will all magically improve—and then you get to college and they humiliate you?

And I think those are fair concerns—and then at the same time I know I'm being so negative and hopeless that instead of encouraging a little good I'm denying even that effort. Well done, me. I don't want to think it's hopeless, that there is nothing that can be said or done to make things "get better." Awareness and dialog helps, but wearing purple ain't gonna do a goddamn thing and that breaks my heart because I understand the impulse, I do. But we're looking at a beast that a purple t-shirt can't change: a combination of the social acceptance of bullying and the prevalence of anti-queer sentiment. Just one of those by itself is a monster; together they do horrible things to kids and to promising college students but I can barely even see it, barely even fully understand it, and the size of the problem scares me.

Into nightmares, and inaction.

I do this. I hate it. I hear about someone's rape and it leaves me incapacitated by my fear of rape culture, I hear about a suicide and and it gets me stuck on my own memories and fears of the hell that can be college, and that's selfish and it does no goddamned good. It arises from sympathy and love, it is how I try to understand how I feel about others, but it all comes back to me. How self-indulgent, how privileged, that I can complain about how these big things make me feel so small and curl up into my little ball and hide. I understand the want to wear purple because I can do that, I can wash a purple shirt and put it on, that's easily within my abilities, it's concrete and it's safe. It's also largely useless, and because it is so easy and so satisfying it's all we do do: we make ourselves feel better with a t-shirt, and then go on to ignore that huge and terrifying problem that it's supposed to represent. Awareness matters. Talking about, sharing, realizing, attempting to publicize the existence of these events matters. Symbols for them can matter, too. But that's not all it takes—it just feels like all that we know how to do.

I actually haven't been that depressed, lately. I've been okay. But I interpret this all too personally. I always do. I feel hopeless and I panic and make myself sick with nightmares. It shouldn't be about me. I'm not sure, though, how to wrap my head around the rest.