Amy Ponds of the 99% (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
allchildren) wrote2010-04-01 02:54 am
allchildren) wrote2010-04-01 02:54 am
serve god, love me, and mend.
This entry is a whole lotta very personal tl;dr about seeing myself in fictional characters and sorting through those reactions and how I process fiction and emotions. Contains: self-description (ugh), reflections on my jerkiness and anxiety, self-indulgent biases. Does not contain: real meta, a conclusion, or proof-reading, or perspective whatsoever.
Around the time the Star Trek DVD came out I had a strong resurgence of Pine Flu. Whatever, hotties in space come for us all. ("If only" - what she said) And I remember having this conversation where I clarified for somebody, and typically also for myself, that it was strange for me to watch the movie going "om nom nom Jimmy T" because I am not extremely attracted to James T. Kirk, although in some moods he is my favorite STXI character. I am attracted to Chris Pine. I identify with James T. Kirk.
I am not a genius-level repeat offender, and I haven't spent that much time in the Midwest, and I am not a dude, and I am not violent except sometimes with words, and I am cautious, and I am deeply uninterested in hooking up. So ... I don't know. I don't know except that I dream in all seriousness of saving the world, that I am a damaged, alienating, cocky, self-sabotaging, overly honest, glib, angry fuck-up, and there are a lot of those dudes in stories. And usually they're the antihero or the obligatory psychotic jackass, and I am usually somewhere between attraction to and overidentification with those characters despite myself and the fact that they're usually end up as fandom woobies or textual scapegoats. (Screwed Over On Grey's Anatomy By The Fact That Her POV Character Was Alex Karev: One Woman's Story, next week on Lifetime!!) But you can also take some (but not all) of those qualities and make a hero, like a boy who lived (who is himself only a few degrees away from Buffy, with whom I have also identified a great deal although she is obviously of a different overall mold). And you can also take some of those qualities and make a tool hero, like rebooted James T. Kirk.
(I know some of you are already spluttering at the lumping of deeply different characters together but I'm talking about certain character traits removed from the larger context that makes them ridiculously dissimilar even as I identify with parts of all of them. I don't claim to be writing meta about anything other than my own psyche now.)
And I think something just clicked in my mind that it's not fair. My subconscious assesses the issues clearly evinced by JTK in the first quarter of the film and takes in some way exception to the fact that he gets to be the hero anyway, the hero whose LACK of emotional investment becomes crucial, the hero whose repeat-offender barfighting destructive nature has been channeled into this goody two-shoes (if rebootedly badass) job. That implication that all his obvious poor emotional health is just being in the wrong place and once he finds his path he's all better. That's not fair. What about the rest of us directionless jerks? I want to suddenly be fine and good and heroic.
And it interacts with my natural desire to deconstruct any given text, especially the emotional arc of any given text, and that is how I become obsessed with such a jerk as Jim Kirk, especially stories where that damage is still there, or before the change came, or during. And why months after Rawles wrote A Compass Wouldn't Help At All I am still roiling with the need to remix from JTK's point of view. Not just to make fair the meddling of Spock Prime, or the absence of Winona in Jim's adult life, but to make his journey fair. And by fair I mean "something I can accept intellectually and emotionally." Jerk to jerk.
(This is why fandoms are built around flawed texts, not the perfect ones.)
It's apt that this epiphany comes now because I have been thinking a lot about why I write fic, and why I respond to certain characters in certain ways. I'm writing a Nyota Uhura fic now, kind of, which I started for![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
dark_agenda's Dark Drabblefest and although it didn't spiral out of control in terms of length -- it's still under 1000 words -- or even really subject matter, it's just been a bit difficult for me to address, so I haven't been able to look at it head-on long enough to finish. Writing Uhura is not something that comes naturally to me because although I love her for being awesome -- what I just said about flawed texts. Uhura is level-headed, efficient, a go-getter, seemingly at peace with herself. I am some of those things in some contexts but none of them are what define me, to me. I don't want this to come across in any way like I'm calling her too perfect because she's not (at all. not in writing and certainly not in portrayal); I also WILDLY do not wish to imply that calm/happy/sane characters/ships/stories are boring or uncomplicated or less worthy of fannish attention because they're not. And I frankly don't want to entertain those tangents.
But -- calm and competent and unconflicted does not speak particularly to me in my story-spot, in the buttons for which we engage in fiction, hoping that they will be hit. I can and do love them but they aren't me. That is why I have a poodle, you know -- having somebody whose story-spots hit a few feet to the right, who can talk about that love intelligently and demonstrate the depth of that story because it doesn't come naturally to me, is incredibly valuable in terms of fiction. And also of, like, life.
I still and always look for the conflict and the soft spots. Not to exploit them or to be able to say "see, she's as fucked up or secretly as jerky as ME THE JERK" but to understand emotionally. I come at these two from opposite directions to try to reconcile them both to different parts of me -- to find a balance of intellect and feeling.
(the final piece in the puzzle of my ardent friendshipping Jimmy T and Nyota: revealed???)
pfew. That's a lot.
Also. This isn't about writing or Star Trek anymore, but it is about processing fictional characters in terms of ME ME ME.
- Britta, from Community. I have had a hard time with her. I am naturally predisposed to like her, and I do, but as the show went on I found I wasn't connecting with the character as I had thought I would. (Late twenties, dropped out of high school because she thought it would impress Radiohead, hard-won doucheray vision, goofily pretentious, notions of politics and feminism -- I thought this would be a clear match! But I am all about the Annie.) Eventually I identified styling as the point of dissonance for me. Why does she dye and curl her hair like that? Why does she wear SO GODDAMN MUCH MAKEUP? It just did not jive with my understanding of her. I know it sounds absurdly shallow, but my great moment of epiphany re: styling and its connection to character came when I did the Vaginas on the Enterprise picspam (though it has always been a factor! haha remember the styling changes from Veronica Mars S1 to S2? awful!) and I frankly think it would be DOING WATCHIN RONG to not on some level be taking character appearance into understanding of that character. Visual mediums are visual for reasons.
However, once I identified this complaint I had a new complaint, not with Britta or the writing/styling of Britta (although I do still think it could be better), but with myself. For being such an elementary TV watcher that I apparently had this subconscious beef with a character I was fond of because she wasn't enough like me. What the fuck, self? Much as this entry offers evidence to the contrary, looking for characters that reflect me is not something I think about when choosing my fiction -- even I am not that much of a jerk! though I am jerky enough to go "I contain multitudes" and mostly mean it -- it is the pleasing emotional result but because of that whole multitudes thing I certainly don't expect any character to reflect all or most aspects of me, maybe just one or two. Like JTK. So what is the deal with that GDB?
I thought she was one thing and she was just another. I was cold WATCHING IT RONG. Projecting my expectations onto a character in a show I admire for its free-range organic ballsiness, at that! Authorial intent is not something I like to rely on for explanations of fiction, but Dan Harmon confirmed my suspicions:
I can't wait to get the Community DVDs, really. It will sustain quite a lot of rewatching.
On the flipside:
- Naomi, from Skins. I barely even watched Skins this series, I was like wtf is this shit and fled. Now I have a Relevant To My Interests superedit to watch! Soon. But in s3, Naomi was my favorite. I identified quite a lot with her, not as I usually do in the "these few traits really strongly" way but in a big picture whole person sense. (Obviously, there is projection going on here too since she didn't get that much screentime in S3.)
Ed Hime, who wrote Emily's episode in S4, said:
Sometimes friends have called me brave or bold. Sometimes I feel those ways; sometimes I am strident and unashamed. When that time of my life came I leapt for Gryffindor. ("A bit of a saving-people-thing.") I could never see myself any other way. But when anxiety took hold I could become a shut-in, terrified of people and papers and the whole world. I could shut down in the face of the tiniest problems, solving nothing, not even saving myself. When I am at my lowest points it is hardest for me to accept any compliment or kind gesture, because I feel so undeserving, so guilty over somehow misleading the complimenter to think I deserve it, because I am awful at demonstrating the love I feel, because I know I am one of those spiky people who wants both out and in and who is no good at interpersonal courage. I remember being in a very low point, writing a confession of my failures, quoting Bob Dylan: my love, she's like some raven at my window with a broken wing. I remember feeling so helpless and ending that entry, "I hate that I have ever been thought of as brave."
So, yeah, fiction. It's a thing!!!
You know, I was in the middle of cleaning before fucking Mumford & Sons who with that name ought to be a tractor dealership made that JTK thought pop up in my head and I spent two and a half hours writing this sitting on the floor. >:(
Around the time the Star Trek DVD came out I had a strong resurgence of Pine Flu. Whatever, hotties in space come for us all. ("If only" - what she said) And I remember having this conversation where I clarified for somebody, and typically also for myself, that it was strange for me to watch the movie going "om nom nom Jimmy T" because I am not extremely attracted to James T. Kirk, although in some moods he is my favorite STXI character. I am attracted to Chris Pine. I identify with James T. Kirk.
I am not a genius-level repeat offender, and I haven't spent that much time in the Midwest, and I am not a dude, and I am not violent except sometimes with words, and I am cautious, and I am deeply uninterested in hooking up. So ... I don't know. I don't know except that I dream in all seriousness of saving the world, that I am a damaged, alienating, cocky, self-sabotaging, overly honest, glib, angry fuck-up, and there are a lot of those dudes in stories. And usually they're the antihero or the obligatory psychotic jackass, and I am usually somewhere between attraction to and overidentification with those characters despite myself and the fact that they're usually end up as fandom woobies or textual scapegoats. (Screwed Over On Grey's Anatomy By The Fact That Her POV Character Was Alex Karev: One Woman's Story, next week on Lifetime!!) But you can also take some (but not all) of those qualities and make a hero, like a boy who lived (who is himself only a few degrees away from Buffy, with whom I have also identified a great deal although she is obviously of a different overall mold). And you can also take some of those qualities and make a tool hero, like rebooted James T. Kirk.
(I know some of you are already spluttering at the lumping of deeply different characters together but I'm talking about certain character traits removed from the larger context that makes them ridiculously dissimilar even as I identify with parts of all of them. I don't claim to be writing meta about anything other than my own psyche now.)
And I think something just clicked in my mind that it's not fair. My subconscious assesses the issues clearly evinced by JTK in the first quarter of the film and takes in some way exception to the fact that he gets to be the hero anyway, the hero whose LACK of emotional investment becomes crucial, the hero whose repeat-offender barfighting destructive nature has been channeled into this goody two-shoes (if rebootedly badass) job. That implication that all his obvious poor emotional health is just being in the wrong place and once he finds his path he's all better. That's not fair. What about the rest of us directionless jerks? I want to suddenly be fine and good and heroic.
And it interacts with my natural desire to deconstruct any given text, especially the emotional arc of any given text, and that is how I become obsessed with such a jerk as Jim Kirk, especially stories where that damage is still there, or before the change came, or during. And why months after Rawles wrote A Compass Wouldn't Help At All I am still roiling with the need to remix from JTK's point of view. Not just to make fair the meddling of Spock Prime, or the absence of Winona in Jim's adult life, but to make his journey fair. And by fair I mean "something I can accept intellectually and emotionally." Jerk to jerk.
(This is why fandoms are built around flawed texts, not the perfect ones.)
It's apt that this epiphany comes now because I have been thinking a lot about why I write fic, and why I respond to certain characters in certain ways. I'm writing a Nyota Uhura fic now, kind of, which I started for
dark_agenda's Dark Drabblefest and although it didn't spiral out of control in terms of length -- it's still under 1000 words -- or even really subject matter, it's just been a bit difficult for me to address, so I haven't been able to look at it head-on long enough to finish. Writing Uhura is not something that comes naturally to me because although I love her for being awesome -- what I just said about flawed texts. Uhura is level-headed, efficient, a go-getter, seemingly at peace with herself. I am some of those things in some contexts but none of them are what define me, to me. I don't want this to come across in any way like I'm calling her too perfect because she's not (at all. not in writing and certainly not in portrayal); I also WILDLY do not wish to imply that calm/happy/sane characters/ships/stories are boring or uncomplicated or less worthy of fannish attention because they're not. And I frankly don't want to entertain those tangents. But -- calm and competent and unconflicted does not speak particularly to me in my story-spot, in the buttons for which we engage in fiction, hoping that they will be hit. I can and do love them but they aren't me. That is why I have a poodle, you know -- having somebody whose story-spots hit a few feet to the right, who can talk about that love intelligently and demonstrate the depth of that story because it doesn't come naturally to me, is incredibly valuable in terms of fiction. And also of, like, life.
I still and always look for the conflict and the soft spots. Not to exploit them or to be able to say "see, she's as fucked up or secretly as jerky as ME THE JERK" but to understand emotionally. I come at these two from opposite directions to try to reconcile them both to different parts of me -- to find a balance of intellect and feeling.
(the final piece in the puzzle of my ardent friendshipping Jimmy T and Nyota: revealed???)
pfew. That's a lot.
Also. This isn't about writing or Star Trek anymore, but it is about processing fictional characters in terms of ME ME ME.
- Britta, from Community. I have had a hard time with her. I am naturally predisposed to like her, and I do, but as the show went on I found I wasn't connecting with the character as I had thought I would. (Late twenties, dropped out of high school because she thought it would impress Radiohead, hard-won doucheray vision, goofily pretentious, notions of politics and feminism -- I thought this would be a clear match! But I am all about the Annie.) Eventually I identified styling as the point of dissonance for me. Why does she dye and curl her hair like that? Why does she wear SO GODDAMN MUCH MAKEUP? It just did not jive with my understanding of her. I know it sounds absurdly shallow, but my great moment of epiphany re: styling and its connection to character came when I did the Vaginas on the Enterprise picspam (though it has always been a factor! haha remember the styling changes from Veronica Mars S1 to S2? awful!) and I frankly think it would be DOING WATCHIN RONG to not on some level be taking character appearance into understanding of that character. Visual mediums are visual for reasons.
However, once I identified this complaint I had a new complaint, not with Britta or the writing/styling of Britta (although I do still think it could be better), but with myself. For being such an elementary TV watcher that I apparently had this subconscious beef with a character I was fond of because she wasn't enough like me. What the fuck, self? Much as this entry offers evidence to the contrary, looking for characters that reflect me is not something I think about when choosing my fiction -- even I am not that much of a jerk! though I am jerky enough to go "I contain multitudes" and mostly mean it -- it is the pleasing emotional result but because of that whole multitudes thing I certainly don't expect any character to reflect all or most aspects of me, maybe just one or two. Like JTK. So what is the deal with that GDB?
I thought she was one thing and she was just another. I was cold WATCHING IT RONG. Projecting my expectations onto a character in a show I admire for its free-range organic ballsiness, at that! Authorial intent is not something I like to rely on for explanations of fiction, but Dan Harmon confirmed my suspicions:
I think I might know Britta the best in terms of knowing what she would do in a given situation. In her inception, she was an amalgam of a few ex-girlfriends. She's an archetype that's been a social fixture in my life, the intimidatingly quiet and eclectic girl that, as she becomes less quiet, reveals that being eclectic is another way of saying over-filtered to the point of self-imposed blandness and crippling insecurity.
I can't wait to get the Community DVDs, really. It will sustain quite a lot of rewatching.
On the flipside:
- Naomi, from Skins. I barely even watched Skins this series, I was like wtf is this shit and fled. Now I have a Relevant To My Interests superedit to watch! Soon. But in s3, Naomi was my favorite. I identified quite a lot with her, not as I usually do in the "these few traits really strongly" way but in a big picture whole person sense. (Obviously, there is projection going on here too since she didn't get that much screentime in S3.)
Ed Hime, who wrote Emily's episode in S4, said:
I wanted to write for [Naomi] because I related to her most out of all of the Skins characters. I think I naturally understood where she was, she’s spiky and wants to be an outsider but desperate to be accepted at the same time, which was easy for me to understand.
...
For the whole series everyone is waiting for Naomi to step up and be brave.
Sometimes friends have called me brave or bold. Sometimes I feel those ways; sometimes I am strident and unashamed. When that time of my life came I leapt for Gryffindor. ("A bit of a saving-people-thing.") I could never see myself any other way. But when anxiety took hold I could become a shut-in, terrified of people and papers and the whole world. I could shut down in the face of the tiniest problems, solving nothing, not even saving myself. When I am at my lowest points it is hardest for me to accept any compliment or kind gesture, because I feel so undeserving, so guilty over somehow misleading the complimenter to think I deserve it, because I am awful at demonstrating the love I feel, because I know I am one of those spiky people who wants both out and in and who is no good at interpersonal courage. I remember being in a very low point, writing a confession of my failures, quoting Bob Dylan: my love, she's like some raven at my window with a broken wing. I remember feeling so helpless and ending that entry, "I hate that I have ever been thought of as brave."
So, yeah, fiction. It's a thing!!!
You know, I was in the middle of cleaning before fucking Mumford & Sons who with that name ought to be a tractor dealership made that JTK thought pop up in my head and I spent two and a half hours writing this sitting on the floor. >:(