(no subject)
Jul. 10th, 2016 07:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydion* Current lilies: http://gwydionmisha.tumblr.com/post/147170466247/current-lilies
* I was watching a foreign language film and there was this extremely fat character, and what fascinated me about him was that the movie treated this as unmarked. The point of the character was his expertise and empathy, not his weight. There were no crass fat jokes. It was not an "issues" roll. There was no intervention. There were no physical comedy beats focued on his weight. No one referenced hi body at all. The character could have been any weight at all and just happened to be very, very fat. I was beautiful.
I thought, when was the last time I saw any media made in America with a fat character where the point of the character implicitly or explicitly had nothing to do with the character's weight? I'm not thinking of any off the top of my head. In American movies and television weight is always a problem. It is the subject of shaming news reports. It is subject to ugly fatphobic jokes. It is used in dehumanizing ways, like the murrder victim in Seven. Fat bodies are often depicted as disgusting or shut ins or villians. It is used to mark a character as sexually undesirable or as a particular often racialized stereotype. It can occasionally be used well in a feminist sense to call out fatphobia as it was used in Spy, but it is never ever an unmarked trait as it was in this film.
That strikes me as pretty fucked up, given the givens. Why can't we have fat people just being people with character traits and narrative purpose that has nothing to do with our fucked up body shaming? Why can't fat people just be people in our media?
* "Three things being a (failed) beauty queen taught me about being a writer:" https://avian30.com/2016/03/25/three-things-being-a-failed-beauty-queen-taught-me-about-being-a-writer/
* Last weekend, Squirrel wandered through on the way to the kitchen and was shocked to hear me screaming in frustration, "Outlaw them! Outlaw them all! Send everyone of them to Norway and let the Norwegians sort them out!" at the Saga of the People of Reykjadal and Killer-Skuta. I never said I was easy to live with.
* Proof I'm not a proper adult #11: I still think of St. Sebastian as the Patron Saint of Bondage and Kink in general.
* So I'm rewatching TNG. You would think, I'd have been all over Star Trek: The Next Generation, seeing as how I was raised on ToS. (My dad and I watched the reruns over and over through my growing up. I watched the animated series when it was new. I had a Kirk and spock action figures. I had the damned colourforms.) The thing is, the first season was a very complicated year for me involving nearly dying three times amoung other things and I saw only the finale. The next two seasons of TNG coincided with me being a Philosophy Monk with little access to television and I missed the first half of the fourth season because I had no television at all.
My friends in Corvallis were very into it. My Lover was very into it. I ended up watching the back half of the forth season in real time while catching up on the older seasons as I could find them. The result was, that Tasha Yar was a sort of legend, much talked about and debated by my friends, who spent a lot of time just generally on analysis. The Tasha I imagined was amazing. When syndication finally brought her around to me, I was less impressed. The version I'd built in my head was so much better than the one on the screen.
This is emblematic of the my experience in general. I know it's get better. I remember the dramatic improvement in the final season. There are a lot of characters in the show, I liked, but my opinion of the hot mess the writers made of the first season and the sexism in general and occasional cringe worthy racism in the portion of the first season I have seen thus far validate my anger and disappointment in these things back when the show was new.
The writing of the women is just terrible. I may try to write another time about just why Tasha is a disappointment to me and always has been, but I haven't the heart for it just now. My original complaints about Deanna Troi stand. She and her power are written incredibly inconsistently. You can see the poor actress trying to work with what she's given and carry with dignity the outfits they put her in. I do not blame her, nor do I blame the woman playing Tasha. It's outright the fault of the writers who never bothered to sit down and conceive of either of the characters as whole human beings the way they did with the male characters. I knew this going in, though the pervasiveness of the problem startled me rather. The writers decided to make both of them some degree of incompetent, unlike all the male core crew who are all depicted a good at their jobs. This is particularly the case with Deanna, who I know will turn out to be the world's worst shrink, though I haven't gotten to the parts that show that yet.
It's a problem. So is first season Beverly Crusher, though not as obvious a problem as with the other two. This was a surprise to me as I missed it 20+ years ago, maybe because of my youth at the time and maybe because I saw her first in a much more developed form, midway through TNG's total run. By then she was more fleshed out. Back here in firt season, she is allowed to be competent at her job, but outside of the job, her characterization revolves around being Wesley's mother, her dead husband, and her possible relationship with Picard. She's not quite a whole person yet, but it's easy not to notice.
Then there are so many problems with the plots. So. Many. Problems. Them not having any kind of hazmat type suits when they go to investigate what might be a deadly biological or chemical hazard and not even bothering with gloves when handling bodies. The over use of Q in the first half of first season. I think, like the Borg, a little Q goes a long way. Use him to often and he is annoying and he loses his punch. So many of the plots fall apart like tissue paper. I can see the bones of what the show can be in some of the characters and plots, but season on is a mess.
There were surprises. Beta version Ferengi are embarrassing, especially as I'd just been watching the first half of DS9 where they are people with a culture instead of bouncing around hissing and... hard to believe they could run, let alone build star ships. I... like Wesley a bit better than I did back in the day. I had always been of the opinion that the problems with Wesley Crusher, like the problems with Ms. Troi could be traced to the writing. I always said the acting was excellent and that may actually have been part o the problem. Wil Wheaton was clearly taking the part as written and playing Wesley as a coherent person, made as believable as he could manage given the writing. I think a worse actor might have protected himself more obnoxious elements in the character as written. Instead, Wil Wheaton takes it all the way. I could actually spot the individual episodes that made my friends so angry at the character. I can see exactly why the character was so hated by that first audience. This time, I notice the nuance that is there whenever the script lets Mr. Wheaton display it. It is, in it's way as admirable as poor Sir Anthony Hopkins in Bram Stoker's Dracula trying valiantly to play the part as Mr. stoker actually wrote it in his book and make occasionally complete nonsense lines sound not only like sense, but things Book Von Helsing would have said even as the rest of the actors appear to be playing space aliens with no familiarity with the book or human behavior. I know liking Wil Wheaton is cool now, but back then I was often the lone voice in the room standing up for his acting and vilifying the writers (which I also did for Marina Sirtis, who I felt was unfairly blamed for the craptastic writing she was given to work with). Anyway, I see whole episodes now I'm in the back half of Season One, where I do like Wesley, which is a real surprise, since the ones I remember liking him in were later in the character run. (I still stand by the opinion my lover and I at the time had, which was they should have evolved Wesley in a completely different direction than they ended up doing, but that's another story). Anyway, another surprise is how violent and impulsive season One Picard is. I suspect they were trying to make him more like Kirk, though by the time I started watching it, Riker bore Kirk's mantle and Picard had grown into the Picard I remember. It's a subtle thing I missed first time around from not watching them in the right order.
This time, I am also really seeing the seams: the places they are trying to do the Original Series vs. the bits where you can see the characteristic TNG showing through. The result is a weird patchwork. I think I'd be having more fun picking it a part if the pervasive sexism weren't so exhausting.
* "Lord of the Rings Re-Read: A Knife in the Dark:" http://www.fandomfollowing.com/lord-rings-re-read-knife-dark/
* "How to help Flint, Michigan:" http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/how-help-flint-michigan
* Help pay for cat food, litter, meds, medical copays: Paypal Lethran@gmail.com
* Donate to help refugees: http://donate.unhcr.org/international/general
* A list of LGBTQA Charities: http://awkward0w1.tumblr.com/post/126399233673
* Want Game of Thrones without the creepy? We desperately need new players. We are very inclusive. "Game of Bones MUSH:" gobmush.wikidot.com
* I was watching a foreign language film and there was this extremely fat character, and what fascinated me about him was that the movie treated this as unmarked. The point of the character was his expertise and empathy, not his weight. There were no crass fat jokes. It was not an "issues" roll. There was no intervention. There were no physical comedy beats focued on his weight. No one referenced hi body at all. The character could have been any weight at all and just happened to be very, very fat. I was beautiful.
I thought, when was the last time I saw any media made in America with a fat character where the point of the character implicitly or explicitly had nothing to do with the character's weight? I'm not thinking of any off the top of my head. In American movies and television weight is always a problem. It is the subject of shaming news reports. It is subject to ugly fatphobic jokes. It is used in dehumanizing ways, like the murrder victim in Seven. Fat bodies are often depicted as disgusting or shut ins or villians. It is used to mark a character as sexually undesirable or as a particular often racialized stereotype. It can occasionally be used well in a feminist sense to call out fatphobia as it was used in Spy, but it is never ever an unmarked trait as it was in this film.
That strikes me as pretty fucked up, given the givens. Why can't we have fat people just being people with character traits and narrative purpose that has nothing to do with our fucked up body shaming? Why can't fat people just be people in our media?
* "Three things being a (failed) beauty queen taught me about being a writer:" https://avian30.com/2016/03/25/three-things-being-a-failed-beauty-queen-taught-me-about-being-a-writer/
* Last weekend, Squirrel wandered through on the way to the kitchen and was shocked to hear me screaming in frustration, "Outlaw them! Outlaw them all! Send everyone of them to Norway and let the Norwegians sort them out!" at the Saga of the People of Reykjadal and Killer-Skuta. I never said I was easy to live with.
* Proof I'm not a proper adult #11: I still think of St. Sebastian as the Patron Saint of Bondage and Kink in general.
* So I'm rewatching TNG. You would think, I'd have been all over Star Trek: The Next Generation, seeing as how I was raised on ToS. (My dad and I watched the reruns over and over through my growing up. I watched the animated series when it was new. I had a Kirk and spock action figures. I had the damned colourforms.) The thing is, the first season was a very complicated year for me involving nearly dying three times amoung other things and I saw only the finale. The next two seasons of TNG coincided with me being a Philosophy Monk with little access to television and I missed the first half of the fourth season because I had no television at all.
My friends in Corvallis were very into it. My Lover was very into it. I ended up watching the back half of the forth season in real time while catching up on the older seasons as I could find them. The result was, that Tasha Yar was a sort of legend, much talked about and debated by my friends, who spent a lot of time just generally on analysis. The Tasha I imagined was amazing. When syndication finally brought her around to me, I was less impressed. The version I'd built in my head was so much better than the one on the screen.
This is emblematic of the my experience in general. I know it's get better. I remember the dramatic improvement in the final season. There are a lot of characters in the show, I liked, but my opinion of the hot mess the writers made of the first season and the sexism in general and occasional cringe worthy racism in the portion of the first season I have seen thus far validate my anger and disappointment in these things back when the show was new.
The writing of the women is just terrible. I may try to write another time about just why Tasha is a disappointment to me and always has been, but I haven't the heart for it just now. My original complaints about Deanna Troi stand. She and her power are written incredibly inconsistently. You can see the poor actress trying to work with what she's given and carry with dignity the outfits they put her in. I do not blame her, nor do I blame the woman playing Tasha. It's outright the fault of the writers who never bothered to sit down and conceive of either of the characters as whole human beings the way they did with the male characters. I knew this going in, though the pervasiveness of the problem startled me rather. The writers decided to make both of them some degree of incompetent, unlike all the male core crew who are all depicted a good at their jobs. This is particularly the case with Deanna, who I know will turn out to be the world's worst shrink, though I haven't gotten to the parts that show that yet.
It's a problem. So is first season Beverly Crusher, though not as obvious a problem as with the other two. This was a surprise to me as I missed it 20+ years ago, maybe because of my youth at the time and maybe because I saw her first in a much more developed form, midway through TNG's total run. By then she was more fleshed out. Back here in firt season, she is allowed to be competent at her job, but outside of the job, her characterization revolves around being Wesley's mother, her dead husband, and her possible relationship with Picard. She's not quite a whole person yet, but it's easy not to notice.
Then there are so many problems with the plots. So. Many. Problems. Them not having any kind of hazmat type suits when they go to investigate what might be a deadly biological or chemical hazard and not even bothering with gloves when handling bodies. The over use of Q in the first half of first season. I think, like the Borg, a little Q goes a long way. Use him to often and he is annoying and he loses his punch. So many of the plots fall apart like tissue paper. I can see the bones of what the show can be in some of the characters and plots, but season on is a mess.
There were surprises. Beta version Ferengi are embarrassing, especially as I'd just been watching the first half of DS9 where they are people with a culture instead of bouncing around hissing and... hard to believe they could run, let alone build star ships. I... like Wesley a bit better than I did back in the day. I had always been of the opinion that the problems with Wesley Crusher, like the problems with Ms. Troi could be traced to the writing. I always said the acting was excellent and that may actually have been part o the problem. Wil Wheaton was clearly taking the part as written and playing Wesley as a coherent person, made as believable as he could manage given the writing. I think a worse actor might have protected himself more obnoxious elements in the character as written. Instead, Wil Wheaton takes it all the way. I could actually spot the individual episodes that made my friends so angry at the character. I can see exactly why the character was so hated by that first audience. This time, I notice the nuance that is there whenever the script lets Mr. Wheaton display it. It is, in it's way as admirable as poor Sir Anthony Hopkins in Bram Stoker's Dracula trying valiantly to play the part as Mr. stoker actually wrote it in his book and make occasionally complete nonsense lines sound not only like sense, but things Book Von Helsing would have said even as the rest of the actors appear to be playing space aliens with no familiarity with the book or human behavior. I know liking Wil Wheaton is cool now, but back then I was often the lone voice in the room standing up for his acting and vilifying the writers (which I also did for Marina Sirtis, who I felt was unfairly blamed for the craptastic writing she was given to work with). Anyway, I see whole episodes now I'm in the back half of Season One, where I do like Wesley, which is a real surprise, since the ones I remember liking him in were later in the character run. (I still stand by the opinion my lover and I at the time had, which was they should have evolved Wesley in a completely different direction than they ended up doing, but that's another story). Anyway, another surprise is how violent and impulsive season One Picard is. I suspect they were trying to make him more like Kirk, though by the time I started watching it, Riker bore Kirk's mantle and Picard had grown into the Picard I remember. It's a subtle thing I missed first time around from not watching them in the right order.
This time, I am also really seeing the seams: the places they are trying to do the Original Series vs. the bits where you can see the characteristic TNG showing through. The result is a weird patchwork. I think I'd be having more fun picking it a part if the pervasive sexism weren't so exhausting.
* "Lord of the Rings Re-Read: A Knife in the Dark:" http://www.fandomfollowing.com/lord-rings-re-read-knife-dark/
* "How to help Flint, Michigan:" http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/how-help-flint-michigan
* Help pay for cat food, litter, meds, medical copays: Paypal Lethran@gmail.com
* Donate to help refugees: http://donate.unhcr.org/international/general
* A list of LGBTQA Charities: http://awkward0w1.tumblr.com/post/126399233673
* Want Game of Thrones without the creepy? We desperately need new players. We are very inclusive. "Game of Bones MUSH:" gobmush.wikidot.com
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(no subject)
Date: 2016-07-14 12:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-07-14 01:50 am (UTC)I maintain that first season was never good, even when it was new, and that it stayed too bland until Rodenberry was no longer able to impose his "no internal conflict" rule. I love a lot of the characters, and I do remember really liking the last season, where they were able to be much bolder, but it was DS9 I loved, and still maintain is the best Star Trek, hands down.
I loved the original series as a kid, but find it mostly unwatchable now, what with Shatner's "acting" and the too obvious scripts, which deteriorated as the years went by. There were some individually good scripts, they really were speaking to the cultural moment and pushing boundaries on what the network and censors would allow, and I loved most of the characters, but the flaws often make me wince.
We often want and need different things from media when we are children and the cultural and political contexts change. I don't think there is anything wrong with that. As long as the thing was helpful to you when you needed it, the value was real, even if the property doesn't hold up when you want and need different things. I loved intensely some things my parents found utterly baffling and which make me wince now. (The Sargeant Pepper movie anyone? Seriously, I haven't seen it since and am afraid too because I'm pretty sure it is mind meltingly awful).
What changes and grows is still alive. :)