There's a cyberwoman in the basement! - or, What Happened on the Character Death Panel at Gally

[rm]

So, Gally, is awesome. It's the last day and I'm hemming and hawing about spending money in the dealer's room. There's always this urge to shop that is is not always focused or reasonable (i.e., getting the pearl necklace with the Dalek charm is hilariously wrong as a Jack cosplayer; it's also profoundly unnecessary.)

This morning, I got to go to the Guest of Honor breakfast, which was hilariously weird, with guests shifting tables every few minutes to have deeply random conversations with us (the utterly refreshing Tommy Knight very much appreciated the sorority girls who were here last night; John Levene talked about his deep, deep, really there aren't enough adjectives here, hatred of George Bush; Georgia Moffett was concerned the pens were breeding).

Of course, though, I feel like the thing I should recap is the "Fan Reactions to Character Death" panel (Tina Beychok, Paul Cornell, Kate Orman, David Wise, Tammy Garrison Wendy Pini, and myself), which was intense for all sorts of reasons -- 7 panelists for one (that's hard to moderate), an active and vocal audience (that included both yelling and tears at various points) and a whole lot of intense emotions on the part of many, many people, myself very much included. It was only an hour, and could have, easily, been five. There is no way we would have run out of anything to talk about, although stamina might well have been at issue.

When I moderate a panel, what I try to do is spend about thirty minutes with just the people on the panel talking. It's a dinner party, and you're all invited to watch. After that I open it up to questions. With this panel, it was almost impossible to hold questions off, because people were literally bouncing in their chairs (things got pretty outbursty at various points, and not in the clever audience interjection way, but in the angry shouting out of turn way -- it was hard to handle and shut down, and I think regrettably ratcheted up tension in the room to a degree that it made me less gracious than I could have been (although I don't think I did actual wrong) in a situation we'll get to below).

So, for a while, we talked about some stuff that of course included Children of Earth, but also covered lots of other fandoms including Buffy, Blake's 7, MI-5 (Spooks in the UK), Star Trek, Sherlock Holmes, and Harry Potter

In the midst of this Wendy Pini told a fantastic story about receiving a long blond braid in the mail after she killed off a character and that character's partner cut off their hair in mourning. (she also mentioned a manga in which the death of a character resulted in their being a moment of silence for the character on radio there -- I need to track her down and get that reference unless any of you know it offhand).

David Wise (OMFG, David Wise, whose many many credits include having written for Buck Rogers in the 25-Century which was one of my FAVORITE shows as a young child), talked about trying to talk the powers that be out of killing Optimus Prime (this led to much discussion about how Transformers have broken the hearts of many).

When we got to Paul Cornell, he talked about his anger at some of the reaction to Children of Earth, specifically that some of his friends received death threats. And Paul, who is pretty much the most conflict averse guy you'll meet in the contentious land of Doctor Who, did it in Paul-style, which meant asking if there was anyone one there who really was opposed to what happened in Children of Earth who wanted to speak about it with him.

This led to a ten minute or so exchange with the woman from the "Save Ianto Jones" campaign (who I now know to be dvcorvis), that was pretty gripping. She talked about feeling as if fans were "sold a false bill of goods" (a phrase which fascinated both Paul and I in terms of the framing of the whole thing as a commodity) and noted that she didn't feel we were shown the "promised" relationship between Jack and Ianto and that she had been proud of the show as a member of the queer community and felt ashamed that she had recommended it to her gay friends when she saw what happened.

Paul was incredibly curious and questioning and gentle with her, and I'll totally admit to jumping in, in a couple of places where I really objected to her arguments (although I did desist when Paul asked me to. ETA -- I've since talked with the woman outside of the panel situation and apologized for my tone. Nothing more to report there other than this was right after she got to chat with John Fay in a conversation that struck me as gracious and moving).

This included the fact that I don't think it's appropriate for any member of the queer community to be viewed as speaking for all members of said community (because I am proud of Torchwood being out there in the world), and that I also don't think it's fair or appropriate to say that whether or not Jack said "I love you" back to Ianto is indicative of whether they loved each other or not. It's not appropriate to set up a criteria for the form of declaration required to determine whether a couple (fictional or not) is in love.

Anyway, this all went on for a while. The woman was crying. Paul was asking questions. I was trying to stop outbursts that seemed angry (and later were pretty explicitly derisive) from another audience member who had been problematic throughout the panel and really alarmed several attendees based on many conversations I had later in the con, and I really, really wanted everyone to have a chance to speak, but there was no way that was going to happen.

Eventually I moved it away from this exchange Paul was having, because the panel really needed to be about more than this split in fandom and others needed the floor. David talked about watching Children of Earth with a group of male friends he described as "very masculine" and "not homophobic, but experiencing a constant low-level of homosexual panic" and how they were all sobbing at Ianto's death scene.

I thought this was a lovely note to end on wrapped things up, but then had to holler to get everyone's attention as Paul had a final statement and everyone had gotten up to leave (and the room was packed -- standing room only). Paul then hugged the woman from the "Save Ianto Jones" campaign, and I certainly hope that that provided some resolution for some people somewhere in all of this (on, I might add, a panel that I had faintly hoped would not just be The Great Ianto Debate).

Afterwards, I had very little time to linger, as I was on another panel, but had a lovely conversation with both a woman who was just coming out and an older lesbian couple and they were both the sort of discussions that were why I do this. I wish, as exhausting and shaky-making as it all was, that we could have gone on for hours.

Later, in recapping it for others, I came to a few conclusions:

I have absolutely no problem whatsoever that people are still grieving for Ianto; I certainly still feel the loss in my own, wacky way in the landscape in my head. I have very little time for people who mock those who are still experiencing grief for a fictional character. The fictional element of the situation is not, in my eyes, problematic. I do, however, feel that for some people the grieving process has become stalled or unhealthy or unproductive; and I would have that same feeling if the grief they are experiencing were for someone non-fictional. It's the non-resolving grieving process I am discomforted with and I think is problematic both for the tenor of fandom as a whole and for some individuals in particular.

In talking to Catie and her team, she mentioned having wanted to create ribbons that read "Let Ianto Rest" (an idea that originated with lady_entropy17, who's their Owen). That really gripped me, and definitely triggered my sudden realization that this whole business of "Save Ianto Jones" is a bit like Ianto keeping Lisa alive in the basement -- it's done out of some very intense, pure, obsessive love, and you can't quite say it's inherently wrong, just as you can't really say Ianto was wrong ... even though he was. It is, in my opinion, a similar type of toxicity, and I'm fascinated by this strange reenactment of the first narrative that actually brings Ianto to our attention.

There's this fascinating narrative that seems to emerge when people talk about "no, no CoE really messed me up too." Everyone seems to talk about being at work the next day and having to excuse themselves to the bathroom to cry (I believe it was Kate who described this on the panel). It's a narrative (a true one) I use too. But I realize that I use it (and so I suspect that this is the case for many others, as well) to avoid talking about how truly, deeply I was affected. I had wanted to start this post really trying to tell you what it was like, as if showing you that pain (and absurdity in the eyes of many) would be some honesty penance that would somehow make it up to the people I not only vehemently disagree with, but am, unavoidably, pretty angry with.

Yet the fact remains, I can't do it. Because it deserves my brightest and clearest and most emotional writing. And I don't have it in me. I just don't. It was an "ecstasy of grief" that ebbed and flowed as these things to, and the brightest and sharpest of it I can barely remember for crying so hard. So I can't do that penance.

I can only say that there is no such thing as the truth and no one can speak for anyone but themselves, and as much as I hold up what's happened with Ianto as the epitome of a not uncommon phenomenon, it is also an entirely unique journey we've all been through simply because of the collective nature of the Internet and our small and instant world.

When I was in my twenties, a woman in my social circle died. She had been an unrequited love-object of my then lover and was a friend to many people who openly despised me in a bullying awful way. She and I had also had a single odd conversation about something deeply personal and so, despite all the obvious awkwardness I felt in mourning her, I too had some claim on grief.

Not long after her funeral, I wrote a poem about it, about the way people try to own the dead and tell each other who has the right to feel what and speak how. I was obsessed with the fumes of ownership that invaded the living in the wake of her passing. It was unpleasant and seems, somehow, deeply relevant here.

Ianto's dead, but he's not been taken away from any of us. And that is, in some cases, I suppose, the horror of it. This experience has not been, I know, something all of us would choose to have had.

But it seems I would. I did. I like this strange life of never-was coming into focus through what I cannot hold. I'm not cosplaying today. And that's sort of why. I can't help but keep this space, even without the coat.

Comments

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

This might repeat a bit of what I just said in my previous comment, but anyway -- I think that for me, it's more than just a mourning process (though it certainly is that too) -- I think for me, it's about rejecting the broader messages of hopelessness, the message that misfits can't be loved, the message that only conventional heterosexual love with babiez is the only love that can be valorised, the message that bravery is useless -- I think that all of those messages were reinforced by Ianto's death, and I will not accept them. Therefore, I will not accept Ianto's death.

I think if it had just been a matter of mourning, then I could let him rest. But it's so much more than that.

[cleverthylacine]

I don't like CoE, but I have to disagree that you can't kill a gay character in a relationship without in some way "endorsing the message that only conventional heterosexual love can be valorised". What, really?

I don't quite think so. I think there is a very real difference between the kinds of stories like "The Well of Loneliness" that were written in an era when you were only allowed to write about queer love if you made the point that it was bad and couldn't end well, so there were no happy endings at all, ever, and the kinds of stories which are written essentially to show people how terrible the oppression of gays is, like "Brokeback Mountain" which can be no fun at all to watch if you're queer but are still enlightening straight folks, and stories in which there are a lot of queer people and one of them happens to die, particularly if the world is ending (as it always is when RTD slips his leash) and lots of people are dying. I have a lot of problems with CoE but this isn't one of them.

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

I don't like CoE, but I have to disagree that you can't kill a gay character in a relationship without in some way "endorsing the message that only conventional heterosexual love can be valorised". What, really?

That's not what I said. I feel that CoE specifically does this because of the way that Jack/Ianto is portrayed as unloving and shallow, while Gwen/Rhys is portrayed as loving and deep -- and I think that's reinforced in the fact that Gwen and Rhys survive, and presumably go on to form a conventional nuclear family, while Jack and Ianto are doomed.

I also think that there it is highly problematic that narratives that are aimed at general audiences, when they do portray queer couples, portray them in the context of a death and bereavement storyline -- while I don't think it's wrong to tell those stories, and I think those stories can serve an important purpose (regardless of the sexual orientation of the couple involved), they are over-represented in storylines about queer couples. When this is combined with the way in which CoE creates a clear contrast between J/I (unloving, shallow) and G/R (loving, deep), I think it ends up reinforcing some really nasty ideas, although I am quite sure that RTD never intended to do so.

I have considered this issue from many different angles, and read many different queer perspectives on CoE -- and as I said in another comment, and ultimately I feel that CoE hurt so many people in LGBTQ communities, because it did reinforce so many negative ideas, intentionally or not, that I just can't see it as something that carries a positive message in that respect. I know there are many LBGTQ people who do not feel that CoE carried a negative message for them, and that is obviously a Good Thing -- but they don't cancel out all the people who did receive negative messages from it.

I do think that Ianto could have been killed in a way that did not reinforce these sorts of discourses; for instance, I think that if they'd stuck to the original plan for Ianto to have Owen's death-and-ressurection storyline in S2, it probably would have worked quite well. But that's not how it happened, unfortunately.

I have never said that it's always wrong to kill a queer character -- I just think that the way it was done in this instance reinforces some really negative messages.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Jack and Ianto were always doomed. The question was just when and how.