sundries

[rm]

On the train this morning a small child was singing: "Spider filled with rabies. Rabies rabies rabies. Spider filled with rabies. Rabies rabies rabies!" It made my morning.

Speaking of bugs, it's an exciting week in Rach and Patty land as we're going to see Ovo on Thursday.

shes_unreal needs some help getting a better job to get out of a bad situation. It's complicated, so I'll let her explain. Reliable source, real person, real situation. Please help if you can.

A fandom auction is being run to help thdancingferret who's job was evil and found a way to fire her for having cancer. Because the need is immediate, bidding closes tomorrow. Go now.

Yesterday on Twitter I linked to this giant sinkhole story before they included any info about the sinkhole, just the picture with no explanation whatsoever. Patty and I had a good time reading the comments (and subsequent ones on Twitter) to each other. They involved a remarkable number of references to "orbital lasers." But that sinkhole? Serious business.

Americans at the Bolshoi. One of the things that interests me is a passing mention that it is "all but taboo" for dance teachers to touch their students in California. I recall having a similar frustration in fencing -- take my limbs and show them where to go! That's how dance was when I was studying, but that was the 70s and 80s, and I guess the world changed; I am glad it hasn't everywhere.

Turns out there's more girls than boys in NYC's gifted programs and, as usual, The New York Times is alarmed. Meanwhile, people shrug and say "well, that's a shame" about all the ways boys of favored over girls. You'd think it would be okay for girls to be better than boys once in a while.

Lovely gay-themed ad for McDonalds from France. Although, when I first saw it, I thought McDonalds was going to be the host of this kid's coming out conversation with his father. But that's not the plot, which makes it all a little bit realer.

A history of trans and trans-like veterans that I should actually get around to checking out, since I reference stuff like this in that Snape, Gender and Heroism project I should actually write up for publication somewhere.

Last night on Buffy and Angel:

So, it was finally time for "Seeing Red," and my feelings are largely ambivalent. I don't think what Spike did (whether it was rape, attempted rape, threatened rape, etc.) was out of character -- we see him physically and sexually bully women both pre- and post- chip. I did find Buffy's response out of character -- not that she was startled, afraid and weak/injured, but just that what the show has argued as her automatic (not learned, most of us forget what we've learned when we're in danger) fighting abilities were not there. Also, I hated how the scene was overlit, although it was also interesting at the end how the scene where Buffy is talking to Xander before Warren shows up with a gun is also overlit. Also this whole thing doesn't stop me from being engaged with Spike as a character -- that's the great thing about fiction, I can like totally shit people who do totally shit things because their use in a narrative is brain stimulating on some level.

I found Tara's death to be startling, even though I knew about it (I didn't know it was this episode), and well done. I did not find it to be homophobic. Willow and Tara were the last couple standing, and if Whedon wanted all the couples doomed and they'd just gotten back together, that's what he had to do. I also appreciated that prior to the shooting Willow and Tara finally read like people who actually fuck, as opposed to the way lesbians usually read on TV, which is as people who pet each other gently and don't really have sex.

Xander was SUCH AN ASSHOLE in this ep I thought I was going to throw something at the TV.

Loved the Spike/Anya thing.

Meanwhile on Angel, Cordy is some mother goddess demon of love who I assume will eventually sacrifice her life so that Angel can become mortal. Connor is fucked up (and where do I know that kid from) and Holtz has bad make-up and a fucked up plan. Lila is courting Wesley and none of this is going to end well.

Comments

[firefly124.livejournal.com]

I agree that Buffy's complete ineffectiveness at fighting back was startlingly inconsistent with how her fighting abilities and strength had been portrayed up to that point. When I managed to revisit the ep from a much more detached POV, as opposed to the first time I saw it which triggered some shit for me, that was one of the things that really stood out.

This, however, is why I can't deal with post-S6 Spuffy. I'm all for redemption themes and such, but I can't suspend disbelief enough to buy that somehow they go from there to any sort of romantic relationship. Which I realize is at least in part about my own issues and triggers, and is all tangled up with rage over the "falling in love with your (would-be, in this case) rapist" trope. However, as I've noted before, this is very much a minority view in Buffydom, as Spuffy does seem to be the dominant ship.

I was only tangentially in the fandom when "Seeing Red" aired, but I do remember the huge storm of anger that erupted over Tara's death. My initial reaction before seeing other fans' response was just to be sad that a character I loved, who had finally appeared in the opening credits, leading me to believe she was finally a firm part of the team, was gone. That was, in fact, one of the things that I saw people freak out over, some in the same way I had and some with a much more profound sense of betrayal by this. I quickly gathered that many young lesbian fans, in particular, were in a place of feeling deeply betrayed by the fact that not only had this much-loved character been killed off, but also that there was that setup at the start of the ep that gave a false sense of, "Oh, good, she's definitely here to stay." While that may have had more to do with giving Amber Benson a full credit before she left the show, it is something that had been done before deliberately (with Jesse in the very first episode), though not with an established character. I like to think that if Whedon and whomever else was involved with that decision had realized just how deeply personally some would take that bait-and-switch, they might have handled it differently, but of course, we'll never know.

The other thing that came up a lot was the trope of the "crazy, evil, or dead lesbian," in particular that the pattern in popular media of making a lesbian character lose her mind or get killed as soon as it's become clear she's actually having sex with her lover. It's not a pattern I'd recognized before or even heard of, but that was the theme of a lot of the enraged meta. Not that it was homophobic to break Willow/Tara, because as you point out, all the couples were broken one way or another by this point, so they were hardly singled out. But that the way it was done was perpetuating that stereotype. I'm ashamed to have to admit that all these years later, I still don't really have enough lesbian popular culture under my belt to speak to that myself, but I imagine that's a meta discussion that it would have been very interesting to hear you weigh in on at the time. I haven't the foggiest if I can even find any of it to point you to now however, though I think I'll poke around a bit this afternoon to try.

[rm.livejournal.com]

bait-and-switch

I'm sitting here with my jaw hanging open but that is probably the phrase I hear most often about some of the rage peopel feel about Ianto's death on Torchwood as various creators had said pre S3, that we'd really love CoE. And, while I did, a lot of people who were invested in it for Jack/Ianto _really_ didn't. The "false advertising" thing comes up over and over again, although in the case of Buffy I do see it as an intentional fake out, because at the end of "Seeing Red" you can't really be 100% sure Tara is gone.

As to what happened with CoE, I've not the energy to rehash and refute today.

[firefly124.livejournal.com]

It's almost impossible not to compare the two. I'd started to, in fact, then deleted the whole paragraph, because some of it gets into how things were handled not only for the rest of S6 but well into S7, including the AfterElton.com article that really looks at how both character deaths were handled both with regard to the other characters on-screen and with regard to the fan reaction off-screen.

One thing I couldn't help but think in the wake of CoE, though, was, "Dude, how can you be such a Whedon fan and not know this was exactly how the fans would react?"

[eandh99.livejournal.com]

"Dude, how can you be such a Whedon fan and not know this was exactly how the fans would react?" Exactly - and James Moran talked openly about th parallels with this episode of Buffy, how he too reacted strongly to Tara's death, and yet somehow Ianto's death was not going to provoke JUST such a shitstorm from fans? Maybe Moran was sincerely clueless, but I doubt very much whether RTD was - maybe he was trying to out-Joss Joss?

[firefly124.livejournal.com]

Maybe. The big difference off-screen was the reaction to the fans, I think. Joss' response boiled down to, "I know, it was really hard to kill her, but sometimes the story demands what it does." That, even if you disagree with whether the character death served the narrative or not, is much less inflammatory than the eye-rolling about "hysterical women." That and the way the grief of the other characters was handled on-screen are some of the reasons I think there are still plenty of fans, myself included, who mourn Tara (or Wash) and may still write AUs out the wazoo where things work out differently, but the level of rage subsided a lot more quickly, whereas some of the post-CoE rage has subsided, but much definitely has not and doesn't look like it's about to. So, if RTD was trying to out-Joss Joss, which may or may not be the case, I have no idea, but if he was, I think he missed a rather key piece.

[eandh99.livejournal.com]

I think RTD knew Ianto's death would cause a huge reaction - but in that portion of the fanbase which he has consistently dismissed, the online fans and in particular the female online fans. Did he mean to be "even more shocking" than Joss? Maybe. He certainly seems to thrive on the reaction.

[elisi]

That is the thing about being a Joss fan - you become deeply distrustful of 'happiness'. Whenever the characters are happy we assume crash positions because we know it means that HORRIBLE THINGS WILL HAPPEN! (If we're *lucky* no one dies permanently.)

(When you're through both shows I shall link you to a post that lays out PTJS 'Post-Traumatic Joss Syndrome'.)

[crewgrrl.livejournal.com]

This goes in with a curse card my friends and I wrote for a home-grown version of Munchkin. The curse card reads as follows:

Curse!

Jossed.

You just died. For. No. Good. Reason.

[heavenscalyx.livejournal.com]

The other thing that came up a lot was the trope of the "crazy, evil, or dead lesbian," in particular that the pattern in popular media of making a lesbian character lose her mind or get killed as soon as it's become clear she's actually having sex with her lover. It's not a pattern I'd recognized before or even heard of, but that was the theme of a lot of the enraged meta.

The only time I've seen the crazy/evil/dead lesbian schtick done more concisely than in "Seeing Red" (1 dead lesbian, 1 evil/crazy lesbian) was "Divided Loyalties" in Season 2 of Babylon 5 (where Talia Winters becomes dead, evil, and crazy all in one fell swoop).

[heron61.livejournal.com]

That was pretty much also my reaction to both "Seeing Red" and the B5 ep "Divided Loyalties".