As I said before, I won’t be blogging each episode individually. That would be way too much work, not to mention that I don’t have something interesting to say about every. single. ep. But the pilot, being the thing that launches the whole series, does get its own post.
I’ll start talking about actual episodes and content soon enough, but before that, I’d like to look at the general format of the show. (No spoilers, really, but I’ll put it behind a cut for length anyway.
So I’m almost done with the revision of the third Memoir, I just turned in my next chapter for L5R, the number of pictures left to edit is down to two digits, and the next ten months are jam-packed full of time-consuming things I intend to do.
Which means it’s a perfect time to start a new giant project!
(Or at least it’s a perfect time for my brain to suggest a new giant project.)
I’ve decided I’m in a mood to re-watch Supernatural. And if I’m going to do that, I might as well blog my way through, because one of my reasons for re-watching it is to take a look at its macro-level narrative structure. Eric Kripke, the showrunner, did a remarkably good job of blending a strongly episodic, Monster of the Week format with a long-term metaplot and thematic development, and I’d like to take a look at how he did it. I won’t be blogging each episode individually, but rather commenting on structural stuff as it comes up during the course of the show.
This will involve spoilers. Lots of them. I’ll put everything behind cuts, but if you already know the show or don’t care about being spoiled, feel free to share your thoughts!
Before I get started on the actual blogging, let me share how I got into this show, and why I find it interesting enough to merit this kind of project.
. . . so let me get this straight. The Kurgan is hanging out in Sleepy Hollow, where the Four Horsemen are terrorizing people and chopping off heads?
Nah, that doesn’t bring anything to mind.
Which is to say, casting female performers for characters who are canonically male, or actors of color for characters who are canonically white.
Look at Hollywood. Look at TV. Look at how frequently they remake or reboot or sequelize existing narrative properties (for a host of reasons, not all of them terrible, but we won’t get into that here). For crying out loud, we’ve got three separate Sherlock Holmes franchises in progress right now.
If you don’t turn Starbuck female — if you don’t cast Lucy Liu as Watson — if you don’t make Idris Elba Heimdall — if you don’t break the mold of those existing texts in ways that will let in under-represented groups — then your opportunities for having those groups on the screen in the first place drop substantially. You’re basically left making them minor new characters, or else cracking the story open to stick in a major new minority character (and people will complain about that, too). Because all those stories we keep retelling? They’re mostly about straight white guys. And the stories that are new, the ones that aren’t being retold from one or more previous texts, can’t pick up all the slack on their own. You make Perry White black, or you make a Superman movie with no black people in it above the level of tertiary character.
Which isn’t automatically a problem when it’s one movie. But it isn’t one movie: it’s a whole mass of them. Including most of our blockbusters.
So either we chuck out the old stuff wholesale (and as a folklorist, I entirely understand why we don’t do that), or we rewrite it to suit our times. (And as a folklorist, I entirely understand that too — and I cheer it on. Go, folk process, go!)
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/594044.html. Comment here or there.
Season five of Eureka is up on Netflix now, so I’ve finally gotten to resolve that bloody cliffhanger from last season. Not before a detour through a random Christmas episode (who do they think they are, Doctor Who?) that I pretty much could have done without, but hey, one episode, then we’re back to actual continuity.
Spoiler-cut for my thoughts on a pair of tropes.
You get rambly thoughts. Yay!
Revenge: A bit muddled here and there, but still interesting, especially because of the extent to which (at least at the beginning) it’s framed as this faceoff between two women, both powerful in their own way. Because of the aforementioned muddling, it doesn’t quite stay that way, but it was still nifty while it lasted. And I kind of love the relationship between Emily and Nolan — all the more so because the show is unafraid to make Nolan a physical wimp. When somebody holds him at knifepoint, he gets scared. And then he turns around and calls Emily on her errors, and she generally admits he’s right.
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kniedzw called it a “soap opera” at one point, which got me thinking about the extent to which a soap opera can be defined as a drama that caters to a female audience. There are other aspects, too — the daytime slot being a shallow one; the constant plot churn being a more substantial one — but “soap opera” has a connotation of “ridiculous,” and really, I don’t think Revenge (at least in its first season) is any more ridiculous than various evening dramas that cater to a male audience. So there’s that.
Lost Girl: The werewolf guy is hot, but the tone of the show really doesn’t do it for me, and I can’t help but roll my eyes at the extent to which the protagonist’s nature seems like an excuse to have her make out with people every episode. Not my cup of tea, I think.
The Vampire Diaries: Also not my cup of tea, but I watched the first two episodes out of curiosity (yay Netflix streaming!), and have to applaud the way Stefan goes against the stereotypical grain of the YA paranormal boyfriend. Which is to say, he’s not an asshole. In fact, he is an anti-asshole in some ways I can’t help but read as a deliberate response to Edward in Twilight, whether that’s the case or not. I still don’t find him that interesting, but at least I don’t want to deck him.
Coriolanus: And now for something that isn’t TV. Not one of Shakespeare’s better-known tragedies, but after watching this adaptation, I have no idea why. It’s been too long since I read the play (my sophomore year of college, I think) for me to recognize whether it’s a matter of how they edited the script, or just the bloody fantastic performances from Ralph Fiennes and Gerard Butler and Brian Cox and James Nesbitt and oh my god Vanessa Redgrave, but it fits all but seamlessly into a run-down, militarized present day, with weary politicians and some conspirators who are, when I think about it, weirdly honest. I think I may have to buy a copy of the movie and add it to my library of Good Shakespeare Adaptations.
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(The following post talks about The Avengers on its way to the actual point, but does not give spoilers.)
Interestingly, one of the moments that has stayed with me the most strongly from The Avengers is the speech Loki flings at Black Widow.
He has other Villain Speeches in the movie, of course. But this one stands out for its sheer, unbridled malevolence. He doesn’t say those things out of megalomania or fraternal resentment or any other such understandable motivation; he says them because, quite simply, he wants to hurt her.
I’ve said before that I tend to write antagonists more often than villains. That is, I write characters who think they’re doing the right (or at least the necessary) thing, who happen to be wrong about that. There are exceptions, of course; Nadrett doesn’t give a damn what’s right, only what he can get away with. But I have a harder time writing that sort of thing.
Which means — of course — that I want to study how it’s done. So this is a Recommend Stuff to Me kind of post: what books/movies/TV shows/etc have those moments of pure malevolence, where the character is just trying to hurt somebody? Off the top of my head, there’s Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles (“Stop sidling, my swan. I am going to hurt you, but I am not going to kill you, just yet. You are going to provide me with a deal of merriment still.”), some of Angelus’ moments in Buffy, and pretty much everything the main villains do in Tokyo Babylon and X, but I’m having trouble thinking of more. (Actually, that’s a lie. I can think of plenty of sadistic villains. It’s just that most of them are sadistic in a shallow, uninteresting way, and I want ones that really manage to get the knife between the ribs.)
Where have you seen this done well?
Edited to add: Please to be avoiding spoilers as much as possible. This discussion will necessarily involve a degree of revelation, but if you can use phrases like “the main villain” instead of the name (where the villain is not obvious from the start), etc, that would be much appreciated.
Since multiple people have expressed interest in something I said in the comments of the last post, I figure I’ll blow off actual productivity for a while and make a post about how I think the anime Rurouni Kenshin takes place in a post-superheroic world.
Background, for those not familiar: the Meiji Restoration of 1868 ended the long rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and “restored” the Japanese emperor to power (hence the English name, though it was more of a revolution, setting the stage for a period of massive modernization and westernization). It also gets called the Bakumatsu, the “end of the shogunate,” and since that’s the name that gets used a lot in the series, that’s the name I tend to use.
The main character, Himura Kenshin (who is very loosely based on a real person), was one of the top assassins on the side of the “imperialists,” the guys overthrowing the shogunate. To the extent that you can break the Bakumatsu down to a binary, that means he was on the side of the good guys; the series makes no bones, though, about the fact that the Meiji side is not wonderful and pure, and there were good people on the Tokugawa side, too. Kenshin believes in what he fought for, but since then he’s forsworn his old identity as the “Hitokiri Battousai”*: he’s taken a vow not to kill, and instead of a katana, he carries a sakaba-tou (rendered in English as “reverse-blade sword” — what would normally be the cutting edge is dull, and the blade is sharpened on the inside curve). He’s a rurouni, a wandering swordsman, and still fights to protect people, but he does so without killing.
*(Side note on language: I wish the official English release didn’t try to translate this. “Hitokiri” can most literally be rendered in English as “manslayer,” but that sounds stupid. And they don’t bother translating “Battousai,” which refers to the fact that Kenshin’s fighting technique includes elements of battoujutsu. Leave the whole phrase in Japanese: the audience will pick it up quickly enough. Here endeth the rant.)
A large number of the plots in the series are some variant on “random guy shows up, tries to get Kenshin to be his old self again.” Usually these guys have scores to settle with him, dating back to the Bakumatsu, and/or are trying to prove they’re the badassest badass ever to walk Japan. To do that, they need to not just defeat Himura Kenshin the pacificistic rurouni; they need to defeat the Hitokiri Battousai. Every so often, for a change of pace, it’s somebody from the Meiji government instead; they have somebody who needs killing, and they think Kenshin’s the only guy who can do it for them. But one of the central themes in the series is the tension between Kenshin’s vow and the need for his abilities: the harder he fights, the more he has to call on his skill and speed and strength to defeat somebody, the more his mind falls into the pattern of the killer he used to be.
So there’s your framework. Where does the superhero bit come in?
Mostly spoiler-free, though I talk a lot about Kyoto-season characters.
Yeah. I know. I’m lazy. But it’s true; I’m thankful for Netflix Streaming, and other services that allow me to enjoy movies and TV from the comfort and sloth of my home. 🙂
Not only because they enable me to act like a total slug, but because they make it me more willing to give a shot to various things I wouldn’t have tried if I had to make an effort to seek them out. And, as a corollary, they make it easier to give up on stuff that isn’t any good. If I’ve rented something, or waited for the disc to be sent to me, I’m more likely to feel as if I should stick it out for the whole thing, even if it isn’t really holding my interest. If it’s streaming, though, I feel very few compunctions about quitting after fifteen minutes. And that frees up more time for me to try the stuff I mentioned at the beginning of the paragraph!
(Mind you, it also means I’m apt to let such things suck away more of my time in general. But there’s a price for everything, I suppose . . . .)
It’s been a long time since I read the books. I think I’ve been through each one twice, except for A Feast for Crows, which I read when it came out, and that was the last I touched the series. And I decided — just before they announced the No Really We Mean It This Time publication date for book five — that I’m going to hold off until the end is in sight, so that means I’m fuzzy on a lot of things.
But watching the TV series, I remember why I like the books. It isn’t because Martin’s writing is Gritty! Epic! Fantasy! Grit for grit’s sake is not pleasing to me. I’ve picked up, and then put down, several other series in that vein. But Martin manages some things that his fellows in the sub-sub-genre don’t, and they are why I hooked onto him and bounced off the others.
Example: characters. There are many unpleasant people in this series . . . and yet, they’re unpleasant people I want to know more about. The absolute bastards are generally intelligent bastards, and I’m keen to see what they do next. The bitter assholes have understandable motivations for their bitterness and assholitude, and some of them preserve a weird core of decency underneath it (which is not the same as a Heart of Gold). People have loyalties instead of Chronic Backstabbing Disorder. I am a reader who generally prefers sympathetic characters; what Martin manages, and many other authors do not, is making me sympathize with people who aren’t very nice. (Exhibit A: Jaime Lannister.)
Also the world. I loves me a good world, whether it’s secondary or built off the real world. I don’t just mean the setting detail, though that’s part of it; the wall of ice and the regional surnames for bastards and Dany eating the stallion’s heart, all that stuff pleases my little anthropological heart. But there’s also the history underpinning it, that makes it feel real instead of a set built just for this story — and the history is both In Ye Olden Days stuff and the intricate network of kinship and alliances that sets up the present moment. Catelyn calling out to the armsmen in the tavern, and Jory reminding Jaime that they fought at each other’s sides once. (I especially love how many of those details the TV show is managing to preserve.)
And, partially underlying those world details, the fact that Martin makes me believe — as so many of his compatriots don’t — that he understands how medieval society worked. How politics work. Money and favors and people passing along tidbits of information; the importance of kinship and ideals, and pragmatism ramming up hard against those ideals. My friends and I are catching up on past episodes, and the conversation between Robert and Cersei just made me so happy, because of the richness it managed to convey. “What’s holding this kingdom together?” “Our marriage.” The trade in daughters isn’t a side note to the important stuff; it’s one of the central posts holding that society up. And Robert’s a shitty king, but he understands war — really understands it, not “the author tells me he does” — so you suddenly see that he isn’t an idiot, just very ill-suited to his current challenges, and it took both him and Cersei to screw up their marriage. That whole scene felt real, because it was based on real understanding, rather than the pale fictional shadow so many authors fall back on.
I know there’s a lot of shocking stuff in his story, and it isn’t to everybody’s taste. But for my own part, I don’t ever feel like I’m being shocked gratuitously — which is not true for many of the other Gritty! Epic! Fantasy! authors I’ve tried. (Note: I speak here of the books, and not HBO, which continues to give me uncomfortable-looking sex scenes I could really do without.) And Martin gives me things to care about, too, even when they’re broken and ugly things and I don’t understand why I care. If I had to put it in simple terms, I might say I feel a sense of empathy in his story, that I don’t feel in his imitators’ work.
Which is a long-winded way of saying I’m really enjoying the TV series, and it’s reminding me of why I enjoy the books, too. I haven’t given up on them; I’m just going to wait until I can enjoy them on my own, more timely schedule.
A Review of the Game of Thrones TV Series Premiere, As Written by Someone Not Starting from a Position of A Priori Contempt For the Fantasy Genre
(LJ won’t let me have a post title that long.)
I thought it was pretty good. The three of us watching who had read the books thought it was a faithful and effective adaptation of the source material; the fourth member of the audience, who had not read the books, said it succeeded at getting her interested, which is what you want from a premiere. Lots of good casting choices, and because it’s a series, it can take the time it needs to build up the characters and the world by methods more gradual than Ye Olde Info-Dumpe.
It being HBO, of course, they were not shy about showing you the nekkid, and things that were faintly disturbing on the page become moreso when you actually see them happening. (In particular, it’s hard to miss how problematic the Dothraki are.) But I didn’t feel they were gratuitously amping the R-rated stuff up just for the sake of spectacle, which is my usual HBO complaint.
I definitely want to see more. Though we’ll probably go the route of recording several eps and then watching them in one go, rather than doling it out an hour each week.
And that, New York Times, is how you do it. You get a reviewer who actually likes the genre to give you an opinion. Not somebody who is convinced of the worthlessness of fantasy before they ever sit down to watch the show. Please remedy this error in the future.
I need a piano icon for this, not a French horn.
Bear McCreary, composer of the utterly freaking awesome Battlestar Galactica score, has put out a book of piano sheet music for the series. It includes seventeen solos (two in both simplified and advanced forms), plus one piano duet (“Kara Remembers”) and one piece for piano and soprano (“Battlestar Operatica”).
A lot of really good stuff is here. “Kara Remembers.” “Prelude to War.” “The Shape of Things to Come.” Some of my favorite pieces are missing, but they’re largely the ones that don’t suit themselves to the medium: “The Signal” may be Totally Badass, but it is also Totally Percussive, and would make an abysmal piano solo. Probably the only thing I really want that isn’t in the book is an arrangement of “Gaeta’s Lament;” you might be able to make that one work without the drums. But hey, maybe he’ll put out a second book later.
I haven’t yet gotten to play any of the stuff, as I lack a piano. Fortunately, teleidoplex‘s new place has one! So I will report back later. The report will likely document how this book handed my ass to me; it’s been fifteen years and more since I played seriously, and the look of some things in here makes me want to hide under the piano bench and wibble to myself. But I have to try. I like trying to pick pieces out by ear, but it’s a lot more satisfying to play a proper arrangement.
I don’t often get into sitcoms. (Or comedy movies, but that’s a separate matter.) Within the last six months, I tried two — Arrested Development and Better Off Ted — and both were funny, very cleverly written, certainly good examples of the genre . . .
. . . and I just didn’t care.
I would watch an episode, and enjoy it while I was watching, but when it ended I felt absolutely no impetus to go on. I didn’t crave more. I didn’t feel any curiosity as to what happened next — well, sitcoms are often highly episodic in their structure, and I’ve made no secret of the fact that I adore a good arc-plot. For me to get hooked on a show whose purpose is primarily comedic, I need something more.
Apparently that “something more” is “dead bodies.”
A friend gave us the first season of Pushing Daisies, and my friends, I have found my comedy show. Not my drama-with-funny-bits — those, I have plenty of — an honest-to-god sitcom about a pie-maker who raises people from the dead (and then puts them back . . . most of the time). His two companions are a private detective who uses him to question murder victims, and a childhood sweetheart he raised and then didn’t put back. Who he can’t ever touch, because if he does she’ll kick the bucket again, this time permanently.
It turns out I really can be bought that easily, by a fantasy component and a bit of gallows humour. Because most of what this show does, is also done by other shows; there’s silly names, implausible characters (the agoraphobic sister aunts who used to do synchronized swimming as the Darling Mermaid Darlings), plot twists out of left field, etc. All the stuff I don’t care about it when other shows do it. But throw in a few dead bodies, some drugged pies, and the matter-of-fact way in which Emerson and Chuck exploit Ned’s ability, and suddenly all that other stuff stops bouncing off my brain and starts sticking.
I still don’t adore it with the heat of a thousand adoring suns — well, not yet, anyway; we’re only four episodes in. My taste runs too much to the drama-tastic end of the spectrum for that, probably. But I suspect I’ll want to buy the second season, and that’s a remarkable achievement in itself.
(Confidential to akashiver — if memory serves, you were trying to push this show on me ages ago. I can only say two things: you were right, and mea culpa for not listening sooner.)
After much hiatus-ing along the way, I’ve finally seen the entirety of Avatar: The Last Airbender. (TV series, natch — not the Shyamalan film. Though I laughed and laughed at how the episode “The Ember Island Players” seemed to presage the movie’s awfulness.)
I very much enjoyed the show: the characters, and most especially the world it takes place in, which has all kinds of nifty little details squirreled away in the corners. Apparently Nickelodeon is planning a new twelve-episode series to air next year — set seventy-five years later, focusing on Korra, a Water Tribe girl who’s the new Avatar — and I am very much looking forward to that.
It was interesting, though, watching a show which fundamentally was written for a kid audience. I read a decent amount of YA, but this was aimed at a demographic aged 6-11 (according to Wikipedia), and they play in a whole different ballpark. I could feel the difference: the show still grapped with interesting and sometimes difficult ideas, but the way it did so was . . . simpler.
Which feels like a criticism, maybe even a dismissal, and that’s the part I find interesting. I can’t find any words to describe what I’m thinking of that don’t sound like pejoratives. It’s simpler. The answers come more easily. They aren’t explored in as much depth.
But that isn’t a bad thing. How many adults got hooked on that series? I’m nowhere near the only one. Just because we weren’t the intended audience didn’t mean we couldn’t enjoy it. If it didn’t reach quite the same depths of grief and heights of joy as, say, Dorothy Dunnett, that’s okay; I was shouting at the TV screen anyway, which is a good sign that I cared. The story may have been simpler, but it wasn’t lesser.
So I’m left wondering, what makes that trick happen? What’s the secret technique that makes a nice, simple story for children (Avatar, Harry Potter) into something hordes of adults enjoy? Was it the characterization? Again, that didn’t have the depth I might expect from an adult show — but it was compelling; I giggled and cheered and wailed at the characters not to do the stupid thing I knew they were about to do. Was it the world? Maybe we were all just starving for a full-blown setting that wasn’t the usual familiar medieval Eurofantasy. I’d be curious to hear from people who loved the show: what was it that drew you to it?
(Be spoiler-free, if you can.)
(No, it isn’t available streaming. kniedzw moved it up in his DVD queue, which I’d been too lazy to do.)
I’ve only seen two episodes so far. But I wanted to post about my initial reaction, because it’s so strong: I don’t remember the last time I saw a show create character and setting so vividly, so fast.
I don’t know what the deal is, either. Really good writing, acting, set dressing, etc? Do the writers try harder because the backwaters of Louisiana aren’t as familiar to viewers as Midwestern suburbia or New York City? Maybe it’s just that it isn’t familiar, so even mediocre writing and acting and so on will strike me more vividly, because I haven’t seen what they’re presenting a hundred times before.
But that’s really how it feels: like I’m seeing something new. These aren’t the same characters I’ve seen in a dozen other shows. It remains to be seen what I think of them; maybe they’ll annoy me or be badly written or develop in ways I think are ridiculous. Or maybe they’ll turn out to be awesome. The setting, socially and physically, is very different; I don’t know how accurate it is, but with more evidence I’ll be better able to guess. The show talks more bluntly about race than I’m accustomed to; I’m interested to see what it uses that bluntness to say. All of those judgments are in my future: I can’t make them based on only two episodes.
One judgment, though, I can make. From the first minutes of the first episode, True Blood had my attention. And that’s more than a lot of shows can say.
Ballet is so the wrong icon for this, but it’s the only dance icon I have.
The LXD has FINALLY started airing! There’s material up at their site, but it’s easier to sort out what’s what at the Hulu page, where episodes are clearly numbered. So far there are two; I’m not sure how often new ones will be added.
My one gripe so far is that the episodes are short. Well, it’s a web series; what did I expect? Awesome dancing, though — especially in “Antigravity Heroes” — and I’m looking forward to them getting past the introductions of the characters and into the story itself, since after all, that’s the other half of the draw: awesome dancing in the context of a superhero story.
One thing that really struck me in both episodes is, you actually see guys dancing with each other. Not just on the same floor at the same time; they physically interact, with holds and lifts and such, and if you come out of a more classical background (as I do) that’s a really unusual thing to see. Men and women dance together in pas de deux; women join hands and such for corps de ballet numbers; you don’t really get guys partnering up. It’s just one detail of what amounts to an entirely foreign aesthetic for me. (I said after watching Stomp the Yard that it was like a foreign film with no subtitles: a character would do something, and I would know from the reactions of those around them that it carried a particular meaning, but I couldn’t translate it myself, because I don’t know that style of dancing at all.)
Anyway, I know several of you were excited about this when I linked to it before. So if you’ve been waiting for the series to actually launch: it’s here at last.
This show is a good example of the Netflix Effect: there are other things I’m more interested in watching, but they’re not available as streaming video, and Bones is. Laziness being a mighty thing, I end up watching the one that is more easily available. (This has its limits; I’ve streamed things where I’ve watched an episode or two — or in one case, five minutes — and promptly given up. But if a show is decent, and also immediately available, it wins.)
Anyway, I wanted to talk a bit about the show, because it’s a story and I can’t not think about stories when they’re in front of me. So far, I’ve watched two seasons, and the first few eps of S3.
As with most ensemble shows, the big appeal is the supporting cast: I am totally there for Hodgins and Zack and Angela, and Goodman (in S1) and Camille (in S2). I am absurdly fond of characters who combine geekiness + gruesomeness, so all the banter about dead bodies and such? I’m there. Given the kerfuffle I saw a little while ago over the plans to axe 2/3 of the female cast from Criminal Minds, I should also give props to the people behind Bones for bringing Camille in at the start of S2, making for a 50/50 balance in the core cast — only it’s more than that, really, because the lab scenes are often dominated by Brennan, Camille, and Angela, with Zack and Hodgins more playing support, and man, it’s nice after all these shows with their one token female character.
Of the two protagonists, Brennan* may be the more important one, but Booth is the one I enjoy. David Boreanaz is capable of less wooden performances than his stint as Angel led me to believe, and I like the way they handle his backstory angst: the scripts rarely wallow in it (at least in the two seasons I’ve seen), but it’s there, and gets brought up when it should be. (My favorite instance probably being an ep where Brennan said of a character, “I wish I had killed him.” Booth’s response: a very curt, “no, you don’t,” and then he got up from the table and left.) Their interactions are reasonably entertaining, and if I have one macro complaint on that front, it’s that I’d like a little more drama to leaven the comedy. But halfway through S2 they had a nice little run of eps that gave me exactly that, so maybe I’ll get more in the future.
My real macro complaint, though — and my real problem with Brennan — has to do with the way the show handles anthropology.
Forensic stuff first, because my comments here are fairly brief. I don’t know much about this field beyond some very basic elements of osteology, but it looks reasonably solid to my eye. The only thing that makes me roll my eyes is when they glance at a skeleton and instantly rattle off its sex, age, and race; that requires measurements, and even then the answer is often a matter of statistical probability, not certainty. But it would get old really fast if every episode showed the characters checking for fusion of the epiphyses and measuring the angle of the greater sciatic notch, and besides, the basic demographic facts of a the corpse du jour are usually not the interesting part of the story. So I’m fine with the scripts eliding that part and getting on to the more complicated questions.
What does bug me is the cultural anthropology. Oh, good lord, the cultural anthropology.
But here’s the thing, guys. If you don’t want to get tarred with the SF brush, you don’t get to play with our toys, either. That means you do not get any of the following exciting action figures: monsters, immortal beings, time travel, alternate universes, glowcaves, Egyptian mythology, electromagnetic magic, insta-healing, psychic powers, Dark Lords, Lords of Light, magical touched by an angel fatecakes, teleportation, mystical islands, or bodily possession. Get your sticky hands off them–you’ll only break them. Make a sitcom and shut up, if you want to howl about not being SF. Make a gritty procedural. Make Thirty-Something, I don’t know. But don’t make an SF show and then prance around telling everyone it’s SUPER REALISTIC while trying to conceal your painful giant quantum rabbit erection. You can’t trot out all those shiny SF baubles and then refuse to develop them or treat them seriously.
And while we’re on the topic of TV and not respecting stuff? I’m at a point where I would like to ban all shows from touching the topic of sf/f community, including but not limited to: comic book fans, LARPers, Renfest folk, players of video games, and anything else of a remotely geeky stripe. Just leave them alone, TV people. You don’t understand those groups, and what’s worse, you don’t want to understand them; you just want to toss them in because you’ve decided to do an episode about people who are totally detached from reality and can’t keep their non-fantasy lives in balance with anything else. And you’ve decided we are those people. Kindly piss off, leave the geeks out of your police procedural or whatever it is you’re making, and stick with things you actually have respect for.
It’s not what Cat was ranting about, but it was on my mind, so I decided to kill two birds with one ineffectual blog post. After all, that’s what the internets are for.
