handful_ofdust: (eccentricities)
handful_ofdust ([personal profile] handful_ofdust) wrote2009-02-16 07:53 pm

Noun Used As A Verb, Film At Eleven

Re yuki-onna, talking about how the ending of Watchmen doesn't work for her because she's been "Neuromancered"...WTF does that even mean, exactly? I read Neuromancer, but about a million years ago, and it occurs to me that perhaps it was exactly as not-so-impressive to me, in the end, as Watchmen was to her. But seriously: There's something "innate" in a received-wisdom sense that I'm supposed to be getting from the reference about how best to end a book, right? And...I'm just not gettin' it, sorry.

I should probably be asking her, I suppose, rather than the universe at large. But I get the feeling I'd just get slapped for being dumb, and I'm not all too into that right now.

[identity profile] readingthedark.livejournal.com 2009-02-17 12:20 am (UTC)(link)
I skimmed it too. Cat's bright but reading her noticing everything everyone else noticed two decades ago without being aware of the past, etc...

But I just looked back at her post and read it more carefully and that was her point, even if she hadn't fully meant to prove it that way.

In context, for her reading Neuromancer or The Watchman decades after their original impact, she saw a lot of techniques and themes that are so commonplace that they're not that interesting...but she's aware that these works are why those techniques and themes became so popular. (In other words, if you've read a dozen clones and then see the original, it can look like it's cribbing from everything else since you've grown accustomed to the things that originally made it great.)

[identity profile] xterminal.livejournal.com 2009-02-17 04:52 am (UTC)(link)
Dunno. I loathed Neuromancer; it's one of the books that turned me off science fiction forevermore, really (or at least until I find someone who actually writes the stuff once again where characters overcomes the technogeekery).

There's something "innate" in a received-wisdom sense that I'm supposed to be getting from the reference about how best to end a book, right?

I don't think so, but then, as noted above, I may well be (probably am) bringing my own baggage to the table. As we all do, natch.