No Ideas: Must Be Monday

[handful_ofdust]

Well, if nothing else, I finally finished the Book of Tongues Interstitial post I've been working on for Music at Midnight, this time about...actual music, ie the stuff I was listening to when I wrote the book. You can find it here (http://musicatmidnight-gfiles.blogspot.com/2010/04/book-of-tongues-interstitial-music.html). Enjoy!

Meanwhile, I've done all the chores, an am marking time until Steve arrives with the Metropass. My brain, she refuses to function in terms of Chapter Four wordage; whatever, dude. It'll happen.

Oh yeah: And this idea of "Protagonist Privilege", which is once more making the rounds here (http://londonkds.dreamwidth.org/378900.html?format=light), continues to be a huge ball of WTF. So...main characters are "world-warping", always shifting things in their own favor, and you want more/equal time for minor characters whose POVs the narrative was not originally designed to be told from; guess you better get writing, then! This would be where fanfiction comes in, I would think, as a concept. But that doesn't mean you get to shit on the narrative as it exists because it's not giving you more about the person you wish was the protagonist, yet isn't.

Watching "The Eleventh Hour", for example--intro episode for Doctor Who Number Eleven--I'm personally perfectly capable of both appreciating Eleven's old/new qualities for themselves (he already has a heaping pile of truly Four-like traits, which I'm very happy about, since Baker remains my Doctor of choice) and wondering why it was so completely beyond the realm of possibility to rejigger the Doctor as female...to have a woman, for once, who gets to stand there saying: "Yes, I'm the Doctor. Basically, run." Let alone a nerdy or attractive dude who's standing behind her, looking at her bum as she changes with that vaguely interested yet more ruminative "hey, she was really cute even when I was a little kid--but it occurs to me that she's like a massively old lady from another planet in a geeky young lady's body, and she also sort of scares me too" look in his eyes.

Yet obviously, if I want this to happen, I'm going to have to do it myself; though the Moff may not want to actually screw the Doctor, he isn't going to screw with him, either. Such is life. Next?

"Protagonist Privilege"! Jesus God, please.

Comments

[baduin.livejournal.com]

****

Actually, this is a very informative post. It includes two points, both of paramount importance throughout history of the Western civilisation.

1) Objective existence of the world vs. the individual world as perception.

http://www.nytimes.com/1956/01/22/books/tolkien-king.html


January 22, 1956
BOOK REVIEW | 'THE RETURN OF THE KING'
At the End of the Quest, Victory
By W. H. AUDEN

" The difficulty in presenting a complete picture of reality lies in the gulf between the subjectively real, a man's experience of his own existence, and the objectively real, his experience of the lives of others and the world about him. Life, as I experience it in my own person, is primarily a continuous succession of choices between alternatives, made for a short-term or long-term purpose; the actions I take, that is to say, are less significant to me than the conflicts of motives, temptations, doubts in which they originate. Further, my subjective experience of time is not of a cyclical motion outside myself but of an irreversible history of unique moments which are made by my decisions.

For objectifying this experience, the natural image is that of a journey with a purpose, beset by dangerous hazards and obstacles, some merely difficult, others actively hostile. But when I observe my fellow-men, such an image seems false. I can see, for example, that only the rich and those on vacation can take journeys; most men, most of the time must work in one place.

I cannot observe them making choices, only the actions they take and, if I know someone well, I can usually predict correctly how he will act in a given situation."

2) The rejection of the idea of a privileged position or of an privileged observer, who has a deeper insight in reality. This is the key idea of Enlightment and of modern scientific methodology, democracy, bureaucracy and of social organisation in general. It is especially visible in Spinoza, Kant, Popper & Hayek.

http://www.the-rathouse.com/CRIntroductionSources.html
the Rathouse
Series of Very Abbreviated Versions of Classical Philosophical Works for Very Busy People.

Conjectures and Refutations Karl Popper
"XIV

In this short section Popper sums up his view that there are many sources of knowledge but none have authority.

XV
The authoritarian structure of traditional philosophy

The traditional systems of epistemology may be said to result from yes-answers and no-answers to questions about the sources of our knowledge. They never challenge these questions, or dispute their legitimacy; the questions are taken as perfectly natural, and nobody seems to see any harm in them. This is quite interesting, for these questions are clearly authoritarian in spirit. They can be compared with the traditional questions of political theory, 'Who should rule?' which begs for an authoritarian answer such as 'the best', or 'the wisest' or 'the people', or 'the majority'. (It suggests, incidentally, such silly alternatives as 'Who should be our rulers: the capitalists or the workers?', analogous to 'What is the ultimate source of knowledge, the intellect or the senses?'). "

This political question is wrongly put and the answers which is illicits are paradoxical (Chapter 7 of OSE). It should be replaced by a completely different question such as 'How can we organise our political institutions so that bad or incompetent rulers cannot do too much damage?' The question about the sources of our knowledge can be replaced in a similar way.

The alternative that Popper suggested is the question of detecting and eliminating error, by means of critical appraisal by all the methods of criticism that we can muster - logical analysis, experimental testing, consistency with other theories etc."

Popper, differently from Kant or Spinoza arrives at correct conclusions from the rejection of privileged knowledge: he rejects any certain knowledge of the reality, replacing it, for utilitarian purposes, with his "falsifiability".

3) Of course, if the knowledge of the real world is impossible to achieve, we must finally accept the personal experience as the basis - and therefore accept the Protagonist privilege.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

I'm of two minds about this - mostly I agree with you but I've also encountered the the type of stories that probably inspired the complaints about "protagonist privilege" - i.e., ones in which the main character gets an infinite number of moral and practical get-out-of-jail-free-cards from the author, without the narrative ever acknowledging it - in other words, the author really seems to think the character really is brilliantly clever and brave and that's why they succeed, while at least one reader/viewer sits there thinking "wow, that entitled adrenaline junkie would have got them all killed just then if that had been anything like the real world.(1)" I suppose it's a kind of pro Mary-sue-ism (I think someone once called it the Macho Sue trope.) I think though that I prefer seeing it subverted rather than avoided, like that scene in Rome where Caesar actually points out that there are these two seemingly-ordinary soldiers who somehow are always in the right place at the right time and never get killed, and that the gods must be watching them; or your own handling of Chess's shooting skills....


I wonder if this is going to be one of those pitfalls that people try so hard to avoid they end up writing a dull story - I'm aware, as Personal Information continues to coalesce, that some characters are grabbing more screen time than others and feel vaguely guilty about it, even though I've already been pushing my own favourite characters down from the very beginning in an attempt to even the playing field a little. I do think I've managed (so far) to not lead Dr. Samadi into marysuedom, though she is unquestionably the POV character - after all, she arrived in the setting the same time as the viewer and is saddled with the task of asking all the dumb questions on our behalf about why things are the way they are.


(1) Yeah, I'm looking at you, Lady Christina.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

It's fine for there to be a POV character. It's an established storytelling methodology. If people don't like Dr Samadi, that's less your fuck-up than theirs. And yeah, you seem to be giving your characters room to grow, which I like--this is an ensemble, right? That's sort of the idea.

Urrrgh, I mean--just let things be what they damn well are, or disengage, you know? It's not that hard. There's more than enough stories to go 'round.

[starvinbohemian.livejournal.com]

I... don't understand? I mean, yes, it's annoying when protagonists are less appealing than their sidekicks and it's really annoying when there's moral dissonance going on between the reader and the protagonist.

But that's... where fan fic comes in? The meta is presented as if it's part of the larger "ism" debate, but it's... not. I mean, it can't be, right? O.o *Scratches head*

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

More of the not-so-gradual "ism"-ing of every damn thing, to my mind. People want it all to be utterly interactive, and it's not: Bawww! I sort of wish I could be more diplomatic about it, but...oh, wait. No I don't.;)

[starvinbohemian.livejournal.com]

I guess I don't understand how this particular issue could be more interactive.

I mean, authors could completely do away with main characters and divide all the narrative development equally among an ensemble cast. Which they could and sometimes do, but that would mean the loss of the Chosen One narrative, bildungsromans, coming-of-age stories, etc. And why? No matter what an author does, s/he can't control which characters an individual reader is going to become invested in, so why shouldn't they write what they want?

I feel like I'm missing something here. Like, the real argument is actually about the moral dissonance that arises when an author allows their protagonist too much moral leeway while not affording it to other characters in the same universe?

[starvinbohemian.livejournal.com]

Well, that argument would make more sense than what I read as a lot of complaining about not liking certain main characters because minor characters get less attention in the narrative-- hence, being minor characters.

See, I understand the impulse to reach out to "offending" authors when they write things that are blatantly racist/offensive because there's good intention there and the faith that if only the author could be informed of why they're actually part of the problem they could see the error of their ways and reform. I do. But the internet has caused too much erosion of the boundary between fan and participant, resulting in that pesky entitlement, and the original good intention is lost.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

But the internet has caused too much erosion of the boundary between fan and participant, resulting in that pesky entitlement, and the original good intention is lost.

Best way I've seen it phrased thus far.;)

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

I think that actually is the real argument/issue here. But when I say "interactive", I guess I mean this increasing apparent idea that if you only call the creator out long enough and hard enough in public for Doin It Rong (IYNSHO), they'll be somehow forced to start doing what you want rather than what they want. And pretty soon there will be no Chosen One narratives, because you personally (and maybe all your friends) have decided they're innately discriminatory against all people who can't identify with the heros/heroines these dumb-ass creators have stupidly invested work in and centralized their narratives around, then unleashed on an unsuspecting world. Tinfoil, meet hat.