handful_ofdust (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
handful_ofdust) wrote2010-05-19 10:58 am
handful_ofdust) wrote2010-05-19 10:58 am
Link, Etc.
A short guest essay on trying to refresh the vampire as trope/character which I wrote for Victoria Janssen's blog is finally up here (http://victoriajanssen.blogspot.com/2010/05/gemma-files-everything-old-is-new-again.html). I suppose I should probably have talked more about the Othering pitfalls of sampling different cultures' monsters, but...to be frank, I was running long, and I kind of took it as wrote: Ah well. Enjoy.
Meanwhile, my repeat tour through Diana Gabaldon's Epic Time-Crossed Lovefest continues apace, and--having just finished Dragonfly in Amber--I've been thinking hardish about Black Jack Randall, that villain's villain. There's this incredibly funny scene which happens halfway through the book: After two hundred pages of Claire and Jamie assuming he's dead (or desperately wanting to assume it, rather, and Jamie having bad dreams and Claire soothing him out of it, and this also-fairly-funny scene in which they run into a guy who absolutely looks like Randall from a distance and Jamie goes into a berserker rage and almost kills him, but!...it turns out it's just Randall's younger brother Alex, who's a really nice guy, and then they become friends, and try to fix him up with a chick Claire knows will eventually be her husband Frank's great-great-great-grandmother), Claire literally runs at full-speed 'round a corner, and whams right into him.
Randall: Excuse me, Madam, but I believe your nasty girl-parts have just come in contact with my--YOU!!!
Claire (at the same time): Jesus H. Roosevelt fucking CHRIST!
Then Jamie appears, and freezes, and Randall looks at him with weirdly vulnerable happiness and affection, and says: "Jamie?"...after which, naturally enough, both Claire and Jamie almost puke. (Granted, Claire is pregnant. But really, they both have equally good excuses.)
I think that if you were making a spread-chart of Crazy, Nasty yet Horribly Hot British Villainry, Col. Tavington from The Patriot would go over on one side, in the "Well, yes, but I have no money and this is pretty much the only thing I'm good at, so if I overstep my bounds sometimes--okay, all the time--isn't that basically vaguely normal? I mean, we're here to hurt these people, right?" category, while in the middle would be Archie from Rob Roy (Tim Roth), in the: "I am a whoreson bastard with no prospects yet a startling amount of aristocrat-by-linen-and-lithsp privilege, and really I have to do these things, but you're right--damme, I do indeed enjoy them" camp.
And those'd be both pretty good stereotypes of Bad Men with Sexy Accents. But then there'd be Black Jack on the absolute other side, thinking: "I truly do not know what exactly is wrong with me, since psychological analysis has not yet been invented [or at least codified], but it has been wrong with me my entire life, and thus all this is A) somebody else's fault for putting me in charge in the first place and B) better than me doing it to my nice younger brother because I love him OH so much I just want to EAT him, don't you think? Sir? Madam? Where...where the fuck do you think you're going, exactly?!?"
Ah, Diana. I don't know if you understand exactly where these things come from, any more than you understand your own obvious liking for extended love-quadrangles and domestic quasi-discipline--but given its products, I certainly do enjoy the way your mind works.
Meanwhile, my repeat tour through Diana Gabaldon's Epic Time-Crossed Lovefest continues apace, and--having just finished Dragonfly in Amber--I've been thinking hardish about Black Jack Randall, that villain's villain. There's this incredibly funny scene which happens halfway through the book: After two hundred pages of Claire and Jamie assuming he's dead (or desperately wanting to assume it, rather, and Jamie having bad dreams and Claire soothing him out of it, and this also-fairly-funny scene in which they run into a guy who absolutely looks like Randall from a distance and Jamie goes into a berserker rage and almost kills him, but!...it turns out it's just Randall's younger brother Alex, who's a really nice guy, and then they become friends, and try to fix him up with a chick Claire knows will eventually be her husband Frank's great-great-great-grandmother), Claire literally runs at full-speed 'round a corner, and whams right into him.
Randall: Excuse me, Madam, but I believe your nasty girl-parts have just come in contact with my--YOU!!!
Claire (at the same time): Jesus H. Roosevelt fucking CHRIST!
Then Jamie appears, and freezes, and Randall looks at him with weirdly vulnerable happiness and affection, and says: "Jamie?"...after which, naturally enough, both Claire and Jamie almost puke. (Granted, Claire is pregnant. But really, they both have equally good excuses.)
I think that if you were making a spread-chart of Crazy, Nasty yet Horribly Hot British Villainry, Col. Tavington from The Patriot would go over on one side, in the "Well, yes, but I have no money and this is pretty much the only thing I'm good at, so if I overstep my bounds sometimes--okay, all the time--isn't that basically vaguely normal? I mean, we're here to hurt these people, right?" category, while in the middle would be Archie from Rob Roy (Tim Roth), in the: "I am a whoreson bastard with no prospects yet a startling amount of aristocrat-by-linen-and-lithsp privilege, and really I have to do these things, but you're right--damme, I do indeed enjoy them" camp.
And those'd be both pretty good stereotypes of Bad Men with Sexy Accents. But then there'd be Black Jack on the absolute other side, thinking: "I truly do not know what exactly is wrong with me, since psychological analysis has not yet been invented [or at least codified], but it has been wrong with me my entire life, and thus all this is A) somebody else's fault for putting me in charge in the first place and B) better than me doing it to my nice younger brother because I love him OH so much I just want to EAT him, don't you think? Sir? Madam? Where...where the fuck do you think you're going, exactly?!?"
Ah, Diana. I don't know if you understand exactly where these things come from, any more than you understand your own obvious liking for extended love-quadrangles and domestic quasi-discipline--but given its products, I certainly do enjoy the way your mind works.