How to Tell Stories

[handful_ofdust]

Lawks-a-mercy! Actual practical standards set for Gender Equity in [Narrative--TV shows primarily, but it can certainly be transposed], here (http://ivanolix.livejournal.com/199285.html?format=light). Said standards could probably also be cross-purposed to deal with representation of any non-default character types, or even several different ones at once.

Otherwise, yuki-onna's been hosting an interesting post about meta/deconstruction. Which are concepts I actually have problems with, mainly because I'm not academic, so the language/jargon defeats me: Why's it gotta be so stiff?, as the fool in Venia's Travels complains. Then I dig a bit deeper, and realize that in fact I'm often playing with the same things that make up this quote-quote "genre"...unreliable POV and narration, for example, reading between the lines and playing with lacunae, all techniques which arguably form the backbone of literary horror.

(I also totally agree with her observation that unless you establish at the outset this is a parallel universe with no horror culture, there's really no excuse anymore for having characters who can't parse the whole Hey, whoa, the DEAD are coming back to LIFE, maybe that means these things are those things known as zombies. How do we deal with zombies? Yeah, let's do that, shall we? equation. See also vampires, werewolves, any other sort of cross-culturally understood monster; personally, I've never understood why people insist on telling the cops Oh fuck, there's a vampire in town!, as opposed to just saying Oh fuck, there's a guy who THINKS he's a vampire in town! One gets you help, the other gets you kicked to the curb--I sure know which one I'd choose.)

Okay...back to the war. 1,000/2,000 words, here I come.

Comments

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

And these days, yes, I often feel that people are represented, but made sexless saints of. For every complicated, sexy, odd character of color and non-default sexuality like Kalinda on The Good Wife, there's a thousand happy-dappy Wills and Jacks, or people who one assumes have HAD sex or might be HAVING sex, but thank God, you don't actually have to hear about it/watch it. One thing I like about SVU, shit as it's become, is that they don't dare make Ice-T sexless. He has a complicated background, an ex-wife with serious issues, a gay son, and seems to be living in some sort of hetero life-mate relationship with Richard Belzer. He's allowed to be at least as effed up as everybody else, and that's saying something.;)

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Fin and Munch are the best things SVU has going right now. By like, light-years. I especially love that they are usually right. I spend most episodes going "Goddamn you, listen to Munch!" and the episode where Fin told Elliott that he was a rat bastard is my favorite for that reason only.

He's allowed to be at least as effed up as everybody else, and that's saying something.

Yes, this is very important. Of course it's especially ironic given that hey, if you're living as a minority-anything in a system run by people who are not like you, the chance that your background/personal life isn't fucked up is especially small!

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but you're not supposed to admit that!;)

Sometimes TV's version of race relations reminds me of The Cosby Show, where middle-class black people were somehow able to spend their whole lives virtually never having to interact with white people at all (let alone obnoxious/problematic white people). It was this weird fantasy of segregation made happy, which maybe explains why Apartheid-era white South Africans apparently loved that show a lot.