Waiting for (the Plumber)

[handful_ofdust]

Man, I am so ready to not have this fucking cold anymore. Sooooo ready. As I sit here all congested, eyes still gummy from seven o'fucking clock A.M., coughing and feeling it rip right down my throat to my esophagus...

So: The trailer for X-Men: First Class just dropped, and it looks promising, but naturally, all this is prompting is a whole lot of "oh well, but I don't trust the Powers That Be anymore because X3 was so scarring, so I don't want to get too invested..." And OTOH, we have people rushing to get caught up on A Game of Thrones before the miniseries starts, thus cueing a whole lot of "oh my GOD, WTF, how can George R.R. Martin be so meeeeeeean!!!!!" Which...man, this really is a triggery goddamn world we live in these days, isn't it? Full of very easily triggered people. I kind of wonder how some of them get out of bed in the morning, frankly.

I don't know about you, but when I pick up a book, I want the author to shock and awe me. To make me care about the characters, then break my heart and run me through the ringer--so long, of course, as they stay true to their own internal logic. Which is why I never think of Game of Thrones as ending on a world-wrecking note, because [spoiler] is so closely followed by [other spoiler]--a twist that elevates through horror, opening up the playing-field once again in a way that changes the world forever. You can see [spoiler] as a sad story, yet not a new one--it's simply human badness, human error, human politicking and bastardry brought to fruition, the triumph of demon practicality over honor and hope. But [other spoiler] is something else entirely, the transformation of a person from one sort of archetype to a completely different one, the karma that everyone responsible for [spoiler] has sown and is now doomed to reap. It's fuckin' opera, man: Someone has to die.

But maybe that's what we're talking about, in the end...that fanfictioneer mindset which wants things static and infinitely reproducible, for nothing to ever grow or change. What amazes me is that they're so intensely conservative--that for people who trumpet the rise of Remix Culture, they often seem incapable of filtering out what they don't like in a narrative, picking and choosing and spackling it back together in a more palatable form. These are the same people who complain about 3:10 to Yuma's ending, and expect sympathy: Oh my God, things didn't go the way I hoped they would! No, they went the way you knew they were likely to, instead, and you see that as a betrayal--so much so, it makes you apparently so bitter you don't want to play anymore. Which is...disappointing, to say the least.

I guess, in the end, I really am like Chess Pargeter, in that I not only expect things to hurt, but firmly believe that that's the sort of contrast which makes the pleasure pop all the better. That that's what makes it good. Or maybe, as Alex Dunkleman tells Bug in My Soul to Take, you have to be a condor and eat death for breakfast, because the trick is to keep on telling them thanks a lot, that felt fucking great, even when it doesn't. Especially when it doesn't.

I mean, really: why would you ever be content to just give your power away like that? No one's got a gun to your head; no one's making you do anything. They're giving you a gift, raw clay with prompts attached, and you're acting like you've been slapped. You're the subversive, revolutionary one here, right? So nut up, or shut up.

Comments

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I agree with you that that can be really problematic, but I think the problematic thing is the denial rather than the fixing-problems aspect? Like, for example, I desperately love The Dark is Rising books, and I am eternally grateful to Susan Cooper for having written the things, and if I were ever to write fanfic about them it would be because there is this aspect of Silver on the Tree that I think is really fucking stupid and poorly thought out and out of character for everybody. She had every right to do it and it's canon, is the thing. I feel that as a reader I have every right to think it's stupid and rewrite it in my head or elsewhere as much as I like, as long as I don't forget that, or that my version is critique and not what she had in mind, because if I were going to actually try to fix it in the actual text I'd need to be reading it in manuscript and arguing with her pre-publication.

I think it's perfectly valid to feel betrayed by a canon, when it's been going along brilliantly and then something happens that is just like, what the fuck happened to the writer's brain. Because writers do fuck up, and there's a difference between that and the writer making a decision the reader doesn't like. Things like, text has been having great women and then suddenly for no identifiable reason they all have no agency and wind up in various refrigerators, that feels betraying. (Whether it really is or not is another question entirely.) But denying that it happened in canon, which is denying the writer's right to make these decisions, that I think is where the crazy happens.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Yes, I actually agree with you on both platforms. Where you and the creator differ is an interesting interstice, because often (if you too are creative) it's the sparking-off point for something new, even potentially equally valid, in which you can address these issues. There's a case to be made for fanfiction as critique, so long as you don't expect the creator to A) accept your revisions and copy them back into their text or B) adjust themselves accordingly, next time 'round. I would've liked to have seen what C.S. Lewis thought of that Gaiman story, for example--or some of Mary Borsellino's more wrenching what-if-Jadis-won stuff--but that's not possible; I'd like to see what Gaiman thought of some of the revisionings of his own work I've come across. Phillip Pullman probably doesn't care, not least because every piece of fic I've seen set in his world tends to agree with him rather than disagree.

And yeah, I think it's valid to feel betrayed by canon if you genuinely think you could argue it point by point with the author: What about this dangling thread? Why does this characterization suddenly seem to change in order to bring about a plot-point which could have been done another, less annoying way? Where we get into trouble, though, is when the sense of "betrayal" becomes toxic. I've literally seen people accuse an author of intentionally fishing them in and playing them along just so they can kick them in the figurative crotch, and...um, no. While I think we all have our little ways, I don't believe anybody does that pre-meditatively; by accident, possibly. By not thinking out all the potential combinations of people who might be reading and how they might react (ie, What do you mean, ladies who've been raped might not want to read about rape? What do you mean, non-default people might not want a non-default villain to be their only representation?). And even if they do, they sure as hell aren't thinking of you, in particular, when they do it!

For me, it always comes back to a fellow reviewer I knew who objected to a scene in Con Air that seemed to put a cild in jeopardy, not because she found it gross and manipulative per se, but because it reminded her of the fact that her own daughter had died of leukemia. How is anyone writing a screenplay (especially an action-movie screenplay) supposed to do that math, exactly? They aren't, any more than the author of Hope Floats knew I, personally, was a child of divorce and would find a particular scene in which a girl runs screaming after her father's car triggery. At points like these, you need to step away from the material, re-group, slap on filters, and just do what you came here to do: Assess the material for what it is, no more, no less. Not what you want it to be. Not what it evokes in you. Not what it was never meant to be.