At some point I’m going to have to go back and re-read the first draft I did of Mark and Jessie’s Christmas. But until then I can imagine what it’s theme song might be, in the style of 90’s animated film ‘love theme’ songs, because that’s my current binge.

It’s interesting following the procession of artists that contribute to these songs; just from that I can link Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Swan Princess together (in that order). It’s quite fascinating, given that it’s 3am while I write this. And even without seeing which songs share which artists, the formula is interesting enough to follow, because it’s so blatantly repetitive. Even Mel Brooks did it. Twice.

I have a feeling that these particular kinds of songs have utterly lost their appeal in contemporary media - except as a nice little retro kick. But I’d be interested to see them come back, I have to be honest, even if just to see what would happen. I assume it would fail. Not at least because we no longer have anybody who can sing ballads like that anymore - I mean there’s Celine of course, but she’s already done one. Then again, who else is there? Katy Perry? Lady Gaga?

Can we have a Lana Del Rey/Pitbull duet for Disney’s next outing please? Or maybe Florence sans the Machine/Jason Derulo.

Actually I can see Josh Groban and … somebody … pulling it off.

Damn. He already did one with Celine.

andCharlotte Church?

STOP STEALING MY FUCKING IDEAS, WORLD!!!!

Anyhow. They’re not nearly recent enough for today’s ever-changing pop scene.

I was going to write my Little Mermaid review but I seriously can’t think. Unlike Michael Bolton, I cannot go the distance.

I can sleep, though, hopefully, so I guess I’ll give that a go.

(bonus question: what duet would you like to see happen? and if it’s already happened, who was it?)

I think that the cow is an under-utilised symbolic entity.

For instance, just stick a ‘d’ at the end of it’s signature call and you get ‘mood’, and I just assume that cows are always in either a fat mood or a bad mood. a fat mood is where you feel fat - not obese or hideous or unhealthy, just fat - which I think only something like a cow could ever feel. I know it certainly doesn’t work for me, and I’m taking that as hard evidence.

sometimes I wonder if I’m just too stuck-up to exist in the real world. which is to say I wonder if I’m too stuck-up. a friend said it to me, and I’ve had many other people say it to me over the years, and I’ve even said it to myself: do what you feel is good. it makes everything easier. and it works.

Anyway, on to the review. I’m sure somebody must have written a review about this film between the date at which it was released and today. But not THIS one. Let’s begin with everyone’s favourite part of this timeless children’s classic: colonialism.

• Be Our Overlord

‘Be Our Guest’ is perhaps the most famous part of this film, and having just watched it (literally like 2 minutes ago, she’s walking around the castle now) and being me, I’ve realised why Hermione set up SPEW. Lumiere and Mrs Potts fucking looove getting their servitude on, to the extent that they sing and dance about it, while stuffy old Cogsworth is all British and therefore anti-fun, at least until the very end where it all becomes too much for him and he joins in the fun. There is literally a portion of the song devoted to Lumiere lamenting the fact that because the Best is such an angsty bastard he doesn’t have any use for his servants anymore, and now that the pretty lady is here to give them somebody to serve their lives finally have purpose again.

Other than the song, there’s the obvious analogy of the gorgeous white outsider trespassing into foreign territory ruled by a tyrannical savage and making everything better by virtue of her very existence and outside beliefs. The Beast turns ‘human’ at the end (yes I know he literally turns into a human and used to be one let me have my fun) as a result of her domesticating influence, which is also portrayed throughout the film; he learns how to do cute things like dance, clothe himself and use a spoon HE USED TO BE A FUCKING PRINCE COME ON WALT.

Interestingly, she gets his magic mirror, which maybe has interesting symbolism in terms of her ‘looking back’ - it’s a mirror, but what she sees is The Beast. Soulmates etc. She doesn’t turn into a beast at the end - though that would have been cool - the mirror is then taken by Gaston and the whole colonial thing gets really obvious - which I guess is kinda the point. Again, though, it’s up to Whitegirl and her father, Whiteman, accompanied by a white teacup to save the day. In the end, she loves the Beast despite the fact that he’s a hideous … well, beast … and her reward is to have him transformed into a normal person like her. But then again, she is the girl, and that’s kinda what they do, if you hadn’t noticed. And if you are a girl, I’m sure you can attest to this. (Plus if she’d turned into a beast as well then it’s the same issue as Avatar where she ‘goes native’. there’s no way to win, unless he remains a Beast and then we get into Furry territory. no thanks.)

(what? have them just be friends? THIS IS DISNEY YOU MORON WHAT DO YOU)

• Tale as old as time

Belle is ‘the perfect woman’; she’s pretty, good-mannered, compassionate, intelligent, brave, has literally no flaws; she even fights a pack of wolves, even if she doesn’t win without the Beast’s help. Then when they get back to the castle, she tends to his manly battle-scars and chides him about his behaviour, though is ultimately grateful to him for said behaviour when in service of saving her life, which, really, is fair enough. She and The Beast form the archetypal masculine/feminine dichotomy that has been perpetuated in literature, popular media and society for generations, reinforcing the hegemonic ideology of HER NAME IS BEAUTY FOR FUCK’S SAKE.

Now I’ll admit, I do love the ballroom scene just for how cute the Beast is. And. Belle’s dress is kinda neat. This scene is actually where the deconstruction of traditional gender portrayal kinda starts; it’s nothing new to have the girl be the one to teach the boy how to do these sorts of high-brow, cultured romantic things, but it’s still against tradition. Not to mention that he, again, is a fucking PRINCE and doesn’t know how to dance …

ugh. Up to the transformation scene now. He’s so …

yeah. the other part of the gender depiction in this film; the Prince is pretty fucking girly-looking. The fact that Belle validates him as a suitable mate over the ultra-manly Gaston (the second-most awesome Disney character ever, or maybe even tied with Scar) could certainly be argued to be a gender critique, or almost anyway, rejecting traditional masculine values such as bravado, physical strength, killing things and whatnot with more … well, feminine ones such as compassion, manners, mercy, looking pretty, blah blah blah.

There’s also a very disturbing bit where the villagers invade the castle and one of them is cackling evilly while plucking feathers out of the duster-chick’s … brush. yeah. suggestive imagery in children’s films for the win.

Then there’s Gaston, and his eponymous theme song, Gaston, which has the most awesome line in any song ever: ‘I use antlers in all of my decorating!’ One day, I will use that line, and it will be true. But the antlers will be either synthetic or fossils, because game-hunting is for douchebags who don’t get the girl at the end. While on one hand the traditionally masculine dude doesn’t win the girl, he’s a little too masculine - which is hardly original nowadays, and wasn’t when the film came out, but it’s still a valid point to raise. ironically, though, Gaston has to be the most memorable character in the film, and has the brand of charm that only comes from being a total misogynistic asshole, much like Vegeta. I won’t pretend to understand how or why it works, nor to like the fact that it does. But I guess at least Vegeta has ‘good qualities’, just buried deep down.

very deep down.

He has a shirt that says ‘Bad Man’ on the back. A pink shirt. The dude is a BAMF.

It’s a bit like The Little Mermaid for me in terms of how I see the gender portrayal - it could go either way, really, either really traditional or quite subversive, or at least semi-feminist. though I’m getting the feeling that I have no idea what ‘feminist’ means anymore. not that that’s ever stopped me from using a word before.

You can say with a significant level of authority that given the gender dichotomy inherent in the plot, Beauty and the Beast is actually just a better verison of Twilight. But much better. And like fifteen years older. What the fuck.

• end review

I like this film. I even kinda liked the ‘midquel’ where Tim Curry plays an evil pipe-organ. To be honest I can’t remember anything about it other than that, and the fact that it was Christmas, and the fact that the Beast was still the Beast, and Belle fell into a frozen lake and had to get rescued again. I have this idea that one day when I can draw really awesomely that I will draw a picture with the Beast, Goliath (from Gargoyles), Quasimodo, Tarzan and Hercules all doing something manly together. Until that day I guess I’ll just imagine it.

or, you know, try and draw it.

(bonus question: are there any instances where Disney has added a new song to one of their films that has actually been any good? I’ll vote for the one in Pocahontas, seeing as it was actually on the soundtrack, which we owned, on cassette tape. yep. those were the days.)

Getting to that time of the year when I wonder what I’m doing with my life.

Yes, that is pretty much every time of the year, but that just makes it even more true.

Writing is one of those things that requires a lot of self-discipline, not simply because you need to schedule and plan and all of that technical crap; that’s relatively easy. it’s keeping yourself from doing other things, such as socialising and not being a total hermit, which is the hard bit. It’s not even a good thing to do, because without human interaction or just something that isn’t sitting in front of a computer for x hours with no other stimuli whatsoever, your creativity will dry up pretty fast. maybe not for a few days or even weeks, but comparatively, days and weeks are nothing in the grand scheme of all things creative.

Thus, having writer friends is a very nice new thing for me. I have co-written a skeleton of a play with a friend; it took two years or so for that, and that’s not even the script. but it was fun, and very, VERY different to writing alone. it’s not just that it’s the polar opposite to solo writing, it’s also that has the same issue of bleeding into the same pool of universal time that we must all draw from in order to get anything done at all, where categories and schedules and timecharts can’t always remain clear-cut and static in the mind-psyche. so essentially it has different strengths but the same defining weakness: it takes up time. but i guess that’s a strength as well, because having things to do is, well, good.

It seems to be the curse of The Crucible that whenever I have a massive fucking rehearsal the next day, I can’t get to sleep. Which is why this blog post is being written. I’ve started reading a fantasy novel a friend hired out for me called Quicksilver Rising. So far it’s pretty standard fantasy fare with a writer who knows his way around not just the genre but the way that it incorporates language to express itself very well, which makes it stand out, and I am glad for this, and am interested to see where it goes. After that I will probably review it, so there we go, giving myself shit to do. Whoop.

I really need to sleep. I’m not even remotely sleepy but I’m very, very tired. I need a way to shut off my inner monologue. As fun as this play is, it’s getting to the ‘work’ stage of the production, and it’s so time-consuming that I don’t really have time for anything else. Though to be fair that will change after today; today’s rehearsal is 11 hours long.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

So yeah. tips on sleep, anyone? I actually have some of my own, but outside perspectives always help/mean I don’t have to put as much effort in. Which is perhaps morally sub-par, but very much in keeping with my philosophy of making things as easy for myself as you know what I’m just lazy okay???

But not sleepy.

I wonder if these things are related somehow.

Well, it will be on Tuesday.

up until yesterday evening I was feeling fine and dandy about the whole thing, totally confident that everything would go right and nothing at all could possibly go wrong because everything always comes together in the end.

So I have no freaking idea why only now I’m starting to freak out, because at this point we’ve come a long way in terms of how ‘finished’ our show is. Particularly in the last week or so. I have no idea.

Also, apparently there are people who text in their sleep. What the fuck.

Also, Piccolo/Gohan shippers make me sick. Even more so than Draco/Lucius shippers. Which exist.

Right after this show I go into another show, and I’m a little worried. It’s basically halfway through the year and this was meant to be my year of self-discovery and independence and shit. I don’t have a job, my writing is - well, it’s happening, but it’s happening the way it should have been happening at the start of the year so that it could develop in whatever way it will eventually develop into later on in the year. I guess that’s just life, but still. And I mean ideally this will be a process that just snowballs and grows on its own momentum, so just saying that I need more time is pretty much defeating the purpose; I want to be flat-out writing all the time, and it’s just not viable. I need money, and ideally I’d be making it from my writing. But alas, this is not the way of things, so a part-time job is going to have to be on the cards after this show ends, even if it means I can’t do the next show.

I’m thinking I may start uploading some stuff online and just try and ‘get noticed’. Obviously this is not going to be a replacement for trying to get published and whatnot, but apparently I also need an agent for that, and I don’t know the first thing about how to get one of those. It all sounds like it costs money, and money is what I do not have in great amounts.

Stupid misleading childhood experiences of how life works.

Oh well. I suppose it’ll all work out if I just organise myself and ask for help. Maybe. Though apparently ‘help’ and ‘handouts’ are the same thing and everyone should feel ashamed for asking for those, so maybe not.

Oh writing. How I lovehate you.

The current project - aptly-named ‘Selkies’ - is very rewarding to write but also hard work, in the sense that it feels awesome to finish each chapter (so far only 2 have been finished, one of which took about an hour, the other 2 months), but so freaking hard to actually complete. that might have just been because writing in a linear fashion almost encourages you to start adding in ‘filler’, something I hadn’t really thought about until a fellow writer brought it up. As we all know, especially those of us who have ever watched Dragonball Z, filler sucks, and I prefer to avoid doing things that suck if at all possible. sadly, with writing, this is not always even remotely possible, but since the overarching process does not suck, that’s fine.

also, this:

http://www.myspace.com/music/player?sid=25242300&ac=now

Again, I’m learning alot about fanfiction this year. first videos, now songs … obviously I’ve been living under a rock (or should I say no I shouldn’t), despite that no longer mattering as even rocks have at least dialup nowadays, but this ‘wrock’ stuff is …

some of the music is actually pretty decent: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUQu-nwOuQg, but the lyrics are … I dunno. maybe it’s a stylistic thing. I guess there’s only so much you can do with Harry Potter references as your sole source of material. I do think Harry and the Potters do it better, but at the moment (having been involved with the wrock scene for all of half an hour) Draco and the Malfoys have to be my favourite, with such hits as ‘my dad is rich’ and ‘your family is poor’.

I’m getting interested now in seeing what other creative expressions I can dub ‘fanfiction’. But seriously; that first one is just ‘I like Harry Potter and will never get over it’ the song - and hey, I like Harry Potter as much as the next person, and more than that other person over there who STILL HASN’T READ THE 7TH BOOK BUT READ ALL THE OTHER ONES BUT STILL HASN’T READ THE 7TH BOOK O_O but she doesn’t read this blog so that’s been totally wasted on her … but I dunno. Draco and the Malfoys and Harry and the Potters, from what few songs I’ve sampled, do not venture into this blatant, undiguised ‘I am a Harry Potter fan’ territory; their songs are established within the stories, rather than being about the franchise and how much they love it. and there’s nothing wrong with expressing yourself, but I won’t deny that it kinda puts me off when it has absolutely no creative merit whatsoever - creativity and expressing your opinion/feelings directly are very different things. just because you sing it doesn’t make it a song.

Okay, yes, it does because that’s what a song is, but you know what I mean.

Writing of songs, I’ve just started investigating Pearl Jam. I initally detested them because the first song I ever heard of theirs was their cover of ‘last kiss’, which is just a bad song. and when I say bad, I simply mean that it’s simultaneously boring and a huge fucking downer. But as for their own stuff … well, I’ve liked ‘daughter’ and ‘better man’ for quite a while, and only discovered ‘alive’ and ‘Jeremy’ within the past year or so. Jeremy in particular I like, but I’m not sure if I should; that’s the thing with using life as art, especially when it’s as direct as that.

For those who don’t know, Jeremy was inspired by two school shootings in America, one of which involved a boy named Jeremy who killed himself in front of his class, the other where a boy shot the other people in his class. And I like the song Jeremy a lot because it’s dark and awesome, but I can’t help but think that every time this song plays on the radio, anybody who knew either of those boys will know what it’s about, will know that it’s cashing in on a traumatic part of their lives, etc., and it seems incredibly inappropriate. I’m not one of those people who thinks that art comes before everything else or that artists should be allowed to ‘make art’ about whatever the hell they want without any repercussions, simply because empathy is a healthy thing to have and separates you from the sociopaths of the world. However, I am also not one of those people who thinks that life and art should be utterly separated; and for all I know the families of people who have had similar songs written about them - ‘I don’t like Mondays’ is probably the best-known one, ‘hey man nice shot’ is another - actually support the songs or feel that they’re a good way to make people aware of these social issues or whatever. it intrigues me, as it essentially boils down to an issue of permission to use certain topics that mean certain things to certain people. I especially think the monetisation of these kinds of art projects is bordering on unethical. And I mean sure, news of this shit spreads and if you aren’t drawing from your life experiences as an artist then you’re going to make shitty art, but I do think there’s a certain line of ethical consideration to bear in mind while you do this, much like science - there is such a thing as ‘too far’, at least in certain contexts.

lifting things from other sources has its own ethical considerations, of course. I was informed today that I am ‘a good thief’, which I take as a compliment - Picasso was onto something when he said ‘good artists borrow, great artists steal’, and the reason for this - well, obviously there’s more than one, and plenty of counter-arguments, I’m sure. I hope. that’s far too contentious a claim to not have some controversy around it. But anyway; theft in art is - no. let me rephrase that. theft in life is impossible to avoid. humans steal. i’m not talking about robbery, i’m talking about imitation. children imitate their parents and peers, adults nowadays seem to imitate children, poorly, because that way spending money on things you don’t need but really want makes sense, and when it comes to telling stories, as with any other skill, you do what you know how to do. we all steal without realising it, because stealing has a very specific set of connotations that go along with it, as well as a few arbitrary and contextual ones. imitating things that other people do is stealing behaviour, and imitating ‘tropes’ and ‘formulae’ is stealing work. It is stealing. and just because everybody does it doesn’t make it any less like stealing, it just makes it impossible to police.

the difference comes in whether or not you’re screwing anybody over, or claiming that it was your patented intellectual property when it wasn’t. Star Wars stole from every archetypal fantasy narrative ever, but it doesn’t try to hide it, which makes it okay. religions steal from each other almost as a matter of principle. science ‘iterates’ and ‘innovates’, which is just building on an idea by stealing it and then seeing what else it can do that hasn’t been done already. critique is theft, because you’re using things like names that you didn’t come up with yourself; if there was no such thing as Fair Use then I wouldn’t be able to write 70% of what I write in this blog (who am I kidding, I just talk about myself and make references to pop culture to keep up with the kids).

Fair Use is interesting in the case of fanfiction. sampling in music is another interesting example. I sort of see them as the same thing. a cover is different because it’s the exact same content; it would be like me rewriting The Great Gatsby, with all the same characters and plot and whatnot, but with a different author voice or narrative style or pacing or whatever. but even then, there’s an official cover and there’s musicians playing other musicians’ songs during a concert, or karaoke night, or being really bored/happy in the car or the shower, or symphony orchestras, or choir groups. if any of those are inappropriate/inaccurate examples then I apologise and give you permission to put it down to the fact that I am an Arts graduate and therefore know nothing, but know that I know nothing with absolute, critical certainty. so it’s intriguing. and believe me, if there was a way for my fanfiction to be legitimised in any way, I would totally write that ‘Hagrid finishes school’ story. Maybe a little semi-satirical Dragonball Z project. But that’s all.

Honestly.

Pokemon.

(bonus question: birthday presents. presents in general. how important are they? should it be a surprise? is it the thought that counts? would you like a receipt? is cash up-front just better? personally I think that while the thought is what counts, it also counts that somebody is giving you something that you need time or space in order to accomodate into your life, and if it’s not something that you want then you should have the option to exchange it. the thought does not cease to count! but feelings may get hurt, and for that reason I really just prefer cold hard cash - or, of course, just asking people what they want.)

showuslove:

mattjolly:

requiemsong:

mldmnnrdrprtr:

crazylipgloss:

thebatmanchild:

athagazagoraphobic:

invisicanada:

About three things I was absolutely positive. First, I had a pokemon. Second, there was a part of me - and I didn’t know how dominant that part might be - that wanted to be the very best, like no one ever was. Third, Gary Oak was unconditionally and irrevocably a douchenozzle.

Reblogging for the comment

How old are you? 

“ten”

How long have you been ten?

“…”

HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN TEN

Misty looked at Ash, his breathing still heavy from carrying her on his bike as fast as he could through the long grass outside of Pallet Town.

“You’re eyes are impossibly huge and black,” Misty said. “Your hair is… incredibly pointy, and doesn’t need product. Your face changes size and shape based on your feelings… and sometimes you speak like - like you’re from the 90’s. You never spend money on anything; you don’t go to the bathroom.”

The silence hung there, thick and heavy like a Snorlax blocking the bike path. 

“How old are you?” Misty asked, not sure if she wanted to know.

“Ten,” Ash replied, with a slight smirk and an almost amused tone.

Misty knew that wasn’t true. Ash wasn’t like the other boys her age. He wasn’t even like her older sisters who ran the gym in Cerulean City. He was wiser and his passion was genuine.

Ash didn’t just want to catch them all, he needed to. He was going to be the best there ever was no matter how long it took, which gave Misty this nagging in the back of her mind. She had to know for sure.

“How long have you been ten?” she asked. Her voice weak, knowing full well the answer could change everything she thought she knew.

“A while…” Ash said. His voice trailing off, as if he were losing himself in a flood of memories.

Misty let out a faint gasp. She knew now. She was certain.

“I know what you are,” she declared, as if whatever had been holding her back from accepting the truth, finally let go of her hand and let her fall right down the Diglett hole.

Ash eyes were alive now, flickering like the flame on a Charmander’s tale.

He stared right into her and said, ”Say it… out loud. Say it.”

Misty’s heart was pounding louder than the thud of a Marowak’s bone club attack.

Despite the now eerily silent meadow, she could barely be heard as she whispered, “Pokemon Trainer.”

So much internet.

i’ve been reading this article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Power

and watching videos such as this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=8mNQX8lUEDI

which i discovered after watching this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt5ghXdq6Z0

both of which make me really grateful for this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwLMM_QBkMc

and that pretty much sums up my life right now. thus I shall elaborate on each of these links according to theme.

• link 1 - Magic Sexism

in terms of the first one, the Wheel of Time magic system - I dunno. the series is 15 books long apparently, or will be when the final book comes out; the author died five years ago, so that should give you some indication of how fucking long this series has been going for. perhaps somewhere along the way it gets a little more subversive or just less sexist.

until then, I just despair of high fantasy.

i tried reading the first book some years ago, got about a tenth of the way through and gave up because it was one: incredibly formulaic and two: soooooo loooooong. i remembered something about the magic being sex-specific and wanted to know just how far it went.

it went far.

for those who don’t want to read it, here’s the breakdown:

magic is divided into two sexes. guess which ones. it is then divided into five elements: earth air fire water and spirit. spirit is sexless, which is at least something. then earth and fire are for boys and air and water are for ladies. on top of this, men generally have more magic, while women are generally more skilled. and no, this does not even things out when it comes to, say, fighting, or at least it doesn’t look like it does.

on top of this, men and women experience magic differently: for women, magic is something that requires harmony, or more specifically, submission for it to work, because trying to ‘command’ it will result in destroying the woman or something. for men, it’s like ‘trying to hold a river of frozen fire and burning ice in your hands’ or something like that; it’s a fight, essentially, and one that you don’t win. i assume that this is what leads to the ‘men are strong and women are skilled’ thing, as women can’t really exert much power over female magic while men use all of their skill just trying to control male magic. which is actually quite neat, except for the fact that it’s ridiculously traditionally gendered and, again, doesn’t actually balance things out when it comes to, say, magical combat. and as far as i can tell, there is no female character with male magic or vice versa, except perhaps for the main character, who is of course an orphaned farmboy.

there are some cool things about it; i like the fact that not only are the experiences different, but even doing the same spells (when that’s even possible) requires entirely different mechanics. it’s like the difference between knocking down a wall and opening a door to get into the next room, and you can only ever do one of them, and it depends on what sex you are. i wonder what happens with intersexuals in the Wheel of Time, though as it’s high fantasy there probably aren’t any.

that’s not where it ends, though. women can work together to form a ‘circle’ with which they can perform group magic, which men can’t do. men can be included in or help to form circles so long as there are at least as many women as men in the same circle. however, there can be only 13 women in a single-sex circle before they must include at least one man, who then takes control of the circle. yup.

it just … ugh. no. for one, it reminds me of how many times women get the ‘alternative’ weapons in fantasy settings if they’re in a remotely combat-oriented role; the amount of chains, whips, chain-whips, bladed fans, stupid little knife things, etc. that fall in women’s hands if there’s a dragon or dark lord within 100 pages is ridiculous. but the worst one is magic, and it’s probably the most common.

there’s the infamous damsel-in-distress trope in fantasy, this we all know, because while it’s not even remotely exclusive to fantasy, it is within this genre that it arguably retains its purest form. ladies who seem to be born to be kidnapped and then rescued in order to provide a reward for the preordained champion of patriarchy don’t really pop up anywhere else - well, except for action films and superhero comics, which i’d argue are just sub-genres of fantasy anyway. high fantasy features war really, really heavily, and we all know women never go to war, right?

for this reason, Eowyn is a really, really interesting case study in terms of subverting this trend, particularly due to the fact that almost all of high fantasy takes its cues from Tolkien’s work, meaning that he came first. which, if we assume that with time comes progress, is just sad.

• sub-rant - Eowyn, shield-maiden of Rohan/the real OG

Eowyn is a princess who falls in love with the most badass prince charming to ever exist in the form of Aragorn. can’t really blame her. here’s the thing though; she doesn’t fall in love with him because (or just because) he’s charming, chivalrous, kind, handsome, etc. - she digs him because he’s a warrior; he is surrounded by glory, and Eowyn really, really wants a chance to prove herself, to attain glory on the battlefield. this may be due to the fact that all of her notable peers in the books/films are male, that her father-figure is a bit distant, and that she’s kinda starved for attention, which while arguably yet another way of making it all about pleasing the men is understandable from a psychological viewpoint. it is also because she wants to actually make a difference in the defence of her people and her homeland, as i assume most people would in her situation.

i got the feeling from Eowyn that she’s very shut-off from the world at large, and sort of ends up becoming a sword-geek; she gets good at fighting, but never gets to put it into practise, and has literally no other outlet for her energies that garners any recognition, unless it’s silly women’s stuff, which, from her attitude, she seems to think is beneath her - and given that ‘women’s stuff’ does tend to feature a lot of really silly and demeaning things, again, i can’t really blame her. this too could be argued in a number of ways, but just think for a moment of some other fantasy heroines. even in the same story, think of Arwen. in the films, she stands up to the Ringwraiths, and then just kinda pines after Aragorn with her psychic powers. in the books, she only features in the first book so that we know how pretty she is, and then in the third book so that Aragorn has somebody to marry who isn’t a puny mortal wench like Eowyn.

Eowyn is not an ‘action girl’ until later on in the story. she starts off wanting to be one, really badly, but can’t make it happen without doing some major defying of tradition/her foster father, who she desperately seeks the approval of, or so it seems, otherwise i imagine she might have gone off and become a nomadic warrior lady of some kind, but that might just be me. yet when she gets going (the trigger for which seems to be Aragorn rejecting her, but that might just be coincidence), not only does she fight, not only does she do so using a sword and shield, the most un-feminine weapons imaginable except perhaps for an axe and a spade, but she kills the second-most powerful villain in the world, and going by the films, the second-most powerful BEING in the world (the Witch King and Gandalf were at a stalemate in the books, rather than Gandalf getting his ass handed to him like in the films, which I never fully forgave Peter for doing). ignoring the fact that she becomes a glorified housewife afterwards (though this is hard to ignore, i’ll grant you), that’s kind of awesome. and she gets to kill him BECAUSE she’s a woman.

there are some issues with how this all works, of course. there’s the fact that she beats the Witch King due to an arbitrary sex-based technicality in his immortality clause, because Sauron wasn’t thinking very progressively at the time. there’s the possibility that if Aragorn had declared his undying love for her instead of giving her the cold shoulder, she would have happily waited at home for him to return so that they could bang (after marriage, of course). and there’s the fact that she does indeed get rewarded not with some kind of military position or becoming the queen of Rohan, but by marrying Faramir, perhaps the most incredibly uninteresting character in the entire story, especially in the books, where he’s essentially a less manly clone of Aragorn with daddy issues. and he’s only the Stewart of Gondor. i wonder what it was like living with Aragorn and Arwen for the rest of her life.

however, i don’t think that this diminishes the accomplishment of Eowyn as a subversive character in terms of gender roles, or at least not enough to totally dismiss her. for a start, the only reason that Sauron even dies is due to a totally circumstantial incident, due to what may have been destiny, the ultimate thief of agency for any character, the dreaded deus ex machina. Gandalf ‘felt’ that Gollum had ‘some part to play, for good or ill’, and he was right on both counts, but mostly the first one, because Gollum kills Sauron, and if he hadn’t been allowed to join Frodo and Sam on their journey, if Frodo hadn’t taken pity on him because it’s what Bilbo did in the same situation, this never would have happened.

so arguably, it was destiny that Eowyn was to fall in love with Aragorn, the manifestation of her heart’s desire in every sense - tall, dark and handsome, chivalrous to a fault (moreso in the films), and most importantly, a badass warrior - if he was a woman, he would be the spitting image of what Eowyn wants for herself. meeting Aragorn is, in Gothic terms, Eowyn’s ‘mirroring’ scene; he is her doppelganger, the externalisation of everything she wants and cannot have - or almost, anyway. and the fact that he’s male actually adds to this, as it is patriarchal traditions that keep her relegated to the domestic sphere, that devalue the possible validity of her warrior identity by maintaining her ‘otherness’ and femininity - as long as Aragorn has power over her, as long as he is a potential love-interest, which is the ultimate pairing of male and female identities by traditional standards, she cannot achieve what she sees reflected of herself in him. it was her destiny to meet Aragorn and be romantically rejected, refused entry to the achievement of the ultimate state of heteronormative femininity that requires coupling with a masculine self, and thus ‘liberated’ (liberated, pushed, whatever) from the stifling prison of her enforced femininity and able to assume the shadow-identity she had been keeping herself from for so long, that of the man of war, the knight who rides out to meet death with open arms and no peers (she is literally the only female fighter in the story), the self that femininity will not permit: the ultimate warrior.

THAT’S what you do with a DOUBLE MAJOR in SOCIOLOGY and ENGLISH: ASSERT your VALUABLE OPINIONS over the INTERNET with CAPS LOCK ON.

like a BOSS.

and as for the housewife thing: it’s fantasy, and it was written by a dude who grew up in the early 20th century, pre-WWII, when gender roles were far, far more universally traditional than they are today. i give Mister Tolkien mad fucking props, because despite all of that, everything that followed, everything that was inspired by his example, until about ten or twenty years ago, was so much worse. yes, it does ultimately perpetuate the connotation that women are not going to find true happiness unless they settle down and pop out a few kids. to be fair, that’s also what Faramir finds in terms of true fulfilment in his life, and Aragorn, for that matter, never mind Sam - poor old Frodo dies a bachelor, although maybe he and Gandalf have some fun times once they get to the Grey Havens. who knows what Tolkien left out of the appendices.

other than Eowyn, however, there’s a rather disappointing lineup of ‘action girls’ who don’t have enough skill to actually do the ‘action’ part or enough personality to be actual characters, and thus take off most of their clothes to get the ‘girl’ part right. there are characters like Katniss, who i have already reviewed, and there are characters like Sabriel, who is similar to Katniss in terms of being a strong female lead, only less interesting as far as character goes and more interesting in terms of what she can ‘do’ (magic and fighting-wise, the only things that matter in fantasy). also, to be fair, The Hunger Games isn’t high fantasy, so Katnis doesn’t really count.

and also, i haven’t really read much mainstream high fantasy, mostly because i dread it. i should probably look out for some Robin Hobb or Anne McAffrey books and see how they go; i don’t need any more David Eddings for as long as I live. and I should probably try and read at least one book from the Wheel of Time, and some Terry Goodkind as well. Terry’s main female character from the Sword of Truth was interesting, though yet another ‘magic girl’ - i’m certainly not trying to argue that all female characters need to be able to fight in order to be good characters; they just have to not suck. i also think the next gender-in-fantasy blog i write is going to be about masculinity, because there’s some pretty intense bullshit that goes on with us guys, let me tell ya.

• Link 2/3/4 - smash it AND bang before you bounce

much like Rebecca Black’s ‘Friday’, I can’t tell if this is a joke or not. ‘Lemme Smang It’ looks like a 90’s hip-hop video, while ‘Go Grab My Belt’ is … home-made softcore porn?

‘Lemme Smang It’ references The Wild Thornberries, which makes it automatically at least somewhat awesome, and since i’m almost desensitised to the overcompensatory rough sex narrative of all gangster rap, i mostly focus on the video, the visual aspect, and it’s fucking hilarious. this has to be the first rap video ever in which the woman is the one paying absolutely no attention while people grind up on her, which i kinda give it props for. then there’s Flynt Flossy, who should be Eddie Murphy. he might be my new favourite rapper, partly because of his sweet moves, which he has an instructional video for in youtube. i wish i knew if it was meant to be as amusing as it is.

‘Go Grab My Belt’ is a power-tripping wannabe pimp wangster and his thick-rimmed glasses doing his best vocal impression of Prince while singing about Freudian sex games. again, i can’t tell if Slick Mahony is just incredibly unpleasant or a comic genius from this video; judging a person based on their persona in a music video is probably not a smart or insightful thing to do, but i’ll do it anyway.

one thing that both of these videos share is dancing women who don’t look especially thrilled to be involved in this particular enterprise. perhaps most rap video dancing-girls are better actors. it’s not like i’m blaming them, but it adds a really interesting element of embarrassment to the whole thing, and consequently also makes it seem more authentic and honest as to what exactly the ideological drive is behind the rampant misogyny perpetuated endlessly in mainstream rap. i hate rap most of the time, except for when it’s political or social critique, which is certainly not what i ever hear on the radio, and i’m too lazy to try and find it anywhere else, though i have heard some Lupe Fiasco and that seems pretty cool.

anyway, after these two videos - and one more, which i haven’t linked; all the videos by this group or posse or whatever seem to be in the same ambiguous funnybad vein - i needed something to counterbalance it. enter Jenna Marbles, a YouTube celebrity with a serious case of juvenile, puerile humour - which she does exceptionally well - combined with rather solid social critique. she has a rap entitled ‘Bounce That Dick’. it is fucking awesome ‘n shit. if you have not watched it, you must watch it, and behold some much-needed subversion of the rap genre - it’s not subtle, but that’s kind of the point.

actually, come to think of it, fantasy and rap share a lot of thematic similarities - men have all the power and are rewarded with desirable women for having said power. both are about overthrowing corrupt authority. both are about how much of a badass you are and how much everybody else sucks. essentially, all rappers are Mary-Sues.

oh.

my.

god.

new book idea.

(bonus question: if you were to write a fanfic, what would it be? or, if you are writing one, what is it, and how do you sleep at night?) (not that i can talk, having written a third of a DBZ one over the course of about five years, started a second DBZ one a mere two or three years ago, tried a Pan’s Labyrinth/Harry Potter crossover, veered dangerously close to re-writing the Star Wars prequel trilogy, and am now teetering on the edge of my Hagrid fanfic thanks to Pottermore, even though it’s been about a month since I was Sorted. oh to be a writer.)

This is one for the writers out there.

The internet is a simultaneously treacherous and wonderful place, like any good setting for an adventure/quest narrative. for fantasy it’s more or less required by tradition (which is why it’s also cliche). evidence of this is contained here:

http://www.springhole.net/writing/marysue.htm

I took this test, following the instructions as I assume they are meant to be followed, and used it on two of the main characters of my now-defunct high fantasy book saga, Realm of the Myth. said characters were the main protagonist and the main love interest.

and they were both, according to this test, complete and irredeemable Mary-Sues.

It was actually rather validating. I had been feeling for some time prior to nixing the project that at least those two got away with too much, made too few bad decisions, and had to depend on too many contrivances to make all of this possible and/or justified - though this was not a concern that urged me to any real kind of, you know, action. more just a nice ambiance while I continued to manufacture various ways to show off how pointlessly awesome each of them was.

the test got me thinking as well: invariably, while i’m writing a scene with particular significance to the plot or the involved characters, I’ll realise that the only way things can go the way I want them to is if something rather … artificial happens to enable it. now I’m great at pointing out this kind of flaw in other people’s works of fiction, and in case you hadn’t noticed, I actually rather enjoy it. but it’s a default mode for me, despite this knowledge of how formulae work in terms of literary tropes and whatnot, to fall into the exact same traps without even noticing it. This is actually one of the more common reasons I have to suddenly stop writing something I’ve been working on: because I just can’t think of anything else to do, but I know that if I leave things as I’ve just written them, it will be horrible. well, I assume that it will anyway. quite often if I go back and edit something like that I’ll change it quite a lot, then return to it and change it to something somewhere in-between the two drafts, having realised that not everything I thought was wrong actually was. writing is an interesting and dynamic process.

of course, Mary-Sue-ism is relative, as the website also says; disproportionate power-levels are only disproportionate if they’re disproportionate when compared to other characters in the same story, for instance; same goes for good looks, though a story full of perfect-looking people who all seem to look good in the same way gets pretty dull, unique ‘quirks’, be they aesthetic or character-based, and special or unique talents - if everybody has one, then it’s more of an ensemble than a one-woman show (Mary-Sue is, after all, a girl’s name, though there are plenty of male examples) (also apparently most fanfiction writers are female) (which is the medium within which Mary-Sues most frequently pop up, as an idealised version of their author).

it’s given me some food for thought - I am terrified of creating a Mary-Sue, and this exercise has given me some much-needed perspective on some ways in which I can identify if and when things begin to slant that way, and more importantly, to better understand exactly what it is about such characters that is so off-putting.

it’s also quite fun to do. I never really had any delusions that the two characters that I tested were particularly good ones; one’s just me with magic powers and fewer psychological issues, and the other is a super-hot warrior runaway princess rebel shapeshifter ranger dancer enchantress changeling (originally an elf) with a dark past and no character defects, other than those of a ‘meta’ nature, such as having no character defects. but oh well. at least it’s over now.

I would certainly recommend any writers to take that test, btw. if nothing else, it’s kinda fun.

okay. time for a proper blog.

one full of self-loathing and

actually, no. i’m a little tired of that.

So basically I’ve been thinking recently about how my goals for this year aren’t happening. I texted this to a friend just before writing this blog, and it got me thinking: what does that actually mean?

often when we set a goal, we set an ending, a destination, a finished product. we do not set a journey.

often, these types of goals are ones that we don’t really give two shits about but feel that we should; the ‘setting’ of said goals is more like social lip-service to appease wider society or our own inner critics or whatever.

my goals, for example, were:

• get a second draft of Mark and Jessie’s Christmas and try and get it published
• explore my music tastes via going to concerts etc.
• take up some form of consistent physical exercise - gym, martial arts, dancing, etc.
• do more acting
• do more drawing
• learn the guitar (specifically my $500+ guitar that I’ve had for two-ish years)
• learn the piano (via the electric keyboard we have at home)
• learn to read music (which would help with those last two)
• get at least a part-time job for money/life experience

so that’s … 9 goals. and maybe that’s a bit much, but to be fair they’ve been ‘priorities’ for a few years now. maybe that’s the issue. maybe I should just be focusing on one at a time and filtering them through until they all get ‘ticked off the list’.

one thing that I have learnt, however, is that if you just wait until you have ‘free time’, you’ll never fucking get anything done. you have to make free time; you have to ignore or obliterate whatever it is that’s occupying this otherwise ‘free’ time and then use it.

more often than not, I’ve found that this ‘free time’ is taken up with procrastination, which I’ve covered in my ‘Meta’ blog post. the point is that using your time effectively depends not on long-term preparation (although ostensibly that ought to help) but on right-now time allocation.

this seems like a good, sensible conclusion to come to: if you want something to happen in the future, do things that contribute towards it in the present. and I think that this is all that long-term planning is, unless you’re orchestrating some kind of Machiavellian scheme with x-thousand specific, consecutive steps required to bring it to fruition.

so when I think ‘I’m not meeting any of my goals’, I’m actually full of shit, to an extent, because I never did any planning to begin with.

I mean how is ‘get a book drafted/published’ a plan? well … it’s not. it’s an idea. it’s a thought. it’s a concept. it is not a plan, nor a goal, nor an investment of time and energy. that stuff is everything that comes beforehand. that stuff comes now or never, to use the old cliche - and I’m not one to say that if you don’t do something right the fuck now, it’ll never get done, but in practise it gets delayed, which can be even worse than clearly understanding that something is simply never going to eventuate, no matter what.

so by this logic, my ‘goal’ should be something like ‘spend x amount of time writing y amount of times per z’ - but in fact, it should start even smaller and more immediately, something like ‘do x now to contribute towards y further down the track’. then that will contribute towards ‘I spend x amount of time writing y amount of times per z’, and that’s good. that’s measurable progress.

again, retrospect = vitally important. so often with big, generalised goals, like ‘losing weight’ or ‘saving money’ or ‘learning x skill I’ve always wanted to learn’, it doesn’t feel like we’re getting anywhere until we have the opportunity to take a break and look back at what we’ve accomplished so far in terms of working towards it. plus, the end result we have in mind is just that, in our minds - what we’ve done already is something that has happened externally, and, for better or worse, can’t be taken back. and plenty of times, it’s for better.

I think the conclusion I’m drawing from all of this is that, sometimes, and particularly for me at this juncture in time, it’s better to actually not see past the end of your nose when it comes to planning, because at some point, shit needs to get done, and done now.

plus it’s fun sometimes to forget what happens next.

all right. time to actually do this stuff.

so originally I was going to write a ranty blog about my slightly oppositional stance on everything this National government is doing or proposing to do. instead, because I don’t feel like burying myself in a carpet of molten vitriol, I’m going to talk about acting, psychology, and feelings.

we did this thing at rehearsal the other day that took up three of our four hours, which was all about exploring one’s vocal range - going high, without going into falsetto, and going low, and articulating and all that stuff. it was really fucking intense, and incredibly revelatory and awesome.

here’s the theory behind it, as far as I understand it: people tend to talk in a certain register, which becomes their ‘voice’. sounds ridiculously obvious, yes? well what’s not so obvious is that people apparently do this because they are, in part, avoiding talking in certain registers, due to what they associate with said registers. it’s different for different people, of course; some people are more comfortable high-up and some are more comfortable down-low, and some stay somewhere between. this default register is also typically their weakest and most defensive one, where they feel the most protected, and other registers then tend to be less comfortable, not simply because they’re not accustomed to using them, but because they’re also tied to certain emotional triggers.

now this isn’t to say that everybody who speaks in a low voice is going to have a nervous breakdown if they’re forced to say a line in a non-falsetto high register; as we all know, the reasons we have for avoiding things can be as serious or trivial as we can imagine. but it was fascinating to see the effects that this exercise had on everybody.

helping this along was the fact that we were all actors, our wonderful director included, and thus it wasn’t just about playing around with your voice - there were lines, too. the director would say a line and then have us repeat it - not as a repetition exercise, but as a method of keying into different registers, and for most people it took a little while before they were comfortable enough to sustain it. the two most common lines he fed us were ‘help me’ and ‘fuck you’, and more often than not these had accompanying actions, from pleading hand-gestures up to and including physically shoving each other (with professional restraint) in order to feel the full impact of the words we were saying. the organic nature of the exercise made for some incredibly intense and powerful exchanges; we’re all friends of course and it’s a safe environment, which is the only way this kind of exercise could have worked, but if anything that made the power of this exercise all the more evident. I saw people transform by doing nothing other than changing their tone; our sweetest members displayed undercurrents of chilling fury and absolute power, and some of the staunchest of us revealed a profound tenderness and vulnerability. all in all, I have not been so happy to be an actor as I was last night for a very, very long time.

because this is what it’s all about for me; this is why I was originally going to major in psychology, why I’m fascinated with gender - every little thing about a person is part of a vast network of absurdly powerful mental, emotional triggers, and altering this balance with something as seemingly trivial as vocal register can start a transformative chain reaction of self, even if only for a moment. this is a good thing as far as i’m concerned, at least in the context of this exercise; at the end of it everybody seemed drained from the intensity of it - not just partaking in the exercise but watching others do it, which i’d say is as much a part of the exercise as anything else, bearing witness to the process that everyone goes through, the effort it took to do this strange ‘actor thing’. it was a cathartic intensity, though, for me at least, and I came away with it wanting to know more about myself, what different shades and tones I have embedded in my identity, and how they operate to make me who I am - and what I could do, who I could be, if I knew more about them and took the time to find out.

I think I’m starting to see the point of ‘doing what you love, no matter what’, because things like this reveal, even if only in a small way, how interconnected everything that we do is. drama and psychology are, perhaps rather obviously, intimately related - they both concern an examination of the human condition, and all of the strange and unexpected ways our intuitions and instincts shape us. ultimately, it seems, we’ll end up being involved in a little bit of everything no matter what we choose to do, which is kind of nice.

(bonus question: am I the only person who thinks Heath Ledger and Steve Irwin are going to suddenly reappear one day? possibly discovered by Bear Grylls? although his show’s been cancelled apparently, so maybe not …)