Sometimes I shouldn't use words

So Vividcon has happened. I haven’t watched ALL THE VIDS or even downloaded them but there is one I’d like to talk about.

On the Prowl by sisabet and sweetestdrain

( Peeping Tara or this vid has ALL THE PAIN )

There’s a post I’ve thought about making several times but my thoughts on the issues always start out chaotic and unfocused and by the time I’ve thought them into line the moment has passed. It’s a post about ablism/disablism and language, about the rights and wrongs of using words like blind and deaf and retarded and lame and autistic (the one I have a personal stake in) and crazy and crippled for anything other than as value-neutral descriptions of the literal condition.

Obviously using these words as playground taunts is wrong. It’s all too easy when first coming across the issue to feel spuriously virtuous that one would never dream of using ‘retard’ or ‘cripple’ as personal insults. One is too nice for that. Equally spuriously, some of the words are part of other people’s vernacular. I wouldn’t say something was lame without major irony tags because I’m not an American teenager. Which I suppose brings up one of the reasons there is resistance to being made to reconsider the use of such words. Vernaculars are part of how people, particularly marginalized people, define themselves and being told to redefine yourself never goes well.

But it’s not only the young or the less privileged who cling to their vernaculars. Metaphorical language, which can act as a vernacular of erudition, includes formulations such as “He was blind to the consequences and deaf to protesting voices.” Or “the economy is crippled, the situation is crazy, Gordon Brown’s behaviour is quasi-autistic.” The argument is that these metaphors and comparisons are intended as pejoratives and, particularly to someone with the non-metaphorical condition, carry the strong implication that the condition itself is a sign of moral failing. I get that and also that these phrases are clichés, used to give an impression of style but not specific enough to add anything meaningful to the description. I get it. But then I get confused by my actual response to the one example that ought to trouble me personally.

“Gordon Brown’s behaviour is quasi-autistic” is annoying but not because it feels like my children are being insulted. Possibly because despite his failings as a party leader I still have a fondness for Brown (for not being Blair), it might be different if I’d seen the description applied to Bush. Also because I find it hard to think of “autistic” as an insult. Autistic is a word for my children and the other children at their school, it’s a word that conjures faces. It’s not a bogeyman word or a “there but for the grace of god” word but something familiar and embraced. And if anyone uses it as insult in their hearing, I will kill them with my brain.

No, Gordon Brown’s alleged autism is annoying because it’s obviously inaccurate and betrays a basic ignorance of the condition on the part of the alleger. It comes back to the niceness thing in a way. I don’t want journalists to stop calling politicians autistic or bipolar or schizophrenic because they don’t want to hurt my feelings or other people’s feelings (although I can’t really speak for other people, not even for my own children). I want them to stop casually throwing out such labels because they recognize that they’re misleading. I want those words to have faces. When it comes down to it, I think it’s a very good thing to make people think about language but I think it’s a means to an end and not an end in itself.

There are phrases that stick in the mind in spite or maybe because of not knowing quite what they refer to when you first stumble across them. “Women in Refrigerators” is one that crops up relatively quickly when browsing around comics fandom in a spirit of idle curiosity. Thanks to the wonders of google it then only takes a few clicks to hit the mother lode, a 1999 web page started by Gail Simone as a list of “superheroines who have been either depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator.” The refrigerator was literal and belonged to one “Green Lantern.” The woman was his girlfriend.

( Read more... )

This is what I wrote for the buffyversemeta metathon

Title: Reader, I destroyed him.

Summary: The special treatment of girl’s stories in BtVS

Source texts: All of BtVS including the S8 comic issues 1-4. AtS S1 The Prodigal, S3 Lullaby, S4 Inside Out and S5 Damage

Word count: 2642

Notes: The original prompt was azdak’s "People are gonna die. Girls are gonna die." (Buffy, S7). Examine the special status of "girls" in the Buffyverse. The quote made me think of how the vulnerability of the potentials seems to contradict the series’ original mission statement about subverting passive female stereotypes. I went from there to thinking about the many ways in which the series did do that (the subversion thing) and how in that sense girl’s stories really do have a special status in the ‘verse. So it’s not entirely unrelated to the original topic even though if I were marking me, I think I’d fail.

(  Reader, I destroyed him. )

This season has certainly inspired much thought and looking back it’s difficult to argue that that wasn’t intended. Other people have pointed out the recurrent themes of power in naming (the Shakespeare Code) or seeing (Blink) a thing, of hope and the will to survive and how the latter can be both a virtue and the most (im)mortal of sins. I still think all the threads never quite ravelled for several reasons that in the end boil down to two things.

( Read more )

( The Long Way Home: Part IV  )

(  The Buffy of it all  )

Not being much of a fic person I haven’t really weighed in on the whole FanLib thing but this response by the CEO to criticism hosted in Henry Jenkins’s blog was interesting. It does sound as if rather than hoping to become the fanfic equivalent of YouTube what FanLib are attempting to create is more the fictive counterpart to American Idol with the web site playing the role of the early ‘freak show’ rounds of the contest. Given the current popularity of all manner of talent shows it may well end up being successful on its own terms but be no more or less likely than the TV versions to discover writers/stories with real star quality.

The whole thing does seem to presuppose that fanfic writers have essentially the same motivations as Idol contestants, individual celebrity, fame and fortune. Not that there’s anything wrong with that but writers on LJ don’t give the impression of being there primarily for the competition.

We are pattern-finding and story-telling animals. It’s what we do. We take the real world and turn it into narratives and symbols so our brains can manipulate them more easily.
http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/summer-2007/column-bears-examining-4-by-elizabeth-bear/

I don’t write stories in my head to any great extent, I find patterns and chop them into ever finer messes but for those to whom stories come naturally it makes sense that fanfic would be both a way to ‘talk’ about them or function as a form of narrative jamming, taking a storyline for a walk as it were.

Speaking of fanfic but more specifically (and based on a sample size of two) does anyone get the impression that fic!Buffy is a more womanly woman than she was on the show? Emotionally intelligent but otherwise not that bright? Joss’s Buffy can have a hard, quite abstract edge to her thinking. Her first line in the first comic has her philosophising about the world not individual inhabitants of it and she’s as capable as Giles or Wesley of understanding the big picture, that there may only be bad choices that Willow may still be evil. The main difference between her and the Watchers is where she draws the line between a necessary evil and a convenient one.

So are the comics canon? Joss, more than other show runners perhaps, is the auteur type. The one thing that units the seven seasons of Buffy is his editorial control over the final product. His influences, the writers, actors, budget and network censorship levels were continually changing but the final word on the published story was always his. It would seem reasonable in this instance to think of a Joss-led and sanctioned continuation of the story as just that, a new season rather than a new series, the comics as part of the same continuous canon rather than a separate new canon of their own, but people don’t. The reasons given for not doing so are multifarious but generally come down to pointing out one or other component of the first seven seasons that won’t be present for the eighth. I don’t think it’s that simple though.

When I was younger and more evil one of my favourite pub wind-ups was to try and convince people that Manchester United didn’t exist. The club was founded in 1878. Since then it’s changed managers, players, coaches, ground, owners, even the name. In 1958 over half the team got wiped out in the Munich air-crash and it had to be re-built from scratch and Bobby Charlton. There’s absolutely nothing left of the original team in the current one. Not a single molecule. Despite that I always, always lost those arguments.

I think stories are like football teams, the fannish mind has an innate capacity to perceive unity, to believe in the existence of one big canonical whole however much the individual components change. As long as there’s something to connect each step in the process to the next, fans can happily ignore all kinds of incremental changes, of cast, of writing staff, of genre. On AtS the only member of the original cast to survive by the end was the titular character, on Dr Who such changeshave become integral to the entire concept. None of the S1 BtVS writers apart from Joss were still on board by S7, on both The West Wing and Due South the show runner ran but the show went on. As to changes of format Buffy wouldn’t be Buffy if it weren’t regularly playing with different forms. Episodes from The Zeppo to Intervention have the characters acting in exaggeratedly dumb or over the top fashion for comic effect but fans still recognize their favourites and incorporate their actions into the overall narrative. If form is so important is the musical less canonical than the other episodes?

I think differentiating canon from non-canon isn’t a strictly scientific process, I suspect it has more to do with the Mulderesque factor of wanting to believe than being objectively able to. The biggest single obstacle to the comics being accepted isn’t anything to do with comicness versus TVness or Jossness versus SMGness, it’s simply that it’s now nearly three years since the canon was declared closed and the willingness to suspend disbelief and engage the fannish capacity for seeing continuity no matter what is no longer unconditional. Joss may declare them canon and clearly has as good an understanding of the meaning of the term as the next fanboy made good but he’s also basing his acceptance on a good deal more evidence than the rest of us. He’s seen the next however many installments, he knows where the story’s headed and where it’s going to end. We don’t.

Classification is a big thing in biology. It’s about much more than the convenience of having a searchable name for every species, the process of naming is an analytical tool for working out evolutionary histories. When phlya get re-assigned it’s in recognition of the fact that some enormous body of evidence and deep reasoned argument has finally convinced the community that fruit flies and threadworms had a common ancestor several million less years ago than we’d previously thought. Really if ‘creation scientists' were doing the job they claim to be doing they should out there re-naming all the animals not wilfully misinterpreting the second law of thermodynamics.

But this post is actually about vids. A while back when iMeem started being used by vidders there was a run of posts in the forum about whether ‘book/fic trailers’ (slide shows set to music to advertise fanfic) could be counted as vids. Subsequently the_reel hosted a debate about whether two ‘vids’ that had been put up for review that consisted entirely of ‘vidder’ filmed material made as a homage to a show or a movie counted as vids. In both cases a number of different ways to classify vids versus non-vids came up. Some were based on content, self-filmed material could be excluded although a certain amount of non-media source was acceptable. Others, especially those thinking in terms of what they might be prepared to review rather than just watch, used process as a determining factor. Original film requires directing rather than purely editing skills, slideshows rely on Photoshop to manipulate images rather then standard video editing programmes and lack all the cues from internal and external motion used to interpret conventional live-action vids. A third group used history and community based arguments, for example that because the first ‘vid’ is often said to be a K/S slideshow, other slideshows should count too. Or should count because they arose from within the same slash community or (this is me extrapolating) were made by vidders as extensions of their previously more conventional work.

Really this post is about lim’s new vid, Us. Which is a thing of beauty and artistry to be sure but is it a vid or an art animation or something else entirely? Does it matter? Not really, a whale is just as awesome whether you call it a fish or a mammal but biologists would argue the point all the same.

Us has media content in abundance but where does the source stop and the filters and effects take on their own life as original animations? It just highlights the continuum that exits along the special effects axis, from editing to directing with no clear-cut cut-off points when one becomes the other. It’s also interesting how the pencil-like effects obscuring the original source work much better as a metaphor for what fic writers often seem to do – overlaying and overwriting the original story with their own whereas I tend to think of vidding as illuminating aspects of the original, making it clearer. But this vid isn’t about the source stories but the story ’we’ made about ‘us’ and about that the clarity is frightening.

Using history as the determinant things get even more interesting, the vid *is* a history, a virtual cladogram, so surely that counts. And if it does, does that mean that vidding has reached the decadent state of being its own subject and is about to disappear up its own fundament? BBC4 had a 90 minute special on last night called The Reichenbach Falls, which turned out to one of those fictions about being a fictional character and specifically the crime writer’s dilemma. To a non-writer it came across as ultimately a little self-indulgent, all me, look at me, this is what I do. That’s where the community aspect of fandom makes it fundamentally different perhaps. Not about Me but about Us.

There are some notable exceptions but most vids are made to songs with words. Hardly surprising given that media fandom is so overwhelmingly verbal and popular music abhors the instrumental. Words are seductive and although meaning is ultimately dependent on musical context (Patsy Cline implies a very different kind of Crazy than Beyonce) it’s easy to forget that when vidding. It’s always tempting to use the lyric as a script and give too much weight to isolated lines or even single words when deciding on what footage to use.

The helplessly literal approach to clip choice is effective in comic vids precisely because of the potential for throwing up incongruous images but that doesn’t mean literalism can’t also be used for dramatic effect. Some of my favourite vids are very lyrics driven. sdwolfpup’s Fix you for instance.

The first half of the vid uses each line of the song to introduce a different character, Apollo is “so tired he can’t sleep”, Tyroll is on the verge of having “tears run down his face,” Adama is gazing at the photograph of the son he’s “lost and can’t replace” and so on. The scenes follow from the lines of the song not from each other but it works wonderfully because at this point what the song is doing overall is setting a scene not telling a story. Each line describes a different item on a list, within the overall context of the song they’re supposed to be isolated, not to flow from each other. Moreover the imagery is not word for word literal rather each character’s emotional state matches that of the line as a whole. It does become word for word though, by the final verse. To, “Lights will guide you home” there’s a clip of cylon ships as lights flickering on in the sky, then one of them moving purposefully across the screen (guiding), then a shot of New Caprica to “home.” Here the literalism works because it’s become abundantly clear by now that the vid is using Chris Martin’s lyric in a deeply ironic fashion “Fix you” in the sense of genocide, concentration camps and divine love.

Another example of how literal image-to-word matching can be exploited for non-comic purposes would be Lum’s Come together, the introductory track on Scooby Road. The song gives the overall impression of being about Lennon in his yippie prophet phase exhorting people to to unite behind him. “Come together” is the perfect message for a vid focussing on Restless and its wider implications but the protagonist of Buffy is not some long-haired, holy-roller, later-day Beatle figure. The vid needs to emphasise the idea powering the refrain but somehow play down the image invoked by the verses. It does this (I think) by ignoring sentence structure to match clips to random words hair, roller, joker, knee. Our John’s image shatters and the whole show becomes a surreal puzzle, much as the dreams in the original episode were.