bladderwrack (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bladderwrack) wrote2009-06-30 08:30 am
bladderwrack) wrote2009-06-30 08:30 am
Nothing much to add to the warnings thing everyone's been posting about
However, I do feel like complaining about the fashion for framing debate and edification in terms of contrived analogies that are more confusing and difficult to follow than the actual subject beiing discussed!
Cropped Scan Theatre says it: "Tsuzuki: Well, you see, this candle represents your life. And, this shoe... represents Maria. And, uh, this pitcher of water represents the guy who's been controlling Maria! So, if you don't want your shoes to be on fire, metaphorically speaking... wait, no, your shoes are on fire. So the only way to put them out is... uh... ... wait, no, I've got it. This chair represents bringing Maria back to life, and the shoe--"
You're making my head hurt here, gaiz*.
*The actual reason I have a problem with this technique is because it smacks of being talked down to, and that is a thing that bothers me considerably more than is rational.
Have gone through the knees of my one passably smart pair of jeans again. I don't know how this happens, it is always the knees. =_=
Cropped Scan Theatre says it: "Tsuzuki: Well, you see, this candle represents your life. And, this shoe... represents Maria. And, uh, this pitcher of water represents the guy who's been controlling Maria! So, if you don't want your shoes to be on fire, metaphorically speaking... wait, no, your shoes are on fire. So the only way to put them out is... uh... ... wait, no, I've got it. This chair represents bringing Maria back to life, and the shoe--"
You're making my head hurt here, gaiz*.
*The actual reason I have a problem with this technique is because it smacks of being talked down to, and that is a thing that bothers me considerably more than is rational.
Have gone through the knees of my one passably smart pair of jeans again. I don't know how this happens, it is always the knees. =_=
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I don't know why this round turned me into a raving, frothing maniac. But it certainly seems to have done. Maybe I should just go back and re-read Cropped Scan Theatre until I get over it?
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It's the intensity of my reaction that I consider irrational, not the reaction itself. It's 'triggery' ahaha
wait is someone going to come and jump on me now. But I think you know what I'm talking about here.^^ *blush* I don't feel terribly oppressed, though? Metafandom-fandom is only tangentially relevant to my circles anyway. (I actually do have strong opinions re warnings etc, but as far as cost/benefit analysis goes getting involved is ftl, and besides I've already spent three hours composing the below part of this response =_=)
Going slightly off topic, but have been meaning to mention this: (I don't have the post in front of me as I type this, so stop me if I'm wrong, but) ... you realise YnM is a salad of genre tropes, right? They're not the same ones as you'll find in Wmedia, to be sure, and sometimes just the knowledge that there exist things other than one's own apparently monolithic culture is enough, but ... to construct an argument about how genre doesn't work for you using something as cheerfully self-referential as YnM is either disingenuous or missing the mark.
Or maybe the post was primarily about fanworks, I don't recall. Either way I think I remember you making a similar proposal about the series itself somewhere before. It's like ... I don't know if you followed the metafandomish arguments, a couple of years ago? when someone's mpreg fic was nominated for a Tiptree award, and people were like, 'but this fic is not in itself doing something NEW and INNOVATIVE with gender, it is part of an ESTABLISHED GENRE' etc etc. Thing is, there are a few series, like Utena, that do go above and beyond the call of pattern-breaking duty, and it makes me uncomfortable to see special qualities assigned to a series primarily because it is unfamiliar and exotic.
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What happened, of course, is that my own buttons got pushed at some point in the original argument. There was just something about the combination of triumphal tone -- 'Look at my cost/benefit analysis! I win, plus everyone who doesn't agree is evil!' -- combined with really basic, obvious problems with the analysis that turned me straight into Law School Girl. Or, as the classic cartoon has it, 'Someone is wrong on the Internet!'
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I'm sure you have said the other thing, possibly in a why-anime-fandom type post, but I can't remember where.
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It's made me somewhat uneasy on the political level all along, because it smacks of the attitude that has been labeled "orientalism." Plus, of course, the dreaded Cultural Appropriation. But I can rationalize this, and do, by telling myself that I know damned well I'm misreading the relevant works, and not trying to work out anything about their place in their own cultural context from them.
- But yeah. As I've encountered other anime and manga sources, it's become increasingly obvious that some of the things that are so refreshing to me, coming from Western culture, are every bit as patterned and predictable within their home culture as they are new to me. If I read manga long enough and widely enough, I can bet that I'll be as twitchy about the predictable sibling tropes in Japanese popular media as I am now about the American Daddy Plot.
For what it's worth? You're one of the genuinely original writers I don't want to see asked to put labels on all her stuff. Um, oops?
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... I don't think you get out of jail free with that one, since it plays into the "the Orient is inscrutable/you Westerners wouldn't understand" meme even if you didn't mean it that way, but wevs.
Ah, Eroica. Eroica is such an anomaly in that it's a manga series that has been adopted into the cohort of old-school slash fandoms, with storytelling conventions to match. I have no idea how this happened, it's not like I was there at the time..Apparently Eroica also predates the BL market as such in Japan? (Second-hand information, again.)
Actually the problem I have with Eroica-the-series is the same as I have with certain types of French comedy: so much lightness is startling and fascinating at first, but several hundred pages of it gets rather wearing. (You might have read this already? It, er, isn't a stereotypical romance between the lead characters.)
Have you ever seen Shoujo Kakumei Utena*, incidentally? (*n.b. if this goes to the main page the article is under Fanfic Spotlight --> Team Bonet's Sunday)
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Is it going to make you want to chew your foot off to get out of the trap, metaphorically speaking, if I argue with you about this one? Because I semi-disagree -- that is, I don't know that I can argue that no one could take this as playing into the inscrutable-Orient thing,¹ but I can and will argue for this kind of taking-out-of-context as a useful approach in the arts and sciences,² and one that's by no means confined to the way the West has approached non-Western cultures. Within our own tradition I can pick off two examples of much the same thing going on, without even thinking hard about it: the 19th century Gothic revival (Ivanhoe, Violet le Duc, you know), and the 12th century misreading of Ovid's Ars Amatoria that turned it into one of the foundation documents of the cult of courtly love.
Interesting things happen, that is, when you encounter the artifacts of another culture without mediation. Or, they can. This isn't to discount the value of trying to understand what they mean within their home cultures, just to say that both processes have their value. And I think we lose something when we discount the former too much, as we may easily do out of suspicion of our cultural heritage of cheerful aggression and pillage.
But, I don't really mean to go on endlessly at you about this, not if it's going to be irritating to deal with. I'd been half-meaning to do a whole top-level post about this stuff, is all, and now it's kicking around in my head, and this conversation triggered it.
And I feel guilty. Honest to God, talking to me is like inviting a vampire in.
¹After all, you've just argued it, which is pretty conclusive.
²Under the circumstances, I feel compelled to drop a footnote restricting this to the Western European/American intellectual tradition. Which isn't to say that it isn't true of other cultures, only that this is the only one I feel able to comment on.
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... and here was me trying to derail the conversation with recs. I'm sorry, I don't know what you think, or more precisely what you cut in order to make a clear line of argument. I may in fact take advantage of the invitation to bow out of this for a while; all this moving-targets stuff is making me seasick. mixed metaphors ftw
Those footnotes are neat, what's the code for the superscript numbers?
But at least you get superscript code out of it!
-- aaand this is me, hedging those bets. I can find something. For the superscript 1, I see Unicode 00B9. But for the superscript 2, I see Unicode 00B2, which makes that Unicode 00B9 seem suspicious to me. Even though it shows up in a neat table that also gives me a superscript 3 as Unicode 00B3, and no higher numbers as superscripts in the 00B range at all.
Perhaps this Unicode thing is entirely irrelevant? If so, I wonder what the devil it actually is.
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Or so the Google tells me. Let me try it here, with the classic example: E=mc2.
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