_The Good Place_

I Would Normally Never Post an Advertisement, but. . .

. . .this Audi ad uses the "Are You Being Served" theme song.



At least, even though it said it was from Audi in my current country, TSOR suggests that it is actually a British ad.

Ramble about a Book

I reread "Another Ambiguous Utopia" today, and it made me want to post something on my blog, but I'm not sure what.  I guess I'll post about something that I wanted to talk to my brother about, but he's not responding to me.

Lately, I've been reading a lot of responses to the situation in Syria and the concept of taking military action there in response to the use of chemical weapons.  It's fascinating and somewhat bizarre to see the contrast between the mainstream media (recently I. . . in a somewhat lengthy story, wound up with something approximating a free subscription to the International Herald-Tribune, which has meant reading a lot more newspaper writing than I had been reading for the past few years), where even those who argue against military strikes seem to see it as an at least moderately appealing option that needs to be persuasively dismissed, and my friends and family, who all just dismiss the idea out of hand and don't see it as even remotely appealing in any way.  But the debates themselves are also somewhat interesting to me, as were the debates about Iraq that these debates naturally remind me of, for a rather odd reason - they are about issues that are so central to my consciousness.

I'm not sure why "the responsibilities of the powerful" and "the ability of those with superior force to actually make any difference" are issues that were so significant in my adolescence, but they really, really were.  In retrospect, given that I was a teenager with the normal lack of power that being a teenager implies and no real ambitions to get any more power than I already had, it seems like yet another one of those odd things (like theodicy) that I didn't really have any good reason to obsess over.  But it was a moral issue that I just kept coming back to.  I wanted to talk to my brother about it because the imaginary game that he, our friend, and I played together wound up focusing on such issues to an odd degree - in a game that started out when I was eleven or twelve with the basic premise of, "A huge force of bad guys are destroying everything.  The good guys get attacked and fight back," it probably says something that at least one of his characters and one of my characters both had huge mental breakdowns about the morality of efforts to defeat the bad guys (who, in all honesty, were significantly more worrying and more of a threat than Syria or Iraq ever have been to the US).  Years and years later, after the Iraqi war, I came up with a plot for a short story (it probably would wind up a novella, if I ever wrote it, given what happens to things I write) taking two of my characters from our game and placing them in an entirely different context but forcing them to have another huge argument over the morality of using power; when I was reading the IHT last week I suddenly had odd visions of my two characters coming on a talk show to discuss their beliefs in relation to the Syria argument.  And it wasn't only those games, either - I also came up with a plot for a book where, I later decided during the Iraqi war, my kind-of-attractive-but-nonetheless-rather-villainous-villain was more or less George Bush (albeit with far more personal reason for his dedication to changing other societies' behavior by force, but nonetheless with no direct stake in the conflict he stirred up other than a desire to use overwhelming power to achieve aims he thought were moral).

Again, it strikes me as odd that this was such a moral preoccupation of mine during my adolescent years in the nineties, long before 2001 brought these issues to the forefront of societal discussion.  It wasn't really something that was all that personally relevant at all since I was neither in a position to be making decisions about that kind of thing nor had the desire to see myself in such a position.  Nor did I have the kind of power where my personally withholding my intervention was something that might potentially have moral implications (at least, no more so than any other person from a relatively affluent background).  When I think about where I came across this obsession and its personal importance to me, then, I kind of find myself thinking of Enchantress from the Stars.  This book by Sylvia Engdahl features, as Wikipedia tells us, "a peaceful, technologically advanced, space-faring civilization called the 'Federation,' which monitors worlds which are still 'maturing,' allowing them to grow without any sort of contact or intervention."  When the protagonist does have to intervene in order to save one civilization from another, she has to do it as gently as possible, making use of the beliefs of the locals rather than the overwhelming force her civilization presumably possesses.  I think this book, despite never quite being one of my favorites, just made a really deep impression on me as a child, both as an ideal and as a concept to argue against.  I definitely do get the sense that all of my later explorations of the concept of power and how to wield it as a teenager really did stem from both the ways in which I found Engdahl's Federation attractive and the ways in which I found it really morally troubling.  It might not have been the most emotionally gripping book (although it's also really, really cool narratively - it really is!), but it was one of the most thought-provoking books of my childhood.  I guess that the same issues also came up in Star Trek, but I never watched that as a child, so this was the one that really made an impression on me and introduced me to those ideas that still come up in serious contexts even today.

I Confuse Myself

I was so happy just now to find that Martin has finally shown up in the new novel version of Hitherby.

I really don't understand my reactions to Martin.  Consciously, I'm not at all aware of liking him.  In fact, I find him really frightening.  But I'm fascinated by him.  But not for reasons as obvious as to why I have similar feelings about Ben Linus.

I See Myself as an Endless Fountain of Immortal Drink

A friend linked to a review (of an episode of Legend of Korra, but that's not particularly relevant), offering up the quotation: "When I was a kid, I insisted on being an extra Michelangelo at recess instead of April. (Believe that I had a costume.) The lone female character who hung out with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles probably wasn’t as heinous as I remember... But 7-year-olds at recess have a way of boiling down characters to their defining characteristics, and [t]he job of the designated April was to hang out on the jungle gym until she was rescued, which was boring. An April couldn’t lead the gang. I could sometimes lead the gang, but only as Michelangelo. ...

"So even while watching 'The Spirit Of Competition,' in which significant time is spent on the long-dreaded romantic-polygon plot, my inner 7-year-old was still dead jealous she missed out on being Korra."

When I see people say things like that, I tend to find it somewhat alienating. Here am I, who was once a seven-year-old girl, and I just don't associate with that at all. I didn't have this kind of visceral reaction against the designated female characters in stories, that wasn't an issue for me. So I worry - does that make me a bad person? What does it say about me that I didn't feel that way? Shouldn't I have been offended by the limited roles open to females? Shouldn't I at least have shown more obvious evidence of having actually noticed?

But then I tried to dig more deeply into my memories of the time, and it occurred to me - I wasn't trying to play Michalangelo at seven, but, honestly, I wasn't exactly trying to play April, either. When I tried to envision myself as a character in an already-created fictional world, I was doing self-insert, at that age, and not self-insert as a Mary Sue heroine of either type, either. When I was doing self-insertion, it was as this kind of omniscient, omnipotent authorial figure. I didn't tend to envision myself as any of the characters in fantasy stories that seriously (I mean, I sort of associated myself with Nan Pilgrim in Witch Week in a kind of vague way, but when I tried acting out the book with my best friend, it was Charles's Simon Says spell that I was (alarmingly) obsessed with casting). Instead, I pictured myself coming into the worlds of the realistic fiction I was reading at the time, The Babysitters' Club and Sweet Valley Twins and being in control. When I made up a huge BSC fanfic in my head, it was from Kristy's POV, even though I was a character, and I went around being mysterious and having magic powers and doing strange things to Kristy. There was this one SVT book about how Jessica arranged for Elizabeth to have a really terrible, unpleasant day in order to orchestrate giving her a surprise party at the end, and I hated that plot. I always felt intensely sorry for Elizabeth. So whenever I reread that book I would make up fix-it fanfic where I was the magical omnipotent author-figure saving Elizabeth from Jessica.

Even my imaginary games - the most significant imaginary games from my early life were Good Rabbit, Bad Rabbit and Good Mole, Bad Mole, which I played with my grandmother and little brother. I think Good Mole, Bad Mole was the long lasting one. It was a story about an orphaned little girl who lived with her evil stepfamily and whose only friend was the protective good mole, but they were at constant risk from the evil, dangerous, bad mole (I think that Good Rabbit, Bad Rabbit was basically the same plot but with rabbits?). So you'd think that I would be the poor little orphaned girl, right? Except I wasn't. That was my grandmother, and my brother was the good mole, but I was all the other characters, especially the evil ones. I don't think so much that it was that I wanted to be evil, though; I think it's more that the evil characters were in control of the plot, and that's where I wanted to be, in control of the plot.

Later in my childhood, once I was around ten or so, I became more involved in playing more normal imaginary games, the kind where I actually explicitly took on the roles of particular characters and acted specifically from their points of view. And at that time, I did default to playing largely female characters (with the occasional male). Those characters are still too important to me for me to easily classify them as "token females" or "powerful females" or anything like that - to me, they're just a lot of the best characters, and of course the best characters I create would include females, given that I see myself as female and I am the source of my own characters. I don't know how much all of my characters draw on stereotypical tropes of female characters, and to a certain extent I would even have to say it's something I'm uncomfortable thinking about. I love my characters too much and too personally to be entirely comfortable with the idea of confronting the potentially reprehensible cultural detritus that has helped to form them (this is a feeling that I wouldn't say I ever have about, say, books I adore, but somehow when I am the creator it's a lot more personal). Nonetheless, I would say that it's important that my experience of playing the games I love was very much still that part of the enjoyment was the sense of being the author, of creating plot. And this remains a feature of my collaborative imaginative life even as an adult - when I first started playing games like AD&D, I was disappointed because the only role for me as a non-GM was to be the character, not to be the author. And I've desperately enjoyed the "story games" that a friend introduced me to because, even if you have a bias towards one character in those games, you're still involved in collaborative plotting - and that's something that I need in order to feel comfortable with the game.

I think these aspects of my imaginative life say something interesting, especially in contrast with the more oft-told story mentioned above of the girl who wants to play boys' roles, about my imaginative life and what the function of imagination is for me - less the fantasy of escaping into being a different person with a more active role at the center of the story, and more the fantasy of escaping outward, into being someone with less personal stake in the world and a more controlling role at the peripheral of the story. It shows a lot about my personality and my expectations of life and my desires. It also reminds me of one of the many awesome papers I wrote in graduate school, the one about Endymion and Keats' letters. I was fascinated by the way that Keats, as poet writing about characters, tends to figure the poet not as the one in control, the one who was developing the story, but rather makes the poet a passive figure guided by others to create. Perhaps Keats was not imagining himself into his own stories as the author. And yet I have always done so, and I expect this will continue to be the form of engagement with stories that continues to appeal the most to me.

I Saw Her Again

Having recently finished a huge amount of work and now in a fallow period, I have been wasting immense quantities of time on (do not click on this link) the website of evil and dismay. As you do. On the page for (do not click on this link) "ThrowItIn" - accidents that end up being kept in an artwork because they turn out to be pretty cool, it mentioned "I Saw Her Again"(the part where they say "I saw her - I saw her again last night," was apparently a mistake originally). This reminded me that "I Saw Her Again" is a completely awesome song - an undeniable truth. But I also love "I Saw Her Again" because it is evil, which is not true of most pop songs and thus makes it stand out rather. I've already mentioned in the past how "Ziggy Stardust" is really creepy. David Bowie writes a song that he then sings, but it's not from his point of view, it's from the point of view of his putative band members, expressing their supposedly negative feelings towards the character represented by David Bowie himself.

But "I Saw Her Again" is kind of the opposite. As far as I understand, the story goes that John Phillips and Michelle Phillips were married, but then Michelle started having an affair with Denny Doherty. So John found out about it, got angry, and wrote the lyrics to "I Saw Her Again" for Denny to sing in order to punish him and Michelle. The lyrics, and it seems like everyone in the band knew this, were about the affair. And the lyrics are so. . . "now she thinks that I love her (yeah, yeah) / Because that's what I said / Though I never think of her." And supposedly they all knew that this was what John was writing for Denny to sing about Michelle. So uncomfortable! In this case, we have the lyricist writing in the supposed viewpoint of the singer to express feelings that the singer really shouldn't be expressing (and, of course, Michelle herself was one of the backup singers emphasizing all the points). Oh, yeah. And apparently Denny wrote the music, so he gets songwriting credit for the song, as well. I will never get over how amazing this is. I mean, in a bad way, but amazing.

I first heard this story on VH1's Behind the Music for the Mamas and the Papas. But afterwards I thought that I must have been misremembering, because the story was just too much like what would happen in a good book to be true. However, the internet corroborates the story, much to my pleasure. So I should put it up here just to commemorate how much I like it.

All the Best People Have to Be Ghosts

For a long time now, I have wondered why it is that I like Utena without loving it. On paper, Utena seems like something I should love. I've described Angel Sanctuary as "all these people who don't fully understand each other always hurting each other inadvertently" with Gnostic overtones implying that "the physical world is evil because it separates us, divides us up into these beings that can't touch and careen about and hurt each other" and, of course, weird gender and incest issues. Given this description, there's almost no distinction between AS and Utena. So, given that Utena is obviously the more intellectual of the two, and AS is clearly sillier by far, why is AS the one I adore and Utena the one I coldly admire?

While I was walking around doing nothing for an hour today, I came up, for the first time, with an answer that makes sense - if it is clearly not the content, then it must be the structure! This is slightly hard for me to accept because the structures do seem superficially similar (well, those aspects of the structure that seem relevant - I do not think the reason I don't love Utena is because of the Rose Bride duels). Both of them feature a main plot in the present and a lot of backstory, which is revealed gradually during the course of the main plot, up until the final, most important, extremely Gnostic backstory that gets revealed at the end. However, the difference between the two of them is, I think, in the balance of the backstory and the main story. It's true that in Utena the backstory is the motivation for the entire present story. It's also true that almost every important individual character has his or her own different backstory, and even that the backstories connect (to some degree - Utena's, Saionji's, Touga's, Akio's, and Anthy's obviously do). However, first of all I feel that less time is devoted to backstory in Utena and the focus is more clearly on the present. Even if I'm wrong about this (and I haven't measured it to find out for sure), I think that it's still true in the sense that people in AS spend a huge amount of time talking about the backstory with each other even in the present, whereas although we see a lot of the backstory in Utena, it seems less common for characters to be discussing it with each other in the present, such that it still makes for a time differential. Secondly, the backstory in AS is far more convoluted and interconnected; all of the characters have motivations that stem from the motivations of other characters who are connected to still other characters, whereas the backstory of Utena seems (if you don't mind my saying so) far less incestuous (as for whether or not this is literally true. . . ummm. . . that's a hard one). These two features contribute to my sense that, despite the many similarities between the two works, the backstory plays a more significant role in my experience of AS than my experience of Utena.

And of course it's very likely that this would, in fact, be a reason for me to love one far more than the other. Because I love stories where a lot of the story time is devoted to figuring out what went on in the past - in fact, that's among my favorite things. If you look at the works of art I have fallen in love with, whether it's Hexwood, Lost, Xenogears, PSME, or Hitherby - these are all stories where a lot of the narrative drive and suspense comes from trying to figure out what's already happened rather than momentum forwards. The big climactic moment of Utena isn't finding out the truth about Anthy and Akio, it's Utena's duel with Akio and the aftermath. It's something that happens in the present. But, although it is the end of the series, it would seem odd to say that the big climactic moment of AS is in fact Setsuna killing God; it seems to be more something along the lines of discovering the true relationship between Alexiel, Lucifiel, and Rosiel and the catharsis for Alexiel and Rosiel of Rosiel's death. So the climax is the reveal of the ultimate truth behind the plot; the death of God is more like a necessary afterthought (as part of the climactic reveal is the revelation that God is to blame for EVERYTHING!). This is the kind of story I love, where the whole point is to discover the truth about the past - it's the reason I fell madly in love with Absalom, Absalom! the moment I read it - because it's a book where the entire plot is laid out in the first chapter, and the rest of the book is just characters researching and then making up an explanation for it.

I don't know why this kind of narrative appeals to me more than other structures when the content is so close - but there you have it, it does. And I think that's a very helpful explanation of my heretofore inexplicable reactions.

Yay walking around doing nothing for an hour!

If the End of the World Has Ever Happened, This Must Be It

Okay, so as far as things to be emotionally involved with go, Mely's opinion of Spike is a rather pathetic one. Nonetheless, I can't help but be pleasantly surprised at the fact that she's suddenly criticizing how Joss wrote Buffy because she's too forgiving of Angel and fails to sufficiently appreciate Spike!

Not to Mention the Cloud Whales

You know, normally, if I don't love something, I'm fairly clear on why I like it or dislike it. I dislike it because it's boring, or I like it because it has that cool stuff that I like.

But when I'm obsessed with something else, it's a little different. When I'm busy being obsessed with The Homeward Bounders, The Homeward Bounders strikes me as the perfect book, and nothing else is even remotely as appealing, because nothing else is perfect. When I'm obsessed with Hitherby, even DWJ books seem wordy and simplistic in comparison to the sparse thematic complexity that is ideal. But, you know, being obsessed with DWJ or Hitherby is kind of okay, given that the things I love them for aren't actually absurd OTT-ness.

And then there's being obsessed with Angel Sanctuary. A friend of mine mentioned on her personal blog that she is really into the new ABC Family TV show Huge and that it has an asexual character, and I was intrigued enough to start watching it. And I am finding it entertaining enough. It's nice to have been motivated to watch TV again (I really have trouble staying motivated to watch TV unless other people are there watching it with me). But. . . I keep on finding myself thinking, Wouldn't this friendship be so much interesting if that guy was actually possessed by an evil sword that has been chasing the other guy's reincarnations for centuries because it's in love with his original identity as a female angel and is actually, unbeknownst even to itself, Lucifer? or, Wouldn't that scene be strongly improved if there was a giant aborted angelic fetus with lots of eyeballs floating above?, or, The best solution for any weird problems with your father-figure is letting him eat you when he turns into a cannibal zombie, and then he can temporarily regain his sanity just in time to save Lucifer from being killed by the reincarnated angel with himself, because he's blind, and then his blindness will be miraculously lifted and he'll suddenly realize that you're not just his surrogate child but actually his real child that he left for dead after cutting you out of the womb of your mother when he was set up into killing her, so that he can save your life and get you to kill him as the real ultimate act of love.

I also find myself thinking very nostalgically of Gardens of the Moon, which is one of the few narratives I've encountered that seems even to approach AS for OTT-ness. I mean, the epic battle at the end is a good house (as in a building) versus an evil tree! I will never get over that!

If anyone reading this happens to have other recommendations of completely OTT narratives, drop them here. I can't promise to read them, but I would like a list! Basically I am looking for things like the good house (as in a building) versus an evil tree, where it doesn't come off as intentionally funny, and the thing is, it is, unavoidably, funny, but somehow it actually manages to work despite that.

A Brief Peek at the Unfortunate Connections My Mind Makes

Erika Gottlieb: "In terms of Orwell's consistent allusion to mystical symbols, the hide-and-seek between Winston and O'Brien is like the mystical 'Game of Love,' described, for example, by Francis Thomson in the Hound of Heaven, which 'shows to us the inexorable onward sweep' of God, this 'tremendous Lover. . . hunting the separated spirit rushing in terror from the overpowering presence of God, but followed, sought, conquered in the end' (Underhill 135)." (Gottlieb, Erika, "The Demonic World of Oceania: The Mystical Adulation of the 'Scared' Leader," in George Orwell's 1984: Updated Edition, ed. Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, New York, 2007, pp. 51-69)

My mind: Love games?

Old Gregg:

_Lost_ Religion is Different from Real Religion

Many people on the Internet are kind of thinking that Esau is Cerberus. I am inclined to believe this as well.

Richard Alpert

Over the past week-and-a-half, I seem to have come to the conclusion that Richard Alpert on Lost is kinda attractive. Here are some related thoughts:

1) He is attractive.

2) His conversations (with Locke, at least) have a tendency to go something like this:

Locke: What does this compass do?
Richard Alpert: It points north, John.

Locke: You told me that I'm your leader.
Richard Alpert: Well, I certainly wouldn't want to contradict myself.

3) He is probably immortal. Anything that involves immortals is inherently a Grace-enticing thing!

4) This is a funny interview with the actor who plays Richard Alpert, Nestor Carbonell. Or, at least, there's one funny question/answer.

Reader (Etc.) Response Theory

One of the formative experiences of my youth was getting into an argument with other people at my high school summer camp over George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. Everyone else argued that Maggie Tulliver was a very sympathetic character; I protested that I found Eliot as a writer to be very manipulative (a point on which I haven't changed my mind; I had the same reaction to Adam Bede 8.5 years later) and that her attempts to gin up sympathy for Maggie made me inclined to rebel. My memory, though it may be somewhat distorted, is that even the professors running the class were kind of aghast that I was unable to just "enjoy the novel" without analyzing it; sure, later on, after finishing the book, it was a good and respectable thing to consider what the author had apparently been trying to do, but when you were just reading the book for the first time, in order to get as much pleasure out of it as possible, you should ignore that kind of thing and just react, without having these bizarre meta-reactions.

Well, later on I came across this attitude as the anti-English department attitude - people should just enjoy books, all of that analysis just gets in the way. I'm unable to buy it, just because I can't imagine turning off that analytical part of my brain. I'm not trying to claim that, on my first reading of a book, I ever do an in-depth, sophisticated reading of it that remains my stable critical attitude towards the book. But, let's face it. My reaction to narrative is inherently an active one; I can't even imagine what it would mean to passively absorb a story. Reader response theory appeals to me to the degree that it assumes that the reader is always playing a role in creating the story, because that's very true to my experience. I'll finish a book and just KNOW things about the characters that the author never bothered to say. And, furthermore, I'll also always come out of a story with a double sense. Ignoring the authorial intent issue for now, let's just say that I come out of a story with two reactions - on the one hand, how did I feel about the characters, plot resolution, setting, etc., and, on the other hand, what would a sympathetic reading of the story have to say about the characters, plot resolution, setting, etc. Sometimes, to be sure, those two reactions are more or less synonymous - but even then I'm consciously aware of the synonymy!

As with Maggie Tolliver, these perceptions quite frequently focus on characters. Sometimes I'll find myself disliking a character that I feel the story itself wants me to like. And sometimes I'll find myself adoring a character where that adoration doesn't feel sanctioned by the story. The latter situation happens to me a lot with Dave Duncan books. Most recently, I read his novel Demon Sword (published under the pseudonym Ken Hood). The hero of the novel is a young guy named Toby, and there's a significant secondary character named Rory. Throughout the novel, Toby has a very vexed relationship with Rory. Rory often treats him badly, and Toby dislikes Rory on first site (later, it's suggested that he subconsciously realized that Rory was a romantic rival for the female lead when they first met). On the other hand, Toby also recognizes many good qualities in Rory and occasionally has moments of showing great respect for him. One assumes we're supposed to root for Toby, based on the fact that he's the hero of the book, makes mistakes but often triumphs, shows a consistent and at least somewhat laudable morality, and, in the climatic moment of what seems to be a fairly light book, triumphs. Thus, Rory is presented ambiguously throughout. Finally, in his last few appearances, it's revealed that, despite his many positive characteristics, he really is a fundamentally lousy guy; he's willing to leave Toby to his death in order to get money and the girl. The structure of the story makes me assume that the reader is being led to repudiate Rory, just as Toby's loyal supporter Haimish ultimately does. And yet I found myself unable to do so. I'm strongly inclined to forgive Rory for his admittedly horrible behavior towards Toby, because I just found him more likable throughout the entire book than I found Toby. So, even though the structure of the narrative made the hero quite obvious, as a reader, I had to ignore that and pick my own, somewhat more flawed, hero.

Actually, despite my divergence from the planned narrative, my reaction to Demon Sword was very positive; I enjoyed the book and didn't really feel bothered that I differed from the narrative's perspective! My reaction to Final Fantasy VII in this regard is more problematic, however. At least Rory is legitimately ambiguous throughout the book. But with FFVII, up until the end of the game, I was convinced that the narrative was setting up redemption for Sephiroth. He did some pretty bad things, to be sure. But the game seemed to stress that he had been lied to all his life, had been manipulated, had never really had any chance to understand goodness. At one point, the protagonist, Cloud, comes to the conclusion that all his life he had taken physical strength as the only means to gain respect and that he's now realized the problems with that attitude; since he specifically considered Sephiroth to be a model of physical strength, I really believed that this scene was set up for the end of the game, when they would reveal Sephiroth's strength to be just as much of a pose, hiding the abused, unloved boy within. I played the game with my brother, and when he told me that we were up to the final dungeon, I didn't even believe that was possible, since the whole part of the game that came after Sephiroth's redemption was yet to come.

Well, Sephiroth, rather famously, was never redeemed. And that struck me as very different from Rory's situation. In Rory's situation, although I liked him a lot more than the narrative seemed to, his ambiguity throughout the book seemed to justify both the narrative's negative end to his story and my own more positive stance. But, in FFVII, I never felt that the narrative was ambiguous. I was expecting the narrative to agree with me. And it was a real shock and disappointment to find that the narrative really didn't.

On the other hand, those stories where the narrative and my own perceptions seem to be in sync can be really powerful. This is probably at the heart of my deep, abiding love for Please Save My Earth - there, the story has some very ambiguous characters whom I love. The suspense of the narrative for me comes from the way it often seems to skirt the edge of throwing off them off the cliff - in reading it, I can't help but feel nervous - what if the narrative ultimately presents Shion or Rin as ultimately evil? But, in fact, the narrative always comes right back and reasserts that my positive understanding of the characters is right! It's a very empowering story for me to read; I love the delicate dance between the possibility that my interpretations ultimately won't be justified and the constant clues the story provides that they will be.

I'm thinking about this in the throes of anticipation for Lost - which I really am very excited about ;-). I feel like my perception of Sawyer might be like my perception of Shion or Rin - an ambiguous character, whom the story often seems to risk presenting as fundamentally problematic, but one in whom my deep faith will probably be justified in the end. And Ben Linus is another case entirely - an ambiguous character whom I find enjoyable to watch as a mostly bad guy, with a few good sides; I'm not on Ben's side, but I enjoy watching him and continuing to not be on his side. I hope the narrative doesn't end up justifying all his actions, but I find him fun to watch nonetheless. But Kate is more of a problem for me; she's an ambiguous character who the story seems to think is more justified than I do. The key difference between Sawyer and Kate is that Sawyer doesn't think he is a good person for having committed horrible acts; he does some pretty bad things, but he doesn't like himself for them and doesn't really expect anyone else to like him, either, because he doesn't think he deserves it. The narrative in that sense helps to exonerate him; it suggests he has at least the possibility of some day making up for his errors. And I'm in line with the narrative. But Kate is presented as a heroine, someone whom, while we're supposed to doubt her, we're also supposed to root for. However, she never shows the same kind of self-doubt or remorse as Sawyer; she expects other people to like and respect her despite the horrible things that she's done. The narrative seems to think that it's exonerated her, at least to the same extent that it's exonerated Sawyer, but I can't go along with it. That's the main reason why her character really gets on my nerves.

Interesting Women Or Men

I don't actually read Questionable Content per se, but it's one of those comics that I don't enjoy enough to read the full archives but do enjoy enough to look through occasionally. I spent the night a couple of nights ago reading it and enjoying the odd psychologies of many of the major characters, and it got me to thinking. You couldn't really call QC a harem comic in the way that I understand people call Megatokyo a harem comic (nb, I have never read Megatokyo myself, so this is just hearsay). Sure, I guess a large part of the comic at first was about the fairly average, socially awkward guy who had two girls who were interested in him, but there are far more characters than that, most of whom aren't interested in him, and the situation with Marten's love triangle has been at least temporarily resolved for quite a while. At the same time, I feel like QC has something in common with a harem comic, in that the male lead is a socially awkward guy who has girl trouble, and this is his main personality characteristic, and, as for the rest of the characters, the interesting female characters seem to strongly outnumber the interesting male characters. The most memorable characters in QC seem very definitely to be Faye and Hannelore, and, after that, the more memorable characters generally seem to be the women rather than the men. It's difficult to count this or quantify it, but I know that in reading the comic I always find myself looking out for the strips that involve the women and mainly only being interested in the men in terms of the way that they're relating to the women.

The interesting thing is that QC is a strip written by a heterosexual guy. This seems to fit with the idea of harem shows in anime, which are generally shows with one average guy picking from a large number of attractive women and are definitely aimed at (heterosexual) men (I enjoyed Tenchi Muyo, along these lines, since two of the characters in it reminded me of the same one of my favorite imagined characters that the actress who plays Charlotte in Lost could play). Azumanga Daioh, a manga/anime with a grand total of one male character (who's somewhat peripheral) was originally written as shounen. Meanwhile, there are reverse harem shows for (heterosexual) girls, featuring, of course, one average girl and the heaps of men she encounters who fall for her, things like Fushigi Yuugi. There are also more borderline cases - Fruits Basket has plenty of female characters, but my experience in watching it was that the writers of the anime directed most of their attention towards the men and the one female lead, although I don't know if this is also true of the manga or not. And of
course there are cases like Gundam Wing, where a show that was originally aimed at boys has a huge fanbase of women and girls attracted by the cast of attractive men with very few women involved to distract them.

I don't claim, of course, that these tendencies are universal, but I think it's interesting that they do exist in some mediums. Certainly my understanding is that Western comic books, mostly aimed at a male audience, tend to mostly focus on their male leads and mostly mistreat their women. And, although there are certainly reality TV shows aimed more at one gender than another, I feel as though scripted American TV shows probably don't have the luxury of narrowing their audience in that way. On the other hand, does Lost actually have more interesting male characters than females? That tends to be my sense of the show, but, if so, it hardly seems to be because the show is largely aimed at women (and the main showrunners are male).

Hey, This Post Needs a Title!

If you go to here and use the password "qilak," you can see three special features for Lost - some stuff from the Season 4 DVD, mainly focusing on Kate (including an interview with her actress and someone else talking about the actress), an interview with the actress who plays Charlotte, and a scene from the first episode of the next season, featuring Kate. I definitely like getting these updates through the e-mail, and they serve their intended purpose of getting me even more excited than I already was for the upcoming season. But I do feel slightly bemused by that particular set of special features.

I mean, okay, I like the actress who plays Charlotte, mainly because she has the perfect looks and, in the first episode in which she appeared, the ability to portray the perfect personality, for one of my favorite imagined characters. I've never before really seen someone who looks so close to the way I've imagined one of my made-up characters in my head, and the fact that she played a character who at least originally displayed a similar personality to my character makes it more exciting. Still, I think we can all agree that Charlotte is very, very, very far from the most interesting character on the show. . . .

And then why do both of the other two features have to focus on Kate? I mean, okay, I admit to being biased here, because Kate is my least favorite character. But I don't think I'd mind if they had one feature about her. But Lost is obviously an ensemble show. It seems really strange to devote two of the three features to the same character and then one more to a really minor character.

Oh, well. I suppose that at least this way I can hope that next time all three of the features are devoted to Sawyer or Desmond. . .

About Me

Now that I've introduced the blog, it's time to introduce myself.

I am in fact female, but I'm ethnically Ashkenazi, not Irish. I'm far closer in age to Bryce Dallas Howard than to Nicole Kidman. I've lived most of my life in the American northeast, which is where I live now, although I've spent half a year in Scotland and a year in China. At the time of writing, I work at an extremely menial job in publishing; I'm hoping to be an English teacher next year. I have an MA in English. I am pretty far left, politically, for an American. I have been in love with many works of art and the city of Edinburgh but never with a human being.

The rest of this post is just a list of art that is very important to me now or has been in the past:

Authors: Diana Wynne Jones, Henry James, Jenna Moran, Dave Duncan, Theodore Sturgeon

Books (by other authors): Please Save My Earth, Angel Sanctuary, Valis, A Scanner Darkly, Absalom, Absalom!, Giles Goat Boy, The Great Gatsby, "Death in Venice"

Bands: Pulp, Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts, Belle and Sebastian, of Montreal

TV Shows: Blackadder, Red Dwarf, Mulberry, Trigun, Buffy, Angel, House, Lost

Webcomic: College Roomies from Hell!!!

Movies: Dogville, Badlands

Video Games: Final Fantasy IV, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VII, Xenogears

Poems: "The Second Coming," "The Book of Thel," Prometheus Unbound

I guess that's it for now - anyway, hopefully that gives you at least some kind of guide.