Neat stuff

[rivkat]

podcath put my DA story Getting By in her anthology: The Manticore Anthology, yay!

cesperanza: So Hey, We Stopped Saying That! Or how fandom learned to stop worrying and love the label “transformative.” (My version of “hey, stop saying that” is here.)

Thanks to geekturnedvamp, talitha78 and mustangsally78 for the holiday cards. It’s not that surprising to me that the latter two both feature cats, and that the first doesn’t!

Via Jason Mittell, a really smart essay on violence in pop culture:

One argument I’m suddenly hearing a lot of is: Of course violent TV has a violent influence. Isn’t the whole TV advertising model based on the idea that content can influence action? Does that influence stop once the commercials are over?
For starters: yes, actually, it kind of does. In the sense, at least, that advertising is a different kind of rhetoric from fiction. It’s generally a direct argument: buy this product, for this reason, you will get this benefit, you will look and feel a certain way.
Fiction–even really bad fiction–doesn’t work that way. It tells a story, and people make meaning from it. It can have profound effects on people, but not necessarily the same ones on everyone, and its message isn’t linear. Breaking Bad, for instance, is a violent story of bad people, but you would have to have much more contempt for its viewers than I do to assume that its “message” is: life is cheap, power is awesome, so go cook some meth, dominate your wife and hurt whomever you have to, even kids, to get your way.

Which led me to this essay on why all the "good" TV is so violent:

But what is concerning is that this revolution has been deep but narrow; it's like we have an army of dazzlingly fluent poets who all write in one language. That doesn't, of course, make all the poetry the same, any more than all English-language poetry is the same. These shows are varied in many ways: The Wire is not the same show as The Walking Dead just because people get shot and otherwise brutalized, and American Horror Story and Boardwalk Empire are hardly identical twins. But they share elements, one of which is that the stakes involve — not solely but largely — avoiding being violently killed. And for that reason, they ask the viewer to want to watch people being violently killed now and then, and sometimes now and then and then and then, because otherwise the threats are false.
(It's worth mentioning that the violence is not the only thing many of these shows have in common. They're also very heavy, though less uniformly so, on the question of what it means to be a morally conflicted 40-ish white guy in modern America, or '60s America, or Prohibition-era America, or Westeros. This is also the theme of the highly decorated Louie, which is sort of a comedy, but only sort of. As much as it's failed to reach many kinds of stories, the revolution has also failed to reach many kinds of people with any regularity.)

Comments

[morgandawn]

reading the comments and the worries from 10 years ago left me feeling confused. Who were these people? Oh wait, now I remember....they were us. And I also remember the feeling of terror and exposure when our little corner of the vidding world went online in the open.

I know some older print origin fan communities are still deeply entrenched in the culture of shame and hiding, but they're the exceptions it seems.

which reminds me, I need to send you an e-mail about pre 1989 copyright notices, if you have time.

[bonspiel]

That last essay is great; thank you. She puts her finger on why I just can't watch Game of Thrones (and haven't even tried with several others, like Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead). It's not a moral disapproval of violence or how the threat of death is often necessary to raise the stakes in a story. It's the sheer weight of all that visceral violence, especially in a visual form (somehow books are easier to move on from, imo), and the toll it takes on you as a person.