Dec. 7th, 2013
December meme: military fandoms and me
Dec. 7th, 2013 06:36 amThere are still lots of open days if you want to ask me anything!
For today,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
executrix asked why I like military fandoms.
I have to start my answer by borrowing a phrase fromoursin: it's all more complicated. I wouldn't say that I like military fandoms in general. I'm only interested in a small subset of them: those set during either the First or Second World War and focused on Britain, or at least not on the United States. Stories about wars more recent than 1945 tend to engage my political brain and make me angry, whereas WWI is distant enough that I can see it as tragedy, and while I do have political thoughts about WWII, essentially I believe that both the Nazis and Japanese imperialist expansion had to be stopped. And stories that are primarily about the US experience of those wars don't appeal to me, partly because of my Anglophilia (I might as well openly admit it) and partly because I strongly dislike the way American involvement in the world wars is presented in American popular culture and popular history. The U.S. did not save the world either time, nor did we make great heroic sacrifices; our involvement in both wars was comparatively limited. To the extent that we did play a crucial role in WWII, it was mostly due to our industrial capacity, which kept both Britain and the Soviets armed. The country that came closest to single-handedly stopping Hitler was the Soviet Union, but even now the hangover of Cold War politics makes that almost impossible to say in the US in a popular medium. Basically, I think U.S. war stories are parochial and very often jingoistic. British war stories can be both those things too, but it's less common and less blatant. (I said in another post that the difference between U.S. WWII films and British WWII films is that in U.S. ones, the hero lives and triumphs; in British ones, he dies. That sums up the different attitudes fairly well.)
Having said all that, the question still remains: why am I attracted to war stories at all? ( click here to read more )
I'll end with a few recs in case any of this has piqued your interest. Colditz has been my favorite fandom for some years now: it's a British drama that aired in the early 1970s about the eponymous high-security POW camp and the men who lived in it, sometimes escaped from it, and more often failed to escape. Wings is another British drama, this time about Royal Flying Corps pilots in the early years of the First World War. It has its flaws, but at its best it's wonderful. Manhunt is a 1969-70 British drama about two French resistance members and a downed RAF officer trying desperately to escape from occupied France; it's slow to get going and can be offensively sexist, but it gets better, has some consistently great acting and intermittently excellent writing, and its final episode packs a hell of a wallop. Secret Army is yet another 1970s British drama; it focuses on the members of Lifeline, a Belgian underground organization that helps downed Allied pilots escape back to Britain; it's bleak, bleak, bleak, and after series 1 it gets bogged down in its creator's anti-communist views, but the first series is great. Almost everyone with any interest in WWI had read Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, but if you haven't, do. Mary Renault's The Charioteer is well known, but worth thinking about as a war novel as much as a gay novel. And I like Susan Hill's Strange Meeting, an exploration of the tender friendship/love that develops between two young British officers in WWI.
For today,
executrix asked why I like military fandoms.I have to start my answer by borrowing a phrase from
oursin: it's all more complicated. I wouldn't say that I like military fandoms in general. I'm only interested in a small subset of them: those set during either the First or Second World War and focused on Britain, or at least not on the United States. Stories about wars more recent than 1945 tend to engage my political brain and make me angry, whereas WWI is distant enough that I can see it as tragedy, and while I do have political thoughts about WWII, essentially I believe that both the Nazis and Japanese imperialist expansion had to be stopped. And stories that are primarily about the US experience of those wars don't appeal to me, partly because of my Anglophilia (I might as well openly admit it) and partly because I strongly dislike the way American involvement in the world wars is presented in American popular culture and popular history. The U.S. did not save the world either time, nor did we make great heroic sacrifices; our involvement in both wars was comparatively limited. To the extent that we did play a crucial role in WWII, it was mostly due to our industrial capacity, which kept both Britain and the Soviets armed. The country that came closest to single-handedly stopping Hitler was the Soviet Union, but even now the hangover of Cold War politics makes that almost impossible to say in the US in a popular medium. Basically, I think U.S. war stories are parochial and very often jingoistic. British war stories can be both those things too, but it's less common and less blatant. (I said in another post that the difference between U.S. WWII films and British WWII films is that in U.S. ones, the hero lives and triumphs; in British ones, he dies. That sums up the different attitudes fairly well.) Having said all that, the question still remains: why am I attracted to war stories at all? ( click here to read more )
I'll end with a few recs in case any of this has piqued your interest. Colditz has been my favorite fandom for some years now: it's a British drama that aired in the early 1970s about the eponymous high-security POW camp and the men who lived in it, sometimes escaped from it, and more often failed to escape. Wings is another British drama, this time about Royal Flying Corps pilots in the early years of the First World War. It has its flaws, but at its best it's wonderful. Manhunt is a 1969-70 British drama about two French resistance members and a downed RAF officer trying desperately to escape from occupied France; it's slow to get going and can be offensively sexist, but it gets better, has some consistently great acting and intermittently excellent writing, and its final episode packs a hell of a wallop. Secret Army is yet another 1970s British drama; it focuses on the members of Lifeline, a Belgian underground organization that helps downed Allied pilots escape back to Britain; it's bleak, bleak, bleak, and after series 1 it gets bogged down in its creator's anti-communist views, but the first series is great. Almost everyone with any interest in WWI had read Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, but if you haven't, do. Mary Renault's The Charioteer is well known, but worth thinking about as a war novel as much as a gay novel. And I like Susan Hill's Strange Meeting, an exploration of the tender friendship/love that develops between two young British officers in WWI.