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reading and other entertainment Wednesday
Jun. 14th, 2023 01:59 pm1) I finished Melissa Scott's The Master of Samar, and enjoyed it a lot while wishing it had had one more round of revisions. There's some important stuff (mostly character-related but also plot) that isn't set up properly before suddenly appearing in the last couple of chapters. Nevertheless, I like what it does, and I especially like
Thinking about how The Master of Samar is actually helping me get at something I couldn't articulate in my last post: part of the reason some contemporary sff feels "fanficcy" to me in a not-enjoyable way is that the emotional stakes are just too high. Everything's turned up to 11, all the time. Don't get me wrong, I want characters to have emotions and for those emotions to matter. But the centering of those emotions all the time, this constant incredibly intense round of despair and joy and jealousy and rejection and etc etc., feels very . . . teenage. And meanwhile the world needs saving, the revolution needs revolution-ing!
I guess this is why I like middle-aged characters. Not that I'm never drawn to the ones with intense emotions sometimes (see: Teach, Edward), but they've also got some good repression skills going on and can usually turn the drama back down again for a while.
Anyway, yeah. Fanfic, both reading it and writing it, trains us to go for as many intense emotions as can be crammed onto the page, and it's not entirely a good thing.
2) Still listening to Old Gods of Appalachia, still really enjoying S2 despite some trepidation. There are political implications to this arc that I'm trusting Collins and Shell to handle thoughtfully; we'll see.
3) I saw a post on Tumblr with a Saturday Night Live promo pic of Daniel Craig (I think it's from a few years ago), that people were explaining visually references the infamous 1974 French sex* film Emmanuelle. And I thought to myself, self, you have never seen this infamous French sex film.
So I acquired it, and watched it, and it's a tremendously silly and pompous film except when it's promoting rape culture. Interesting as a document of its times, I think, and with a few embedded critiques of cishet-male-centered sexual liberation that disturb the rest of the bullshit in useful ways, but ultimately deeply unsexy. I went to Wikipedia afterwards and learned that the novel it's based on has a gay man and male/male(/female) homoeroticism in a central role; the film took all that out and substituted a rape scene. Color me surprised.
(ETA: *I wouldn't really call it porn. Maybe the softest of softcore. All the sex is simulated, no more graphic than a modern R-rated movie and often less. There's a lot of nudity--all female, no dicks on display--and one notorious scene set at a Thai sex show, in which a Thai woman smokes a cigarette with her vagina. That's graphically shown; nothing comparable was asked of the western actors. Besides everything else, the film has a massive unexamined freight of colonialism.)
Anyway, my point in bringing this up was this: you know the much-GIFed scene from Hannibal where Will is standing against a ladder and Hannibal approaches close to him and it's all very breathless and eroticized? It's a direct visual quotation of a scene in Emmanuelle where our heroine is seduced by a woman for the first time. I'm sure I'm not the first person to notice it, but I'm entertained.
Vague spoilers follow; click here to see
Scott's willingness to give us a culture that's both fucked up (patriarchal, homophobic, hierarchical) and threatened by a collapse that would be worse. I like that preventing devastation comes at a cost, and that the cost is very much felt and somewhat resented. I like that the relationship between Irichels and Envar is well-established, stable, trusting, drama-free, and that a situation many other authors would have milked for every drop of sweet sweet angst is treated matter-of-factly.Thinking about how The Master of Samar is actually helping me get at something I couldn't articulate in my last post: part of the reason some contemporary sff feels "fanficcy" to me in a not-enjoyable way is that the emotional stakes are just too high. Everything's turned up to 11, all the time. Don't get me wrong, I want characters to have emotions and for those emotions to matter. But the centering of those emotions all the time, this constant incredibly intense round of despair and joy and jealousy and rejection and etc etc., feels very . . . teenage. And meanwhile the world needs saving, the revolution needs revolution-ing!
I guess this is why I like middle-aged characters. Not that I'm never drawn to the ones with intense emotions sometimes (see: Teach, Edward), but they've also got some good repression skills going on and can usually turn the drama back down again for a while.
Anyway, yeah. Fanfic, both reading it and writing it, trains us to go for as many intense emotions as can be crammed onto the page, and it's not entirely a good thing.
2) Still listening to Old Gods of Appalachia, still really enjoying S2 despite some trepidation. There are political implications to this arc that I'm trusting Collins and Shell to handle thoughtfully; we'll see.
3) I saw a post on Tumblr with a Saturday Night Live promo pic of Daniel Craig (I think it's from a few years ago), that people were explaining visually references the infamous 1974 French sex* film Emmanuelle. And I thought to myself, self, you have never seen this infamous French sex film.
So I acquired it, and watched it, and it's a tremendously silly and pompous film except when it's promoting rape culture. Interesting as a document of its times, I think, and with a few embedded critiques of cishet-male-centered sexual liberation that disturb the rest of the bullshit in useful ways, but ultimately deeply unsexy. I went to Wikipedia afterwards and learned that the novel it's based on has a gay man and male/male(/female) homoeroticism in a central role; the film took all that out and substituted a rape scene. Color me surprised.
(ETA: *I wouldn't really call it porn. Maybe the softest of softcore. All the sex is simulated, no more graphic than a modern R-rated movie and often less. There's a lot of nudity--all female, no dicks on display--and one notorious scene set at a Thai sex show, in which a Thai woman smokes a cigarette with her vagina. That's graphically shown; nothing comparable was asked of the western actors. Besides everything else, the film has a massive unexamined freight of colonialism.)
Anyway, my point in bringing this up was this: you know the much-GIFed scene from Hannibal where Will is standing against a ladder and Hannibal approaches close to him and it's all very breathless and eroticized? It's a direct visual quotation of a scene in Emmanuelle where our heroine is seduced by a woman for the first time. I'm sure I'm not the first person to notice it, but I'm entertained.
