lilliputian meta on manpain

[lotesse]

just a tiny bit of meta, because it's summer and I'm apparently incapable of writing longform, so I'll just link: so thingswithwings made this amazing vid, posted with this accompanying meta, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about manpain since.

Because I am, arguably, a Manpain Queen. Pain makes me happy - in fiction, that is, ahem. My problem with mainpain - and it is a problem, don't get me wrong - is that it actually minimizes the amount of pain available. What if Sha're was taken by the Goa'uld and we got three seasons of Daniel angsting over it AND of Sha're dealing with possession/strugging to hold on to her own subjectivity/becoming increasingly radicalized and badass as she saw more of the world and its cruelties? Instead, manpain structures limit us to half the tasty suffering and weemo.

It's not that I want white dudely protags to hurt less. It's that it'd be cool if we had a more catholic camera in regard to pain in media, that was willing to explore ladypain and pocpain and trans*pain and other such interesting and possibly very moving sorts of things. Not restriction, but rather broadening of narrative focus. And the attendant increase in the gross volume of narrative pain for me to splash around contentedly in!

(I've been trying all morning to think of source texts that actually do this. Um, The Scarlet Pimpernel? possibly Tamora Pierce's books, though she still has issues with chromatic masses and white privileged protags, but the gender stuff is better most of the time. hrm.)

Comments

[laughingrat]

I like a good h/c, angsty, or introspective kinda fic myself, too. I got the impression that some of the issues around manpain specifically is that it almost always occurs at the cost of the character/person (it's a RL thing too, after all) that is really being injured. So if a dude's wife is killed, it's not about how her life was stolen from her, it's about how it made him all sad. If his daughter is raped, it's not about her trauma and the recovery process, but how he is all broke up inside that his property no longer has value princess was hurt. That kinda thing.

[aiffe]

I often speak in defense of manpain, because I think there's something else at work here: the idea that men can't hurt, that they're being too wussy by hurting, too feminine. The round of mockery that goes up every time a man hurts. The way, when Zuko had manpain on Avatar, fandom laughed at him and said he had "sand in his vagina" or made repeated jokes about him being on his period. That was just overt misogyny, and it was being directed at a man, for daring to step into the feminine territory of having emotions.

Even the way we say "manpain" seems to mock and delegitimize it. Because the Doctor's pain at having committed genocide against his own people to save the rest of the universe is funny, and he should stop feeling it. He's a man, so he needs to act like one. -__-

However, that said, I completely agree that men should not have a monopoly on meaningful pain. There is this insidious assumption that a woman's pain (or anyone else's pain) just isn't as interesting, and that needs to GDIAF. I noted this a few months ago, and tried to think of female characters who got that same level of suffering, and not small, normal suffering like your husband left you and how will you feed the kids when you make 70 cents on the dollar, but torment.

Sha're would have been a prime candidate for this, and as a character she fascinated me. I can understand why the narrative didn't follow her, since it was with SG-1, but I profoundly wish that he'd taken her back to the base instead of her ending up dying in Forever in a Day. That was the point (Sha're's death) when Daniel Jackson went from being my favorite character to being less interesting to me. His wife made him interesting. She was gone. If she'd gotten a much bigger part of the plot, I would have been glued to my screen, instead of just drifting away, which was what happened.

That, and some people are just...uncomfortable with sadness. I've seen people get angry and express their discomfort at shows that try to show them sadness, or turn around and attack and blame the characters for it. These people, in my experience, were raised to believe their own sadness was unimportant, and that nobody should ever show their sadness because it's a burden on anyone who sees it, and you're being selfish by sharing. So manpain, along with all the other pain, will get attacked by these people.

Buffy got angst. Heaps and heaps of it. Sakura, from Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, got angst. Yuna, from Final Fantasy X, got angst, and she also got the typical male angst of having her love interest die. Men in refrigerators, anyone? *g* Though it should be noted that wasn't the driving point of her angst, just the angst cherry on her angst pie. Xena got angst, with attending Christ imagery. Colette, from Tales of Symphonia, has some spectacular angst, from what I've heard/seen, though I have not actually played through the whole game.

There are more examples I can't think of right now, though I am not saying these invalidate the point--the point stands that male pain is more "valued," and that's a problem. I am 100% behind you in wanting more pain for everyone.

[ilthit]

A lot of the examples cited were kind of trite in that they did, as you say, focus on the lesser of the pains involved. A woman is cornered by a madman, tortured and murdered - wow. I don't really WANT to read that, but that is indeed pain. Her boyfriend feels bad about it? Why the hell do we even care? He's going to wipe that tear and go on to the next episode unchanged by the events. If that's all we focus on, the event itself becomes kind of meaningless, because it didn't really change anything.

[wolfy_writing]

This was linked to on Fanlore! Hi!

This may be my favorite bit of meta on Manpain. Because I have a certain fondness for tormented protagonists and combining heroism and suffering, which leaves me cheap for manpain. However, more recognition of different types of narrative pain and different characters who suffer them would make everything even more interesting, both in terms of recognizing that everyone else in the world is as worthy of being seen as human as straight, cis white men, and in providing loads of pain for angst-fans!