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Feb. 24th, 2012 11:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseI started watching The X-Files last night. Yes, for the first time - I spent the 90s without a tv/access to pop culture, and somehow I'd never gone looking for XF since the glory that is streaming video burst onto the scene of my life.
Wow, y'all, this is pretty boss. Scully, how so awesome? She's short and not super-skinny and not dressed like a model and smart and savvy and driven and I love the way the subtext of the show, at least, is aware that she has to protect her career much more aggressively than Mulder does, that it would be a lot easier for her to lose everything via bad reputation due to her gender. And Mulder is like this babydoll Slytherin, really sweet & vulnerable but also bitchy and scathing and not above trolling when he has nothing better to do. I can see why this ship appealed to slashers so intensely! And also, that scene at the end of 1.03 with Mulder in the chapel and his hypnotic regression playing in voiceover? Holy fuck that's elegant meaning-making right there - though I did feel like I had a smallthingswithwings hovering over my shoulder making noises about manpain, courtesy of that vid.
But a lot of the thoughts I was having last night were about history and politics - which is interesting considering that I watch a lot of tv older than this - but watching XF in 2012 kind of convinced me, for the first time, that 9/11 changed everything. I have very little awareness of a time before the PATRIOT act. I'm used to the FBI being really scarily powerful, to wiretapping being no big deal, to the Feds being the omnipotent baddies, and in XF they're sort of lovably powerless! Mulder and Scully keep getting kicked off crime scenes by cops, marginalized by the government, generally cast as underdogs. The dissonance is so weird.
Also, all the microfilm scanning is making me more thankful than ever for the digital age. My god, how did anyone ever get anything done?
Wow, y'all, this is pretty boss. Scully, how so awesome? She's short and not super-skinny and not dressed like a model and smart and savvy and driven and I love the way the subtext of the show, at least, is aware that she has to protect her career much more aggressively than Mulder does, that it would be a lot easier for her to lose everything via bad reputation due to her gender. And Mulder is like this babydoll Slytherin, really sweet & vulnerable but also bitchy and scathing and not above trolling when he has nothing better to do. I can see why this ship appealed to slashers so intensely! And also, that scene at the end of 1.03 with Mulder in the chapel and his hypnotic regression playing in voiceover? Holy fuck that's elegant meaning-making right there - though I did feel like I had a small
thingswithwings hovering over my shoulder making noises about manpain, courtesy of that vid.But a lot of the thoughts I was having last night were about history and politics - which is interesting considering that I watch a lot of tv older than this - but watching XF in 2012 kind of convinced me, for the first time, that 9/11 changed everything. I have very little awareness of a time before the PATRIOT act. I'm used to the FBI being really scarily powerful, to wiretapping being no big deal, to the Feds being the omnipotent baddies, and in XF they're sort of lovably powerless! Mulder and Scully keep getting kicked off crime scenes by cops, marginalized by the government, generally cast as underdogs. The dissonance is so weird.
Also, all the microfilm scanning is making me more thankful than ever for the digital age. My god, how did anyone ever get anything done?
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Date: 2012-02-24 05:25 pm (UTC)Interesting observation -- and my God, how depressing.
I adore the X-Files and have since the first episode, although it's the monster stories rather than the series mythology that enthrall me.
Also, all the microfilm scanning is making me more thankful than ever for the digital age. My god, how did anyone ever get anything done?
It was a slower, simpler time. We didn't have to check our Facebook every five minutes.
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Date: 2012-02-24 10:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-24 05:32 pm (UTC)I remember people being all about X Files in real time, but I had a new baby and thus was oblivious.
I need to get back into it sometime, because SCULLY ROX.
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Date: 2012-02-24 10:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-24 06:17 pm (UTC)X-Files was my first fandom (I was twelve), and I still love it kind of a ridiculous amount, cheesy 90s effects and all.
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Date: 2012-02-24 10:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-24 06:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-24 10:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-24 07:37 pm (UTC)This is a perfect description.
Ohhhh, these kids. I love them probably more than any fictional characters ever, at least at certain moments! The X-Files is actually a canon I have always loved too much to read fanfiction for, even though it is a tremendously flawed canon as time goes on and there are vast amounts of holes to patch.
I spent one summer years ago watching seasons 1 - 5 for the first time as a grown-up and was also struck by a) how insouciantly people seemed to treat the FBI b) how beautiful Gillian Anderson was and is but this in the excellent context of the non-focus on her face and body as reasons the viewer should care about her. I mean, eventually the fashion is less eighties and they are kind of better lit and everyone gets prettier, but I would actually disagree that she suffers too much aesthetic meddling. I remember reading somewhere that after the first season the network wanted to get rid of her and bring in someone sexier, but Chris Carter STUCK TO HIS GUNS, which I will all my life be grateful for.
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Date: 2012-02-25 07:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-24 08:26 pm (UTC)I became convinced of the same thing while watching it for the first time a few years ago. In later seasons it becomes clear that domestic counterterrorism is regarded as the most boring and unglamorous job in the whole of the FBI, and it is just so refreshing.
I'll look forward to seeing more XF posts from you! It's great to hear how it strikes someone who's coming to it fresh.
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Date: 2012-02-25 07:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-24 09:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-25 07:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-24 10:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-25 07:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-25 03:45 pm (UTC)Even the word "manpain," like men don't feel real pain or some shit.
I am the last person ever to claim that men are oppressed, but I do believe that gender essentialism is restrictive and confining to everyone and really does nothing but harm all around. And part of that is that men aren't supposed to feel pain or get angsty (or "emo"), and so seeing a man in pain makes a lot of people feel uncomfortable, and challenges gender norms.
It's also this really fucked up thing where like, handling things LIKE A BOSS is masculine, weeping and ~feeling things~ is feminine, so if a man weeps and feels things and we hate him for it, it's not only for not toeing the line, but this kneejerky androcentrism because he's doing something feminine and all feminine things are bad and should be hated, even if it's a man doing it.
I do think it's a problem that that kind of serious, hardcore angst is shown more on male characters. These emotions are a necessary part of the hero's journey, and they're um, a bunch of other things I am too tired to type right now, but they're AWESOME and some people can't cope but seriously fuck the haters. Why we don't see these specific emotions as much on women is something I'd love to see examined. They do get to be POV characters a lot less, and when they are, they're being ~the chick~ and have to have emotions about girly things like sexual assault or breakups or missing kids. Which isn't to devalue these things at all, but guys get to explore those things all the time too (it actually weirded me out when I realized I could think of more male examples of rape survivors in my shows than female ones) and they get to do the Byronic hero thing, and they get to just angst it out hardcore about pretty much anything.
I realized a while ago that most of my favorite characters were men, and that all of them were angsty. I tried really hard to think of female characters with...are we going with womanpain? No, because manpain was terrible too. Angst, anyway, and not the sort of thing you'd find IRL, but fantastic angst. I came up with Yuna from FFX (you could seriously genderswap her and Tidus, and Tidus would be the one getting the hate, and fangirls would be creaming their panties for Yuna) and Sakura from TRC. (And only in certain parts of it, which I can't really elaborate without spoiling.) And yes, these two are among my favorite characters.
I don't think that if the vidder wanted to highlight the lack of female angst representation, mocking male angst was the way to go about it, and the mocking of male characters in pain just struck me as incredibly mean-spirited and just all around gross. I mean, you wouldn't take real men who had suffered hardship and mock their tears. I'm aware that this is fiction, but real people do identify with these characters *raises hand* so when the vidder did that I really felt like it was my pain that was being mocked.
:(
What I'm saying is, don't let that vidder ruin your enjoyment of Mulder's delicious angst. Or Scully's, for that matter, because oh yes she does have some.
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Date: 2012-02-25 08:00 pm (UTC)As an angst reader, I'm interested in grounding, prolonging, and exploring negative feelings. I like reading about male characters dealing with more internalized feelings of pain, like depression or ptsd or other negative feelings that are about the pain of just existing as a human being sometimes. Manpain is always this short sharp thing, but imo suffering tends to go on and on and on. So instead of stories about how Daniel Jackson, you know, deals with being Daniel Jackson - weird, socially marginal, lonely, transient, disconnected, insecure - we get media portrayals of Daniel crying over a dead woman. Doctor Horrible might be the banner example of this - Billy is way more interesting as an angst object before Penny gets friged, imo.
The other part of the vid that resonates for me, though, and is maybe the main reason why it resonates so powerfully for me, is the way it shows manpain as a mechanism for removing female characters. I can't speak to Who, but Supernatural and Stargate both definitely use manpain as a way of getting rid of women, tossing them out of the narrative, foreclosing the telling of their stories. Instead of having to deal with Sha're, or develop her, tptb get to sexualize her, marginalize her, kill her - and thus silence her. And, again, as an angst fan, I want the story about the long, drawn-out, complicated story of Daniel and Sha're having to deal with it all, having to confront her rape, their cultural differences, trying to pull themselves back together even after the dream has shattered. The story of how she dies doesn't hurt for long enough.
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Date: 2012-02-25 11:13 pm (UTC)But the type of male pain ("manpain" is a terrible word and it should feel bad) that I see getting mocked most in fandom is the drawn-out pain that isn't neat, isn't over quickly. The Doctor does cry briefly over losing Rose, but he continues to be sad about it for pretty much the rest of Ten's run. Not overtly or every single second, because that's not his character, he's someone very complex and layered who tends to cope more with escapism and risk-seeking, but she does come up a lot and he has trouble bonding with the next companion, yet all I ever heard from fandom was "GOD STOP GOING ON ABOUT ROSE."
The way fandom reacted to the main source of his pain was even worse. He's the only Time Lord left (usually), and his planet is gone, and he's the one who did it. Fans of the classic series know he had a...complicated and adversarial relationship with the authority figures on his planet, but that doesn't mean it wasn't genocide, and that doesn't mean it wasn't home. Nine is the first Doctor after this event, and his reaction to this pain is mostly something people are more comfortable with: anger and not talking about it. But when Ten comes along, he's got just enough distance from it that he can start unpacking it and feeling it, but not enough distance that it doesn't really hurt. And again, it's mostly fairly subtle, because it's 100% his characterization (the Doctor in general, not just Ten) to run from things he can't deal with, and he so cannot deal with this. But it's sort of like this body that's been dumped that keeps on coming back up no matter how he weights it.
And what do the fans say? That Ten's "emo." That they wish his "manpain" would just go away, because his life is fun and awesome. That the show would stop reminding us that he's terribly lonely, and while his life looks like a big carnival, he doesn't know how to stop and can't stop, even if he wants to. That he bawwwwwws. That they can't take him seriously as a character anymore. That they hope the next Doctor goes back to acting like the ones before he had to, you know, commit genocide against his own people, because this pain is getting OLD. And stop bawwing over Rose, while you're at it!
(Rose isn't even dead. And they couldn't have kept her on the show, the actress wanted to leave.)
To people who say Ten's angst is excessive, I said he could pretty much spend an entire episode doing nothing but shaking and crying, and it would not be even close to excessive. They get really frustrated with me at this point.
I think Ten's pain on Doctor Who is definitely at the point where it makes people uncomfortable, and anyone who denies this shall be introduced to some macros I've found. -____-
I don't remember what other fandoms were represented in the vid, but I know I'm into a lot of vampire fandoms as well, because the vampires have fantastic, ugly, long-term angst, and the angst-hating is pretty much at its worst there. They should just shut up and stop fretting about being undead monsters (in most cases, turned against their will, and ending up killing people even though that was very much not what they wanted) and be happy vampires like pre-chip Spike and pre-amnesia Eric Northman. Now, why there aren't many angsty female vampires, that's a huge issue, and I'd love to see that addressed. But we need more female vampire angst, not mocked male vampire angst.
I hear all these writers saying they're going to write vampire novels, you know, but cool ones, in which the vampires never feel sad, but are proper monsters that like murdering, because that's way more interesting than some cliched emo angst.
I think if the vidder did want to critique angst for being too small, they had a really funny way of going about it, and sounded almost exactly like all the angst-haters I keep failing to avoid in fandom.
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Date: 2012-02-25 04:28 pm (UTC)It was going back and watching some of the original series of Star Trek after having seen the movie that did it for me - the original series was so optimistic and exploratory, and the movie has just a completely different tone.
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Date: 2012-02-25 08:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-29 01:06 am (UTC)