this is sort of productive kind of

[whynot]

SNOWFLAKES: I can haz! Thank you allothi, almostinstinct, briar_pipe, not_sally, and stealingpennies! <333 \o/

You know how penknife made an SGA starter kit for people who want to get into the show but maybe don’t want to watch the zillion episodes already out? Is there something like this for Supernatural?

Speaking of TV, how about The Office and how I couldn’t finish watching the “Scott’s Tots” episode, argh. I love The Office to bits but this episode was so painful and terrible D-:

To help me think my anthropology final through, under this cut is a discussion of

The problem with my spiel on destiny and identity in Narnia is pretty well-articulated by this recent Missives from Marx post. It’s the primary roadblock between my approach to fannishly overanalyzing Narnia/Merlin/whatever and how I can actually make this flailing a viable academic paper. When I flail about it online, it’s always about “how the characters in the text advance a social agenda within the plot of the text itself” because that’s what I’m interested in as a fic writer. But I reckon my professor would probably prefer an analysis of the relationship between the text and the reader/audience.

There’s a couple of ways I can approach this.

In the case of Narnia, my impulse is to appropriate Susan Pevensie’s POV as the reader/audience’s POV i.e. our POV. The link between Susan and us is that of the rationalism and disenchantment associated with adulthood. So, whenever I write ‘the reader/audience’, I can pretend it’s fanon Susan. This is the more fun approach.

My secondary impulse is to talk about Narnia fandom. About you guys! About us! How do we relate to the text? Why do we engage with it the way we do? And we have an agenda. We criticize Lewis’s Christian moralizing and of-the-era misogyny, and we rescue Susan from judgment, we rescue colonial stories from being narrativized into a romanticized tale of victory and conquest, and we take back life from death when, during The Last Battle, life is declared to be inferior to death.

However, I am intrigued by caramelsilver’s assertion that there are two Narnia fandoms: one that is primarily bookverse in which Lewis’s image of Narnia as a pastoral idyll is perpetuated, which chills out over at fanfiction.net; and one that I’ve already described in the previous paragraph in which the fantasy is rationalized and critiqued, chilling out primarily on Livejournal (and Skyhawke and AO3?). Perhaps this can be my question in my paper: what does this splinter signify? What is at stake? Then I bring out the big guns about subjectification, identity, internalization, and the subaltern. Why are their agendas different and how are they the same? What draws these fans together and what instigates their self-enclosure in a subsection of fandom? Hmm, this is not to say that the first and second groups of Narnia fen are mutually exclusive.

I started reading Magic Abjured: Closure in Children’s Fantasy Fiction because I’m the kind of dork who reads JSTOR articles for fun. Gilead refers to fantasy stories where the protagonists are whisked off to a magical world Other to our own, and she identifies 3 ways that these stories end:

1) The return to the ‘real world’ justifies the foray into the fantasy world as necessary to the spiritual/emotional/mental growth that the children will need in the non-fantasy world e.g. Baum’s Wizard of Oz and Maurice Sendak’s picture books.
2) The return to the real world dismisses and belittles the fantasy world by treating it sentimentally. The return tends to come as an interruption than as a resolution e.g. Carroll’s Alice books.
3) The return does not justify nor dismiss the fantasy, thus “fostering a neurotic avoidance of social and psychic realities” (Gilead 278) e.g. Barrie’s Peter Pan.

#1 is what Lewis seems to think Narnia is, and what the first group of fen on ffnet perpetuates. #3 is what Narnia actually is. Alternatively, #3 is how the second group of fen interpret Narnia (and I’m obviously part of this group, so). (Just for fun, #2 is how Susan interprets Narnia.) One can of course postulate other ways that these stories end. In her endnotes, Gilead brings up the idea that the closure in Narnia stories are actually none of the above and end with – #4 – the absence of expected return. What this means, she does not elaborate. Also intriguing is the idea of evaluating the series of returns and closures in the whole Chronicles.

And then at this point I usually think, okay, this is all well and good, but how can I tie this back to my readings mythology and ideology? To individuation within and without the group? To conditions of production? To structuralism and poststructuralism and empiricism and imperialism and yaddayaddablahblah-ism and cultural formation? That’s the fucking thing about anthropology, everything is one big amorphous blob. I think what is key is not losing sight of the reader’s relationship with the text, and this can happen by discussing a number of things: the adult/child dichotomy, the reality/fantasy divide, the id/superego conflict, and whether rationalism and innocence are mutually exclusive terms. Maybe I should just write ‘the reader’ when I actually mean Susan. Sure I’d be projecting, but what academic isn’t?

Apparently what I want to do for my final paper is to paraphrase Gilead’s article, but to also include Narnia and Narnia fandom.


Or, I can just write my final paper about fandom in general, or maybe ‘Merlin’ fandom specifically! Hoo man, ideology and mythology in ‘Merlin’ fandom, that is a completely different post.

Randomly, I miss watching Ocean Girl :(. WHERE ARE YOU, OCEAN GIRL SEASON 4.

ETA: Hilarious vid rec of the whenever!: Arthur in the Afternoon. "A dazzling tribute to Arthur Pendragon and his amazing wooing skills. Or, an incisive exploration of the increasingly shameless objectification of Bradley James by the British Broadcasting Corporation."

Comments

[zempasuchil.livejournal.com]

I think the split in Narnia fandom, between canon/diverging from canon I guess, might be more prominent than in other fandoms? there's this sort of false dichotomy between the options of either going along with Lewis' allegory or critiquing it - unfortunately many of us are too emotionally involved with the text to approach it from some middle ground rather than just Way Subjectively or Way Postmodernly/Deconstruction-ally.

uhhhhh I've been working on papers all day and I guess that is why I just made a big claim about Narnia didn't I

I like your idea of identifying Susan with the audience - it's weird but it actually works, because this audience that you're identifying is one looking at things objectively/from the outside, like Susan is.

OH NEAT those three types and an analysis of that is fascinating! I kind of get what she means by #4 - every time they return they're reminded that they can't stay forever and have to go back (whether they get banned or someone else does), and then when they can all go back forever it's not the same Narnia. "better", whatever, it's not the *same*. And in fact it's never the same - they do all sorts of time and space travel so they never end up visiting the same situation twice, right? soooo disorienting.

I think Susan is the key to looking at all these things - structuralism, poststructuralism, whatever - but it's hard because most of that exists in fan speculation and self-identification as a reader who's moved beyond the Narnia of childhood. It sounds like you have really interesting things to say about Narnia fandom and its split, though, and that's more substantial than a few lines about "no longer a friend of Narnia." Maybe you could look at both of them and maybe parallel the ff.net fen with the Narnia Faithful and the postNarnia (!! postnarnia?!) fen with Susan?

Ideology and mythology in Merlin might be easier... Except it's not part of a myth that people really *believe* in, right? :/

(oh my god, I feel like I'm drunk commenting but I'm honestly just really really tired. it's that weird post-coffee tired, do you know what I mean? caffeine crash possibly? :P)

[twoskeletons.livejournal.com]

It's all 'cos of the movies. There was a Narnia fandom before, but then LWW came out and the fandom grew a little more, but PC brought on the real second wave. Because it was wildly different from the books, it brought on a wildly different strain of fans, and now here we all are, being all invested and emotional and dorky about it. lol big claims about Narnia, THAT IS ALL I AM DOING HERE. XD

trufax, the Pevensies never get to return to anything. Return is the TRAGIC LIE. All Pevensies do is move forward ever onward!

POSTNARNIA. OH MY PANZER WE ARE TOTALLY THAT KID omg lolz <3333333 \o/

When the Gilead article talks about the reader/audience, it totally sounds like she's talking about Susan, which was how I got the idea. And hey why not, because if Susan is the reader, and I identify with Susan, AND I'm also the one writing the essay, then HEY trifecta! Everything is a symbol for everything else, and SUBJECTIVITY IS A LIE and apparently not an option here hahahaha. But we won't tell my professor. But somehow the paper would be Susan's observations on herself as she reads the story of her life. IS THAT MY PAPER OR IS IT FIC? This class is a total trip.

I don't know about the story of Merlin itself, because I think if I were going to take on the Arthurian legends, I'd have to account for the billions of retellings. I am no Arthurian scholar. But what IS interesting is Merlin fandom itself! How the fandom becomes an arena for the reclamation/discussion of the subaltern! I have never been in a fandom like Merlin before. I'm just like O_O sometimes! On top of everything else, everyone is so hyperaware (or at least hyperconcerned) of the race/gender implications in the narrative, and everyone is all about EMPOWERMENT. I mean, you wanna talk about emotional investment? Everybody wants to write empowering stories with happy payoffs all the effing time! Seriously, before 'Merlin' came along, my default writing mood was ~dark~, but then 'Merlin' fandom came along and was like, "Lighten up! Let's have a gender party instead! Whee, gender! Empowerment yay!" Then it threw some glitter on me and danced a jig, I swear.

[zempasuchil.livejournal.com]

That is true, the fans brought in by PC are more open to interpretation and reinterpretation of Narnia in general.

they do, just like in LB! Further up and further in! but, like freud says, all we really want to do is regress to childhood.

XDDD oh man, we are that kid, and do you know what? I love it. rock on, us :D

But somehow the paper would be Susan's observations on herself as she reads the story of her life. IS THAT MY PAPER OR IS IT FIC?
Let's call it meta, and let's remember that all meta is really an essay :D

Can I ask, also, what is the subaltern? I wiki'd it and felt satisfied but now I just put the term in my essay and I don't want to have it wrong. it's someone who's totally excluded by cultural hegemony, right? someone who has no power or voice in it and can't possibly ever? oddly enough I'm writing about subjectivity. sometimes I wonder if you should be writing about postcolonialism and literature as an academic because it so makes me think of you.

YES wow you've hit it on the head! Empowerment! And I think it's totally a reaction against the show's 1) focus on destiny, but more importantly, 2) already-determined-bad-end: things are going to be tragic, right, and Arthur's pretty much gonna die. fans want to change things and in this case we have to convince ourselves that we have control of our own futures, that we have power that can be used for good and the same goes for Morgana, that Uther/the Man will not triumph, and that Arthur is not going to be Uther / progress is real and revolution is possible.

But you're right, geez, Merlin's the most intentionally happy fandom ever. wow.

[twoskeletons.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and I don't think myth has to be believed in to be real. I'm not talking about myth as something explicitly religious (though it can be), but more like a collective subconscious thing. Something both urtext and subtext, ummmm like if we're focusing on something on just the smell instead of the thing that smells? Oh lord, defining myth, ALWAYS FUN (NOT) (MAYBE A LITTLE).

I'm no Arthurian scholar or medievalist at all, so I'm really not sure. Fanonically there are, which is interesting, and maybe that's where my paper should lie. Like, even when the ficcers are writing about Narnia, the Arthurian tropes are so inescapable that we end up using them to make richer stories. Maybe it's not about how Arthuriana influences Narnia, so much as how it influences Narnia fandom?

[zempasuchil.livejournal.com]

oh so I guess when I said belief, I was thinking about anthropology. Like, the place of mythology in a culture has a lot to do with how much the culture thinks about it, right? It'd be easier to write about Christian mythology's affect on people than Arthurian mythology's because hardly anyone thinks that Arthurian mythology affects them. but I am not the one taking a class on myth so I am sort of guessing wildly here.

[be-themoon.livejournal.com]

I am not aware of any starter kit for SPN, but I could write you one, actually. I might later today or tomorrow, my school is starting to ease down (I can comment on my flist! I feel so happy). :D

I agree with Z and Caroline - there totally is a fandom disconnect in the Narnia fandom, and it is mostly marked by the divide between fanfiction.net and LJ. I've been on fanfiction.net, and the Narnia fandom there tends to be anti-incest, believe that the kids were sad upon returning to England but didn't really have many issues, and also give the kids long romances in Narnia. Whereas on LJ, there's, well, I guess this corner of the fandom, which tends to look at Narnia to deconstruct it and generally believes the kids are totally screwed up upon return.

(also, Z is totally right about how the return is never really a return. the Pevensies are never given the option of a return, actually, except for Lucy and Edmund at the end of PC, who then don't actually return. which, you know, sucks for them.)

[be-themoon.livejournal.com]

that's a good deal of it too, probably. The books are so heavy-handed, I think it's hard for me to enjoy them almost at all, whereas the movies, like you said, do treat it a lot more realistically, what with issues and everything.

That does make sense. And different people gravitate to the different forms of the text because of their beliefs about the story. I think a lot of it is informed by worldview as well. I know several of the major people in the much more book-based fandom, and many of them are Christians, whereas I think most of the people I know in the movie-based/Lewis-criticizing fandom have a really wide range of religion/nonreligion. Backgrounds inform our view a lot too.

I guess it's a mix of things. :P

[twoskeletons.livejournal.com]

I just watched the first 4 episodes of SPN and I can see why some feminists have road rage over it, but I am def intrigued. Well, I didn't watch Wendigo only 'cos I watched the ending of it ages and ages ago, back when the premise of the show just made me eyeroll. "They probably won't represent the monsters correctly," I thought, and apparently I am right(?) but not in the way I thought I'd be.

From reading the comments in this post, I concur with almostinstinct that the bookverse and movieverse splinter groups are essentially interpreting different texts. Movieverse actually touches on how difficult it is to adjust back to England after 15 years in Narnia, so it's less of a leap from there than from bookverse. The themes are different.

[be-themoon.livejournal.com]

I love SPN. I really, really do. The constant beating up of women on the show is basically it's only downside with me (other than hi, monsters and ghosts, which I have problems watching because I freak out). I made you a primer! It is... long, because so many of the episodes are good. But if you only watch episodes I rated, like 7-8 and up, those are the ones that are needed to watch. As for the monsters, I dunno. I don't really care much about what happens. but yeah.



splinter groups! ahahaha. fandom = really weird politics, complete with idealogies, mythologies and other such crazy things. uh. but yes! different texts, and I think the backgrounds of the people is one of the things that makes the groups so different too.

[marycontraire.livejournal.com]

AAAH, THINKY THOUGHTS ABOUT NARNIA. I must come back and read this post more carefully when I have actual time. Which might be never, actually, or at least not until Christmas day, as I sit in a sea of wrapping paper bits and dazedly ponder how I managed to get through all of my finals (WHICH END ON DECEMBER 23, WHAT THE HELL?), buy presents for my family, and navigate Christmas Eve-apalooza at my house without collapsing from exhaustion or resorting to getting drunk with my dad. That is assuming that I do manage to do all of these things, of course.

So in the mean time:

+ Supernatural. You really need to start at the beginning and watch the first season all the way though and then decide if you're sticking with it or not. (You will stick with it. No one can resist its magical powers. Or the Impala.) However, feel free to skip "Hook Man," because that episode just sucks.

+ I definitely belong to the "critique Lewis" camp of Narnia fandom, but even while we all throw down about how much we hate his Christian moralizing, I think his incorporation of religion is the most fascinating part of the series, and without it I would doubtless find the books boring. (Maybe that's why I like this splinter of fandom best? Because in our confrontation with his ideas of religion, we all manage to incorporate some of our own ideas about it and problems with it, etc.?)

But I think I'm a bit of an exception to the rule in this part of the fandom, because a lot of people I've talked to about it either don't approach the stories from a Christian perspective, or are nominally Christian but don't really practice, and thus didn't notice the religious subtext as a child, and only returned to it when they were older.

For me, Narnia has been all about religion since I was six, when I first joined my Church's catechism school, which is called "Narnia." I shit you not. I would be all, "Mom, do I have to go to Narnia after school?" So when I finally read the books at age seven or eight, I immediately looked for the subtext and found it staring me in the face. I think it was one of the first times I ever had the experience of understanding that a text I was reading was referencing another text I was familiar with (I was seven! Or eight!), and I think I really enjoyed that about it. And when I was a little kid, I thought Susan was boring and Lucy was fun, so. It wasn't until I got older and re-read them that I had all this criticism. And love for Susan.

[lazaefair.livejournal.com]

I still have trouble understanding sometimes how someone wouldn't realize immediately all the religious parallels in Narnia, especially LWW. I grew up in a very Christian home, so even at age 7 (or whenever) it jumped out at me really blatantly. In the years afterwards whenever the question came up, "Is Narnia a religious allegory?" my answer for a long time was, "This is considered a valid question?"

[twoskeletons.livejournal.com]

I'm gonna stay here for Christmas though so I reckon I actually have to buy Christmas presents for people this time. UGH WITH WHAT MONEY. MAYBE I WILL JUST GIVE THEM PAPER SNOWFLAKES GODDAMN.

I've watched the first 4 episodes excepting Wendigo 'cos I watched the last ten minutes of it, like, forever ago.

It's like Lewis talks entirely in tropes without fleshing anything out, so it's easy to flesh it in any direction you please. I loved critiquing Lewis when I first starting writing Narnia fic, but now I feel like the tables have turned, because now I actually enjoy theology, and it's all because of overanalyzing Narnia. I've become more sympathetic to the religious mind and somewhere Lewis is laughing at me I'm sure.

didn't notice the religious subtext as a child, and only returned to it when they were older.
This is me. My third grade teacher read it to us in class and even showed us a video, but it didn't occur to me that it was Christian at all. I was only vaguely interested in the first Narnia movie, but then PC came out and I fell hard in love because it totally brought up what horrified me about the LWW ending. And THEN I started reading the entire Chronicles, and was amused/horrified (amurified?!) at how blatant and clumsy they are. I like Narnia's questions, but not their answers, I guess.

[animus-wyrmis.livejournal.com]

Man, I hate the split in the fandom, because it is all bookverse people on ff.net writing things that are not as good and do not seek to critique on the one hand, and awesome movieverse people on the other, and I am sooooo bookverse it isn't even funny, but almost all the writers I love are movieverse. :(

I think the split can also be explored with the approaches to post-LB Susan fics. FF.net fics seem to have Susan being silly/dumb, generally hating on her siblings, having silly friends, and running away--sometimes literally--from Aslan. She isn't supposed to be running and it's not sympathetically portrayed; she's one of those "atheists" who really just hate (or not even that--feel betrayed by?) God or want the freedom to do what they want (ie sin) instead of doing good things. Whereas lj seems more prone to understanding Susan and presenting her favorably, and seem to have less of a firm interpretation--we waver about whether she remembers or not, when she drops away, and why. And lj critiques Aslan, which ff.net tends to refuse to do.

I think on lj there's more of a push to see Lewis as punishing Susan for being sensible/silly in the wrong ways/a girl; on ff.net Susan is seen as bringing it All On Herself and therefore gets punished more (because losing your whole family isn't enough??), usually until she wises up and apologizes to everyone. ::sigh:: And ff.net is maybe more likely to want to explore the chivalric Golden Age in long narratives than we are? (I think to some extent this is a site divide--lj is not really very helpful with longer fics.) And then they throw in romances and things, whereas I think if we did that it would be about expanding the empire while having romances/sex/political alliances while sleeping with Peridan, because there's much more of a "wtf colonialism" thing going on here. [Someday I am going to write an epic Aravis fic, and it is going to be awesome.]

I guess I am in the middle of these groups because I am not a big fan of dark!Aslan or a Jadis who is anything less than a total psychopath or incest, but I have soooo many problems with Lewis, agh.

I think the argument that Narnia is #1 on her list of Fantasy Journey Endings would be much stronger if the kids were ever given a chance to use any skills acquired at home, or even shown enjoying themselves with any non-Narnia person at home, like, ever. [What does she say about Oz given that Dorothy eventually returns for good?] And hooooooow can they not be screwed up afterward?!?!

[lazaefair.livejournal.com]

Man, I hate the split in the fandom, because it is all bookverse people on ff.net writing things that are not as good and do not seek to critique on the one hand, and awesome movieverse people on the other, and I am sooooo bookverse it isn't even funny, but almost all the writers I love are movieverse. :(

You just encapsulated why I haven't gotten involved with Narnia fandom and now feel very ambivalent about the whole thing despite my undying love for the books. :/ All the great ficcers are movieverse whereas I couldn't stand to watch more than 20 minutes of Prince Caspian before deciding I didn't give a flying crap about these characters and turning it off.

And hooooooow can they not be screwed up afterward?!?!

Because it's a light fantasy series for children. How many children's tales are so, so utterly effed up but we (or at least I) ate it up when we were kids because we weren't old enough to realize the authors were ignoring all these dark implications? Most of them, really. I personally love all the deconstructions and expansions going on in the adult Narnia fandom and cringe at all the gaping psychological holes Lewis left in his characters. But at the same time, I still cherish my childhood Narnia, with her lighthearted characters waltzing through adventures that really appealed to the mundane middle-class kid trapped in suburbia.

[twoskeletons.livejournal.com]

I don't really see how longer fics are more difficult on LJ. Bedlam's managed XD. I can see how maybe the fandom on ffnet is more concentrated because everyone posts to the same place and there's more a sense of community, so maybe you're more likely to keep up with things? Whereas in LJ fandom, even the Narnia fandom is kind of divided, uh, or even MORE concentrated into slash, RPF, and refuting Lewis. And even within these categories, there are different cliques.

EPIC ARAVIS FIC ABOUT COLONIALISM?? \o/! TELL ME MORE.

I don't tend to see Aslan as dark, at least not in a malicious way. Distant, maybe. Inscrutable. And Jadis may be a psychopath but that's part of why she's so interesting! It's like how some people protest that omg Mordred is not evil he's just fucked up and oppressed, and, yeah, exactly. But it's not about "I think XYZ but" but "I think XYZ and".

I think the argument that Narnia is #1 on her list of Fantasy Journey Endings would be much stronger if the kids were ever given a chance to use any skills acquired at home, or even shown enjoying themselves with any non-Narnia person at home, like, ever.
Trufax. I wish Gilead had written about Narnia, but she only mentioned it in footnotes. Moar academic articles about Narnia plz! I didn't read the Oz parts too closely, I just skipped ahead to the parts about Alice and Peter Pan and Where The Wild Things Are because those are the texts I'm familiar with.

And hooooooow can they not be screwed up afterward?!?!
Well maybe that's the point, that they are a little bit different. 'Cos Lewis is saying, "Yeah, you're kind of out of step with things because you are sticking to your ideals i.e. Christianity! And that's okay."

[katakokk.livejournal.com]

I think the split fandom is the most interesting one (though fandom in general, or the Susan POV = readers' POV is also incredibly fascinating; I need to take a class where I can do this), because it's sort of unique to Narnia fandom (there are always divides in fandoms based on pairing, but this is like two separate entities entirely). And if you write this paper, I kind of really want to see it.

I NEED TO READ THIS JSTOR ARTICLE. ANOTHER WAY TO PROCRASTINATE FOR FINALS.

[twoskeletons.livejournal.com]

Yes, because what does that say about the reader? I think there is the assumption that the reader is this completely objective figure looking at all these and making unbiased opinions, but that is totally not true! Maybe Gilead is only talking about the reader as a construct of the author's mind. Maybe the author only conceives of the reader as a non-criticizing receptacle of these ideas, when that is not the case. Maybe the author's reader is ALSO just a fictional construct!

It is totally a fascinating article. If you can't access JSTOR, I can send you the PDF.

[dhobikikutti]

Don't have time to read other comments, but I think that you make a good case for using Narnia and its fandom as an example of how personal mythologies shape literary mythologies - that is, how the stories we live shape how we interact with stories. I know I wrote fix it fic for Narnia in part to rationalise the emotional investment I had made in it as a kid, with the huge problems and resentment I had with it as an adult. Similarly, look at how the kids in Bridge to Terebithia interact with Narnia, vs Neil Gaiman's story The Problem of Susan.

[twoskeletons.livejournal.com]

During our last anthro class, one student was talking about how he wished the class had focused more on how ideologies/mythologies shape art and I totally agree with him, though I didn't vocally say so. The class veered more towards politics and economics, which okay fair enough, but then that means that my ramblings about the effects of mythology and ideology on aesthetics were (mostly) confined to LJ.

I never read Bridge to Terebithia. They interacted with Narnia?! Or are you talking about the book's fantasy world in of itself.

[mrinalinee.livejournal.com]

I agree with other comments about Supernatural! Sort of? I am only just finishing up S2, so I don't know much, but as far as I can tell it's got a format sort of similar to the X-Files (there have been at least 3 occasions at which I have said, wtf Kripke I have seen this X-Files episode before) in that there are some mytharc-heavy episodes and they are developed pretty inconsistently throughout the season and standalone monster-of-the-week episodes and OMG DEAD WOMAN IN MY LIFE angstangstangst. The race/gender issues are there pretty much from the beginning, but it's mostly the obvious stuff: a lot of fridging and women-as-the-object-of-male-desire and hyper-sexualized violence, but I think that's just a product of the horror-ish/roadtrippy genre that they're trying to emulate; it's easy enough to ignore if you just want to enjoy the silliness - and there were a couple of times I thought they were even trying to address it, but either they failed pretty spectacularly or I was giving the writers too much credit to begin with; I'm thinking of "Skin" in particular; unrelatedly, if you do watch that episode, and I really liked it: it's one of creepier episodes of season 1 and sets up the plot for "Nightshifter" which is one of the better episodes of season 2, I challenge you to look at Dean's face in, idk, one of these scenes where Sam is tied up and tell me it looks like a human face because it does not, omg, it is green, what is up with the lighting in this series and why is it so weird. Run-on sentences yay! Also, I totally think you should watch the racist truck episode just because it is so lulzy and failtastic; once or twice I though "wow, this is really unintentionally offensive" but most I just. could not. stop laughing. I am laughing just thinking about. In public. Anyway, the series itself pretty top-heavy, and I could look up the episodes that just give you an idea of the mytharc if you like, but it really depends on what interests you most. The mytharc-heavy episodes are not necessarily the creepiest/most compelling imo, but I am pretty allergic to mytharcs in general OMG THE X-FILES AND THE WAY IT ENDED THERE IS NOT ENOUGH D: IN THE WORLD. Also that show I will not talk about here. HOW MANY TIMES CAN I USE THE WORD MYTHARC IN A PARAGRAPH.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, they are selling seasons 4 and 5 of the X-Files on amazon for like $20 each and I am pretending this is within my budget, which one do I waaaaant. Season 4 was the one with the incesty Pennsylvanian farmers AND WE ALL KNOW HOW I AM ABOUT INCEST AND PENNSYLVANIA but season 5 had some pretty funny episodes and was it also the year that they were on a motherfucking boat and there was kissing? Or was that season 6? WHY HAVE YOU INSPIRED THIS NOSTALGIA IN MEEEEE. Why am I talking like this, more importantly.

I love JSTOR. How much of my life do I waste looking for articles on the appropriation of Lilith into the Judeo-Christian tradition and THINGS OF THAT NATURE and pretending it is fic research? (Lucifer fic about Lilth and bb!Maz, y/y?) So much. That disconnect is so interesting though! I always thought that LJ was pretty consistently divided and at war between squee-y types and meta-y types (not that people who squee can't meta and vice versa but.) so that is pretty crazy! P-possibly it has something to do with the fact that the canon is finished and was long before the advent of online fandom (unlike HP) so people have some more distance, but it is also like, there is undeniable ~literary merit~ (oh CS Lewis, Milton scholar) and also OUR CHILDHOODS so it makes sense that people might not want to touch that. Unlike Merlin, which everyone knows is kind of terrible - I'm pretty sure the writers know that even - so we can read anything into it that we feel like? And also bring the dinosaurs. WHATEVER, WHO KNOWS WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT ANYMORE.

[twoskeletons.livejournal.com]

I've read a review where people say that Supernatural is very like X-Files in tone! It hasn't been supercreepy yet so far for me - well, the haunted asylum was creepy I guess - but perhaps it is only a matter of time. And if I think about it, why am I not in SPN fandom already anyway?! It's got folklore, Christian mythology, road trips, questionable family dynamics, and it's set in the US so I don't have to be Britpicked yay.

I'm not bothered by the gender/racefail I think, I just can't not notice it. It's like what we were discussing a while back about how now I now have sensitive faildar thanks to fandom. I mean, I don't want to not see it, it's just that now it's a big part of how I process stories. If I want to focus on other aspects of the narrative, I consciously have to tell my faildar to calm down.

LOL RACIST TRUCK WUT

ALSO LOL I actually do not know about your thing with incest and Pennsylvania, I have not seen you mention it. Maybe you should?! WHAT KISSING ON A MOTHERFUCKING BOAT, WHAT. Maybe what you should do is make a list of the shippiest X-Files episode XD.

Lucifer fic about Lilth and bb!Maz, y/y
YYYYYYYYYYYYYY

I agree with almostinstinct up there that the two groups of Narnia fen are dealing with different texts. The books are happyfuntimes, but the movies articulate some consequences that Lewis completely glossed over. It's less of a leap to go from the Prince Caspian movie to post-Narnia angst and anger at god, because the movie actually touches on this. Narnia-wise I end up gravitating towards what Lewis doesn't say, rather than what he does.

A dinosaur's opinion on fantasy stories. (http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=720)