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allothi, almostinstinct, briar_pipe, not_sally, and stealingpennies! <333 \o/
You know howpenknife 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 bycaramelsilver’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."
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."
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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)
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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.
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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.
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Yes, the subaltern is that. FUNNY YOU SHOULD MENTION HAVING NO VOICE, because the article I was reading about it (quite short, 5 pages) is Can the Subaltern Speak? (http://dspace.library.uu.nl:8080/bitstream/1874/29948/1/scan011.2.pdf). The subaltern are victims of epistemic violence. Their stories are written by their oppressors. "The terms 'people' and 'subaltern classes' [are] used as synonymous throughout [Guha's definition]. The social groups and elements included in this category represent the demographic difference between the total population and all those whom we have described to be 'elite'."
SOMETIMES I WONDER TOO, but then would I start to hate it, because it is no longer a hobby, but WORK? I do wonder if I get my PhD, if I'd get it in, like, international development, or if I'll go in for comparative literature or some crap. I hear there is a grad program at Harvard about FOLKLORE. *grabby hands*
It's totally reactionary, but why? Is it because it is a large fandom and this is just the specific section I find myself in? But HP was pretty large and these sorts of discussions didn't constantly came up. Is it because the subtext brings queer theorists to the yard? Is 'Merlin' just particularly gender/racefaily that it needs to be commented on? I don't think it is the most faily show out there though. WHAT IS IT ABOUT THIS SHOW AND ITS FANDOM. Admittedly, I've never been immersed in such large fandoms before. Narnia is tiny and all about Susan, and is a total downer canon, and BDS is all about VIOLENCE and, like, didn't have any women in it, so wasn't conducive to these sorts of discussion.
REVOLUTION IS POSSIBLE BUT WILL NEED TO BE REVOLTED AGAINST EVENTUALLY D:
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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?
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THIS IS JUST GIVING ME CRACK BUNNIES, SGRIO. It is the apocalypse, and Arthur is wandering around dazed around this modern London trying to get a grip on himself so he can save the world, when he bumps into this dude in a white dress. And Jesus is like, who are you? And Arthur says I'm Arthur I'm here to save this land. And of course Jesus is like noooo I'M here to save this land! AND THEN THEY DUKE IT OUT.
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They can meet for tea afterward and compare world-saving methods!
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These stories and folk tales and folk wisdom are totally still with us, so they totally affect us. But how? How does folk tales affect us as opposed to religion?
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And then later subversions in fantasy literature: it's harder to write about women deconstructing gender roles in our shifting modern day, but relatively easier to write about the female knight exploding into a medieval man's world (Alanna, I'm looking at you), especially when the medieval world is also fictional. Haven't there been a bunch of books in the last two decades about the "women behind the throne" in Arthurian and Shakespearian tales?
The last humanities course I took was Sociology 101 freshman year, so take my ramblings with a large a grain of salt as you please.
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Oh yeah, definitely, that was pretty much the whole point of Star Trek. With fantasy/sci-fi, it's easy to construct an entire society devoted to justifying your Morality Anvil. Now that I think about it, C.S. Lewis kind of did the same thing - basically reconstructing BibleLand within a schema of European fairy tales (maybe to make it more accessible to the European Christian child who wouldn't be able to relate as much to the Bible's original Middle Eastern milieu?)
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Gender roles are really hard to deconstruct without accidentally promoting offensive tropes anyway. /whine
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