been readin', been wonderin'
Masque, and wondering if Phantom of the Opera fandom has finally come to claim me after all these years, because apparently I have thoughts about Christine Daae: Monsterfucker and how it's a shame Bethany Pope's published phanphic doesn't go as hard on that as it could. Inverting the monstrosity of the fellas while also NOT inverting it because Erik still kills people and there's a glimpse of interiority for Christine (well, more than a glimpse, a third of the story), but there's this huge open door around Erik's murder and their making art until someone dies and IDK, it's all terribly Mad Love but it doesn't actually step through that door and go hard on Christine and Byron and murder and deciding she's going to learn to love that face - it's all there but the WHY isn't, it's like it collapses back into pure plot at all the wrong moments. Otherwise, quite liked it.
Talking of Mad Love, I also read Harleen, and my gosh is talking about Harleen a fucking minefield of discourse that I don't really fancy skipping through. Suffice to say that I think it's a sensitive, occasionally sexy, not at all apologetic version of the Joker/Harley romance that has Harley herself valourising it but also deep-inside self-aware about how awful it is - it's got nuance is the point I'm saying, and I think Stjepan Sepic's background in thoughtful and considered bondage erotica is helping him negotiate all of this. It's also GOOD. And the reason I want to talk about it is partly because it's good but also because I can't stay away from this kind of mindfucky groomy power-imbalancy awful-people relationship when I read and write - it's not something I live but it's absolutely something I live for, the fantasy of it, and yet I'm aware of exactly what kind of awful-yet-basic daddy-kink-yet-so-vanilla patriarchal dork-scum say things like that and I have enough decency/dignity to not be one of those guys (except what if I totally am?).
(Vaguely related, I also watched Birds of Prey with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hark for Obligation Day, and I am so here for vigilante lesbianism in what's clearly Gotham's gay village, far too gay for the extremely heterosexual Batman to get involved with, and also for unabashedly camp superhero movies that aren't afraid of being anything other than dark and quippy. Please let DC decide that since they can't compete with the Disney/Marvel Extremely Normified Superhero Propaganda Machine, they might as well go cult and camp and weird. And let them poach Taika Waititi. Obviously all corporate cinematic media is wanktoss and so on and so forth but I still want to see this dramatic industry pivot. It'll be amusing.)
Love is for Losers (proof copy, a perk of the job), and wondering why I apparently have a frustrated teenage lesbian dwelling not terribly far behind my eyes, because I never USED to be a sucker for romantic realism or high school "o shit I'm so gay" plots and sometimes I just don't know who I am any more. Maybe this is all arrested-development nonsense (I mean, it's 2020 and I'm sitting here on a LiveJournal clone, so probably)? I mean: single parent family, single sex schooling, eighteen years old before I (briefly) got a sex life, most of my twenties trying to fake middle-class heterosexual career fella... I feel like there's a lot missing there. Or maybe I'm next in the "my midlife crisis is being trans!" line that quite a few now-ladies of my acquaintance and approximate generation seem to go through - as if we've failed/been failed by masculinity so hard that rather than trying to live up to it by exaggerating (buying a motorbike or something) we just fob it off altogether. I don't even know if I'd entirely mind, although my face looks off without a beard so I'd rather eat shit than pass. (Unless I want that as a way to not be quite so problematic in my tastes, as discussed previously - is it different if it's queer, if it's a trans woman liking/writing it?) Anyway, Love is for Losers is spiky awkward broken girl meets girl who has her shit together and takes approx. 350 pages to figure it out.
Boy Parts (another proof), and wondering about life and art and such. See, there's this bit about how teenagers unironically love their faves and (if they're bein' crea'ive) their influences and wear that on their sleeves, in the kind of "my tastes are part of my identity, saying 'this sucks' is saying I suck, fight me online" way that I'm sure we've all been through to an extent. And then, by BA, they unlearn that, because they're being educated to, because they've learned that detachment protects against that particular kind of pain that comes from a perceived attack on the extended selfhood, and they learn to say things like "a perceived attack on the extended selfhood" instead. And then, maybe, they come back around to unironically liking things again, which makes me think of a) Evanescence, and how pissed off I am that they've become a meme band when they still slap and the last album has a cut of Bring Me To Life like Amy Lee WANTED to record it, and b) how I never took lyrics into any of my creative writing classes, I think because I didn't want to unlearn unironically loving them, and how all my fic is songfic now and maybe that's how I get back into unironically loving something enough to deal with all the unpaid labour and failspotting and hoo-hah of Doing Fandom, because I never ruined lyrics for myself by studying them.
And gosh, how basic is "I studied this and now it's not fun any more" - I promise I enjoy doing research, I think provided it's aligned with Making Better Things rather than Talking About Things And Trying To Sound Clever, and all of this is a roundabout way of saying I might well drop out of my PhD/tap out with an MRes/come back practice-based and actually make RPGs instead of doing theory about them, because I secretly enjoy doing something and commentating on it a great deal more than theorising and then applying theory as analysis. It's just I've done more of the analysis stuff because I was consistently deterred from creative practice outside of a very specifically bourgie mould - "you can't be in a play but you can take A-level Drama and do Music/Speech/Drama festivals and get awards and qualifications because that's acceptable and probably won't make you a willy woofter" kind of thing.
Really, that whole "frustrated lesbian theatre teen" is starting to make more and more sense. Let's go peak fandom-as-filter-for-parsing-a-difficult-world: wish I could just regenerate.
Talking of Mad Love, I also read Harleen, and my gosh is talking about Harleen a fucking minefield of discourse that I don't really fancy skipping through. Suffice to say that I think it's a sensitive, occasionally sexy, not at all apologetic version of the Joker/Harley romance that has Harley herself valourising it but also deep-inside self-aware about how awful it is - it's got nuance is the point I'm saying, and I think Stjepan Sepic's background in thoughtful and considered bondage erotica is helping him negotiate all of this. It's also GOOD. And the reason I want to talk about it is partly because it's good but also because I can't stay away from this kind of mindfucky groomy power-imbalancy awful-people relationship when I read and write - it's not something I live but it's absolutely something I live for, the fantasy of it, and yet I'm aware of exactly what kind of awful-yet-basic daddy-kink-yet-so-vanilla patriarchal dork-scum say things like that and I have enough decency/dignity to not be one of those guys (except what if I totally am?).
(Vaguely related, I also watched Birds of Prey with
hark for Obligation Day, and I am so here for vigilante lesbianism in what's clearly Gotham's gay village, far too gay for the extremely heterosexual Batman to get involved with, and also for unabashedly camp superhero movies that aren't afraid of being anything other than dark and quippy. Please let DC decide that since they can't compete with the Disney/Marvel Extremely Normified Superhero Propaganda Machine, they might as well go cult and camp and weird. And let them poach Taika Waititi. Obviously all corporate cinematic media is wanktoss and so on and so forth but I still want to see this dramatic industry pivot. It'll be amusing.)Love is for Losers (proof copy, a perk of the job), and wondering why I apparently have a frustrated teenage lesbian dwelling not terribly far behind my eyes, because I never USED to be a sucker for romantic realism or high school "o shit I'm so gay" plots and sometimes I just don't know who I am any more. Maybe this is all arrested-development nonsense (I mean, it's 2020 and I'm sitting here on a LiveJournal clone, so probably)? I mean: single parent family, single sex schooling, eighteen years old before I (briefly) got a sex life, most of my twenties trying to fake middle-class heterosexual career fella... I feel like there's a lot missing there. Or maybe I'm next in the "my midlife crisis is being trans!" line that quite a few now-ladies of my acquaintance and approximate generation seem to go through - as if we've failed/been failed by masculinity so hard that rather than trying to live up to it by exaggerating (buying a motorbike or something) we just fob it off altogether. I don't even know if I'd entirely mind, although my face looks off without a beard so I'd rather eat shit than pass. (Unless I want that as a way to not be quite so problematic in my tastes, as discussed previously - is it different if it's queer, if it's a trans woman liking/writing it?) Anyway, Love is for Losers is spiky awkward broken girl meets girl who has her shit together and takes approx. 350 pages to figure it out.
Boy Parts (another proof), and wondering about life and art and such. See, there's this bit about how teenagers unironically love their faves and (if they're bein' crea'ive) their influences and wear that on their sleeves, in the kind of "my tastes are part of my identity, saying 'this sucks' is saying I suck, fight me online" way that I'm sure we've all been through to an extent. And then, by BA, they unlearn that, because they're being educated to, because they've learned that detachment protects against that particular kind of pain that comes from a perceived attack on the extended selfhood, and they learn to say things like "a perceived attack on the extended selfhood" instead. And then, maybe, they come back around to unironically liking things again, which makes me think of a) Evanescence, and how pissed off I am that they've become a meme band when they still slap and the last album has a cut of Bring Me To Life like Amy Lee WANTED to record it, and b) how I never took lyrics into any of my creative writing classes, I think because I didn't want to unlearn unironically loving them, and how all my fic is songfic now and maybe that's how I get back into unironically loving something enough to deal with all the unpaid labour and failspotting and hoo-hah of Doing Fandom, because I never ruined lyrics for myself by studying them.
And gosh, how basic is "I studied this and now it's not fun any more" - I promise I enjoy doing research, I think provided it's aligned with Making Better Things rather than Talking About Things And Trying To Sound Clever, and all of this is a roundabout way of saying I might well drop out of my PhD/tap out with an MRes/come back practice-based and actually make RPGs instead of doing theory about them, because I secretly enjoy doing something and commentating on it a great deal more than theorising and then applying theory as analysis. It's just I've done more of the analysis stuff because I was consistently deterred from creative practice outside of a very specifically bourgie mould - "you can't be in a play but you can take A-level Drama and do Music/Speech/Drama festivals and get awards and qualifications because that's acceptable and probably won't make you a willy woofter" kind of thing.
Really, that whole "frustrated lesbian theatre teen" is starting to make more and more sense. Let's go peak fandom-as-filter-for-parsing-a-difficult-world: wish I could just regenerate.