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selenakTaken from a lot of people, this week's fannish five:
The five favourite relationships in my fandoms
Only five? Yikes. That demands some ruthless cutting and slashing. (No, that that way.) (Well, except for... you'll see.)
1) Buffy and Dawn in BTVS. I have a thing for sibling relationships, and having been an older sister, there was such a lot that I recognised here. The ups, the downs. Of all of Buffy's relationships, this is probably my favourite. More on Buffy and Dawn when I finally get around to writing that essay.
2) Londo and G'Kar in Babylon 5. Yes, you're all so surprised. And here's where I regret the limit of five, because I love the friendship between Londo and Vir almost as much, but the Londo/G'Kar (interpret that any way you want) arc is the core of the show, and the best thing JMS ever wrote. It actually pulls off the mortal enemies turning into friends/companions/whatever you want to call them by time season 5 ends thing which many fandoms are so fond of in fanfic, without ever trivalizing the massive issues on the way. On the contrary, JMS makes it harder by actually showing us Londo's fall first, in all ugly details, instead of presenting it as backstory (backstory being something fans are much more easily inclined to forgive).
3) Amanda and Duncan in Highlander. Because it's pretty unique. Amanda and Duncan never were presented as Destined Lovers (tm). Duncan's Star-Crossed Love (tm) was Tessa. They had a lot of sex over the centuries, sure, but above all they were and remained friends. He forgave her her occasional double-crosses. She could pull him out of his brooding and make him laugh when life was pretty horrible. And when it really counted, they were there for each other.
4) Angel and Connor on AtS, only barely etching out Angel and Darla. After spending a season and a half without caring about Angel the character (from Epiphany onward, I think, till A New World), this father-son tragedy made me empathize with him again, completely. They were such a messed-up, intense pair, he and Connor, and Connor himself competes with his mother (and Buffy) for being my favourite overall Jossverse character.
5) John Crichton and Scorpius in Farscape. Yes, there are a lot of interesting and likable relationships on Farscape but this dark one intrigues me more than any other. Blue-eyed obsessive 1, meet blue-eyed obsessive 2, via torture, mind games, alliance of necessity and several other bizarre courtship rituals.
***
I've been biting my tongue about politics in recent weeks, since there was more than enough strong feeling on lj already. (And outside of lj. I've been having conversations with my father which basically circle around an "I won't visit Bush Land in the next four years and neither should you"/ "Let's keep a little perspective, shall we?" exchange.)![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
yuki_onna wittily related the extreme polarization to the recent film version of Lord of the Rings, saying that most lj'ers cast Bush & Co. as Sauron and wonder why the 50-something % who voted for him didn't see it that way. Which reminds me, Time Magazine in 2002 actually in its review of The Two Towers cast Saruman as Osama Bin Laden and the Americans as the beleagured humans and hobbits, which horrified one of the film's stars, Viggo Mortensen, so much that he wrote a letter in protest and appeared on a lot of talk shows wearing "No Blood For Oil" t-shirts.
Now personally, I find both extremes annoying. The Americans-as-Hobbits line by Time writer Richard Corliss evoked a disbelieving "How self deluded can you get?" from me at the time, but conversely, I don't see Bush & Co. qualifying for the Prince-of-Darkness label just yet. But I think what this points towards is more than a bi-partisan longing for a world in which villains are clearly seen as such and get their proper defeat, it's that we really don't see the same things anymore, if we ever did. "If you could see what I've seen with your eyes..." says Roy Batty, the rebel android, in Blade Runner. He means something else, but that is the problem. I look at Bush and don't see a prince of darkness, but I do see a dangerously deluded man of limited intelligence and abilities, without any kind of intellectual or emotional curiosity about what is outside his immediate circle, who has caused much havoc in the world already and will continue to do more. That he's (probably) a good husband and father is as irrelevant in this context as George III. civic virtues were.
Meanwhile, I do have friends of different political persuasions, both in RL and in the lj world (hobsonphile and shezan, for example), who look at Bush and see someone completely different. They see a competent leader of moral integrity etc. And I don't think either of us has had access to facts and reports the other hasn't read/seen/heard. We look at the same material, but we don't see the same thing, and that seems to be a universal experience these days.
Errol Morris, whose documentary about Robert McNamara, The Fogs of War, won respect from both sides of the political spectrum, wrote a great analysis of this cognitive dissonance apropos the recent pictures from Fallujah. Since not everyone is registered with the NY Times, I'll give you some crucial quotes:
We can imagine, in the privacy of our thoughts, that war is heroic and honorable - even noble. Photography can make it difficult for us to maintain these illusions. Take the recent videotape of the Iraqi insurgent in Falluja being shot and killed by a marine. It does not tell us everything we need to know about what happened. It does not tell us what the marine was thinking or what his prisoner was thinking - that is, what he was thinking before he was shot dead. But it does tell us that something happened. And, as a result, it makes the shooting, the killing, much harder to deny.
No doubt, there will be an investigation - an attempt to provide context - to fill in the details: why the prisoner was there and who he was; whether the marine was acting on instructions from his superiors and what those might have been; or whether he acted in self-defense. One central question remains: What are we looking at? And that question will not go away.
(...)
For many people, the interpretation of this videotape will devolve into general questions about Iraq. People will interpret this videotape according to their ideological dispositions. Are we looking at the face of freedom on the march, or at the footprint of an out-of-control behemoth leaving a trail of bodies in its wake? For the true believers in the war in Iraq, these images will make little impression. For them, the ends for which this war is being fought justify the means. War is bloody, brutal; the enemy is vicious. But the objective of extending freedom redeems what has to be done to achieve it. In this view the war is unfortunate but necessary.
For people, like myself, who are deeply skeptical about this war, it is not clear what the "ends" of this war might be. It doesn't seem as if Iraq is freer or will be freer in the near future. Call me a naysayer or a skeptic, but what I see in the newspapers all seems evidence of mayhem. And with no end of the war in sight, the terrible means - the manner in which this war is being fought - seem, at best, misguided and at worst, deeply wrong.
Of course, such philosophical deliberations are easier when you're thousands of miles away, when you're neither the marine or the prisoner, neither the British woman who worked for years to help others and now has been murdered, nor the mother who lost children in the most recent bombings. If you're actually living there, your point of view sounds more likely like this.
I'd call it fascinating, except that I fear this increasing gulf of perception will only grow and ultimately contribute to more death.
The five favourite relationships in my fandoms
Only five? Yikes. That demands some ruthless cutting and slashing. (No, that that way.) (Well, except for... you'll see.)
1) Buffy and Dawn in BTVS. I have a thing for sibling relationships, and having been an older sister, there was such a lot that I recognised here. The ups, the downs. Of all of Buffy's relationships, this is probably my favourite. More on Buffy and Dawn when I finally get around to writing that essay.
2) Londo and G'Kar in Babylon 5. Yes, you're all so surprised. And here's where I regret the limit of five, because I love the friendship between Londo and Vir almost as much, but the Londo/G'Kar (interpret that any way you want) arc is the core of the show, and the best thing JMS ever wrote. It actually pulls off the mortal enemies turning into friends/companions/whatever you want to call them by time season 5 ends thing which many fandoms are so fond of in fanfic, without ever trivalizing the massive issues on the way. On the contrary, JMS makes it harder by actually showing us Londo's fall first, in all ugly details, instead of presenting it as backstory (backstory being something fans are much more easily inclined to forgive).
3) Amanda and Duncan in Highlander. Because it's pretty unique. Amanda and Duncan never were presented as Destined Lovers (tm). Duncan's Star-Crossed Love (tm) was Tessa. They had a lot of sex over the centuries, sure, but above all they were and remained friends. He forgave her her occasional double-crosses. She could pull him out of his brooding and make him laugh when life was pretty horrible. And when it really counted, they were there for each other.
4) Angel and Connor on AtS, only barely etching out Angel and Darla. After spending a season and a half without caring about Angel the character (from Epiphany onward, I think, till A New World), this father-son tragedy made me empathize with him again, completely. They were such a messed-up, intense pair, he and Connor, and Connor himself competes with his mother (and Buffy) for being my favourite overall Jossverse character.
5) John Crichton and Scorpius in Farscape. Yes, there are a lot of interesting and likable relationships on Farscape but this dark one intrigues me more than any other. Blue-eyed obsessive 1, meet blue-eyed obsessive 2, via torture, mind games, alliance of necessity and several other bizarre courtship rituals.
***
I've been biting my tongue about politics in recent weeks, since there was more than enough strong feeling on lj already. (And outside of lj. I've been having conversations with my father which basically circle around an "I won't visit Bush Land in the next four years and neither should you"/ "Let's keep a little perspective, shall we?" exchange.)
yuki_onna wittily related the extreme polarization to the recent film version of Lord of the Rings, saying that most lj'ers cast Bush & Co. as Sauron and wonder why the 50-something % who voted for him didn't see it that way. Which reminds me, Time Magazine in 2002 actually in its review of The Two Towers cast Saruman as Osama Bin Laden and the Americans as the beleagured humans and hobbits, which horrified one of the film's stars, Viggo Mortensen, so much that he wrote a letter in protest and appeared on a lot of talk shows wearing "No Blood For Oil" t-shirts.Now personally, I find both extremes annoying. The Americans-as-Hobbits line by Time writer Richard Corliss evoked a disbelieving "How self deluded can you get?" from me at the time, but conversely, I don't see Bush & Co. qualifying for the Prince-of-Darkness label just yet. But I think what this points towards is more than a bi-partisan longing for a world in which villains are clearly seen as such and get their proper defeat, it's that we really don't see the same things anymore, if we ever did. "If you could see what I've seen with your eyes..." says Roy Batty, the rebel android, in Blade Runner. He means something else, but that is the problem. I look at Bush and don't see a prince of darkness, but I do see a dangerously deluded man of limited intelligence and abilities, without any kind of intellectual or emotional curiosity about what is outside his immediate circle, who has caused much havoc in the world already and will continue to do more. That he's (probably) a good husband and father is as irrelevant in this context as George III. civic virtues were.
Meanwhile, I do have friends of different political persuasions, both in RL and in the lj world (
hobsonphile and shezan, for example), who look at Bush and see someone completely different. They see a competent leader of moral integrity etc. And I don't think either of us has had access to facts and reports the other hasn't read/seen/heard. We look at the same material, but we don't see the same thing, and that seems to be a universal experience these days. Errol Morris, whose documentary about Robert McNamara, The Fogs of War, won respect from both sides of the political spectrum, wrote a great analysis of this cognitive dissonance apropos the recent pictures from Fallujah. Since not everyone is registered with the NY Times, I'll give you some crucial quotes:
We can imagine, in the privacy of our thoughts, that war is heroic and honorable - even noble. Photography can make it difficult for us to maintain these illusions. Take the recent videotape of the Iraqi insurgent in Falluja being shot and killed by a marine. It does not tell us everything we need to know about what happened. It does not tell us what the marine was thinking or what his prisoner was thinking - that is, what he was thinking before he was shot dead. But it does tell us that something happened. And, as a result, it makes the shooting, the killing, much harder to deny.
No doubt, there will be an investigation - an attempt to provide context - to fill in the details: why the prisoner was there and who he was; whether the marine was acting on instructions from his superiors and what those might have been; or whether he acted in self-defense. One central question remains: What are we looking at? And that question will not go away.
(...)
For many people, the interpretation of this videotape will devolve into general questions about Iraq. People will interpret this videotape according to their ideological dispositions. Are we looking at the face of freedom on the march, or at the footprint of an out-of-control behemoth leaving a trail of bodies in its wake? For the true believers in the war in Iraq, these images will make little impression. For them, the ends for which this war is being fought justify the means. War is bloody, brutal; the enemy is vicious. But the objective of extending freedom redeems what has to be done to achieve it. In this view the war is unfortunate but necessary.
For people, like myself, who are deeply skeptical about this war, it is not clear what the "ends" of this war might be. It doesn't seem as if Iraq is freer or will be freer in the near future. Call me a naysayer or a skeptic, but what I see in the newspapers all seems evidence of mayhem. And with no end of the war in sight, the terrible means - the manner in which this war is being fought - seem, at best, misguided and at worst, deeply wrong.
Of course, such philosophical deliberations are easier when you're thousands of miles away, when you're neither the marine or the prisoner, neither the British woman who worked for years to help others and now has been murdered, nor the mother who lost children in the most recent bombings. If you're actually living there, your point of view sounds more likely like this.
I'd call it fascinating, except that I fear this increasing gulf of perception will only grow and ultimately contribute to more death.
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-20 05:40 am (UTC)At trhe heart of American politics and any true discourse is the ability to respect the opinion of someone who you would work forever to keep their ideas from becoming fact. More and more that respect, that ability to see from another's viewpoint, is fading. And as it does, the gaps grow wider and wider and hope seems a far more precious commoddity.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-20 06:19 am (UTC)Since the election I've been thinking a lot about why we lost, and trying to analyze based on data, not wild emotion. I think the key thing is this gulf of perception -- that the people I meet in red state America are literally not living in the same culture as people in blue state America -- that in some ways the cultural gulfs are much greater than between you and I.
We have read many of the same books, seen many of the same movies, explored the same parts of history. We have even travelled some of the same places. Dialog is interesting because we are not alike -- and possible because there is so much common ground. If you express a view that seems shocking to me, my reaction is not "well, I don't know what to say about that so I'll stop talking" or "what a nut!" but "I wonder why she believes that. Tell me more!"
I find it much harder in some ways to bridge the gulf with red state America, despite the common language. (And as we've discussed before, in some ways the reason I'm the Ambassador to Red America is literally because I speak the language.) The experiences are too different, the givens of life too far apart. But, unlike a conversation with someone in Japan, where we know that we are coming from radically different cultures and both understand intutively that we may not be understanding things in their proper context, when you talk with someone from Red America, you both think that you're on a common footing.
When you look at the same thing and see two different events.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-21 01:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-20 06:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-21 01:49 am (UTC)Chilling.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-20 03:40 pm (UTC)I wish you wouldn't bite your tongue. Your analyses are informed, thought-provoking, and insightful. I appreciate them very much.
Thank you for this post, and for the links to Errol Morris' article and the Baghdad Burning blog.
And in response to what
no subject
Date: 2004-11-21 01:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-20 06:11 pm (UTC)Re. "Red" and "Blue" America - you might be interested in this report (http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Pres_Election_04/Report10_21_04.pdf) which surveys Bush and Kerry supporters on their beliefs about international affairs. Some of the "Red" conclusions are just astounding ... Bush has improved the US's standing in the world???
no subject
Date: 2004-11-20 10:45 pm (UTC)All of which are positions one can argue with on a rational basis, but what is outlined on that paper is just too bizarre...