fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #697 ]

⌈ Secret Post #697 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe]

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[NO WAY I AM NOT COUNTING WORDS]

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[Naruto]

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Notes:

CITY STUFF → http://lolbuttsex.myminicity.com/

Secrets Left to Post: 09 pages, 217 secrets from Secret Submission Post #100.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 1 2 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 - posted twice ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Rowling, unlike Meyer, has actually SAID she wants to send people a Message. Up until 2000 when GoF came out, they were just stories. Along about 2004 she visited the Holocaust museum and decided she wanted to Send A Message. I haven't liked a thing she's written since. I never said she didn't have the right or that it was morally wrong for her to write these books. I said that she was saying things she says she didn't intend to say and that I thought it was pretty gross. This argument here, right here and right now, is against the idea that writers HAVE to send a message and that they are morally wrong and shouldn't be in print if they're sending the wrong one.

You show me where Stephenie Meyer has said, "this is the kind of life you should live". Or gone on line and told people she's worried about the love lives they will actually have because they like a character in her books she's not so fond of. I've yet to hear her say that if you like Jacob better than Edward you're going to be an abused wife.

I do NOT think every book HAS TO SEND a message and must be judged on the message. I do think that if you're going to go on about how your books are about morality and love and choice then people can look at that and say, "okay not so much." But I have NEVER, EVER said that JKR does not have the right to write these books or that they should not be marketed to children because they don't send the right moral message.

It's okay to dismiss characters, period. They're fictional. If you don't like a character, you are not obliged to try to like them, and it doesn't really matter to me why you don't like them. Most of the arguments that I've made that you seem to be thinking of were arguments against the notion that if a female character appears to be badly written (or a character of colour appears to be badly written, for that matter), fans should embrace them anyway, even if they don't find the character likeable, and blame the writers, not the character (okay, the character doesn't exist, and is therefore not responsible, but even so, if the character sucks, they're fictional, their feelings are not going to get hurt!) and try to save that character from the writers. Problem: in order to want to save a character from bad writing, there has to be something there to make you like them to start out with. Some of the characters I've been in arguments about don't make that cut. Nobody is morally obliged to like fictional people, regardless of the colour of their fictional skin or the shape of their fictional genitals.

I do think that if you know for a fact that a character was added to a long-running series and the casting call is for "hot," that's suspicious. When it's clear that the character has been "created" not as a character who is a whole person but rather a plot coupon for a male character, you are justified in saying "that's not actually feminist writing". (Which isn't the same thing as saying it HAS to be feminist writing.)

I don't think that creators don't have the right to create these characters, which is what 101 was saying and what I disagreed with 101 about. I do think that it's silly to judge fans as "woman-haters" and "anti-feminist" because they don't embrace this kind of writing about women, and particularly when the judgement is coming in the middle of a ship war and therefore probably doesn't actually have half as much to do with feminism as it does with "ACCEPT MY OTP IZ CANON". Unfortunately, most of the people who scream that Wincesters hate their vaginas because we didn't all love on Jo actually are Dean/Jo shippers, which does not help their argument.

I have NEVER said anything to the effect that being girly is bad. Dude. I wear skirts and blouses all the time, I have 200-odd dolls, a pink canopy bed, I own an insane amount of jewellery and perfume and I don't own a pair of blue jeans. They don't even ascribe this opinion to me on fandom wank.

Edited 2008-12-03 02:36 (UTC)

I understand what you're saying (though I disagree with you about some of your interpretation of the HP books), but I also think that writers always send messages with what they write. It's just that it's often not a conscious message. Depicting reality is telling your audience that this is what you think reality is.

I mean, if a writer thinks of women in a certain way, they'll portray them in a certain way, sending the message "this is how women are". They're not trying to make their audience think of women in a certain way. They're simply depicting reality as they see it, saying that their view of women is the reality (argh, I'm being so redundant right now, and way too tired to edit; I'm sorry if it's impossible to make sense of).

Of course, it's not easy to see whether this is the case; unless the creator/s actually tells us what they tried to portray, we can't know for sure. Not to mention that they might fail.

This!

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a great book. It's also intensely misogynistic. Did Ken Kesey mean to send a message about how horrible women are oppressing all the menz and are only acceptable as happy hookers? Maybe, maybe not, but regardless, it's still a very ugly part of the book and tarnishes my enjoyment, and I have every right to be frustrated if people ignore that aspect of it because they think the good parts make it above reproach.

As for whether or not Twilight is sending messages...haven't read the books, can't say for sure, but I found this (http://stoney321.livejournal.com/317176.html) both hilarious and terrifying.

Yeah, I've seen that before, and, er, it's pretty spot-on. ^^;

Since Smeyer wanted to write a perfect love story, Twilight describes what she thinks that is. And it is creepy and laughable at the same time...

The fact that Meyer has made it pretty damn clear that she considers Edward/Bella to be a romantic ideal, even if she hasn't been as conscious of the messages it might be sending, puts your argument on shaky grounds.

I don't really care what characters you like or don't like. I do, however, get annoyed when I see someone saying, "The only reason people hate Ginny is that she's a non-character who exists just to be someone's girlfriend," and then later the same person getting up in arms because someone said almost the same thing about Bella Swan, just a little more passionately. No, I'm not a big Harry Potter fan and I couldn't care less about the couples in it. I just find hypocrisy annoying. So Twilight pushes your kinks as a tale of dysfunctional love; don't delude yourself into thinking that Meyer meant it that way and therefore it and its characters are exempt from criticism.

As for the girly thing, maybe I'm mixing you up with someone else. I thought I recalled you insisting that demure feminine characters are virtually always written worse than tomboyish female characters and that's the only reason they get hated on at one point, but it's FS, I tend to block out details like names sometimes.

okay, the character doesn't exist, and is therefore not responsible, but even so, if the character sucks, they're fictional, their feelings are not going to get hurt!

Sure, but I still get uneasy when I see people raging about how much (insert usually female character here) sucks while putting much less emphasis on the things the creator did to make her suck. Victim-blaming skills honed on fictional characters can wind up getting applied to real people if you're not careful.

Everyone sends a message and makes a statement about the kind of person they are in the various things they do. Analysing popular culture tells you a lot about a society. The message isn't always conscious but I would argue that it's more important to analyse texts because of the messages aren't always deliberately placed.

[ SECRET POST #697 ]

JKR actually did begin saying after book 5 that she was trying to send a message...

Re: JKR actually did begin saying after book 5 that she was trying to send a message...

Re: JKR actually did begin saying after book 5 that she was trying to send a message...

Re: JKR actually did begin saying after book 5 that she was trying to send a message...

Re: JKR actually did begin saying after book 5 that she was trying to send a message...

Re: JKR actually did begin saying after book 5 that she was trying to send a message...

Re: JKR actually did begin saying after book 5 that she was trying to send a message...