Unpopular Opinion Friday

[anghraine]

Maybe I should just have hatred empowers us as a tag.

It’s rather awkward when you run across conversations you’d really like to be involved in but … you aren’t, and even if it wouldn’t be inappropriate to butt in, it feels sort of pointless. So I’m just going to be passive-aggressive and declare this

UNPOPULAR OPINION FRIDAY

One per fandom or thing-I-participate-in-on-the-Internet.

(1) Persuasion is okay, but a bit rough and flawed.

(Whence comes Mrs Smith?)

(2) Padmé doesn’t die from childbirth. She isn't (...belatedly) killed by Anakin's Force-choke. She dies from losing the will to live. Yes, I know it sounds stupid, and no, that doesn't matter: it's what's in the movie, and therefore it's canon.

(Thus, when people blame her for her death, they’re not blaming her for blood loss/infection/suffocation/whatever, but for simply giving up. "You shouldn't blame women for dying in childbirth" is true, but not relevant.)

(3) Lily Evans is completely in the right in breaking off her friendship with Snape. Also, she's awesome.

(4) Guru Pathik isn't morally wrong, he's just incorrect.

(5) Temperance Brennan's Ziva-moments are not that unrealistic, native Anglophone or not.

(6) The Circle of Magic world-building is far superior to Tortall's.

(7) Susan Sto Helit got her Deathiness from both parents.

(8) Romana is still in E-space.

(9) The Elenium is far and away the best of the Eddings series, but Polgara is cooler than Sephrenia.

(10) The insistence that Disney ruined the Original One True Versions of fairy-tales is kind of hilarious.

(11) My biggest issue with porny het and slash is that there are too many dudes in them.

(12) Hades is kind of nice, as gods go.

(13) Wide Sargasso Sea is legitimately good, but representing Afro-Caribbean culture via a white girl is a bit wonky.

(14) Best Reasonable Authority Figure ever: Queen Angella.

(15) Fellowship was the best of the LOTR movies.

(16) At least one of the Pevensies probably married during their reign, and not to one of the others or local fauna (yes, including actual fauns). Peter/Cool Calormene Lady Who Is Nevertheless Nothing Like Aravis OTP!

(17) John of Lancaster > Falstaff

(18) Holmes/Watson is not actually canon.

(19) First Contact makes no sense for Picard's character.

(20) The Old Testament has some of the best female characters in anything ever.

(21) The secret behind the veil is a total cop-out.

(22) Marguerite Blakeney cannot seriously be the cleverest woman in Europe. 

(23) Dickon is a painful Mary Sue.

(24) The best novel written by any of the Brontë sisters is The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

(25) Carmela is a teensy bit annoying.

(26) Ludicrous assertion of the week: nasty things that systematically happen to asexual people because they're asexual actually aren't happening because they're asexual, but are instead misogyny-meets-ableism and maybe a few other things but definitely not about asexuality. Yup, even when they happen to able-bodied asexual cismen.

Comments

[tree]

(9) The Elenium is far and away the best of the Eddings series, but Polgara is cooler than Sephrenia.

trufax. although they both bug me in different ways. i'm surprised that you're not squicked by the sparhawk/elena.

(10) The insistence that Disney ruined the Original One True Versions of fairy-tales is kind of hilarious.

yeah, since there's no One True Version. but disney still ruined them. and i object to them becoming the One True Version for a lot of people.

(11) My biggest issue with porny het and slash is that there are too many dudes in them.

my feelings exactly. although i am mostly okay with het, obvs.

[anghraine]

(9) You read Eddings too? Awesome. They're so problematic and yet -- I don't know. Too good to be guilty pleasures, too awful to be guilt-free pleasures.

Ack, Sparhawk/Ehlana is totally squicky! Not as annoying as Garion/Ce'Nedra, but much squickier. On the upside, I like Ehlana a lot more, and Aphrael is infinitely more awesome than Eriond. But mostly I just think the Elenium is more ... thoughtful, I guess, and better-written.

(10) I am torn about Disney! Because I am not a folklorist, as is probably obvious, and most of what I know comes from loving fairy-tales as a child and tracking down as many as I could find, which included Disney (I was born in '86, of course there was Disney). And I loved them all and I cannot regret having versions of my favourite stories with sparkles and songs and villains calling on the powers of hell.

But the weird way that Disney codifies their watered-down versions is clearly not a good thing and messes with the, idk, process that's what made it fun to read straight through thirty versions of Cinderella. So. It's like -- I wouldn't want The Lion King to replace Hamlet, but I still think it was an awesome movie in its own right, and that reinterpreting for a new generation is perfectly acceptable in itself.

(11) Heh. Yeah, it's -- sexy times without ladies are just not to my taste at all, and thus femmeslash is awesome and het is okay and slash is a bit meh. I've written a lot of het, or the Elizabeth approximation of het, but it's always rather uncomfortable. (With FI, I was Deeply Tempted to just jump off the rails and go for Catherine/Charlotte or only have the one genderswap and make it Catherine/Elizabeth. Maybe it would have been better!)

[tree]

hi! i'm in ur journal, finally replying to really old comments.

9. ah! thank you for correcting my spelling of Ehlana's name. i knew i was wrong but couldn't be bothered to go dig out my copy of the book. or, um, do a google search. anyway. i'm so glad you think Garion/Ce'Nedra is annoying! i thought i was the only one. i'm not sure i agree re Aphrael and Eriond, mostly because i like Eriond and he's just a baby!god, whereas Aphrael has been doing this for a much, much longer time. but also because Aphrael is like the manic pixie dream girl of fantasy gods, and there is something off to me about a goddess who chooses to take a child form. like, if she just was a child goddess, that would be one thing. but there's that scene where she transforms and it's made clear that her true form is adult. plus, she can be just as annoying as Ce'Nedra at times. also i find the whole getting herself born as Sparhawk and Ehlana's child fairly creepy.

the elenium is definitely the best writing of the series. although i really like the mallorean for some of the new characters. okay, it's just that i love cyradis and zakath.

i should really reread at least the elenium. i reread the belgariad/mallorean a couple of years ago for yuletide (i betad a mallorean story and it got me nostalgic) and frankly i couldn't believe how bad i found them. i think i gave almost all of them 1 star on goodreads. even seven or eight years ago i was still rereading them for pleasure, so obviously my introduction to feminist and social justice theory has made me incapable of enjoying anything a different sort of reader than i used to be. so that's depressing!

which leads me to

10. disney. i grew up with old school disney: cinderella, sleeping beauty, snow white, bambi. and the disney reboot happened when i was in high school, so i was into the little mermaid and aladdin and the lion king. but then i started understanding what exactly the movies tell us about gender roles and "the other" in terms of aladdin and the lion king. and i also learned more about the disney machine itself and it all just made me revoluted. so, i mean, i still know all the songs, and i love ursula, and other stuff, but it's all pretty tainted for me now. and i probably am overly repulsed by it all because i loved it once and now i'm, i guess, repudiating it?

11. sexy times without ladies are just not to my taste at all,

my thoughts exactly. :D

[anghraine]

hi! yay for old comments.

Re: Eriond and Aphrael, Eriond was always 'blah' for me. Likable enough, but he's just this ... nice kid. Who's a god. A bit like Garion with less personality. Aphrael could be immensely irritating at times (though I don't really think anyone can be as irritating as Ce'Nedra -- especially not someone as consistently effective as Aphrael), but she does have a fairly distinctive personality.

I did like the early Aphrael better, though, because yeah, the whole thing where she's actually an adult woman pretending to be a child so people will pick her up and kiss her -- um, do not want. I don't mind incarnating herself as Sparhawk and Ehlana's daughter, though. And I rather liked that she chooses a light-hearted trickster rather like herself and not ... idk, Khalad or something.

I definitely like the Malloreon too, and Zakath and Cyradis are some of my favourites (though, um, I maybe ship Garion/Zakath more than Cyradis/Zakath? idk, fandom has broken my brain). The series is ... when I re-read it about a year or two ago, I was pretty much wincing a good portion of the way through, but not so much at the quality of the writing (which I find to be generally adequate and sometimes good) as the unfortunate implications about everything. I still enjoy it, but it's skeevy as hell.

Which does lead right into liking-problematic-media. I agree with you that those things are all, well, problematic. But at the same time, for me -- born in '86 and brought up in an ultra-conservative environment even by American standards -- the Disney I grew up with was the most progressive thing in my world. Maleficent and Ursula and Belle and Mulan were pretty much the first emissaries from the land of awesome that I came across, so there's a vast nostalgia attached to it, even beyond the singing and shininess.

But -- I mean, my favourite is Beauty and the Beast, which came out just as I was getting alienated by most of everything, and while that does say some things that I still genuinely like (just about everything to do with Gaston), there are obviously problems too. I'm not really sure how you do deal with that -- even accepting that everything is kind of problematic, some things are much more so than others, and Disney is one of those things. Also, the Belgariad. So -- I don't know. (The whole concept of the one pure version of fairy-tales still amuses me, though.)

[rebeccation]

How did you manage to limit yourself to just one thing?

(1) Persuasion is okay, but a bit rough and flawed. (Whence comes Mrs Smith?)

Mrs. Smith has always made me wonder. Not just where she comes from, but what happens to her afterwards, and how she influences the rest of the book. Austen's usually so much more careful with her characters and events! Disappointing!

(10) The insistence that Disney ruined the Original One True Versions of fairy-tales is kind of hilarious.

Originality, when we're talking about true folk stories, is a slippery thing to catch. On the other hand, the Hans Christian Andersen and the Charles Perrault stories do have an original version. I'm all for the alternative ones, but it bothers me that Disney supplants all memory of an alternative canon. That, and I got into a collection of Grimms' fairy tales when I was seven or eight, and after the violence and absurdity in those, Disney never quite measures up.

(15) Fellowship was the best of the LOTR movies.

But RotK was the best of the books. I'm still not sure which was the worst movie, though: Two Towers, for being utterly forgettable, or Return of the King, for getting everything wrong and skipping the second half of the book. (And mashing up old Icelandic poems to make Inspiring War Speeches. As if Tolkein's songs weren't enough!)

(20) The Old Testament has some of the best female characters in anything ever.

Yes! YES! Oh God, plot bunnies everywhere! Powerful women and real women, seen through men's eyes, doing things we'd hesitate to let women do today, even in fiction.

(24) The best novel written by any of the Brontë sisters is The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Yes, at least in terms of content. I love Gilbert and Helen. The ideas of what a girl should learn, what makes a virtuous woman, and what her rights are even (especially?) within a marriage--there's so much to cut your teeth on there! I've never been much of a fan of the style of gothic novel, though I was oddly attached to the talk of fairies in Jane Eyre when I was thirteen and am now a little in awe of sturdy little Jane who clings to what she thinks is right and real despite pressure from adults, her lover, her cousin(s), and society at large. Would I had been so sure of the world and my own morals at eighteen!

[anghraine]

LOL, I filled a doc and then just selected one thing from each category. I foresee more of these. :P

That's the thing about Persuasion -- it wouldn't be significant from most people, but Austen is usually so smooth when it comes to that kind of thing. But Mrs Smith comes out of nowhere for me and then pretty much disappears, which is a bit deus-ex-machina for the end of a book. I'm also a bit 'eh' about what a friend once described as dewy-eyed sentimentalization of the navy.

I read the Grimm versions too, but I also read light and fuzzy two-page stuff, so I suppose Disney didn't stand out so much (also, I was alternately terrified and heartbroken by my childhood adventures in Disney, so I don't see it as quite so light-hearted as all that). For me, the codification is really the "problem" with Disney.

Re: LOTR -- I like both TTT and ROTJ better than FOTR in the books. I'm not sure which is my favourite, honestly! As for the movies, I personally like ROTK better, but that's probably because I'm a Faramir fan and TTT wasn't so much forgettable as OMG NO.

Powerful women and real women, seen through men's eyes, doing things we'd hesitate to let women do today, even in fiction.

THIS.

Re: Tenant, I ... mostly love Helen and the ideas and taking on a marriage and a villain who is less a villain that a run-of-the-mill jerk while still being every bit as damaging. Also, I think it's technically a bit smoother than the others, too.

Jane herself is impressive -- she doesn't, idk, affect me as much as Helen, who gets more of an arc, I think (I'm never sure how much Jane changes; she's self-possessed and indomitable as a child, never mind an eighteen-year-old), but she's very admirable. But I hate pretty much everyone else in the book and I don't care for the Gothic and there's something about JE as a whole that strikes me as self-indulgent; Tenant is much more rigorous to me.

[greenchestnuts]

"(22) Marguerite Blakeney cannot seriously be the cleverest woman in Europe. "

I am shamelessly posting on a months-old post to say I AGREE WITH THIS. It's why I stopped reading that series almost before I started.

[anghraine]

Heh. I like Marguerite, but no way. I mean, we're talking 1790s - I'd take, say, Mary Wollstonecraft over her any day.