Anghraine

My best friend and I had an interesting, fairly wide-ranging conversation about the distinctions between adaptation, retellings, fanfiction, other forms of directly intertextual storytelling (à la Wide Sargasso Sea, Lavinia etc), covers (as in music), heavily illustrated editions of texts, collage, sampling, novelizations, ekphrasis generally, translation, and inspiration.

The distinctions here are mainly ones that he makes and I do not. For me, all of these things are on a spectrum or scatterplot of something like intertextuality. As I was saying on Tumblr the other day (re: fanfiction), I don’t actually think that most of these kinds of terminology reflect coherently defined art forms at all. They reflect norms, values, and conventions shaped by laws and corporations and other economic/cultural concerns, not any consistent system of understanding intertextuality more broadly.

This is a frequent point of disagreement between him and me, because he prefers to refine terms like these into … philosophical coherence, I guess? So he’ll say, well, I think of the term as more specifically meaning X, not Y, and that lets us examine the different approaches that X and Y take in a more systematic, artistically formal way. (As in the linked post, this is formal in the sense of form not as in propriety.)

And I’m like … it does, yes, but I don’t think that kind of re-definition corresponds to the meanings of those terms in actual usage. Narrowing the definitions imposes a coherence and logic to these distinctions that I don’t think actually exists. It’s more like a grab bag of imprecise, overlapping categories defined by values and customs and legal practice than anything they’re doing artistically.

Him: inconsistent laws and customs are kind of arbitrary and uninteresting in terms of theorizing categories of art, though.

Me: not to me, but anyway, I think the way we theorize art is very profoundly shaped by modern customs and laws to a degree we often can't even see, and words are defined by usage, not philosophical convenience.

(Yeah, we’re super fun at parties. But seriously, this is how we’ve talked since high school.)

Regardless, his theory is that adaptation is actually a narrower category of intertextual art than in casual (or academic) usage. His view is that an adaptation is an attempt to represent the actual source; there may be new material added, and some of the original material may be removed, but there is an effort to preserve not just character outlines or plot structure or elements of setting, but considerable amounts of the original source, usually in a different medium than the original. A re-telling, on the other hand, is a work that re-casts the source material into new language and sometimes generic (as in genre) form.

This is all according to him, not me. I think all storytelling of this kind = re-telling and that there is no hard line separating these approaches, just gradations of variance.

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My best friend and I watched the second season of Halo last night. It's been very watchable, more than S1 IMO, but I have enough reservations that it had started to feel like a bit of a chore. It's both more ambitious and less cohesive than S1, with major characters disappearing for significant stretches of time (I was worried about Miranda!) and a split between so many arcs and subplots that it's weird and tiring. I like most of the characters in themselves, even the ones who are dreadful human beings (Halsey is my terrible fave!).

However, it's ... interesting that so many dudebro-type Halo fans had tantrums over the show being anything other than a direct recreation of the game (the protagonist of a TV show having emotions???) and particularly over it being "woke." I can't speak to the matter of fidelity, given that I've never played the games and my brief experience of watching them seemed pretty underwhelming after Mass Effect, but it is anything but woke. In particular, the critique of the UNSC undercuts itself in this season more than in the first and this season is far more racist.

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I saw an interesting, but also somewhat disturbing, conversation about the history of the Sansa Stark hatedom that touched on something I've been thinking about for awhile.

The Sansa hatedom discussion was sparked by someone asking about the reasons for the dudebro Sansa hatedom of days of yore. Someone else brought up these same dudebros' idealization of Arya by contrast with Sansa and how they basically valued Arya in "not like the other girls" terms. Yet another person argued that this was #problematic because the criticism of NLOG is homophobic. Somebody was like ... don't you mean misogynistic? Neither of these characters are gay? The previous person explained that the criticism of NLOG ignores the social context that it arises out of and disproportionately targets GNC women who are often lesbians, hence the connection with homophobia.

I do get that a lot of the kneejerk condemnation of NLOG rhetoric arises out of the misogynistic and gender essentialist and generally fucked-up perception of GNC women as threatening to femininity in some way, that plenty of those GNC women are lesbians or otherwise WLW and thus it can factor into homophobia in practice, and that those condemnations of the NLOG rhetoric are trotted out to dismiss the most basic criticisms of gender role expectations for women (imagine a conversation about the connection between the make-up industry or body hair removal and the widespread social pressure put on women to conform to narrowly-defined and generally harmful and expensive beauty standards that did not promptly turn into defensive choice feminism screeds).

I even get that there are over-invested Sansa stans who prop her up at Arya's expense because they find Sansa's conformity to feminine gender performance appealing and more appropriate to their own expectations for women/girls, and that they have used criticisms of NLOG rhetoric to bash Arya (or basically any woman/girl who even mildly diverges from gender performance norms).

But in this case, the conversation was about the ways Sansa has been harshly criticized for her association with femininity/feminine performance, mostly by adult men hyper-scrutinizing the gender performance of a fictional eleven-year-old girl, and framed as inferior to Arya because those men (like many men!) hold anything and anyone associated with femininity in contempt. That is something that very definitely did happen, frequently. There is a reason that "like a girl" or "girly" is an insult and has considerable power in defining what masculinity looks like to so many men and boys (there are further complications w/ this that I don't have the time to get into, but it's certainly a very conspicuous aspect of the construction of normative masculinity). The idea that an entirely accurate description of something that actually happened is problematic, even unspeakable, because the criticism has been misused in other contexts sits really uncomfortably with me. It feels a bit like creeping up to alternative facts from the other side.

However. I'm also writing about hyper-scrutiny in my dissertation—generally speaking, the way in which women's behavior (especially wrt sexuality) is placed under such intense scrutiny that you get this obsessive nitpicking and over-scrutinizing of anything and everything a woman or female character does or feels. Literary critics absolutely fall prey to this and that's the context of the discussion in my dissertation—essentially, that each individual nitpick they're making could be correct as far as it goes, but the cascade of so many of them and the way some early modernist critics concentrate this scrutiny on female characters does seem pretty misogynistic after a while. And I've seen that kind of behavior in other contexts.

Like, when MTG released LOTR art in which Aragorn was depicted as Black, some people were explicitly racist about it, and some people explicitly welcomed the depiction. But the thing I noticed was the way that some people would make all these detail-focused criticisms of the art that didn't mention race at all, but seemed very disproportionately directed towards the art pieces that presented heroic characters as POC. And many of the people doing this were familiar as the same people who responded similarly to The Rings of Power, especially the characters played by POC. Some of these critics just kept escalating and eventually went full mask-off; there was one former follower (former because I blocked him) who at first seemed a normal enough nitpicky purist (something I get), then suspiciously so, and within a couple of days his blog was just overtly racist responses to any heroic Tolkien characters being depicted as POC. Some of these people never went that far, but would actively minimize the impact of racism and misogyny on the general ROP discourse (like, there were popular ROP discourse memes in which the more respectable criticisms were presented up front in large letters and the racism/misogyny in significantly smaller font on the edges of the image). Others didn't do that, either, but still hyper-focused on every "wrong" detail about characters played by POC like Disa, Arondir, and Míriel.

It is, let's say, unsurprising that the ROP characters who probably got the most positive fandom reception in the end despite the general histrionics around the show were Elrond, Durin, Halbrand, and (more controversially) Galadriel. The most popular ROP ship by a gigantic mile is a white het ship, and at least on AO3, Celeborn (who does not appear in the show and is only very briefly and belatedly mentioned at all) shows up in more ROP fics than any of the characters played by POC (Arondir and Isildur barely squeak onto AO3's top ten list of commonly tagged ROP characters, following after Galadriel, Halbrand/Sauron twice, Elrond, Adar, Elendil, Gil-galad, and Celeborn, with Míriel, Disa, and Bronwyn not even making the list).

So, like ... it's not news that Tolkien fandom is racist and misogynistic. But the broader point is that popular condemnation of something can reach such a volume and be so disproportionately targeted that even things that are individually true or at least defensible in isolation start looking really suspect. And often they are really suspect in ways that become pretty obvious (it's about ethics in gaming journalism!!!!). But I'm not entirely sure how to reconcile my extreme distaste for "you can't use criticism of NLOG to characterize dudebro fans actively using that exact framework in a grossly misogynistic way because of the homophobes" and my extreme distaste for Tolkien fandom's refusal to consider the context before they start going on screeds about Arondir or MTG Aragorn.

My best friend and I were talking about the ways that Legend of Korra does and doesn't work for us, and particularly about the way it feels very erratic on a craft level where ATLA is pretty consistently good to great, yet ultimately LOK engages us both more. Inevitably, we wound around to a point of firm agreement: excepting Unalaq and Vaatu in B2, we consider the main villains of LOK a lot more personally and thematically interesting than Ozai and this has a weird effect on LOK's politics.

I drafted a far longer post about this [ETA: lmao], but anyway: there are many obviously progressive elements to ATLA. Ozai as a villain is fundamentally aligned with things antithetical to progressive ideals. He is a hereditary autocrat carrying on a multi-generational campaign of imperialism that historically (in the show) has been justified by familiar bigoted, reactionary rationales about civilizing and bringing prosperity to other cultures. He's overwhelmingly authoritarian in every aspect of life—as a ruler, as a conqueror, as a father, as a husband. He's less a person than an embodiment of domination, imperialism, autocracy. And the ultimate solution that ATLA provides for the problem of Ozai is 1) a greater power defeating him in combat and 2) replacing him with a good autocrat.

That's not a charitable characterization of a beautifully executed and emotionally satisfying conclusion. And I think the underlying rationale for that resolution owes more to ATLA's mythic and fantastic structure than to any serious commitment to the "what we really need is a good dictator" form of political discourse that has unfortunately become increasingly common. But solving the problem of imperialism with a Chosen One and a kinder and softer absolute ruler over the imperialists is not ... exactly a radical solution, let's say. It's not that different from, say, Lord of the Rings.

It works for ATLA's story! I just don't feel that this resolution is particularly daring or transgressive in the way that it is sometimes represented as being. Other aspects of ATLA are much more daring and revolutionary than this, but the core politics just don't feel that way to me.

LOK, by contrast, has a lot of centrist-at-best baggage. It would take awhile to detail all of this (the fantasy copaganda is probably the most obvious), but it's especially apparent with the villains. LOK essentially has a revolving door of major villains who are each very different in personality, goals, motives, politics, and symbolic alignments, but thematically unified by one very familiar concept that is obvious even before it's explicitly spelled out in B4.

I've talked about this before in relation to LOK and had plenty of criticism of it (here and here), but the basic idea is this: What if the villain actually has the right idea, but just goes too far?

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Anyway, thinking about LOTR as usual, and IMO one of the most intriguing things we hear about Gondor is that the hardy and strong people of Lebennin are a) considered citizens of Gondor, and b) descended from both Númenóreans and “the forgotten men who housed in the shadow of the hills in the Dark Years ere the coming of the kings,” and in fact, some of them are primarily descended from the forgotten men.

Of course, that raises an obvious question: Who were the forgotten men?

And clearly there was some degree of intermarriage, but what were the conditions of it? What happened to them, anyway, that they’re so wholly forgotten—even by their own descendants, even by ones who have little other ancestry? Are they really completely forgotten in Lebennin or …?

Almost the only thing we hear about them in this passage is that the people who are mainly descended from them are short and “swarthy” (um) by contrast to the primarily Númenórean people of Belfalas and it’s like—uhhhh, clearly questionable, but I’m just really curious about the forgotten men of Lebennin and what happened to them. We know that Tar-Aldarion’s ecologically destructive colonization efforts drove off some of the indigenous people of Gondor, so—are the ancestors of the Lebenninians the people who stayed in the face of Númenórean imperialism? And if so, what happened?

It feels like there’s a really major story there and we just know very little about it.

Tagged: #tolkien has quite a few essays about various things in gondor but just drops 'forgotten men' with NO explanation #why are they forgotten. who were they. what happened. what place do their descendants occupy #what do they say about them in lebennin (if anything) #it's also ... interesting that the southern army that aragorn brings to minas tirith is strongly associated with lebennin #(legolas sings about it!) #so the forgotten men's descendants were instrumental in the salvation of gondor and middle-earth #yet there's like... nothing

moggett responded to this post:

It also seems to utterly ignore how Elizabeth is also supposed to be overcoming her initial incorrect first impression of Darcy. It’s not like Elizabeth is perfect in the text while Darcy changes…

I replied:

Oh, definitely. With fandom, to be fair, you get a mix of that and more balanced takes, but I think academia generally (though not always) tends to resist the equality between them forwarded by P&P’s structure and dynamics.

I think it’s partly because P&P does a really good job of inviting readers to participate in Elizabeth’s perceptions and mistakes while leaving open the possibility of doing otherwise, which is especially uncomfortable for academics of a certain type (who are often not great at accepting being wrong), and all the more so for ones who can’t bring themselves to complicate their initial judgment of Elizabeth as the only truly right-thinking character.

It’s an old piece, but I remember reading an essay about how Darcy’s letter hijacks readerly sympathies that should continue to belong with Elizabeth to the point of provoking resentment from readers. I don’t think it actually does that for most readers (Darcy has always been popular, as Austen intended; when she was worrying about what her beloved niece would think of P&P, Austen wrote, "Her liking Darcy and Eliz[abe]th is enough. She might hate all the others if she would"). But it does have that effect for some people who are often prone to these academic approaches. But it’s—the evidence that Elizabeth’s judgments are skewed by her vanity is pretty copious by the time that Darcy proposes, if you’re willing to see it, and unwillingness to see it or give it ethical weight even upon re-reading is, I think, basically an unwillingness to engage with the novel on its own terms.

Tagged: #/rambles #i genuinely think a lot of academia handwringing over pride and prejudice comes from being unable to accept being wrong #with a side of hugely prioritizing theory to the point of neglecting the details of the text #i don't mean subtle detail either ... it's more of what strier was talking about imo

tree responded to this post:

i can’t remember the wording, but someone (mrs gardiner?) even comments on the significance of such a recommendation of his character by an intelligent servant.

I replied:

It’s in the narration, but yes!


The text is emphatic that the judgment of Mrs Reynolds and those in roughly similar positions to her is immensely important as an indicator of Darcy’s (or anyone’s) true character. I think people do tend to treat it as "trifling," unfortunately—nice, but not terribly weighty, despite Austen underscoring its importance here and Elizabeth suddenly grasping that Darcy’s character is best understood by those who are directly subject to his power.

I actually find that moment super interesting in general, because I think the implication is that Elizabeth had not before understood this. It’s not that she never thought about it before because she didn’t have access to the people under Darcy’s power, IMO, but because she wasn’t thinking of his power in those terms. So it’s doing interesting work with Elizabeth’s characterization, too, but still gets relegated to an afterthought. :\

So, at the end of Pride and Prejudice, Georgiana learns from Elizabeth that what a nearly 30-year-old man will accept from his 16-year-old sister/ward is not actually a model for how husbands and wives behave towards each other.

It seems that while Georgiana is initially unsettled by Elizabeth’s behavior towards Darcy, she (Georgiana) comes to accept that it’s fine for Elizabeth to treat Darcy in a very different way than Georgiana can treat him, with the implication that Georgiana herself will approach her own eventual husband very differently than she does Darcy (whom, we hear repeatedly, she regards as almost her father).

Of course, sometimes people take this to mean that Darcy and Georgiana’s relationship is actually ~problematic, and either he’s tyrannizing over her (intentionally or unintentionally) or, at the very least, the dynamic between them isn’t quite right. I unsurprisingly disagree; I think it’s perfectly fine for their relationship to verge on father-daughter when he’s much older and literally raised her, and that it will likely become somewhat less unbalanced as Georgiana fully grows up.

Meanwhile, an essay I read the other day takes it one step farther and argues that not only is Darcy tyrannizing over Georgiana, it indicates that he will also tyrannize over Elizabeth. Like … how you get from “Georgiana learns that this relationship isn’t what husband-wife relationships look like” to “actually this relationship is what Elizabeth and Darcy’s relationship will look like” is kind of beyond me, except in an academia edgelord sort of way. Bleh.

Tagged: #the essay also completely ignored the explicit 'darcy and elizabeth were always grateful for their marriage' hea statement #like most of those sorts of takes do #and i ended up using it for my exam anyway #not that argument - a different part of it that was fine and relevant #i genuinely do think that pulling valuable aspects out of flawed work is okay and even important #but it still felt a bit dirty lol #thinking about it though #i've seen the attitude in fandom too #not the 'darcy will tyrannize over elizabeth' thing of course (...much) but #that the dynamic between a teenager and her 28-y-o guardian should be like everyday sibs and it's like... uh. no #even if we're setting the vast differences between 1795/1813 and 2021 aside #but i think part of the reason it annoys me so much is that i actually find the darcy-georgiana relationship really interesting #in how they're partially distanced bc of the age/authority gap yet also in other ways all the closer because of it #there's this repeated emphasis of how they're almost like father and daughter but it's always 'almost' and not quite there #like ... they're kind of stuck in this in-between space with very little personal direction and figured out this thing that works for them #and like. she's more talkative when he's around and they write long-ass letters to each other and-and-and #it /does/ work and the immensity of georgiana's love and respect is what ultimately saved her from wickham #i think it's both complicated and sweet and they're doing their best in a very human way

ngl I have yet to read any justification for Aragorn's argument that Théoden's edicts should not apply to him in Rohan that I didn't find deeply annoying.

I just saw yet another one on Tumblr, which ultimately was not very different from the rest. The argument was that given actual Anglo-Saxon customs, it is Théoden's requirement that everyone relinquish their weapons (often great heirlooms, which Andúril is) that is unreasonable, not Aragorn's distaste for doing so. In other permutations, it's Háma who is being short-sighted in not accepting Aragorn's greater authority. But essentially the idea is that Théoden's command itself is sketchy and Aragorn is the one being reasonable.

None of this addresses the actual problem, though, which Háma himself does.

Yes, Théoden's insistence that warriors relinquish their swords or other weapons is clearly framed as dubious and a marker of Gríma's malign influence over him, much like the use of the Rohirrim's language as a shibboleth. This is perfectly evident even without bringing in Anglo-Saxon history. Yes, Aragorn has good reason to be uneasy about leaving Andúril lying around with a random door warden. None of that is the problem.

Aragorn does not only argue that Théoden's decree with regard to weaponry in his hall is a bad idea. He argues that it is not his (Aragorn's) will to give up his weapon and that "it is not clear to me" that Théoden's will as king of Rohan should override his own as heir of Elendil "of Gondor."

There are a number of issues at play here:

You know, the thing about the history of fanfiction is that I don't think (for instance) that Shakespeare's plays based on pre-existing narratives are actually fanfiction in the contemporary sense. But I certainly do not respect any take on fanfic and its relationship to its source materials that does not engage at all with the very, very, very long history of human beings responding to pre-existing stories by re-telling and re-imagining those specific* stories in a wide variety of ways, often within the same or a similar medium.

People have always done this. The laws and norms and expectations around it do change, the forms it takes change, but the practice of responding to stories by drawing directly on those stories to create other versions of them is not unique to modern fanfiction. If your argument about fanfic (especially if it's ones about the unique evils of fanfic) is contingent upon assumptions or assertions about that general practice rather than anything specific to modern fanfic in particular, your argument is short-sighted, painfully ahistorical, and poorly reasoned.

Like, here's a very obvious example. My favorite Shakespeare tragedy is King Lear. The story told in King Lear was drawn from the pre-existing narratives around the mythical King Leir. This had recently appeared in the anonymous play King Leir (which seems to date from the 1590s, while Shakespeare's Lear was written in the very early 1600s). A version of the story shows up in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (published in the 1590s as well). Shakespeare integrated other narratives into the core Leir story he took from the King Leir play written and performed just a few years earlier (most of the extra narratives in King Lear also have pretty obvious pre-existing sources). Famously, Shakespeare altered details of the traditional story in this process, and especially of the King Leir version, to suit his artistic preferences. In some versions, for instance, Cordelia survives the events of the main Leir story only to be killed years later. Shakespeare didn't even come up with the idea of Cordelia dying tragically after initially seeming triumphant (one of his main changes from King Leir). But he integrated her death into the main story in a more cohesive and streamlined way than it was generally done.

So Shakespeare didn't invent the essential narrative of Leir/Lear. He didn't invent most of the characters in it. He didn't even "file off the serial numbers" in the modern phrase; the characters are meant to be recognized as those familiar, pre-existing characters to a contemporary audience. Part of the power of the play for its original audience would come from their familiarity with other versions of the story and characters. In general, say, they would expect Cordelia's return to the story as an ally of Lear's, but not Cordelia and Lear's tragic defeat. Modern audiences unfamiliar with any other version of the story can still register the shock and horror and bleakness of Shakespeare's handling of it, but not usually in the way that an audience of the time would have registered it. The power of the conventional Leir narrative was such that in later years, Shakespeare's version would get "corrected" back to the established Leir story as appearing in things like King Leir. It was only much, much later that the King Lear of Shakespeare would be regularly performed as he wrote it, without making it more digestible to then-contemporary sensibilities or closer to the "canon" he was working off of.

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