Anghraine

I was actually slightly on edge about getting into a frankly notorious fandom without encountering this kind of thing sooner. After getting a somewhat clearer sense of trends and fun conversations and persistent annoyances (at least on Tumblr), and after monologuing my TOS feelings, I still hadn't received any particular unpleasantnesses on a personal level, and was like ... well, maybe people are nicer now, even to someone like me. But mostly I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop, especially given that I'd found TOS in particular very different from what I'd expected via fandom and pop culture osmosis on many, many levels.

But it would have never occurred to me that my controversial TOS hot take would be "Spock's co-workers are racist to him a lot and this is the main vehicle for TOS's exploration of racism as a thing." But yup, I got anon hate about how "funny" it is that I'd been complaining about bad Kirk takes (specifically, I'd recently seen a conversation about how "TOS Kirk actually doesn't experience angst over anything but challenges to his authority" when I'd been very surprised to discover that a) TOS persistently returns to how lonely and fearful of being left alone he is, and b) TOS Kirk is a genocide survivor struggling with his options of "doing nothing" or "ruthless vengeance", and he was bullied in the Academy for being "grim" (no shit?), and that's not even the only massacre he survived, and a lot of his infamous romances are blatantly coercive towards him). See, it's funny because I'm so biased towards Spock that I don't even realize it and have said people are just always being mean to him.

(I don't think I said "mean." I said racist.)

Anyway, I was so utterly baffled by that of all things being my big controversial ST opinion that I read it to my housemates for shits and giggles, though normally I keep fandom drama away from RL. Since my BFF J is a massive Trekkie and Ash has watched a few TOS episodes with us, they got the context and J was just laughing his head off while a very confused Ash was like, "Has this person seen it?"

On the bright side, we had a whole conversation about the various desperate flailing attempts I've seen to defend the general racism against Spock within the show, or at least to suggest that it's no different from Spock's or Kirk's own behavior, and that ended up being actually interesting, so at least something deeper came of it! But I'm still baffled at how you watch something like "Balance of Terror" and come away thinking the point of Spock's experiences and Kirk's outrage is "Spock gives as good as he gets, though, so it's not REALLY racism."

On top of that, J and I had actually been talking days earlier about how there seems this strange fandom embargo on engaging with, particularly, McCoy's racism in interpreting his character, its function, and especially his relationships with Spock and Kirk. Not only "I prefer to headcanon something different" but indignation over anyone anywhere even acknowledging it's part of the show. J and I are actually really interested in the ways that TOS sets up this Spock vs McCoy tension in which Kirk is either the mediator or battlefield—or the tension rises because he's not there—but this is never really a balanced tension because both Kirk and the narrative itself so obviously favor Spock over McCoy. And Kirk himself is even more favored. There's a reason that Spock gets twice McCoy's share of the overall dialogue even though McCoy is chattier. J actually has a theory that a more balanced version of the triad might have been more effective in a lot of different ways (thematically, their relationships with each other and how those reflect on their individual characters, etc), which I do find interesting to consider, but there's so much defensive dogma about how they're all totally balanced and equally important and favored that it can be difficult to figure out where these interpretations are even coming from. Just about every conversation I've seen about McCoy in any capacity, or about the bigotry directed at Spock, becomes a very strange game of Telephone very fast.

Hey all. :\

I have a post on Tumblr about it that I imagine most of you have already seen. The short version would be that this doesn't feel as bad as Trump's first victory did—I had told myself over and over that this could happen, that it would come down to political trends thousands of miles away from where I live, etc. But my brain is telling me it's actually much worse. Trump scraped a victory in 2016 with a deck stacked very heavily in his favor, and without certainty about what his administration would really look like given that he's a lying blowhard, via the electoral college but against the will of the greater number of voters. That didn't mean he wasn't president, but getting fucked over by outdated mechanics of government set up by long-dead men is not the same as getting fucked over by fellow citizens who are very much alive and who know, or have the ability to easily find out, about the policies of the first Trump administration. Kamala Harris, whatever her faults, did not have anything like the baggage of HRC and yet the people of this country were far more willing to vote for Trump against her.

I've been quietly enraged for hours in a way I don't often get—I get annoyed, and sometimes I get normal angry, but like ... in 2016 I broke down crying over and over, and I haven't done anything of that. I feel cold but not numb. The last time I felt this kind of frozen hatred was when a relative told me he'd struck a plea bargain about statutory rape with a sixteen-year-old student and was telling me so I didn't find out about it in the news. I didn't get upset as such, or feel immediately angry, or fight with him about it. I simply didn't care whether he lived or died for years afterwards.

There's this awful review of The Borgias that condemns Jeremy Irons's performance as Alexander VI/Rodrigo Borgia, because the reviewer claimed Irons lacks the appropriate "fire" to play Rodrigo—he admits that Irons does play him with a kind of fire, but says that Irons "burns with the steely flame of the North, not Latin fire." I thought this was a hilarious and very stupid characterization of both Alexander VI and Jeremy Irons, and told my best friend J about it, and it's entered our friendship lexicon. But he (my bff) has remarked a couple times that when I get truly, genuinely angry, it is absolutely a Steely Flame of the North situation. And I'm definitely feeling that now—not numb, not sad, not shocked, not screaming, just kind of hard.

I will say that, despite dutifully voting for him in the primaries, Bernie's "this is happening because of the Democrats turning their backs on working-class people, they lost the white ones to Trump and now they're deservingly losing Latino and Black ones" shtick is even more contemptible than usual IMO. Yeah, he's hammering it into his The Class War Is The Only War constant replay loop, but I don't know why the fuck he's associating this with Black voters. From what data we have at this point, the talk about Black men switching from Biden to Trump came out to a shift of four points from 2020 in exit polls (which, while done carefully, are known to be rough estimates—that's in the realm of statistical noise) and even if you did treat them as 100% accurate, the exit polls have Black female support for Trump actually dropping three points from 2020. (Union households favored Harris, btw.) Maybe he referenced Black voters to avoid sounding like he's scapegoating Latine voters specifically (who did shift towards Trump, especially men), maybe he's talking about lower turnout, but I think it's honestly super shitty to associate Black voters with this loss when a) there are many other more proximate causes, b) many Black voters are deliberately disenfranchised by their state governments and deal with more obstacles to voting than virtually any other group, and c) Black voters have been and remain unambiguously the most stalwart Democratic demographic apart from LGBT people (iirc the only group even slightly close is Jewish people—the same exit polls have them at 78% Democratic to Black voters' 85%, with Black women specifically at 91% for Harris). Lumping Black voters in with almost anyone else flattens a truly vast divide.

So my best friend J and I were talking about creative writing, and how sapped I've been through the later part of graduate school and also am just a slow writer, and about what writing for joy would look like, etc. I thought about for a little bit, then:

me: I think I know what kind of writing would bring me joy once my brain reconstitutes.
J: Yeah?
me: ...I could never, ever try publishing it professionally and wouldn't want to.
J: *pause* Oh, so fanfiction?
me: Yes. I wouldn't want to risk the wrath of Disney.
J: That has to mean Star Wars.
me: Yeah. I—there's one—I mentioned a few years ago that I wrote a Rogue One fanfic that I'm fond of ...
J: The one where they escape but get stuck on the Death Star?
me: Yes! It's pretty long and I stopped seriously working on it a long time ago, but it's very close to being finished and ... pretty long ... and it's always nice when someone recommends it as technically unfinished but satisfyingly resolved, but lol I tagged it as slow burn in 2017 and they, they never kiss or declare their feelings to avoid complicating such a dangerous situation, so it's just uhhh yearning and camaraderie for thousands and thousands of words. But also there's some plot.
J: That honestly sounds really cool. I should read it some time, but anyway, I think you should do it! I bet that would make you happy.
me: :)

He's not into fanfic at all—he tried a couple of times and it always just morphs into original fiction—and I've rarely talked to him about it at all, so I was touched that he both remembered the premise and was supportive in his creative writing friend capacity! Also, he's a big SW fan (bigger of ST, but even so) and Rogue One is his favorite SW film, so I was touched! He even ended up asking if they get blown up with the Death Star, how they're involved with the "rescue" of Leia, if they're involved with releasing the tractor beam, etc.

I told him about how I really wanted to get the scale of the Death Star across with the long elevator trips and such, and a bit about how I wanted our heroes to be competent but also not to face no serious challenges or stakes, even though a lot of Imperials are pretty silly. I specifically wanted Cassian to face a situation where he had to set aside the big picture for the sake of some extremely flawed individuals and where Jyn, who sees the personhood in random strangers but can lose sight of the big picture, to face a situation where she has to sacrifice an individual for the greater good. The guy isn't meant to be likable but he is meant to be very decidedly a person with his own feelings and relationships, his friend worries about him even when the other Imperials just assume he fell into a bottomless chasm or whatever, and then she and Cassian are left with a very suspicious dead body in the detention center where they're working.

J: lol they should throw it into the garbage compactor!
me: Oh, they do.
J: WHAT
me: :)
J: Really?
me: Yes. So when Leia and everyone jump in, there's—
J: *bursts out laughing*

We'd been trying to figure out how exactly to entertain ourselves last night, since my mind was so melted from Dissertation Day that I wasn't really up to much, and then J had a brainwave.

J: You could do research!
me: ............I'm not sure I really have that in me right now.
J: No, not that kind! Let's watch A New Hope. It's not as heavy or complex as the others, but it's really good and fun, and it'll be research for your story :)
me: :)

So we did! It was great, as ever.

It feels a bit silly to measure time by fanfic, but according to AO3, it’s been over ten and a half years (!!!!!!!!!) since I finished First Impressions.

I’m just … it doesn’t feel recent, but it certainly doesn’t feel like that long, yet it was one of the last things I did in my all-Austen-fandom-all-the-time phase, before I jumped into SW fandom. And my earliest SW fics are ten years old now (somehow???).

But idk, it seems so strange.

Tagged: #my birthday is in ten days and i'm both looking forward to it and feeling a bit weird about it this year #idk i feel like i should be more ~accomplished at this point in my life #or more something #maybe because the things people point to as accomplishments whenever i mention it #are pretty far back too #in any case objective lengths of time just don't match up with how the passage of time feels and it's weird #might be different if my best friend were here (he was born 11 days after me) but we haven't seen each other for over a year #/sigh

I'm breaking my "no more than 1-2 Tumblr posts a day and usually less" semi-hiatus to spam SW posts, haha, but I'm very excited because 1) STAR WARS and 2) my bff J and I are actually going to see a showing of The Empire Strikes Back (my favorite Star Wars!! narrowly beating out Rogue One) today. I've never actually seen it in a public setting—I wasn't into SW until we met because I didn't really like the prequels and hadn't seen the originals as a kid. In high school, J insisted on showing me his beloved VHS unaltered version of ANH and we could see what I thought afterwards, and once it was over I was so enthralled that I insisted on marathoning the entire OT that day and was Never The Same.

He's a bit more of a Star Trek person (his great one true love; I like ST but don't have the same attachment) while, obviously, Star Wars is my cinematic darling in particular, but we've had long discussions about it over the last 20+ years and both of us are huge fans. So it's a cool day for our nerdy professionally over-analytical brains :D

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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I meant to start the stuff I have to do today (AGHHH HAVE TO CHECK MY EMAIL AGAIN) at noon, while getting a scene together on my story in the morning … but by the time I looked up from the story, it was 1:30. Oops?

Tagged: #my best friend is like 'why are you even doing this when you clearly want to be a writer' #me: well once upon a time i figured i'd need a day job. though that's laughable at this point #but it's not like i'm just going to quit my fully funded phd in my fourth year bc the job market is bad #i just #kind of hate everything rn #except the One True Love of fiction writing #bleh

*after discussing SW for an hour and a half*

me: honestly, I’ve had people ask me questions about the expanded universe to prove my nerdiness.

best friend: …you really don’t need to prove that.

me: well, there’s the thing where you’re less of a fan if you don’t know about the [Star Wars] EU, even though my thing is that I do know about it, I just dislike it.

best friend: you own and have read Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. I think you’re good.

me: it’s bad, though. Just … interestingly bad.

*cue discussion of Splinter of the Mind’s Eye for twenty minutes*

Tagged: #it is in no way canon but nobody will tear luke's space duolingo account from my headcanon

best friend: I mean, I tried social media, but it’s such a terrible way to do politics, I’m not sure how you—

me: I barely use it for politics

best friend: …what do you use it for?

[ten minutes later]

me: -so Luke doesn’t have enough firebending training to redirect Palpatine’s lightning, and Anakin decides to save him, but he doesn’t risk going into the Avatar State so the cycle will continue, and his starship is a dragon that curls around him and Luke as he dies and *sniff*

best friend: …wow.

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