The badfic examples remind me of a post you linked to awhile back--the guy who was talking about exagerating characters? It's like that--you get a very young (in a writing sense) person trying to develop a story with conflict and emotion, and they grab the topics with the most inherent drama.
There are times in which "irresponsible" writing bothers me, though. I have a masochistic need to watch "7th Heaven" (my brother and I, since we have no family values, used to bond by MST3K-ing it), and their "very special episodes" drive me crazy. I think it's in part though because it [i]pretends[/i] to be a socially responsible vehicle of commentary--the creators pride themselves on it being a "family show" and tackling "tough issues"--their handling of which I almost always find offensive. Of course, I'm also a nit-picky person--the girl who grumbles when movies and tv set off the inplausibility meter. I certainly didn't have [i]high[/i] expectations for [i]Mona Lisa Smile[/i], but as soon as the story took the tact that professors at Wellsley would think Picasso was so OMG!kerrazy and non-art in 1950-whatever, I was done.
I do think there is a vanity angle, too. I hate to be all "blame the media! Rawr rawr rawr!" but I think we have a lot of weird issues about pain and suffering in American culture--a very odd mixture of Puritan/pioneer stoicism and also being totally confessional. My mom used to watch Dr. Phil and gave it up when she felt all he was doing was setting up really exploitive situations. What kind of "therapist" encourages people to bring their [i]children[/i] on national television to discuss their most intimate family problems? Why did anyone think this was a sensible thing to do, ever? And he always winds up by thanking the families for being willing to "share" their stories with the nation, which has always seemed like a weird concept to me.
Then again, I think a lot of "therapy culture" privileges processing emotions in a certain way. I don't mean to knock therapists, but I think there's a sense via psychology-in-the-media that everyone should roughly follow such an such pattern. And some people get angry when the "victims" don't seem victimized enough, or refuse to articulate it. A friend of mine in college once wrote in her blog something that referenced her having been sexually molested as a child, and amazingly people wrote back and called her a liar--based solely on the fact that in other parts of the blog she'd referred to her boyfriend, and "if she had [i]really[/i] been molested, she wouldn't trust men and would never want to have sex." People assume that someone who's quiet is being aloof rather than shy, or unfeeling rather than reserved. I've done some volunteer work in death-penalty abolition, and met victims' family members who didn't ask for the death penalty for their loved ones' murderers, and lots of them have gotten hate mail or media coverage suggesting they didn't really love the people they had lost. People can be really threatened when our psychological mythology is bucked.
I do find it worse when something well-written comes up with a situation I have difficulty contenancing. I've been on a bit of a Josephine Tey binge recently and I just read [i]The Franchise Affair[/i] for the first time, and liked it much less--not because of the story itself, but because the narrator was so aggressive in pushing the story's conclusions. It always struck me as sort of quaint and charming when both Inspector Alan Grant and Lucy Pym believed that faces were clues to characters--but less so when the narrator affirmed that everyone with slate-blue eyes was sex-crazed, and various "good" characters expressed their desire to beat up a sixteen-year-old girl (or their approval of it having happened). I live in a world where the beating of even very nasty sisteen-year-old girls isn't something I can heartily embrace, and having it so aggressively pushed on me was rather unpleasant. But in order for me to care, I have to either care a certain amount about the author or some element of the story, otherwise I can just write it off as "it takes all types." (It's so dreadful when you have the feeling an author you admire would scorn you or despise you personally, or vice versa).
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Date: 2005-05-24 04:27 pm (UTC)There are times in which "irresponsible" writing bothers me, though. I have a masochistic need to watch "7th Heaven" (my brother and I, since we have no family values, used to bond by MST3K-ing it), and their "very special episodes" drive me crazy. I think it's in part though because it [i]pretends[/i] to be a socially responsible vehicle of commentary--the creators pride themselves on it being a "family show" and tackling "tough issues"--their handling of which I almost always find offensive. Of course, I'm also a nit-picky person--the girl who grumbles when movies and tv set off the inplausibility meter. I certainly didn't have [i]high[/i] expectations for [i]Mona Lisa Smile[/i], but as soon as the story took the tact that professors at Wellsley would think Picasso was so OMG!kerrazy and non-art in 1950-whatever, I was done.
I do think there is a vanity angle, too. I hate to be all "blame the media! Rawr rawr rawr!" but I think we have a lot of weird issues about pain and suffering in American culture--a very odd mixture of Puritan/pioneer stoicism and also being totally confessional. My mom used to watch Dr. Phil and gave it up when she felt all he was doing was setting up really exploitive situations. What kind of "therapist" encourages people to bring their [i]children[/i] on national television to discuss their most intimate family problems? Why did anyone think this was a sensible thing to do, ever? And he always winds up by thanking the families for being willing to "share" their stories with the nation, which has always seemed like a weird concept to me.
Then again, I think a lot of "therapy culture" privileges processing emotions in a certain way. I don't mean to knock therapists, but I think there's a sense via psychology-in-the-media that everyone should roughly follow such an such pattern. And some people get angry when the "victims" don't seem victimized enough, or refuse to articulate it. A friend of mine in college once wrote in her blog something that referenced her having been sexually molested as a child, and amazingly people wrote back and called her a liar--based solely on the fact that in other parts of the blog she'd referred to her boyfriend, and "if she had [i]really[/i] been molested, she wouldn't trust men and would never want to have sex." People assume that someone who's quiet is being aloof rather than shy, or unfeeling rather than reserved. I've done some volunteer work in death-penalty abolition, and met victims' family members who didn't ask for the death penalty for their loved ones' murderers, and lots of them have gotten hate mail or media coverage suggesting they didn't really love the people they had lost. People can be really threatened when our psychological mythology is bucked.
I do find it worse when something well-written comes up with a situation I have difficulty contenancing. I've been on a bit of a Josephine Tey binge recently and I just read [i]The Franchise Affair[/i] for the first time, and liked it much less--not because of the story itself, but because the narrator was so aggressive in pushing the story's conclusions. It always struck me as sort of quaint and charming when both Inspector Alan Grant and Lucy Pym believed that faces were clues to characters--but less so when the narrator affirmed that everyone with slate-blue eyes was sex-crazed, and various "good" characters expressed their desire to beat up a sixteen-year-old girl (or their approval of it having happened). I live in a world where the beating of even very nasty sisteen-year-old girls isn't something I can heartily embrace, and having it so aggressively pushed on me was rather unpleasant. But in order for me to care, I have to either care a certain amount about the author or some element of the story, otherwise I can just write it off as "it takes all types." (It's so dreadful when you have the feeling an author you admire would scorn you or despise you personally, or vice versa).