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I was reading a discussion on Scans_Daily today that circled around one of my pet peeves: the importance of a "normal" life. I don't know why this bugs me--I can remember getting into a big fight about it once regarding a kids' book years ago.
Let me define normal in this context. Sometimes fandom etc. uses "normal" to describe people not in fandom, often associating the word with things that are boring and mundane. That's not what I mean here. I don't think there's anything wrong with living a "normal" life that you enjoy. I don't think that Jim and Pam on The Office have betrayed themselves or us by admitting that they are satisfied working at a small paper company while they enjoy each other and their baby probably soon to be babies.
This is not about putting down the "normal" life--it's more about the opposite, the sometimes unthinking judgment that "normal" is healthy and therefore "abnormal" is unhealthy.
I’m talking about situations where, for instance, certain details associated with suburban American childhoods are held to be immensely important for development in ways they probably aren’t. I remember someone once telling me that when Jodie Foster was asked her about not having a childhood, because she was a child actress her entire life, she replied basically: wtf? I did have a childhood. Just because I didn't have the childhood you did doesn't make it not a childhood. I so love her for that because it sounds like she had a really awesome childhood in some ways. It’s also like how on sitcoms whenever characters have babies it suddenly becomes important to their healthy development that they live in the suburbs.
There's plenty of stories of child actors going off the deep end--it can be a terrible life. But it also, it seems to me, can be particularly good life. One where a kid learns how to be a professional and work with adults from an early age, makes contacts and money to go to college. Or has plenty of fun meeting different people, going on location, learning new skills and acting. The idea that the job would *take away* from childhood always seemed very strange to me. There’s plenty of pitfalls and bad things a child could learn (especially if they don’t make it as an adult actor), but professional acting in general doesn’t seem automatically harmful.
The conversation on S_D, which was pretty fascinating to me, centered on the idea of "play." A character was brought to a moon bounce to jump around and learn how to “have fun.” What was (rightfully imo) challenged was the idea that this character didn't know how to have fun because he hadn't experienced this kind of recognizable experience of fun. Things the character was showed being interested in, like complex math, engineering and building cars, and weaponry, didn’t count as fun because they were too practical and helped with his job. Or were, objectively difficult things to do.
There seemed to be this idea that learning and play were two different things, because play was by definition not practical. But the opposite is actually true. All play is about learning and gaining skills. When baby mountain goats leap around with each other or wolves play fight they're learning coordination and skills they're going to need. Humans are pretty unique in that unlike other animals we play for our entire lives. We never stop learning that way. We rehearse social skills, physical skills, and intellectual skills all the time. Puzzle solving and tinkering might look like work to people who don't like them, especially if it's at a very high level and has practical results (like figuring out who's stealing from Wayne Enterprises or creating a Batmobile that can fly) but that's just an extra plus. It's the doing that's fun.
To overly analyze the idea of these two characters on a moon bounce, for instance: Moon bounces are fun because of the sensation of bouncing, and they teach physical sensations and coordination etc. For older people moon bounces are fun in part because the sensation is fun and in part because of the nostalgia. A person who did not moon bounce as a child and regularly experiences weightlessness and bouncing in a far more extreme way (swinging from buildings on a cable) probably wouldn't find moon bounces that fun. As I said in SD, it’s would be like telling Dick Grayson he didn't know how to have fun because he found swing sets boring when he grew up on a trapeze. There’s plenty of games I found absorbing and fun as a toddler I’d find boring today.
Fun and difficult don’t have to be enemies, and work and play can spill into each other. Charles Darwin was mad about collecting beetles as a kid. The Brontes made imaginary worlds. Professional sports players often enjoy playing sports for fun. Being able to relate to people is, imo, important, and shared cultural experiences can help that, but I think that's different from subtly suggesting that having interests that seem difficult or not fun to a hypothetical average person is a problem. Or that fun/not fun and work/play are divided into categories clearly designated by laughing, yelling or the words like "game" or "fun" on one side and focus, absorption, thought and a complex result on the other.
To use Bones as an example, for instance, it’s one thing to school Brennan on times when she thinks only what she thinks and only what she knows is intelligence—that’s true and as an intelligent person she should know that. It’s quite another to tell her that she shouldn’t find anthropology and working with skeletons more fun than sitting on a beach—that’s not true.
This is maybe an idea that’s particularly important to fans of characters like House, the Leverage team, Batman etc. The Batfamily celebrates hyper-competency in the areas in which they specialize. So I think there’s a natural feeling of being threatened when designated “ordinary” characters get added to that mix. Not because the ordinary character is necessarily bad, but when they seem held up as something the super competent characters need to be more like in terms of their ordinariness. Like, would you really be interested in an ep of Star Trek where a non-Starfleet member taught the crew to have fun by toilet papering somebody’s house?
This lj is kind of proof of that of the whole premise, really. I pretty much write informal English papers for fun.
Let me define normal in this context. Sometimes fandom etc. uses "normal" to describe people not in fandom, often associating the word with things that are boring and mundane. That's not what I mean here. I don't think there's anything wrong with living a "normal" life that you enjoy. I don't think that Jim and Pam on The Office have betrayed themselves or us by admitting that they are satisfied working at a small paper company while they enjoy each other and their baby probably soon to be babies.
This is not about putting down the "normal" life--it's more about the opposite, the sometimes unthinking judgment that "normal" is healthy and therefore "abnormal" is unhealthy.
I’m talking about situations where, for instance, certain details associated with suburban American childhoods are held to be immensely important for development in ways they probably aren’t. I remember someone once telling me that when Jodie Foster was asked her about not having a childhood, because she was a child actress her entire life, she replied basically: wtf? I did have a childhood. Just because I didn't have the childhood you did doesn't make it not a childhood. I so love her for that because it sounds like she had a really awesome childhood in some ways. It’s also like how on sitcoms whenever characters have babies it suddenly becomes important to their healthy development that they live in the suburbs.
There's plenty of stories of child actors going off the deep end--it can be a terrible life. But it also, it seems to me, can be particularly good life. One where a kid learns how to be a professional and work with adults from an early age, makes contacts and money to go to college. Or has plenty of fun meeting different people, going on location, learning new skills and acting. The idea that the job would *take away* from childhood always seemed very strange to me. There’s plenty of pitfalls and bad things a child could learn (especially if they don’t make it as an adult actor), but professional acting in general doesn’t seem automatically harmful.
The conversation on S_D, which was pretty fascinating to me, centered on the idea of "play." A character was brought to a moon bounce to jump around and learn how to “have fun.” What was (rightfully imo) challenged was the idea that this character didn't know how to have fun because he hadn't experienced this kind of recognizable experience of fun. Things the character was showed being interested in, like complex math, engineering and building cars, and weaponry, didn’t count as fun because they were too practical and helped with his job. Or were, objectively difficult things to do.
There seemed to be this idea that learning and play were two different things, because play was by definition not practical. But the opposite is actually true. All play is about learning and gaining skills. When baby mountain goats leap around with each other or wolves play fight they're learning coordination and skills they're going to need. Humans are pretty unique in that unlike other animals we play for our entire lives. We never stop learning that way. We rehearse social skills, physical skills, and intellectual skills all the time. Puzzle solving and tinkering might look like work to people who don't like them, especially if it's at a very high level and has practical results (like figuring out who's stealing from Wayne Enterprises or creating a Batmobile that can fly) but that's just an extra plus. It's the doing that's fun.
To overly analyze the idea of these two characters on a moon bounce, for instance: Moon bounces are fun because of the sensation of bouncing, and they teach physical sensations and coordination etc. For older people moon bounces are fun in part because the sensation is fun and in part because of the nostalgia. A person who did not moon bounce as a child and regularly experiences weightlessness and bouncing in a far more extreme way (swinging from buildings on a cable) probably wouldn't find moon bounces that fun. As I said in SD, it’s would be like telling Dick Grayson he didn't know how to have fun because he found swing sets boring when he grew up on a trapeze. There’s plenty of games I found absorbing and fun as a toddler I’d find boring today.
Fun and difficult don’t have to be enemies, and work and play can spill into each other. Charles Darwin was mad about collecting beetles as a kid. The Brontes made imaginary worlds. Professional sports players often enjoy playing sports for fun. Being able to relate to people is, imo, important, and shared cultural experiences can help that, but I think that's different from subtly suggesting that having interests that seem difficult or not fun to a hypothetical average person is a problem. Or that fun/not fun and work/play are divided into categories clearly designated by laughing, yelling or the words like "game" or "fun" on one side and focus, absorption, thought and a complex result on the other.
To use Bones as an example, for instance, it’s one thing to school Brennan on times when she thinks only what she thinks and only what she knows is intelligence—that’s true and as an intelligent person she should know that. It’s quite another to tell her that she shouldn’t find anthropology and working with skeletons more fun than sitting on a beach—that’s not true.
This is maybe an idea that’s particularly important to fans of characters like House, the Leverage team, Batman etc. The Batfamily celebrates hyper-competency in the areas in which they specialize. So I think there’s a natural feeling of being threatened when designated “ordinary” characters get added to that mix. Not because the ordinary character is necessarily bad, but when they seem held up as something the super competent characters need to be more like in terms of their ordinariness. Like, would you really be interested in an ep of Star Trek where a non-Starfleet member taught the crew to have fun by toilet papering somebody’s house?
This lj is kind of proof of that of the whole premise, really. I pretty much write informal English papers for fun.
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But I know I've done that to other people. I think I may have done that about the house elf thing. Somebody was really mad that I was like, 'Yeah, so they're slaves and Harry's a slave owner and that's okay." No matter how many times they explained it to me, it just didn't hold up any other way to me!
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One of those days :P