One for Sorrow

At some point I need to do a post round up of the three plays I saw in something like a week and a half—and all really good!

Before I get to that, I had one of those things this week when a couple of things seemed to happen that commented on something I was reading and thinking myself. And it's very much related to fandom things.

I'll start with last week's Community, which as you've probably heard (hopefully not entirely from Community fans that annoy you!) is being put on hiatus. There were a bunch of comments about last week's episode, in which the Dean tried to make a commercial for Greendale college, with Abed also making a documentary about the process because, as Abed and Luis Guzman both agree Hearts of Darkness (the documentary on the making of Apocalypse Now) is much better than Apocalypse Now. The ep has naturally spawned really interesting meta about the process of having stories and how the stories create reality, because they are a way for people to explain their experience of something via emotion.

I was particularly eager to think about that because of a book I've been reading, Sybil Exposed by Debbie Nathan. Perhaps you already know Sybil, because she was a huge cultural phenomenon in the 1970s. She was the subject of the "nonfiction novel" Sybil by Flora Schreiber, which told the story of Sybil Dorsett, a woman with 16 personalities who was cured via therapy with her brilliant, caring psychiatrist, Cornelia "Connie" Wilbur. The book was huge and later was made into an awesome TV movie with Joanne Woodward (who once herself starred as multiple personality Eve in The Three Faces of Eve) and Sally Field, who until then was known for her goofy sitcoms.

I hadn't realized, since when I read/saw Sybil in high school it was years after either came out, was that Sybil essentially created the modern understanding of multiple personality/dissociative identity disorder, and the idea of repressed memories brought out through therapy. That, of course, eventually peaked in the 90s with thousands of people diagnosed with the disorder (before Sybil it wasn't even in the DSM) without half the symptoms described in the book, and many therapists sued when the memories they recovered turned out to be completely false. ( Memory, it turns out, doesn't work like a Pensieve. )

I don't if this is interesting at all if you haven't heard of Sybil, but I do recommend the classic TV movie. Apparently it was remade with Jessica Lange at some point and I didn't even know, but it's just not the same if it's not the classic tale of multiple personalities and endlessly weird, torturous child abuse.

The pajamas in this clip got them sued on homophobic grounds!

I'm reading the reactions to the SPN finale and having total flashbacks to HP. Usually I don't think of those canons being very similar, but they both have characters with strong personalities that color all their reactions. They can get hurt by someone saying something not intended to hurt them, or do something that's hurtful to someone else without thinking it's hurtful. They can do obviously the wrong thing while thinking it's totally the right thing.

It makes the interactions fun to analyze to tease out how the characters are talking past each other or influencing each other in ways they can't understand, and makes every character an island where they can't ever truly understand the other person. I mean, they can understand them based on familiarity with their behavior, but if you asked them to analyze the other person it would probably bear no resemblance to how that character saw themselves.

But this leads to a fandom with a lot of different factions who see one character as right or sympathetic and other characters as wrong. And along with that go assumptions that if you disagree with someone on which character deserves understanding it must be because you're a stan of that character and so completely biased, rather than just seeing a grey area a little differently than the other person. The show serves up a sad, tragic situation that mixes love and resentment or has characters having a bad influence on each other without meaning to, it is guaranteed to cause fury!

Not generalizing the whole fandom with that there. There's plenty of people not doing that and writing about it, I've seen it. I'm just totally not surprised that after that finale there's a lot of fury going on, with different groups complaining that their character was dissed and hated on by the writers and will continue to be so while other characters unfairly elevated. The messiest fictional situations inspire the loudest insistance that it's all very clean and simple.

Today I had one of those thoughts that's kind of stating the obvious so there's little need to write it down, but it was in response to many people implying it wasn't true so I'm writing it down. It has to do with female characters. ( Or rather, the perfect female character. )

Okay, so Damian Wayne. Robin. There was a discussion of the preview for the next Teen Titans up, where Damian gets into it with Ravager, and that led to talk about his sexist jokes in the comments. I find them really creepy. I find it especially creepy that they have become the go-to joke with Damian. ( And while I have certainly blamed Grant Morrison for a lot of things that bother me about the Damian character, I don't think this is one of them. )

I was reading a post on No_Scans_Daily about nerds taking over as the dominant group in the media, and complaints that this was a betrayal of what a nerd or a geek was, because they just became like the jocks who kept them outside. That's a really quick sum up just to get to what it got me thinking about which was...( I don't think the classic nerd idea was really an outsider ever. )

I threw out a little theory on Fandom!Secrets that had to do with something I've been thinking about lately...I hesitate to say it because it’s a simple answer for a complicated thing done by many different people, but I still wonder if there's not a strain of this in fandom. ( So I'll toss it out. )

I feel like I haven't been on lj for years. I have been checking in, but I can off the top of my head think of many posts that I read, wanted to comment on, but didn't get a chance to at the time and they are now lost forever.

One cool thing that I did instead of lj was going to a few exhibits at the Met--one was on paintings called American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life 1765-1915 and the other, which sort of makes a theme, was looking at the photographs of Robert Frank from The Americans. ( They were both really cool-some big images inside. )

Oh my god, this meme ate my entire weekend almost! It's hard! Which I should have known. But I think I finally finished. I'm going to post it before I change my mind on everything.

(  Top Five Favorite (Not Fanfic) Authors )

( Top Five Self-Indulgent-But-Undeniably-Appealing Fanfic Tropes )

( Top Five Characters You Ended Up Loving More Than You Thought You Would At First )

( Top 5 websites )

( Top 5 books )

( Top 5 Moments of Glee )

( Top 5 Fanfics, The Ones You Read Again And Again )

( Top 5 Actors )

( Top 5 Songs You Associate With Anything Fannish )

( Top 5 Cities You’ve Ever Visited )

( Top Five Missing Moments/Scenes/Episodes )

( Top Five Horror Stories, Can Be Movies, Books, Etc. )

( Top Five Favorite Endings To Books )

( Top 5 Villain Archetypes )

( Top Five Ideas Or Themes You Find Yourself Concerned With When Interacting With Fannish Works )

( Top 5 favorite fictional characters, answer in picture form (either pictures of them, or pictures of something that represents what you like about them; whatever. Pictures!). )

( Five best episode endings )

( Top 5 Batman stories, Top 5 Robin stories? )

( Top five successful adaptations of books to films. )

( Top 5 fictional worlds )

( Top 5 Fictional Friendships )

( Five Top Fannish Meta Pet Peeves )

( Topo five things about Dick Grayson/Robin )

Regularly on F!S somebody posts a secret about how they've made it out of fandom and discovered that elusive "real life" by walking out their front door into the sunshine and it's awesome. And even though they denied it before, now they can admit that their time spent in fandom always really was a pathetic way of hiding from real life. Now that they don't care about fandom anymore (phew!) they can post that .jpeg to tell other people about it. It's almost as if you're not truly not a nerd anymore if you don't make it clear to other nerds that you find them pitiable now.

( And it makes me wonder, do other hobbies have this much shame involved? )

Having just read a bunch of posts on warnings in fics that didn't actually cover my own feelings about them? I thought I would share them!

A lot of the discussion has centered around triggers, which I think is important, but even as someone who doesn't think of herself as really having any triggers, warnings are still important to me. ( Just as they are in non-fanfic )