Even if I drew on your face with a pen

[sovay]

This post is not actually about The Last Jedi (2017), which I still haven't seen. I just happened to be reading Film Crit Hulk's "The Beautiful, Ugly, and Possessive Hearts of Star Wars" when I hit a small emotional minefield. An entire section of the essay is devoted to the self-seriousness of toxic fandom, with its complaints about too many jokes and juvenile humor unbecoming the franchise and failure to treat the characters with the respect they deserve:

But it's all very simple: if the movie feels silly, then they feel silly.

And they do not want to feel silly one bit. Make no mistake, a lot of people watch movies and live vicariously through the characters. They go "I'm Luke Skywalker!" or "I'm Spider-man!" and they do this because these movies are really good at making us feel this way. So it's not just about escape, but an empowerment fantasy. They want to hold a lightsaber or web-sling around New York City. They want to feel awesome. They want to feel badass. But they definitely don't want to feel like the butt of a joke. It's exactly why Christopher Nolan endeared a certain kind of superhero fanboy who wanted to dress up their dark affinity for Batman in an intellectual, very serious packaging. While I will certainly go to bat for those films, there is nothing inherently "mature" about this fan approach. As I've argued before, most fan posturing has nothing to do with maturity, but instead the desire to shed their kid-like sensibilities and child-like interests, all by catering to juvenile stories.

There's a reason the Star Wars petitioner personality gets saddled with the "basement dweller" stereotype. It's not a fair one and probably not even accurate (which is scary, imagining them as full-grown adults with jobs and stuff), but it happens because making those comments are absolutely the tonal equivalent of a self-serious tween boy yelling, "MOM, GET OUT OF MY ROOM, I'M SUPER SERIOUS." It is always in the desperation to be taken seriously that we make ourselves the joke. But embracing our kid-like sensibilities, along with all the sadness and range life has to offer, is maturity itself. It's understanding we can be silly and make fun of ourselves just as much as we can be anything else.

By nature I take things seriously. I had to learn to understand a lot of jokes. (I still don't get entire classes of them. I believe that other people find them funny, but they don't produce the same reaction in me. I don't feel bad about it.) Even as late as college, I'd get accused of not having a sense of humor, not knowing how to have fun, not knowing how to lighten up, not knowing how to relax. (Scotty, with technical journal: "I am relaxing!") And I spent a lot of my childhood and my adolescence being made fun of. Big news. I survived to the age where I could have conversations with my peer group and my life got a lot better. But I realized while reading the paragraphs cited above that it is still extremely difficult for me to disentangle learn to have a sense of humor about yourself as part of the process of becoming a healthy adult from be a good sport, what's wrong with you, can't you take a joke? I know they are two different things. One is legitimate life advice; the other is bullying. I even think I managed the first somewhere in my decades of brute-forcing social skills into my brain. [edit: Okay, Tiny Wittgenstein, back off.] But the second is so often passed off under guise of the first that when I encounter the life advice in the wild—not even directed at me! I haven't seen The Last Jedi and I'm not an entitled cishet fanbro!—apparently some unexploded ordnance goes off in my head and I wind up re-reading the section several times to make sure it's not accidentally punching down in its attempts at uplift. There's a lot of mainstream fan culture I have no affinity for, but stop taking that silly thing so seriously is one of the few overlapping hills I will die on.

Anyway, I went to look at some other parts of the internet to get my heart rate back down and saw that handful_ofdust had tagged me WWII AU Newt Geiszler and Hermann Gottlieb, which definitely helped. The link in comments is dead, but I am delighted that I am not the only person who wanted to cast Burn Gorman as Alan Turing after seeing Pacific Rim (2013). I feel validated like five years after the fact. I don't feel bad about that, either.

Comments

[sovay]

Yeah, I think that blog is the kind of thing that would be delightful to dip into now and then as someone's published diary, maybe, but somehow unrolling on the screen in perpetuity it's just awful.

I backed off of footnotes because I didn't want to become her system of fifteen million footnotes indicated by protracted grawlix! I used to use them a lot in both reviews and general posts. Now something has to be really serious or under an LJ-cut to rate a footnote because I have looked into the abyss and it is four degree symbols in a row.

Yeah, it reads to me like what people think dialogue is like, although when you listen to recordings of how people actually talk, you realize how fragmentary and allusive and downright odd actual human speech is.

I was just trying to edit my comment to wonder if it was the effect of podcasts being such a popular art form: if people are now writing for the eye as if for the ear. (If the answer is yes, it's going to drive me up the wall. Simulated meandering is not something I enjoy even listening to.)

Haha no. You still need those people, they can't be replaced by a program.

You mean "illicit" is not interchangeable with "elicit"?

I don't want to nitpick the critic's spelling because that seems petty; homonyms happen and people re-reading their own work see the words they expect to see. I don't make typos often, but I have had some ridiculous ones get past me into the wild. I do think it's fair to nitpick the market not getting a pair of second eyes on it, which I agree with you it does not look like they did.

and I've caught a lot since the NYT went mostly online

Didn't they purge most of their copyeditors recently?

Or like reading a single page in a book, rather than having prose be running down a screen that's one of 20 or 100 or 200 tabs open at the top.

I learn better from books. It's three-dimensional. I can place passages by where I read them first: how far through the book, which side of the page, how far down the page. I can't do that with scrolls. It's one of the reasons I still prefer to read as much as I can in print and ink. I don't want something to vanish out of my head just because there's no way to fix position on a screen.

[kore]

I was just trying to edit my comment to wonder if it was the effect of podcasts being such a popular art form: if people are now writing for the eye as if for the ear. (If the answer is yes, it's going to drive me up the wall. Simulated meandering is not something I enjoy even listening to.)

My dim memory is that style of writing -- discursive, personal, rambling, "about" one thing but really with 20 different subjects -- was around long before podcasts, like with the first "bloggy" blogs (like Heartbreak Soup by Emily Gould of Gawker infamy). There are some more focused older blogs, like Sheila O'Malley on books, or Meg....argh, I no longer remember her name, who focused on the NY lit scene. It was made very very famous by Choire Sicha, also of Gawker infamy, but that was just its apex. I think it was built into blogging before then. Which is interesting because the first 'blogs' were basically linkrolls. Some of those very early bloggers, like kottke, sometimes got around to more personal writing, but not in the same very rambling way. Probably around the time Blogspot really took off? That was the first free and very easy to use blogging tool, and it was sort of the AOL CD of online personal writing.

My dad first made his mark in radio news and I grew up listening to newscasts for fun and OH MY GOD, I cannot deal with most amateur podcasters. The vocal fry! The weird emphases! The terrible pacing! IT'S LIKE LISTENING TO REGULAR PEOPLE TALK. WHY ON EARTH WOULD YOU RECORD THAT AND WANT PEOPLE TO PAY TO LISTEN TO YOU. Suddenly the whole world thinks it's Frederick Wiseman. Only, sadly, and not just sadly in this instance, there is only ONE Frederick Wiseman, and it is never more evident that what he does is not "just turn on a recorder" than when you listen to stuff that is actually made by someone....just turning on a recorder. I hate amateur podcasts more than video instructions, which is really something.

I don't want to nitpick the critic's spelling because that seems petty; homonyms happen and people re-reading their own work see the words they expect to see. I don't make typos often, but I have had some ridiculous ones get past me into the wild.

Yeah, I didn't mean spelling, altho I automatically pick up typos because of a pattern recognition thing, so if a piece is full of them it drives me nuts. I was thinking more of the editor who is like "you don't need this introduction," or "you need to get back to your point here," or "this comes out of nowhere, why not back up and write more?" Some of the old stories, like the editor who takes away the first three pages of your article because that's where the real beginning is. Which isn't necessarily true, but is a fun exercise. It's too bad editing gets reduced to typo-picking and squeezing the juice out of everything in the pop culture mind, because to me that's not what editing really is at all. But I think the lack of it is very easily signalled by really terrible recurring typos, missing words, and other things you could call the surface symptoms of the internal disorder.

and I've caught a lot since the NYT went mostly online
Didn't they purge most of their copyeditors recently?

PROBABLY. I would be greatly surprised if any big newspaper or pub house had any copyeditors left, which really fucking annoys me because once I thought it would be how I made my living. (But I also thought that would be writing, editing, teaching....so anyway.) I hear a lot of plaints from friends who are indie editors that now they're contracted by trad pub houses (often paid a flat fee, no salary or benefits of course) and expected to do the work of proofreader/copyeditor/editor for maybe one quarter of the pay of what any of those people would have earned. Gotta love late stage capitalism.

I memorize better from books. It's three-dimensional. I can place passages by where I read them first: how far through the book, which side of the page, how far down the page. I can't do that with scrolls. It's one of the reasons I still prefer to read as much as I can in print and ink. I don't want something to vanish out of my head just because there's no way to fix position on a screen.

HAH, I do the same thing -- I never thought of myself as having an eidetic memory, but I do exactly the same thing with "that passage is on the left-hand side on page 33" and I could visualize it. No, you can't do that with endlessly scrolling grayscale text. I didn't have any choice about buying books, though; our apartment is already full, we went broke multiple times, and the idea of moving (which we HAVE to do) is a nightmare because of the number of books. I seem to be able to remember content pretty well from ebooks, though, I just can't do that visual placing. Which is weird but better than nothing.

[kore]

Reading on a page and going to ebooks for me was like going from a typewriter to a computer. I PREFER the typewriter/book. It's how I learned to read/write and I did a lot of it and got very good at it in that medium, and the screen, whether for book or writing, always feels wrong. But the truth is I can't find any hard copy book in my apartment unless it's in a couple of obvious places because there are so many endless piles and stacks and triple-filled bookshelves, and the IBM Selectric II I used from about age 12 on chewed up my wrists, left thumb and elbows so badly I got severe RSI that almost prevented me from typing at all for years.

I mean I can feel, in my fingertips, what a typewriter keyboard would feel like under them even now. It would feel like home. It would feel like inspiration. It would feel like dreams and ambition made tangible. It would also probably permanently cripple both my hands in under an hour.

[asakiyume]

I don't really listen to podcasts, but I've heard a fair number of these-are-also-podcast radio shows from NPR that are such clones of each other that I can barely stand it anymore. Maybe not all podcasts sound like this. They have either a deadpan locution, learned at the foot of Ira Glass (I do like This American Life a lot of the time, but I don't want everything else in the whole world to sound like that!), or else a dewy eyed golly-gosh-whilikers tone as they explore science or sociology or the economy. Grah grah grah. And I think they **do** influence how people write.

[kore]

The pro ones tend to make me doze off, LOL. The amateur ones just make me want to scream at the people doing them about vocal fry and that is NOT GOOD for you (which I should know because I had a terrible case of it, from GERD).