Forgiveness and Dr. Strange

There’s a pun somewhere there, but the whole thing lends itself to puns, which seems to be a thing that happens when you create characters in the seventies.

Anyhow, I saw Doctor Strange this past weekend, as one of the MCU movies that pops up on Netflix from time to time. (There’s also Civil War, which I should really watch but will make me yell at the screen and fume about failed analogies, so I keep putting it off even though I know it’s good.) I really liked it; I don’t see the point of making Benedict Cumberbatch do an American accent when you could have tweaked the character’s background on basically the sub-atomic level (seriously, nothing about the dude changes if he starts off an arrogant doctor in London rather than NYC) and pleased a whole section of the fanbase more; but I’m a fan of the more trippily mystic elements of comic universes in general, and the movie didn’t let me down.

(I do disagree with the casting of the Ancient One, but I feel like other people have talked about that more and better already.)

As usual, I like when people are generally adults, and don’t flail around all Personal Issues when the world needs saving (TONY STARK) (HAL FUCKING JORDAN). Strange kept his flailing to a minimum, kept it fairly relevant–hey, if the AO is actually drawing power from the eldritch abomination you’re fighting, that’s a legit concern–and got his shit together once he figured out that the danger was real. I liked that.

One of the things I give the movie particular points for was where Strange ended up regarding his ex: that they had a civil working relationship, they love each other in their own ways, but clearly (hopefully, since one can never count on screenwriters) aren’t getting back together. He was an asshole, and while he sincerely regrets it, apologizes, and isn’t an asshole now, she’s moved on. Appropriately for the movie’s theme, you can’t repair some things, and good intentions aren’t enough to reverse time.

And I love it.

I often say that I don’t believe in forgiveness, at least not for anything severe or for a long-term pattern of behavior. (Everyone flakes from time to time; everyone snaps at people when it’s been a long day; but if you harm someone, especially maliciously but not even necessarily that, or are a dick repeatedly and persistently, that’s different.) And that’s mostly true, but not entirely.

If you’ve been an asshole–say, if you’ve acted like your talent meant you didn’t have to care about people and then been horrible to someone who was trying to help you–you don’t have to stay an asshole, but that means…you don’t stay an asshole. You go off, you get whatever help you need (without expecting unpaid emotional labor from family and friends), and you essentially make yourself a different person, someone who wouldn’t do those things. Then you apologize (sincerely and without trying to justify yourself), you make what amends are possible given the situation, you consistently and for a long period of time demonstrate that you’ve changed…and you accept the consequences of what you did.

And sometimes, those consequences are that the relationships you had are no longer possible. That’s not wrong. Forgiveness isn’t obligatory. Bad memories are hard to forget, and it’s not really possible to make yourself love someone again–especially if the reason you stopped loving them in the first place is self-preservation. Nobody should have to make nice with people who hurt them, much less re-enter a romantic relationship with them.

Sometimes, the price of becoming a better person is that you have to go and be a better person somewhere else, with different people.

That’s not wrong.

One of the romance genres I have the hardest time reading is exes getting back together. There are scenarios that can make it work, but they basically all come down to either external intervention being the cause of the breakup (“sorry I have to go fight the French oh hey now you think I’m dead”) or the original relationship being a teen thing, and both of them meeting again when they’re adults (and *not* having carried a major torch for each other ever since, because…adults, FFS). Generally, if things don’t work out between two people, they’re not going to work out on the second try.

Even if you can manipulate time, you don’t get do-overs.

Well done, screenwriters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sample

I can’t think of anything to write about this week. LARPs will do that. 🙂 Meanwhile, here’s a sample chapter from the novel I’m writing, in which my heroine is on the road with a mysterious teenager and an elven warrior. In 1989.

• * *
• The van banged into our rear bumper, rocking us sideways and forward. I caught myself on the back of the seat and bit my lip: screaming won’t help, screaming won’t help, screaming. Won’t. help.  

   

  Would anything?

   

  I twisted around to look at the van. It was a decent double of the one they’d dragged me and Rose into back in Boston: fair-sized, with no markings. A guy in a suit rode shotgun, though thank God not literally that I could see. The driver was a girl younger than me, with long pale purple hair and a fan of mauve shadow over each eye, visible even through two layers of glass and a bit of distance. Even if I didn’t know Rose’s real identity, I would have recognized her. I watch TV occasionally.

   

  “Sparcyl,” I said.

   

  “Ohno,” said Rose. It all came out one word, under her breath.

   

  “Guessing she’s gonna do more than play the guitar,” I said, my voice all high and brittle. We whipped around another turn. My seatbelt bit into my side, and I was sure I’d have bruises for days, but that was so not the main concern.

   

  “They all can.” She sounded hopeless. I didn’t blame her.

   

  There were no other cars on the road, and no houses to either side of us. The water in the quarry was black and motionless. Maybe it wasn’t hundreds of feet down, just fifty or sixty, but that would be more than enough, and the quarry walls looked steep. This was where you got maniacs in hockey masks, or you came to throw stuff off the Talahatchee Bridge. Nobody would help us.

   

  Sathinal was a set of narrowed blue eyes, a pair of white-knuckled hands on the wheel, and a neck with the muscles corded in strain. I knew he was flooring it, or as much as he could manage under the circumstances, but the van had the inside lane. They could ride along the shoulder at ninety without killing themselves. We weren’t nearly so lucky.

   

  Wham again, this time on the side, and our tires skidded as Sathinal yanked the wheel to the right and the car away from the railing. The landscape outside my window spun: water, fence, half-paved road. We shot forward. I clung to the door handle to try and hold myself still. Mostly I broke three nails and felt like I was pulling my shoulders out of their sockets.

   

  Inside my head, I stopped cursing only to pray or shriek. Rose was praying aloud, though I didn’t think it was one she’d learned from Sunrise, just a whispered nopleasenopleasenopleaseno that rose and fell in the rhythm of sobs.

   

  I wanted to reassure her. I wanted to reassure myself. Neither one was happening.

   

  Then, as the road straightened out, the van caught up with us. In a moment it had pulled ahead. I gasped when I saw it suddenly veer left – not pulling in front of us like a normal car, but splaying itself across the road and braking, hard.

   

  “SHIT.” I did scream then, as Sathinal slammed on our brakes. The tires squealed again, the brakes themselves screeched, and I waited to find out what death by car crash would feel like. I’d heard cars didn’t blow up as much as they did in movies. I didn’t know if that was true if you t-boned a van, or what side the gas tank was on, and I would have started crying if I’d had time.

   

  Then we stopped. My head slammed back into the seat, I saw stars and almost lost the word Sathinal was saying.

   

  Sword.

   

  Right. Okay. Yeah. I fumbled for the bag and handed it to him before my vision was entirely clear. We didn’t have a lot of time.

 

Non-Recommendation: Anne with an E

Due in part to Project Gutenberg and a lot of boring temp jobs, I’m more than passingly familiar with the Anne of Green Gables series. It’s fun, and I feel like it holds up well as an adult, or at least that you can derive amusement out of it from different angles. (Like, the secondary protagonist in Anne’s House of Dreams has *all* the angsty backstory. Seriously. It’s like she was created in a Victorian chicklit version of the Traveler system.) (For those less geeky and old than me.)

Netflix announced a series based on the book, and I liked that idea; I’d seen the original miniseries and liked it, but wasn’t super attached. (A child of the Disney era, I’m pretty chill about remakes as a rule.) Make it a gritty exploration of the orphan-workhouse-bizarro-Victorian life? Sure, why not? I’m decent at viewing the original as separate from the film version.

So I watched three episodes. The storyline wasn’t bad (one character was *way* more about The Feels than she should have been at that point in the narrative, and I do not love how people who turn historical fiction into cinema think we’re all incapable of understanding emotional nuance; like, I can get that people are feeling things even if they don’t go up to eleven when expressing them, KIERA KNIGHTLY PRIDE AND PREJUDICE) and the costumes and setting were great.

And then…the dialogue in Episode 3.

“Feminism” in 18whatever I can fanwank–it got used in France in 1857, Canada has a big French population, sure, I’ll roll with it.

And then a Victorian schoolboy says “Hey, buddy, how’s it going?” to another, and I cringed. Because: no. Slang changes. Dialects change. Pre-teens in the nineteenth century shouldn’t sound like the fratboys of my undergrad days. THAT IS NOT HOW LANGUAGE WORKS.

I thought, okay, maybe it’s a fluke, everyone makes a mistake…so I rolled with it, until fifteen minutes later, when the word “homeschooling” got used like we were watching the Real Housewives of fucking Marin County.

Annnd no.

People: I don’t demand complete historical accuracy. I’m fine with costuming and hair erring on the “looks good” rather than “exactly as it was, complete with stupid fashions” end. If you’re working with Middle English or Vikings or other sources from times when we don’t know how people actually spoke and/or it was super alien, you get more latitude–and I’m not inclined to care that much about ten or twenty years’ difference either way.*

But when you have recorded dialogue that a modern audience could easily understand, and you choose instead to use words from a clear hundred years in the future, either a) you’re lazy as hell, or b) you think your audience is stupid. I’m not fond of either quality in a scriptwriter.

*Though the editorial department at Sourcebooks is great about letting me know when my vocabulary is jarringly out-of-time, and their resource does seem to hit within the ten-or-twenty year mark, even for medieval stuff. They have Skills, those people.

Hulu Shows Without Romance

…though with plenty of sex. Just, much of it isn’t the kind you want to watch, or at least I really hope so.

I’ve been enjoying Harlots (…yeah, there’s no good way to write that) and, while I don’t know if “enjoying” is the right word for watching “The Handmaid’s Tale” in 2017, I’ve found it very well-done and compelling. I didn’t set out to make this the Spring of TV Shows About Women Defined By Sexuality In a World Somehow Even More Sexist Than Ours, nor do I think Hulu did, but it does seem to be a theme. Also bright colors, tiresome religious fanatics, and men being ninety-three percent useless.

This is where we’re going today. Spoilers for everything through Episode 4 of Handmaid’s Tale (and the book) and everything through Episode 7 of Harlots.

Like I said, these are both stories focused on women, specifically women who aren’t “respectable,” in situations where men, particularly white men, have way more power. And they also set up scenarios that I’ve seen used for romance in both published fiction and fanfic: the virgin about-to-be-prostitute who needs a protector and the jaded nobleman who’s been burned by women; the servant and the master of the house who starts encouraging her societally-forbidden interests; the woman who wants to get away and the man who’s in a position to maybe help her but can’t let his superiors find out. I’ve read a fair number of variants on these dynamics and, don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed them.

But both these shows do a good job of showing the other ways it should–and usually *would*–go, and it’s not romantic at all.

One of Lucy’s would-be “keepers” in Harlots is cute and urbane–he also gets all weird with a knife and a pomegranate, enjoys her discomfort, and oh, right, actually belongs to a club of serial killers. (I was going to say the Hellfire Club with extra murder, but it turns out that the actual HC was also way less rapey and admitted women as equals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellfire_Club_) so well done, 1700s hedonists; also they probably had very little to do with Jean Grey’s confusing love life, which is another point in their favor.)

The other guy, also physically attractive and kind of puppy-dog earnest when we meet him, spends his wife’s money so recklessly that her tenants suffer (thanks, 1700s), is ludicrously and disgustingly petty to his servants, and…is also a rapist, with the extra-creepy motivation of getting back at his mistress for not taking him seriously/maybe flirting with another guy by sleeping with her younger sister. And I find him more resonant than Guy 1, because Charming But Actually Murderous is a thing, but Guy 2 is really what the men who make a public show out of “being hurt before” or “tired of women’s games” or whatever tend to be like: petty, pouting, and deeply resentful of any suggestion that they might not get and deserve whatever they want or that the people they’re paying to act nice might not actually love them.

Similarly, the Commander in Handmaid’s Tale, as other people (especially on Previously.TV, the Tor.com reread, and the AV Club) have noted, is really invested in the idea that the woman who has to have sex with him should also have to enjoy his company. Both Atwood in the book and the writers of the series do a great job at using the trappings of romance — the secret meetings, the witty banter, the small acts of kindness — in a way that makes it clear just how awful they all are in that situation. In a very different scenario, this could maybe be a genuine attempt to connect by someone whose choices are also limited (although even then, given the grotesque power imbalance, there could be no meaningful consent), but it’s very clear that the Commander is one of the people who set up this whole horrible world. He made the restrictions, which makes it an absurd pantomime of generosity when he grants Offred small exceptions to them. Like the asshole in every customers_suck story who complains when the waitress doesn’t smile enough, he has to be aware on some level that she’s not choosing to be there, and yet he wants the appearance of joy, or of genuine desire.

Similarly, I like that the guy who thwarts June and Moira’s escape starts out being nice and helpful. He’s not barking orders or insulting June like Coffee Shop Douche in flashbacks. He offers a hand, he’s understanding…and then he makes sure she goes back to the hellhole she escaped from. It was a good touch. They’re frequently nice and helpful, right up until they have a reason not to be.

There are men with good intentions in these shows, but they’re not in a position to do much with them. In Harlots, William and Daniel mostly serve as the voices of conscience for Martha and Charlotte, respectively. (William going after Harriet’s kids may be the exception. I’ll report back after I see how that turns out.) Neither are rich, or powerful, and for the time and place, both face racial animus, William more so. Two constables seem to want to do the right thing most of the time, but end up covering their own asses more than doing any good. Charles and Emily seem to hate each other most of the time, and he spends much of the first season as an enforcer for his creepy mom, even if he does treat her nicely when Quigley’s not looking. Nick, in The Handmaid’s Tale, “wishes” he’d just driven off with June rather than hand her over to the state torture squad, but…he didn’t, and if he’d tried, they’d likely both have ended up dead or worse. Luke seemed to be a good guy, but he’s also either dead or in Canada, and either way he’s not a lot of help.

One of the AV Club’s comments about Harlots, which I agree with, is that it’s good there’s no white male savior figure in the picture, and I feel the same about The Handmaid’s Tale. The whole “power corrupts” deal seems to hold true in both universes, and associating with power…well, sometimes it helps you. Sometimes, occasionally literally, it just gets you fucked.

 

 

 

 

 

A Terrifying Look at My Musical Tastes Part I: Billy Joel

Failbot 9000 failed hard last week, but hopefully this week is only slightly faily, and scheduled posting shall resume next week. Meanwhile, having listened to some Mark and Sarah Talk About Songs a lot, I thought I’d talk about music myself.

I’ve listened to a lot of Billy Joel over the years. My friend Abby is to blame for some of this. Also, my high-school radio station played “Goodnight Saigon” at 7:30 every morning, or just about, so I’d be regularly brushing my hair to a song about young men dying in a war that ended before my parents met, which I’m sure did wonderful things for my mental health.

But I’m unduly fond of Billy Joel, and while I’m sure there are technical reasons for this that I can’t explain because I damn near failed music in ninth grade (sorry, Ms. Cavalier, we were awful students) a large part of it is because lyrically he’s…well, it’s not that he’s not dramatic, as such, but he’s never naive about it.

See, the top-40 music of my adolescence was the music of the mid-to-late nineties/early two thousands. I like a lot of it, but (unless you wanted to try and figure out whatever the grunge dudes were saying, which, no) there was a tendency for songs about human relationships to be very sincere and earnest and like the singer was the first person in the universe to ever have a crush. This hit its…”peak”…in the era wherein I was going to school dances and hearing LeeAnn Rimes expound, in three or four different forms, on You Are The Most Wonderful Guy Ever and I Literally Cannot Survive Without You.

(And then I spent a summer in a deli alternating that with Elton John’s Hey, Pretty Famous Women Are Tragic and Misunderstood, Don’t You Have Feelings About That? and Lee Greenwood’s Getting Hard for the Stars and Stripes. Slicing my hand open was only the second or third least pleasant part of that job.)

That is not my thing. That wasn’t really my thing even in high school. I’d read a lot by then, and I’d learned in various ways that the heart heals like any other lump of living meat (unless you’re Padme, I guess, sigh) and also people live without literal internal organs and can we maybe take it down seventeen or eighteen notches? People have liked boys that way since boys were invented. Parents have never understood. Find your chill.

Joel is good at taking it down those notches. As far as I can tell, his songs (particularly the romantic ones) fall into one of two categories: Well, That Happened, and Yeah, I’ll Go There. (There’s the occasional Also A Lot Has Happened Since The Cuban Missile Crisis, BTW number, too.)

WTH songs include “Got to Begin Again,” “Say Goodbye to Hollywood” and many of the third-person songs that aren’t directly about the economic downfall of the mid-Atlantic. Sometimes, everything has gone to shit, and it’s sad, but it’s not like the world is ending or this is uncharted territory; people, including you, have done this before and will do it again; Brenda and Eddie would always know how to survive; etc.  This is not the first breakup in the universe. This isn’t even a surprise. (A message that also makes me love non-Joel-but-similar-era “I Know Him So Well.”) Take a breath, have a drink, and wait it out.

YIGT songs include “Only the Good Die Young,” “For the Longest Time,” “This Night,” and “And So It Goes.” Things are good. Things may even be great. They might not stay that way. In fact, they probably won’t. Man is delight of man, yet each shall fail his fellow. Maybe I’ll be sorry when you’re gone, but you can have this heart to break–and there’s no real question about the breaking, is there, one way or another? (Non-Joel song with surprisingly similar resonance: Swift’s “Wildest Dream”.) All joy comes at a price; that price is always (at least in the narrative of the song) worth paying, but you’re not going to pretend you don’t know it.

(“I’ve Loved These Days,” another favorite, falls somewhere between the two: an era is ending, you’re going to miss it, but you neither regret having it for that or are going to stand in the way of change.)

The world goes on, one way or the other. Few people are completely happy or sad for very long. If I was going to assign Tarot cards to singer/songwriters, which is totally a project I don’t need, Billy Joel would be the Wheel of Fortune, and I’m both jaded and fatalistic enough to enjoy that.

None of this justifies “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” though.

Failbot Fails

I have totally neglected to write a blog post this week. Such is the way of post-LARP weeks. Don’t even ask about my laundry. I am trying not to look directly at it, lest I make it angry.

I’ll be back next week, ideally when I’ve slept.

Quick Post: Quick Podcasts

Currently strapped for time, for reasons which may or may not have to do with final proofs, learning to swear in Finnish for a LARP, and the day job. So here are some podcasts I enjoy, all clocking in at well under an hour–the perfect length for a short commute, a small load of laundry, or cleaning out your inbox.

Mark and Sarah Talk About Songs (http://markandsarahtalkaboutsongs.libsyn.com/): I’ve been a fan of Sarah Bunting since she ran Television Without Pity and I was a gormless freshman with a bad haircut. She currently blogs at Tomato Nation (tomatonation.com) and is one of the site-runners at Previously.TV (previouslytv.com); she’s a main contributor on longer PTV podcasts Again With This and Extra Hot Great, both of which I wildly endorse. Here, she and her friend Mark Blankenship (another EHG regular, and an awesome guy) discuss one or two songs in a 20-minute-or-so podcast, occasionally branching out to cover whole genres like Painfully Sincere Folksongs or Supremes Covers. They’ve got great senses of humor, they’re insightful without being technical, and they make fun of Jewel, which is always a bonus.

The Hidden Almanac (thehiddenalmanac.com): Ursula Vernon! Ursula Vernon is the best. Ursula Vernon wrote Digger (diggercomic.com), an epic adventure involving a wombat. She deconstructs fairy tales, she writes a bunch of great short stories, and she wrote This Vote is Legally Binding, which I link to whenever men start being self-pitying (http://ursulav.livejournal.com/1680540.html). The Hidden Almanac is a 3-4-minute podcast, written by Ursula and voiced mostly by her partner Kevin, with “The Writer’s Almanac but in an extremely weird alternate reality” as a core concept. More cheerful than Night Vale, full of gardening information and elderly assassins, it also has some very touching broadcasts, particularly around the November 2016-January 2017…Times.

Welcome to Night Vale (welcometonightvale.com): Night Vale! You have probably heard of it: Lake Wobegon meets Lovecraft. I really love it, though fair warning: the individual podcasts are the longest here, around 25-30 minutes each, and at this point there’s three years of canon behind it. Unlike the other two, Night Vale does do a lot of work with continuing arcs, so I’m not sure how easily you could catch up if you didn’t start at the beginning.

Enjoy!