gaudior

And now the fun begins.

For lo, in this round, I have paired all of the previous ukes with other ukes, and all the semes with other semes (with the addition of Riku x Sora from Kingdom Hearts, because I accidentally messed up the numbers). Because all of you bastards are completely unable to pick between Gojyo and Hakkai,* I put Hakkai as uke because Thrud says that's cannon (in Saiyuki Gaiden, currently unavailable in English).

So, see what you think. I encourage discussion of this, particularly with pairings in which people don't know one of the two characters, and have questions.

( Without further ado... ) Voting is now closed, thank you much! Go vote on today's!

I have to say, some of these pairings are just fun.

Grin.

*Quite correctly, in my opinion

I like it, tho. And in celebration, I shall do... well, not exactly a meme, but I ganked the idea from teenybuffalo: seven things I should like to NEVER SEE IN A WORK OF FICTION AGAIN.

1) Taking an otherwise undeveloped and neglected character and giving him/her a tremendous amount of character development immediately before killing him/her. So that we get to be all sad about a character death, and it gets to be all dramatic, without actually losing any of the main characters. This feels cheap to me. If you're going to develop someone, develop him/her-- and then keep him/her around so we get to see what happens next. If you're going to kill someone, make it real.

2) Obligatory romance. I like a good love story as much as the next rabid shoujo fan (i.e., quite a bit). But that means that I see love as something which is complicated and unpredictable, and each romance is unique. A "love interest" shoehorned into a plot which is really about something else loses all of the power of love, and doesn't really add much. (The converse of this is that I dearly love stories in which (straight) men and women are friends-- or in which queer characters of the same sex are. Love is awesome, as is sex-- but it isn't everything.)

3) A single gay character. Marvel comics are particularly guilty of this one: the story about a whole lot of straight people who have one (1) gay friend/team member/co-worker/etc... who is apparantly the only gay person in the universe. So there are some gay jokes, (which are okay because they have a gay character, doncha know) and maybe the gay character has Angst because s/he falls in love with a straight character... but s/he never does anything actually gay. Because there's no-one to do it with. So these characters do not date, have sex, have kids, or do anything else except give fashion advice and snark.

4) A "smart" character who appears to be a person of average intelligence who has swallowed a thesaurus. These are supposedly genius characters who don't actually do anything intelligent, who don't come up with intelligent plans or profound thoughts or clever jokes, but are "the smart guy." So they spend all their time in labs spouting incomprehensible technobabble, and they never say anything that doesn't have polysyllables. In X-Men, you can always tell that the writer's actually good because all of a sudden Beast becomes capable of using slang. Because, like, smart people do that, too. They just happen to be smart.

5) Monocultures. If you have an alien species, you had better give me a damn good reason for it if they all speak the same language, all have the same religion, all look alike racially, etc. It's like "the jungle planet,"-- planets are big, and they have multiple ecosystems. I would accept the answer that the planet is a hive mind, and so don't have different cultures because they never have enough distance separating them for such things to develop. But otherwise...no. If you don't have time to go into all the cultures, that's fine, but don't pretend they don't exist. (Star Trek, I'm looking at you.)

6) Female characters in historical settings who have modern sensibilities. I am a feminist, and proud to be one. But I know damn well that the way I'm a feminist is a product of my culture-- and particularly of birth-control technology and superior medicine and food-production techniques. In my culture it makes sense to have casual premarital sex, to treat anyone with a brain as equally able to do almost any kind of work, to value work done outside the home which brings in money more than work done inside the home which doesn't, etc. This just wasn't usually the case in pre-industrial times and places.

And the thing that people tend to miss is that this doesn't mean that most women resented it all the time. Because frankly, if it's 1300 Europe, everyone's life sucks, and everyone is stuck doing things that are difficult and unglamorous, and their best hope is heaven. I'm pretty sure that "women's work" was not seen as nearly as unimportant as people see it as being now-- because money was not, always, the major motivating force in people's lives. Survival was. Power and respect were not tied to work in exactly the same way they are now. In other words, not every single little girl wanted to run away and become a knight. I am eternally grateful to The Privilege of the Sword for the fact that the woman who learns swordfighting didn't want to-- she wanted to be a proper lady, becuase there was nothing wrong with that.

I realize that this makes it tricky if you just want to curl up with a nice fantasy novel that feels comfortable that you don't have to think about. But honestly.

7) Ignoring Christianity in settings where it's really, really present. I realize people worry about being banned. I realize that generic "gods" are easier to talk about than what you grew up with/what you grew up in opposition to. But sometimes you write American Gods, and you leave out Jesus almost entirely, and you spend an entire book talking about how Americans are so secular and this is no good country for gods, when in fact, it is an excellent country for one god, and he's won. And that's just lame.

...Hm. In looking over the list, it seems to mostly be annoyed at people for not thinking enough.

I'm cool with that.

--R

PS: VACATION!

Happy International Blog Against Racism Week!

So, I’m starting this with a caveat: the below is not meant to suggest that I don’t think it’s a good idea to talk about race, try to educate, confront racism, etc. On the contrary—I’m incredibly glad people do, because it’s made a major change in my life. My first year of graduate school, one of my professors showed us some very unsettling films and had us read several assumption-questioning papers ("Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack," etc.) It made me start to really question a lot of my beliefs about race, and it sent me to the internet, where I joined ap_racism and read and wrote a lot of essays (yay rachelmanija, oyceter, coffeeandink, and yhlee), and generally spent about two years thinking. The result of which is that I’m much clearer about my views, much more comfortable addressing and working with race in my fiction and my practice (very good thing when you work with clients of color), feel much less guilty and more empowered, and am enthusiastically working for equality.

All of which is why I was a little taken aback by what happened when, at a dinner party yesterday, the question of race came up. I mentioned the idea of differentiating between “prejudice” and “racism,” where racism = prejudice + power. What interested me was that while many people had interesting things to say, one of the reactions was not to react to the idea itself, but, “That sounds a lot like the kind of internet-wankery that people get into on livejournal.” I replied that yeah, I and a lot of my friends on livejournal do talk about race a lot, and someone else said that this was all well and good, but that often, it seemed to fall into the “gotcha-game”—where discussions of racism became, not discussions of racism, but people trying to catch each other doing something wrong.

Which is frustrating. Because yeah, many white people do feel very guilty and defensive about our privilege, our attitudes about race, etc, so there is a fair amount of defensiveness\. But on the other hand, it’s totally true. Some discussions about race really do feel like the discussants are just trying to “win” by proving the other person stupid.

( The problem with this, and the way to prevent it, seems to be one of clarifying goals before starting the conversation. I can see five different reasons why people discuss race online, and I think they’re all worthwhile… but when they get conflated, things go downhill fast. )

So, on Friday, I made a post about a thought I'd had about cultural appropriation*. Unfortunately, I got it all down really quickly and ran out the door, so it came out sort of half-baked. (And then I went down to see my wife and my friends for the weekend (yay!), and spent no time online to fix it). And people came and made interesting comments on it, so I don't want to delete that entry, or massively revise it, because then their thoughtful and interesting comments won't make any sense. On the other hand, I think the idea was interesting, and I want to work on it more. So I'm going to leave the original entry there (and respond to the comments presently), and post the revised version here. Cuz it's my lj, and I can re-post if I want to.
****************************************************************************


So, sparked by coffeeandink's useful post on last year's WisCon panel, I've had a thought. I haven't, I'm afraid, read enough to know whether anyone else has had this thought, but I think it's a good one.

Last year, I wrote a post on cultural appropriation trying to answer the question that many White people have upon first hearing the concept-- "Why is this such a big deal?" But what I'm thinking about now is: why, for White people, is it so hard to understand that it is a big deal? A lot of people give the answer of "entitlement," and that may well be true, but I think it's only a partial answer-- ( and that there are more interesting cultural reasons behind it. )

*cultural appropriation: the use of other cultures' creations and ideas for one's own purposes, sometimes without much understanding of their meaning in the original context
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Over the past year or so, a number of people have asked me for recommendations for psychotherapists. In helping them find one, I've realized that most people don't know much about how to choose a shrink, besides a sense of the personality with which they'd feel most comfortable. Now, it's true that personality maters, but there are also other factors to keep in mind. Namely: there are about half-a-dozen different theoretical orientations and types of degrees which therapists have, and these make them differently equipped to help you with different problems.

So, the following is a list of exactly what the different types of therapist are and what they're good for. I hope this is useful-- and please pass it on to anyone else who might need it! Thanks!

( These are the shrinks in your neighborhood... )

This idea comes out of a discussion B and I were having the other day, wherein we were arguing (as we often do) whether or not rational thought is more important than emotion. I think I've come up with an answer I'm happy with.

Post-modernists often say that we can only experience subjective reality-- that if there is an objective reality out there, we're far too limited by our own experiences and beliefs to see it. I don't think I buy this entirely, as it doesn't really give a satisfactory explanation for why all of our subjective realities so often match up so well. Almost everyone agrees that the sky is up, that people eat food, that cats are furry. The differences seem to be mostly in matters of interpretation. (I may be oversimplifying the argument).

In fact, I think we all live in both objective and subjective reality. The objective one, we know about mostly by discussing it with other people-- "You see fur, too? This must be fur, then." Objective reality, then, is what can be described with language, what can be experimented on and quantified. Objective reality is rational thought.

Subjective reality is what is harder to express, what is not shared. And I think that the way we see our own, personal, subjective reality is through our emotions. What we feel is what is true to us. It may not be true to anyone else-- it may not even make sense to anyone else, and when we try to put it into the words of objective reality, it stops making sense and we might start to deny it. But it is the clearest reflection of our truth. If you get a promotion, and everyone agrees this is a wonderful thing (more money, more status, more responsibility), and you find yourself terrified and sad, then it is your truth that you loved your old job dearly, more than you wanted "success."

Which is why emotions are important. I do believe that both subjective and objective realities are "real," and both are worth considering. But the world's truth is not always your truth, and your emotions are a powerful tool to let you know what your truth is. Which is worth listening to, because it's your head you're going to be living in for the rest of your life, not everyone else's, so you might want to know what's really going on there.

--R

So anime music videos (the downloading and watching thereof) are one of my more favorite hobbies. The really good ones do a splendid job of pointing out cool things you hadn't noticed about the series, the bad ones are at least a chance to watch the art (which is, honestly, my more favorite part of anime). And they all take you out of narrative and into deeper, primary-process thinking (the level of subconsciousness, emotions and dreams), which is one of my more favorite places to spend time.

But I cannot help noticing that there seems to be an unwritten law that every series commonly vidded has at least one shot which must be in every single vid. Usually because they're really cool, powerful images. Which is fine, but after you've seen them in five thousand amvs, they start to lose something.

Such that I would pay money to see good videos which did not contain the following shots:

( Here be thousands of spoilers. )

In a comment to a recent post of mine, homasse described "White Woman Syndrome," or WWS, a phenomenon discussed on a lot of the minority-focused forums on lj. She said that the usual explanation people there come up with for why White women sometimes act like complete, entitled twits is that "White women, being considered the ideal for beauty and such, fully expect the world to love them and make everything perfect for them because they were the Perfect Little Princesses, and when it's *not*, they can't deal." She says she's not sure she buys this completely, but she can't deny the phenomenon.

Neither do I, and neither can I. ( But I think I have some ideas about where it comes from. )

So I know I'm days late to this topic, but it's finals time (they're going well-- one class completely finished, three more with only small bits of work left to do, one with only an optional class, yay!). But this post appeared a few weeks ago in the blog Reappropriate, "a political, current events, and personal blog written from the perspective of a loud and proud Asian American woman": "Fuck you Asiaphile": I'm Mad As Hell And I'm Not Going to Take It Anymore. Followed by tremendous discussion, both in her comments thread and in debunkingwhite and sex_and_race. (I got the link from homasse. Thank you, J.) Basically, Jenn is pointing out how annoyed she is, as an Asian-American, at White Americans who profess love for all things Japanese, or all things Asian.

Now, as an undeniable otaku (looking up, I can see eight pieces of anime merchandising without having to turn my head), I was quite bothered. I could see myself as definitely being one of the people she was talking about, and I felt dismayed and unhappy to hear that my taste in art could upset anyone that much. I could see myself pretty easily in many of the commenters to her thread who objected, and I didn't see what the deal was.

So I sat down to think it over. And, twenty minutes later, I think I understand. I think I've hit on the thing which was so obvious to Jenn that she didn't bother to say it, and the thing which all the objectors to her post had never thought of. ( I think it's about choice, and power. )