More violent movies from WG.
Nov. 2nd, 2005 09:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icarusWG brought home another action flick. It starred Bruce Willis and had the usual hail of bullets with hostages being killed, not so bad. I rather liked the one hostage-taker's brother (we were meant to) who got tangled up in it by mistake, and the plot was complex.
Then that character was thrown off a three-story balcony, crushed on the ground below, twitching with convulsions as his spine had been snapped while his brother helplessly cradled his head in his lap. Completely gratuitous violence. Even WG was surprised.
Okay. That's enough. I walked out.
I've been considerate. I've picked sci-fi action flicks that I know we'll both enjoy. But I've had it with him picking movies for his own enjoyment with no thought for me.
I'm now picking movies I want to see regardless of whether or not he'll like them. My taste in movies, where it doesn't intersect with his.
I have in my hand Muholland Dr, Casablanca (which I've never seen), and I want to get Gosford Park. I've wanted to see Kenneth Branaugh in Henry V but I knew WG would whinge. Tough titties now, kiddo. Also there's a cult classic version of Hamlet where "Denmark" is a corporation that I have my eye on.
Speaking of gratuitous... what is it with slash fiction that every author has to reach for rape if they want some shock value? I'm not talking about And Just Plain Wrong where the whole point of the stories is a sort of lurid fascination with rape (which I don't share). I mean the sort of situation where if your character has to have a "tragic past" where another character has "empathy" for him, a lot of authors seem to reach for rape as a standard feature and salt it in like so much hamburger helper. It's become a staple.
First, the way it's written, it often feels like feminization. I know men get raped. It happens all the time in prison and I happen to know two boys who were raped as kids. But you know what? Guys don't react the same way as girls. When a guy's been raped and he shares his story with someone (which, by the way, most guys go to the grave without telling a soul) he feels worse. He's judged. There's a sense that a woman can be the helpless female but if a guy is helpless, he doesn't get the same empathy. There's something wrong with him, he's somehow weak. If he tells a women, most react to it with a sense of smugness believe it or not. They don't say it, but there's a sense of "oho, the shoe's on the other foot now, is it?"
Which may be why rape has become (or has been) the slash staple, with women projecting their own experiences onto men. Or maybe writers are just lazy.
The response among men... well, guys just don't tell other guys. But generally men who hear of it (if it wasn't in prison) react to it with a sense of shocked disbelief. They just go blank. Because it's not supposed to happen to guys, and they don't know what to think of a man who let that happen to him. Yes, let it happen to him. People blame the rape victim when it's a woman, but it's twenty times worse with men.
So they start fishing for excuses for their friend, "Well, you were just a little kid" or "Hell, it was dark" or "That's a pretty dangerous part of town" -- but the excuses ring rather hollow because if a man is raped, he's less a man and they both know it. The excuses are as humiliating as the admission.
Not exactly the warm empathy you can expect (sometimes) as a woman who tells her story to other women, where chances are good you'll find others who've been through the same thing, or women who know someone who's been through it, or who can imagine it happening to themselves.
Second, it's a little dull. I'm sorry, it is. All the rapes are pretty much the same, and they're always done by complete or near strangers (which is unusual in the world of sexual assault). Tied up, beaten, sexually assaulted by [fill in random Death Eater/bad guy/Slytherin/Voldemort], yawn.
If you need a wounded dove for your fic, why there's a vast panoply of types of abuse available to you that can seriously fuck up your character without resorting to the same old, same old. Emotions and human relationships are complicated. Parent-child relationships can mess someone up. One can have authoritarian issues. A bad relationship with a crazy ex-boyfriend or girlfriend can do some real damage. There's neglect, unpopularity, physical problems, politics, horrific job situations, and in the wizarding world there are magical options to screw up your character as well (Ron fears spiders because the twins turns his teddy bear into a spider). Just once I'd like to see a character recovering from Imperius. Heck, we have a war on in Harry Potter. Wars are great for screwing people up.
I know, I know, this involves a greater depth of thought about your characters and is not as easy as a one-time event. It may take valuable time away from the healing process if we have to have a complicated problem as well.
I note that (despite the blame-the-victim reaction to it) rape might seem more sympathetic because it's beyond your character's control. There may be some fears that a character might not get as much empathy if some of his troubles are of his own making. But fear not. Most of us create our own problems and empathy we'll have for your character is the empathy we have for ourselves.
Well, off to school. I've a test today.
Then that character was thrown off a three-story balcony, crushed on the ground below, twitching with convulsions as his spine had been snapped while his brother helplessly cradled his head in his lap. Completely gratuitous violence. Even WG was surprised.
Okay. That's enough. I walked out.
I've been considerate. I've picked sci-fi action flicks that I know we'll both enjoy. But I've had it with him picking movies for his own enjoyment with no thought for me.
I'm now picking movies I want to see regardless of whether or not he'll like them. My taste in movies, where it doesn't intersect with his.
I have in my hand Muholland Dr, Casablanca (which I've never seen), and I want to get Gosford Park. I've wanted to see Kenneth Branaugh in Henry V but I knew WG would whinge. Tough titties now, kiddo. Also there's a cult classic version of Hamlet where "Denmark" is a corporation that I have my eye on.
Speaking of gratuitous... what is it with slash fiction that every author has to reach for rape if they want some shock value? I'm not talking about And Just Plain Wrong where the whole point of the stories is a sort of lurid fascination with rape (which I don't share). I mean the sort of situation where if your character has to have a "tragic past" where another character has "empathy" for him, a lot of authors seem to reach for rape as a standard feature and salt it in like so much hamburger helper. It's become a staple.
First, the way it's written, it often feels like feminization. I know men get raped. It happens all the time in prison and I happen to know two boys who were raped as kids. But you know what? Guys don't react the same way as girls. When a guy's been raped and he shares his story with someone (which, by the way, most guys go to the grave without telling a soul) he feels worse. He's judged. There's a sense that a woman can be the helpless female but if a guy is helpless, he doesn't get the same empathy. There's something wrong with him, he's somehow weak. If he tells a women, most react to it with a sense of smugness believe it or not. They don't say it, but there's a sense of "oho, the shoe's on the other foot now, is it?"
Which may be why rape has become (or has been) the slash staple, with women projecting their own experiences onto men. Or maybe writers are just lazy.
The response among men... well, guys just don't tell other guys. But generally men who hear of it (if it wasn't in prison) react to it with a sense of shocked disbelief. They just go blank. Because it's not supposed to happen to guys, and they don't know what to think of a man who let that happen to him. Yes, let it happen to him. People blame the rape victim when it's a woman, but it's twenty times worse with men.
So they start fishing for excuses for their friend, "Well, you were just a little kid" or "Hell, it was dark" or "That's a pretty dangerous part of town" -- but the excuses ring rather hollow because if a man is raped, he's less a man and they both know it. The excuses are as humiliating as the admission.
Not exactly the warm empathy you can expect (sometimes) as a woman who tells her story to other women, where chances are good you'll find others who've been through the same thing, or women who know someone who's been through it, or who can imagine it happening to themselves.
Second, it's a little dull. I'm sorry, it is. All the rapes are pretty much the same, and they're always done by complete or near strangers (which is unusual in the world of sexual assault). Tied up, beaten, sexually assaulted by [fill in random Death Eater/bad guy/Slytherin/Voldemort], yawn.
If you need a wounded dove for your fic, why there's a vast panoply of types of abuse available to you that can seriously fuck up your character without resorting to the same old, same old. Emotions and human relationships are complicated. Parent-child relationships can mess someone up. One can have authoritarian issues. A bad relationship with a crazy ex-boyfriend or girlfriend can do some real damage. There's neglect, unpopularity, physical problems, politics, horrific job situations, and in the wizarding world there are magical options to screw up your character as well (Ron fears spiders because the twins turns his teddy bear into a spider). Just once I'd like to see a character recovering from Imperius. Heck, we have a war on in Harry Potter. Wars are great for screwing people up.
I know, I know, this involves a greater depth of thought about your characters and is not as easy as a one-time event. It may take valuable time away from the healing process if we have to have a complicated problem as well.
I note that (despite the blame-the-victim reaction to it) rape might seem more sympathetic because it's beyond your character's control. There may be some fears that a character might not get as much empathy if some of his troubles are of his own making. But fear not. Most of us create our own problems and empathy we'll have for your character is the empathy we have for ourselves.
Well, off to school. I've a test today.
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no subject
Date: 2005-11-03 01:29 am (UTC)Actually, it could be just cheap made-for-tv melodramatics, on the level of yelling "fire!" to create artificial excitement in your fic because you haven't developed your villains enough to make them genuinely scary.
Icarus