Busy Weekend

[chomiji]

The sis-in-law (the one who's married to a minister) had a rotten week: her employer is transferring her, with almost no notice, to a different facility, and as she runs a senior center (basically, daycare for senior citizens), it means leaving behind not only staff, but also clients. So she decided at virtually the last minute to come down (with our nephew in tow) and see the Young Lady's play (our daughter is crewing her school's not-quite-spring musical, Beauty and the Beast) Friday night, because she thought it would cheer her up. This meant I had to clean up the guest room, which was wall-to-wall wrapping paper bits and rolls still, from the last installment of Xmas. But when I got home, there was an Amazon box waiting: I have Samurai Deeper Kyo 27, xxxHolic 11 [thanks, megan!!], and Takumi-Kun 2!

Saturday I was not feeling well - malaise about sums it up - and nothing much happened except meals out (lunch at Oriental East, which has great dim sum and forgettable service; dinner at Austin Grill, which is quite good for a chain) and the week's grocery shopping. The Young Lady was crewing again and had to eat leftovers for dinner. Oh well - it builds character!

Sis-in-law left early Sunday morning, and then sanada came to visit! We had brunch at Jackie's (retro American cuisine in a groovy-funky 1960s industrial setting) and talked manga nonstop. A good dose of fangirling makes one feel ever so much better. Then we went and saw the matinee of the play ourselves. Energy level good, one or two really good performances, scenery very uneven (the Beast's castle was very, very good, the village scenery was pretty lame), costumes pretty nice (althought the dinner plates were awful), and the special effects were much fun ... during the Beast's transformation at the end, petals fell from the catwalks onto our heads. They were meant to be rose petals, but all I could think of was (a) Sakura of Doom and (b) Nanao dumping baskets of petals over Shunsui. And the casting was the usual marvellous Blair High School racial mix: Oriental Belle, African American Gaston, Hispanic (I think) Beast, and so on. Dinner was what the Mr. calls "the meat place" - Brazilian BBQ.

Comments

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

As far as, strictly, you and I on slash, based on the conversation in the Comment Thread of Doom(and trying to avoid touchy subjects altogether), I suspect a lot of it boils down to one of us having primarily positive experiences in terms of female persence and power over us growing up, and the other had more negative experiences. As a result, I seem to be much more comfortable with female characters in general than you(I've noticed that you tend to shy away from discussion about female characters a lot in general, not just in terms of slash.)

My problem with slash is a purely feminist one, and is wholly limited to slash where there's canon het for one character: it takes a part of the female's role in the story, reduces or displaces her influence on the story, and gives it to a male. Any time I encounter anything that reduces, overlooks, or trivializes a female's role in the story, I react viciously and violently, and have to subdue most of my reaction, even if I hate the female in question. It has nothing to do with slash itself(if I disliked slash, there are a lot of things I wouldn't read now or wouldn't have in the past if I had issues with slash in general) and everything to do with female characters and roles. (And has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not I like and/or respect a person.)

[chomiji]

>> you tend to shy away from discussion about female characters a lot in general <<

My first inclination was to say "Nu-uh! No such!" - but you know ... since I started seeing sanada and smilla in RL, this is the first time perhaps in my entire life that I've had more than one FTF girlfriend who wasn't also a relative. And that's not even counting ones like you that I only "see" online. That is flipping amazing to me, to have so many female friends. And that's not even counting my gaming buddy Camille, who's finally becoming a confidante after knowing her nearly 20 years.

This is also probably why, as my shrink noted, I do not tend to seek out solace from my RL female support system, especially my stepmother. I love her a lot, but there's no inclination in me to seek Mommy when I'm miserable. I can include my old friend Kat along with my sister (especially since I've known her since high school), and I'm starting to put some of my online friends there as well ... but my sister is my younger sister, so ... .

On the other hand, there aren't that many manga heroines that I'm finding to be peer-level at all - I like BotI Rin, but she's my daughter's age! (And realistically acts it.) And I don't think you and I have that many novels in common yet ... tell you what, I have to try to re-read Wheel of the Infinite, and you can blog it, and we can talk about Maskelle. (I didn't think that much of Kade.)

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Hmm...I've just noticed that, in conversations on manga in general, you seem to mention a female character if one comes up, then quickly turn the conversation to the male characters connected to the female character. The only real exceptions that I've noticed seem to be Shaga and Kousuke(unless we count Akari, but even though I think of Akari as female myself, she is technically a male.) (And I'm not including characters we mutually dislike, such as Tokito and Akito.)

I don't really seek my RL support system, male or female, a lot either, and I grew up close to my mother and we still are close, even though we somewhat drive each other crazy(shall we simply say that a fantasy loving bookworm who's wardrobe only very grudgingly has anything besides jeans and plain shirts, and who's never had a serious romantic relationship at 27 simply is not what she imagined when she had a 2 year old with curly, strawberry blonde hair who loved pink dresses?) I'm actually pretty introverted and solitary in real life.

I don't really have many characters who would be peer level with me, either...I'm younger than you, but still a decade(or a little more) older than most female manga leads(even Rukia, who's far older than either of us, is still written to be read like a 16~ girl.) I don't really need to connect with characters, just to like and understand them.

At this point, I'd have to reread Wheel of the Infinite to properly blog it, and I need to reduce the backlog some, first. I am trying to get ahold of Death of the Necromancer and Riddlemaster of Hed, though, and I'll be blogging those and the other Ile-Rein books when I read them. Ravenna was much more interesting than Kade, but I thought Kade was fun, if maybe a little full of herself.

[chomiji]

(One other thing I need to throw in here - I thought of it while writing my review of the Chabon book: On the one hand, discrimination against women (and later on, against older women in particular) made my mother's professional life miserable. On the other hand, it was other girls who mocked bookish, four-eyed, chunky young Cho - and boys who played space explorer with me and talked SF&F to me, and my father who took me to the bookstore and the planetarium and taught me to use hand tools and listened to my problems - even, later on, about menstrual cramps and crushes on boys, BTW.)

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I don't think what's been coming up means that women should like all female characters(I certainly don't) but rather is referring to the idea that women tend to automatically shy away from female characters and automatically assume the males and their relationships and storylines are the more interesting ones, and paying less attention to the females because of that assumption, and I do think that spawns a lot of slash. I also think that many women are uncomfortable with women for whatever reason. It's something that I see with both slash and het fans. It likely is from generations of our being told that men and their relationships are more interesting and important than women and their relationships, but instead of trying to break free of that, it's just reinforced by most sides of fandom. In that context, I do think there's something subconsciously self-hating to it. The thing is, anywhere I look, I can literally trip over male relationships that are important...I have to literally hunt for anything that bothers to give importance to a relationship between females...even mother/daughter is treated as far less important than father/son, mother/son or father/daughter. Without a female presence-romantic, maternal, platonic, mentor, whatever-something has to be amazingly fascinating to hold me. Why? Because fiction is drowning in guys and guy relationships. Even most shoujo ends up being more about the guys than about the girl. Decent female characters, especially in something that actually gives them importance, is a lot harder to find.

But yes, slashing does often come across as self-hating to people who don't slash, both male(even moreso there, based on RL experience) and female. Not strictly because of the "making a male you're attracted to even more unavailable to you" but because of the "females removing females from the equation" aspect.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Well, there's a big difference between "people seem to only think certain kinds of female characters are strong or interesting or cool" and "all female characters are great and should be loved." What I seem to see a LOT is that a character has to be of the Starbuck variety(warrior, lots of attitude) to be a strong female character, and that for there to be good gender politics and/or gender dynamics, the female needs to be the dominant force. This is something I disagree with a lot, partly because it strays close to "like a man"(in fact, I initially had a very strong and negative kneejerk reaction to Starbuck when I watched a little bit of BSG, because they used a lot of "like a man" shortcuts with her in the miniseries) and also because I see a lot of people automatically dismiss characters not like that as "ornamental" or "dull."

The most interesting female character I've seen in years is probably Madam Jami in Emperor of the Sea(the korean drama with the love triangle I told you about a while back.) She was a noblewoman and a merchant (and a villain in the series) and became one of the most powerful people in Shilla and China, including rebuilding herself from the ground up at one point, and she did so with sheer cunning and ruthlessness. The heroine was her protegee who despised her methods, and eventually broke free of her and set out to prove(and did) that you could become just as powerful without sacrificing your morality. Their rivalry(which was also based on a mother/daughter love, and Jami had raised Jung Hwa for over half her life and kept her with her when most other girls she fostered had been sold off as mistresses) ran parallel to that of the hero and his enemy/former friend/romantic rival, and was given almost as much importance, and she was consistently the hero's greatest threat because of her intelligence and ruthlessness. In the end, when she had been defeated, the captain of her guard, who had served her for almost 20 years, confessed his love for her, and it wasn't until then when she saw him die defending her that she realized she also loved him. It is, of course, not exactly an uncommon plot, but the actual handling and character are compelling, and she's pretty much the most popular character in the series. Of the four most important women in the series, only one is a warrior, and while not as compelling as the two main females, she's still strong and interesting.

I'm not going to be turned off by all males/no females exactly, but if given a choice between something that sounds interesting but has no apparent female presence, and some that sounds interesting that does, I'll go with the thing that has both males and females. And I only recognize the first and last two of those names(I think I would have clicked really solidly with Utena if she hadn't been so hung up on Anthy, who rubbed me wrong from the start.)

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

And now the warrior women are pretty much all you can find. A lot of them also seem to be more talk than anything else, and there seems to be a deemphasis on smarts that don't involve fighting(one thing I did like about Xena was that Xena was smart and crafty all around, and Gabrielle was a extreme thinker who learned how to find.) One of the reasons I took to Sam Carter in Stargate so well is because, while she's just as good as the guys in a fight, the emphasis has always been on the fact that she's a genius and a fast and creative thinker, and while she's a tomboy, she's still very, very much a girl.

I took to Utena in the opening for the same reason(and I also took to Juri and Touga right away), but Anthy struck me not only as annoyingly doormattish, but also struck me as very manipulative from the start, and using Utena to her own ends, and as the series continued and Utena was more and more hung up on her, I started to get annoyed with her. The fact that the series just got harder and harder to follow after the first arc didn't help.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I've had RoS equally recced and warned against for me, but haven't seen it. Most of the recs seem based on my tastes, while all but one warning has been "ahistorical/not RoS/not Flynn=sucks"(but the one other is from someone I tend to trust, but we'll see...I'll watch it eventually.)

[chomiji]

The trouble is, as a RL human being, I have generally got along better with men that with women.

This might seem really odd, given that I'm a big bag of emotions. But girls and women usually think I'm much weirder than guys generally do, and it hurts my feelings. In everyday life - on the job, dealing with my child's school, at the synagogue -= where I'm likely to encounter 99% non-fannish people, I can rarely be myself, and it's worst around other women. I have had conversations go totally cold - the other woman hears that I'm more likely to be playing with my computer or reading fantasy to watching TV or taking a family bike ride, goes "Oh - really?", changes the subject, and within another sentence or two finds reason to go talk to someone else. Guys, on the other hand - even fairly mainstream ones - will ask about the computer or tell me some SF/fantasy TV show or movie they like or at least say "Hey, my officemate is really into that."

It's not that I hate other women. I've been desperate for female friendship. But other women don't like me. I'm amazed at how many women are talking to me here. It makes me almost giddy at times! I want more, more, more!

I think that the result for reading fiction/manga is that female characters have to really click with me, or I'm unlikely to be interested in them, because they're people who wouldn't like me. And I am very tolerant of - if not wildly interested in - good-hearted characters like Yuya or Tohru Honda, because they wouldn't treat me like that.

Female characters that I have liked - like Rin in Fruits Basket ... did we ever try to talk about her? You'll notice, I think, that although I may have mentioned that the idea of Yuki and Hatsuharu is cute, I'm not inclined to try to split them up. I like them together. They're complex and sexy. The way Rin is willing to completely throw her own happiness out the window for the sake of those she loves - and the arrogant, angry way she handles herself through it, because she's no one's doormat - excites my admiration.

Hell, I wouldn't even try to split Kyo and Yuya, even though I'm a firm believer in UST between Kyo and Yukimura. Yuya's the one for whom he's put himself through hell. Yukimura is a tantalizing minor distraction, at best. But I can't get into Yuya much, that's all.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

"This might seem really odd, given that I'm a big bag of emotions. But girls and women usually think I'm much weirder than guys generally do, and it hurts my feelings. In everyday life - on the job, dealing with my child's school, at the synagogue -= where I'm likely to encounter 99% non-fannish people, I can rarely be myself, and it's worst around other women. I have had conversations go totally cold - the other woman hears that I'm more likely to be playing with my computer or reading fantasy to watching TV or taking a family bike ride, goes "Oh - really?", changes the subject, and within another sentence or two finds reason to go talk to someone else. Guys, on the other hand - even fairly mainstream ones - will ask about the computer or tell me some SF/fantasy TV show or movie they like or at least say "Hey, my officemate is really into that.""

The thing is that (except for the child part) that actually is pretty much my experiences...it wasn't until college that I met anyone who who didn't think anyone who read SFF(outside of Tolkein and C.S, Lewis) was a weirdo, and girls who are into it are definately bigger weirdos here. For that matter, I've only ever met a small handful of people (all guys) who don't think a girl-esp. one in her 20s, now-reading comics is a complete freak. It's just that I don't remotely see how it results in an alienation from female characters, especially characters like Yuya or Tohru(or Orihime or Noi from Wallflower) who would be the polar opposite of that (in fact, it probably is why I latch onto characters like them, or like Rin or Sunako, who stand up for them and theirs, and can't tolerate it when they see someone letting themselves get pushed around or talked down to.) They're more like girls I would want to know, or would want to be.

Also, even though I try very, very hard not to read it that way, it almost comes across as "girls were mean to me, so I'm mean to/ignore girls in fiction."

There's also this idea I stumble across all over fandom, both het and slash, that female characters are there to be "tolerated" and have to "prove" themselves, but male characters are automatically liked or given precedence to, and have to prove themselves unworthy to be viewed in the same vein as that females are automatically viewed in. No, it's not universal, but it does seem to be the dominant practice.

You've only ever mentioned Rin to me once in passing, saying that if you had an FB OTP, it was Rin and Haru, but mostly talked about Yuki and slash in that comment, and about how Yuki/Machi bored you(and it is boring, but at least it gives him something to do besides being the third wheel in Kyo/Tohru.)

[chomiji]

>> girls were mean to me, so I'm mean to/ignore girls in fiction. <<

OK, let's try another tack. If someone was burned in a fire and still twitches/cringes when she sees a picture of a flame, is this "The fire hurt me, so I'm going to be mean to the picture of the fire"?

megan, you're really acting like this is conscious on my part, and it's not, and I feel hurt (again with the feelings, see - I am that way, I've said so) that you keep coming up with this. I mean, I'm flushed, typing this - I can feel it on my face and arms.

Are your sexual situation squicks conscious? Do you "decide" to react this way?

Certain types of situations and encounters hurt me in the past, so I avoid them. I don't think "ewww, girly person, I don't like her" - my mind just goes sort of grey toward the character.

What can I do to convince you that this is NOT conscious decisionmaking on my part and that in fact, I hadn't even realized before that I was doing it - so how could I be deciding "I'm mean to them."

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

"OK, let's try another tack. If someone was burned in a fire and still twitches/cringes when she sees a picture of a flame, is this "The fire hurt me, so I'm going to be mean to the picture of the fire"?"

Well, maybe a better way for me to put it is that it seems to be "a girl was mean to me, i'll avoid girls" instead of "a girl was mean to me, i'll just find one who isn't"

And no, I don't think it's conscious. i'll point now back to my comments about the extremely different feminine influences we had growing up as an explanation. It's just that you post these explanations, and seem to expect me to go "Yes, exactly. It makes perfect sense to me now and I see why slash is better and female characters are less appealing and interesting" when it actually has the exact opposite affect on me, so I try to explain my view, and how it sounds to me. You also seem to always imply that by not liking slash when there's canon het(and yes, it really specifically only slash in that context that I have any objection to) or by not wanting to turn more to male characters than female, that I'm deliberately oppressing you.

It's why I try to avoid talking about slash with you, because it always seems to turn to "if I don't like and see the slash, then I'm saying there's something wrong with you" which is very much not my opinion, but I always feel like I'm put in a position of having to personally defend myself, because it seems to be how you approach it.

[chomiji]

I've given up trying to sell you on slash. Really. Truly.

All I want from out these explanations is a feeling that you understand that that:

1. There are reasons why I (me, Cho, nothing to do with you) may not be running to embrace female characters in lots of manga/fiction;  
   
   but
    
2. That does not mean I'm trying to get rid of female characters entirely and slash the crap out of everything.

megan, what's sadly amusing here is that we're both paranoid. I keep thinking you're saying I'm a weirdo who doesn't like other women, and you keep thinking I'm trying to warp your brain into liking slash.

The only reason I bring up slash anymore is to try to acknowledge that I may have slashy reasons for liking certain books, but you may still like them on another level entirely. But I'm beginning to think I'd just better not bring the term up again at all if I can help it, because it's become too much of a hot button.

Please, I'm only trying to justify myself, the way I am - not change you, unless you count introducing you to more authors you might like as a change.

Few things make as miserable as not being understood.

Good Night ....

[chomiji]

(Sorry we couldn't seem to get this settled out this afternoon ... hope you have a wonderful weekend.)

[chomiji]

Yes ... and at some point, you get tired of feeling like a freak, don't you? So you don't bother any more. You keep all the relationships with the average woman at the really superficial level, and just wait to get back to the place where you can be a real human again, and not just a person in a mask.

That's not to say I've never had this crap shoveled at me by a guy - there was the odious man from the synagogue Chavurot (friendship group) committee who came out to talk about our interests when I contacted them about trying to find other families in the congregation that we might like to get to know. When he heard we liked SF, he was like, "Ooooh! You mean like ... Star Trek?" The condescension was thick enough to cut with a knife. But still, it was only with other women that it became a pattern. (And yeah, I have a kid, but she doesn't play sports or a musical instrument, doesn't like to go to the mall and hang out ... so now I'm not only weird myself, I'm a bad mom who's raised a weird kid.)

You know, what I really like in a story is guy buddies. And I don't always slash them, either. Justin and Flavius in Sutcliff's The Silver Branch should be very slashable, but I'm not even tempted to go there - they're cousins and friends, and nothing more. Ithink that's why Gentlemen of the Road was so appleaing, because of Zelikman and Amram's buddy relationship. (And I don't feel like slashing them, either!)

[chomiji]

Yes ... close friendships among adult women really do get short-changed in our genre, don't they? That's one thing I like about Phyllis Ann Karr's otherwise rather bad duology Frostflower and Thorn/Frostflower and Windbourne ... the title characters of the first book do indeed become friends by the end of it, and it's pleasantly and realistically presented as an attraction of opposites, but just a friendship, not a romance (Thorn is aggressively het, Frostflower is celibate on account of her calling). Also, The Northern Girl - the only one of Elizabeth Lynn's Tornor Chronicles that I really like - has a couple of good female-female and male-female friendships, as well as some gay (Lesbian) romance.

Oh - the Hodgell includes a great non-romantic, cross-class-lines friendship between Jame and the gentle giant guardsman Marcarn.

[chomiji]

I've been trying to think of why I want to slash certain guys, most particularly in manga. It seems to come down to a particular type of teasing, plus a particular type of interested glances between the two.

Gojyo gives Sanzo these looks - mockingly - and Sanzo never gives them back. Yukimura gives Kyo the sweet, submissive smiling ones - and Kyo does return the dominant, wolfishly grinning answer, in a way he doesn't do with most of the other characters. Not all the time, BTW - when he's legitimately pissed at Yukimura - as in when he realized that Yukimura has entered the Shogun's tournament in disguise, in vol. 4 - there's no smiling at all.

And the Hakkai/Gojyo actually goes beyond that - as my daughter put it (out of the mouths of babes) "They're so married." They don't really flirt ... but during the early scenes in "Be There," when Hakkai is recovering, the loaded looks they exchange: it's two people really, really getting to like each other. The look Hakkai gives Gojyo at the end of the "Jack of all trades" exchange; the one Gojyo gives Hakkai when he greets Hakkai's big revelation about Kanan with "Some people go for that, I guess" - my heart just turns over.