don't scare the white people.
Aug. 19th, 2003 03:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amand_rDon't scare the white people.
Almost wrecked the car when listening to Aaron Freeman give advice to Arab Americans today on All things considered: Don't Scare the White People.
Bah. Working on RK and HL fic. RoXoRs. Raghr. Need new mode of communication. Perhaps will try other things. Like happy happy, the greatest wank I have ever read taking place on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
marysues: w00t! Author Freak Out, Happily hap hap.
Siva sent Tianyu and me a weddin' present, and what a lovely one it was: candles and artwork, and a lovely wooden and silver box…filled with candy. Teeth are stuck together, which is good because I'd be chattering away here from the sugar high alone.
So, was having all this trouble with this scene in TOA, when it occurred to me, that I could just, you know, delete it. So I did. Problem solved. DELETED!
argh-o-rama. Had much better introduction to this next bit, but was eaten when computer crashed. PDF! PDF!! WHY?!
Oh hell, it's the tri-monthly bit of schlock I write when it feels like the lj is getting too bogged down in rl. That right! Time for a little
Not that that title made any sense. It's mostly because Tianyu brought up the moral order, while I brought up the shizzle. I still think I make a better argument. Nizzle-wise, that is.
Okay, I'm in a way this time of the month ::cough cough:: if you catch my drift, so it's all very emotional, and to be frank, makes no coherent sense, in that I seem to be stringing random thoughts together:
We're thinking about Yeats being a member of the Golden Dawn when I suddenly bring up King Lear.
Me: So, remember Cordelia, who dies in the end of Lear?
Tianyu: ::cautiously:: Yeeeeesss?
Me: So, let's think about this. Shakespeare kills the one character in the play who actually deserves to live, except for Edgar, Kent, and Albany, all good, likable guys (except for Edgar's "poor Tom let us smear ourselves with excrement" phase). Can you believe that someone rewrote the ending of the play so that she got to live in the end?
Tianyu: ::nodding in a completely unsurprised way that I cannot even begin to comprehend:: Some people have a problem with character death.
What follows is a long garbled string of fannish criznap that I can only type as it hits my brain, so will number or something:
1. Following Lear, it's interesting to note that in fact, Shakespeare's version disappears from the stage around 1681 and is replaced with the edited version by Nahum Tate, who writes in his foreword that the original play was
a heap of jewels unstrung and unpolished, yet so dazzling in their disorder that I soon perceived I had seized a treasure. 'Twas my good fortune to light on one expedient to rectify what was wanting in the regularity and probability of the tale, which was to run through the whole a love betwixt Edgar and Cordelia… (Barnet, Sylvan. "King Lear on Stage and Screen." King Lear. London: Penguin Books, 1987.).
Put aside the squonky notion that Edgar then becomes the biggest and best Gary Stu in history. While titillating, it is neither here nor there for the moment.
I'm amused by the rewriting. And it's not just lines. Tate structurally rapes Lear: 1. he manufactures the love interest for Edgar and Cordelia (Edgar, BTW, in this version saves Cordelia from being raped by Edmund) and therefore eliminated the King of France; 2. deletes the Fool; 3. adds a happy ending, keeping Lear, Cordelia and Gloucester and marrying Cordy and Edgar. Apparently, this version of Lear is preferred and performed all the way until 1838, when the original is basically restored, with minor changes. (Barnet again)
Inner demons: EdgarStu! EdgarStu!
Note that Tate wants to "rectify" what he sees as improbable actions in the play itself, namely, the lack of a happy ending, in which not only do villains get their just desserts (and in Lear, they certainly do), but also those who are innocent, and sometimes even virtuous, are rewarded with not just life itself, but love. Hence, the shizzle AND the nizzle. Tianyu argues that it's a kind of feeling of need, this rewriting, the need for moral order, as he calls it.
2. But life isn't like this: it doesn't even HAVE a sense of moral order, except that which we attempt to impose. Like Tate. Tate's moral order reigned for close to two centuries, and then it was crushed. Lear as we see it today is the First Folio.
Samuel Johnson says that everything in Lear, all the evil done by the characters culminates so as to "impress this important moral, that villainy is never at a stop, that crime leads to crimes, and at last terminate in ruin. But though this moral be incidentally enforced, Shakespeare had suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and what is yet more strange, the faith of the chronicles. Yet this conduct is justified by the spectator, who blames Tate for giving Cordelia success and happiness in his alteration, and declares, that, in his opinion, the tragedy has lost half its beauty.
"A play in which the wicked prosper, and the virtuous miscarry, may doubtless be good, because it is a just representation of the common events of human life: but since all reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot be easily persuaded, that the observation of justice actually makes a play worse; or, that if other excellencies are equal the audience will not always rise better pleased from the final triumph of persecuted virtue" (Johnson, Samuel. "King Lear." King Lear. London: Penguin Books, 1987.).
Okay, so people like a happy ending. Does that merit the rewriting of it, though? Hrm.
2. Somehow this all translated into the fact that there are people out there who are writing HP fic in which Sirius survives the fight with the DE, and have prefaced the story with the statement that Sirius shouldn't have died. (Am reminded of massive amounts of Armand!denial and Richie!denial as well). In search of the truth, I asked our friendly neighborhood Sirius Lover,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
arsenicjade, who had several things to say about the subject….which I just promptly deleted. CRIZNAP!
For the sake of commentary, I shall paraphrase that AJ loves Sirius, and that she is still in mourning. She recognizes that Sirius was impulsive and hotheaded, and she understands why he died, but it is still sad. She even admits that she might write a resurrection fic if she could pull it off successfully, which I assume means that she could play within the confines of the canon, something or other. She does not, however, feel that Sirius's death was unjust and therefore needs to be rebuked.
I also recall that she would be interested to see what purpose Sirius's death serves in the grander scheme of things as books six and seven arrive. And if I have gotten any of this incorrect, she may throttle me utterly.
All of this only translates insofar as there's an interesting phenomenon that has gone back centuries (including GaryStu). Of course, the rewriting of popular books is not possible in the mainstream market today, so one must look to the fandom for the phenomenon. It would be interesting to find more Sirius lives stories. ::hint hint::
3. Lastly, is something that Tianyu points out with character death and the fear of death in general. The death is unacceptable because, despite that Western society is steeped in lore that supports life after death (I am aware that there are other things, but Christianity is prevalent), people fear death as an unknown (Tianyu didn't go that far, I believe he said that "people perceive death as a loss of something"). He also added that sometimes death is acceptable to the one who dies, as seen in the case of samurais, etc. I would guess that would extend to those who share the dead's cultural beliefs as well.
On the concept of that, we discussed Connor MacLeod'd death, which I once described as "apt", and still agree with (though I disagree that Endgame is great, I have this terrible belief that unless it's utterly unbelievable ::Zeist!cough:: it's canon. So goes with Season Six. This is probably why I think the Tate version is ludicrous.) in the sense that it made sense. In fact, as Tianyu points out, some cultures believe that it is the better man who can dies when he needs to, and that survival is over rated.
If it takes the better man to be able to die, then Connor was that man. Not that Duncan wasn't great, but he didn't come to the solution first. Connor did. And though there might have been other ways to fight Kell, Connor perceived that this one would do the trick, as well as serving as a means for him to end an existence that he had, from the looks of it, come to despair.
I say to Tianyu that it seems as if a lot of people are sad that characters are dead simply because they're well, dead, not there anymore. His response is to drag out Maus, I find myself reading and thinking of Methos, as well as character death.
Pavel: So, do you ADMIRE your father for surviving [Auschwitz]?
Art: Well. sure. I know there was a lot of LUCK involved, but he WAS amazingly present-minded and resourceful…
Pavel: Then you think it's admirable to survive. Does that mean it's NOT admirable to NOT survive?
Art: woosh. I-I think I see what you mean. It's as if life equals winning, so death equals losing.
Pavel: Yes. Life always takes the side of life, and somehow the victims are blamed, But it wasn't the BEST people who survived, nor did the best ones die. It was RANDOM.
(Spiegelman, Art. Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pentheon Books, 1991.)
Makes me love Methos more. I swear it does. But it does take the shine off the "too good to die" sentiment (sentiment, because I wouldn't call that an argument that anyone is having, except the teeniebop crowd, as far as Sirius is concerned.).
Anyway, it was the thought that counted, and in this case, it may not count for much, as I said before: not organized, and I can't wrap my brain around it.
Have noticed that there's correlation here, not actual causation or anything else. If anything else, it was interesting to dig out the Lear again and finally make the realization that there may have been Mary Sues even back then. ::snerk::
Almost wrecked the car when listening to Aaron Freeman give advice to Arab Americans today on All things considered: Don't Scare the White People.
Bah. Working on RK and HL fic. RoXoRs. Raghr. Need new mode of communication. Perhaps will try other things. Like happy happy, the greatest wank I have ever read taking place on
marysues: w00t! Author Freak Out, Happily hap hap.Siva sent Tianyu and me a weddin' present, and what a lovely one it was: candles and artwork, and a lovely wooden and silver box…filled with candy. Teeth are stuck together, which is good because I'd be chattering away here from the sugar high alone.
So, was having all this trouble with this scene in TOA, when it occurred to me, that I could just, you know, delete it. So I did. Problem solved. DELETED!
argh-o-rama. Had much better introduction to this next bit, but was eaten when computer crashed. PDF! PDF!! WHY?!
Oh hell, it's the tri-monthly bit of schlock I write when it feels like the lj is getting too bogged down in rl. That right! Time for a little
Not that that title made any sense. It's mostly because Tianyu brought up the moral order, while I brought up the shizzle. I still think I make a better argument. Nizzle-wise, that is.
Okay, I'm in a way this time of the month ::cough cough:: if you catch my drift, so it's all very emotional, and to be frank, makes no coherent sense, in that I seem to be stringing random thoughts together:
We're thinking about Yeats being a member of the Golden Dawn when I suddenly bring up King Lear.
Me: So, remember Cordelia, who dies in the end of Lear?
Tianyu: ::cautiously:: Yeeeeesss?
Me: So, let's think about this. Shakespeare kills the one character in the play who actually deserves to live, except for Edgar, Kent, and Albany, all good, likable guys (except for Edgar's "poor Tom let us smear ourselves with excrement" phase). Can you believe that someone rewrote the ending of the play so that she got to live in the end?
Tianyu: ::nodding in a completely unsurprised way that I cannot even begin to comprehend:: Some people have a problem with character death.
What follows is a long garbled string of fannish criznap that I can only type as it hits my brain, so will number or something:
1. Following Lear, it's interesting to note that in fact, Shakespeare's version disappears from the stage around 1681 and is replaced with the edited version by Nahum Tate, who writes in his foreword that the original play was
a heap of jewels unstrung and unpolished, yet so dazzling in their disorder that I soon perceived I had seized a treasure. 'Twas my good fortune to light on one expedient to rectify what was wanting in the regularity and probability of the tale, which was to run through the whole a love betwixt Edgar and Cordelia… (Barnet, Sylvan. "King Lear on Stage and Screen." King Lear. London: Penguin Books, 1987.).
Put aside the squonky notion that Edgar then becomes the biggest and best Gary Stu in history. While titillating, it is neither here nor there for the moment.
I'm amused by the rewriting. And it's not just lines. Tate structurally rapes Lear: 1. he manufactures the love interest for Edgar and Cordelia (Edgar, BTW, in this version saves Cordelia from being raped by Edmund) and therefore eliminated the King of France; 2. deletes the Fool; 3. adds a happy ending, keeping Lear, Cordelia and Gloucester and marrying Cordy and Edgar. Apparently, this version of Lear is preferred and performed all the way until 1838, when the original is basically restored, with minor changes. (Barnet again)
Inner demons: EdgarStu! EdgarStu!
Note that Tate wants to "rectify" what he sees as improbable actions in the play itself, namely, the lack of a happy ending, in which not only do villains get their just desserts (and in Lear, they certainly do), but also those who are innocent, and sometimes even virtuous, are rewarded with not just life itself, but love. Hence, the shizzle AND the nizzle. Tianyu argues that it's a kind of feeling of need, this rewriting, the need for moral order, as he calls it.
2. But life isn't like this: it doesn't even HAVE a sense of moral order, except that which we attempt to impose. Like Tate. Tate's moral order reigned for close to two centuries, and then it was crushed. Lear as we see it today is the First Folio.
Samuel Johnson says that everything in Lear, all the evil done by the characters culminates so as to "impress this important moral, that villainy is never at a stop, that crime leads to crimes, and at last terminate in ruin. But though this moral be incidentally enforced, Shakespeare had suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and what is yet more strange, the faith of the chronicles. Yet this conduct is justified by the spectator, who blames Tate for giving Cordelia success and happiness in his alteration, and declares, that, in his opinion, the tragedy has lost half its beauty.
"A play in which the wicked prosper, and the virtuous miscarry, may doubtless be good, because it is a just representation of the common events of human life: but since all reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot be easily persuaded, that the observation of justice actually makes a play worse; or, that if other excellencies are equal the audience will not always rise better pleased from the final triumph of persecuted virtue" (Johnson, Samuel. "King Lear." King Lear. London: Penguin Books, 1987.).
Okay, so people like a happy ending. Does that merit the rewriting of it, though? Hrm.
2. Somehow this all translated into the fact that there are people out there who are writing HP fic in which Sirius survives the fight with the DE, and have prefaced the story with the statement that Sirius shouldn't have died. (Am reminded of massive amounts of Armand!denial and Richie!denial as well). In search of the truth, I asked our friendly neighborhood Sirius Lover,
arsenicjade, who had several things to say about the subject….which I just promptly deleted. CRIZNAP!For the sake of commentary, I shall paraphrase that AJ loves Sirius, and that she is still in mourning. She recognizes that Sirius was impulsive and hotheaded, and she understands why he died, but it is still sad. She even admits that she might write a resurrection fic if she could pull it off successfully, which I assume means that she could play within the confines of the canon, something or other. She does not, however, feel that Sirius's death was unjust and therefore needs to be rebuked.
I also recall that she would be interested to see what purpose Sirius's death serves in the grander scheme of things as books six and seven arrive. And if I have gotten any of this incorrect, she may throttle me utterly.
All of this only translates insofar as there's an interesting phenomenon that has gone back centuries (including GaryStu). Of course, the rewriting of popular books is not possible in the mainstream market today, so one must look to the fandom for the phenomenon. It would be interesting to find more Sirius lives stories. ::hint hint::
3. Lastly, is something that Tianyu points out with character death and the fear of death in general. The death is unacceptable because, despite that Western society is steeped in lore that supports life after death (I am aware that there are other things, but Christianity is prevalent), people fear death as an unknown (Tianyu didn't go that far, I believe he said that "people perceive death as a loss of something"). He also added that sometimes death is acceptable to the one who dies, as seen in the case of samurais, etc. I would guess that would extend to those who share the dead's cultural beliefs as well.
On the concept of that, we discussed Connor MacLeod'd death, which I once described as "apt", and still agree with (though I disagree that Endgame is great, I have this terrible belief that unless it's utterly unbelievable ::Zeist!cough:: it's canon. So goes with Season Six. This is probably why I think the Tate version is ludicrous.) in the sense that it made sense. In fact, as Tianyu points out, some cultures believe that it is the better man who can dies when he needs to, and that survival is over rated.
If it takes the better man to be able to die, then Connor was that man. Not that Duncan wasn't great, but he didn't come to the solution first. Connor did. And though there might have been other ways to fight Kell, Connor perceived that this one would do the trick, as well as serving as a means for him to end an existence that he had, from the looks of it, come to despair.
I say to Tianyu that it seems as if a lot of people are sad that characters are dead simply because they're well, dead, not there anymore. His response is to drag out Maus, I find myself reading and thinking of Methos, as well as character death.
Pavel: So, do you ADMIRE your father for surviving [Auschwitz]?
Art: Well. sure. I know there was a lot of LUCK involved, but he WAS amazingly present-minded and resourceful…
Pavel: Then you think it's admirable to survive. Does that mean it's NOT admirable to NOT survive?
Art: woosh. I-I think I see what you mean. It's as if life equals winning, so death equals losing.
Pavel: Yes. Life always takes the side of life, and somehow the victims are blamed, But it wasn't the BEST people who survived, nor did the best ones die. It was RANDOM.
(Spiegelman, Art. Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pentheon Books, 1991.)
Makes me love Methos more. I swear it does. But it does take the shine off the "too good to die" sentiment (sentiment, because I wouldn't call that an argument that anyone is having, except the teeniebop crowd, as far as Sirius is concerned.).
Anyway, it was the thought that counted, and in this case, it may not count for much, as I said before: not organized, and I can't wrap my brain around it.
Have noticed that there's correlation here, not actual causation or anything else. If anything else, it was interesting to dig out the Lear again and finally make the realization that there may have been Mary Sues even back then. ::snerk::
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Not scaring the white people here...
Date: 2003-08-19 02:26 pm (UTC)Re: Not scaring the white people here...
Date: 2003-08-19 04:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-19 09:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-21 06:37 am (UTC)Naw....
Date: 2003-08-21 08:28 am (UTC)Sense?
Date: 2003-08-21 10:52 pm (UTC)