grayestofghosts | Entries tagged with analysis

I have a lot of things I could write about but instead I'm going to write about a twitter post.

User solarlesbian wrote in response to another user,

"the bechdel test was a satirical joke about lesbian loneliness and alienation. don't piss me off

passing the bechdel test is not a litmus test for whether a work is feminist or not, it's not even about setting what is supposed to be "the feminist bare minimum" or whatever. it's literally a joke about how lesbians have to look for less than crumbs and still find nothing."

Another user notes how specifically the comic itself implies that this specific comic was made in response to 1980's muscle-guy movies, which aren't really a thing today, and another user notes how Allison Bechdel's favorite movie is apparently Groundhog Day, that does not pass this test.

There is definitely something to think about how 'lesbianism' has been conflated with 'feminism' when it's not, and has forced lesbianism, which is not a coherent social and political movement and never has been, to take up the reigns that straight feminists are unwilling to due to their inevitable proximity with men. One of the consequences of that has been kicking historically lesbian men (like me) out of lesbianism entirely on ideological grounds, but that's probably a topic for another post. With even the slightest bit of analysis, that straight women saddle lesbians with the 'job' of feminism unfairly while they get to be more 'complex' because they are 'forced to navigate men' becomes obvious and unjust.

Idk. These are not fully fleshed-out thoughts while I'm waiting for my boyfriend to get ready to go. I'm not the one to ask about this.

Current Music: "Soldier, Poet, King," The Oh Hellos

I was thinking about the web art/photography phenomenon of 'liminal pools', and was watching a video by youtuber Nightshade most particularly about Jared Pike's art. The video itself is interesting and I also read I think on a reddit post about how people who tend to enjoy or desire solitude find these images calming while people who need people more find them distressing (I love looking at them, and my boyfriend was immediately put off by them).

But I think something that's missing from the overanalysis of Nightshade and a lot of analyses of liminal pools in general is that until very, very recently, you could not bring your phone (or any electronics) to the pool, which I think for at least a certain set of people brings a feeling of nostalgia and calm of not being connected. In the liminal pools, the vibe it brings you is that you are safe from emails, essentially, ironically, considering people are generally viewing these images on a device that receives constant internet communication. While Jared Pike does sell prints of his work, I have a feeling that just sticking it on a wall would not be the same.

Current Music: "Rainbow," Kesha

So I just saw the monthly "Is Haruka/Sailor Uranus genderfluid" post on Reddit and they're at it again, arguing about how gender works in Japan vs the west and lots of quibbling over terminology of what did or did not exist in 1994 when the character was invented.

I think it's very tiring to read this because regardless of the creator's intent, Haruka Ten'oh is probably the clearest, unambiguous, most simply read genderfluid character I've seen in a lot of media. Sometimes Haruka is a girl, and sometimes Haruka is a boy, and she's enough of a girl that she's in the 'girl only' group of sailor scouts, but also enough of a boy that she lives through her private school system as a boy in a boy's uniform without any of this presentation being questioned. This is different in the anime, apparently, which I have not seen all of, where she clearly denies being a boy at some point, but in the manga the read is startlingly unambiguous, and the waffling is from people who deny that gender fluidity is possible or real, and want to couch her existence in safer terms, like 'really' being a girl who likes to dress in boy's clothing.

And, like... I do think there's a huge cop out here when labeling characters as 'only' butch lesbians vs genderfluid, transgender, etc. Because the pervasive labeling of a character like Haruka as a butch lesbian is never a real analysis of her identity but always couched in making her safer and simpler to understand to a cis audience, when this is not the reality that actual butch lesbians who are actively read as men in real life situations experience. The 'only a woman in man's clothing' has been a label to soothe cis people and has not protected butch lesbians from gendered and sexual violence for their existence and does not necessarily reflect their views on their own genders. There's multiple writings by butches on how they don't feel like women, and they feel like men forced to live in some kind of liminal space or otherwise not women, and how they feel like they can't actually express this. This is not to discount possible butches who do see themselves as women in men's clothing, but to shove off a character into the category of 'butch' does not mean that they are devoid of gendered feelings, complexity, and interiority that would make a cis audience uncomfortable, and Haruka's actions do demonstrate that whether the audience likes it or not, regardless of any vocabulary used. Gendered subcultures like butch, genderfluid, nonbinary, etc are historically very fluid but this does not mean the formalized gender is correct, just that it is a forced choice forced by a society that cannot tolerate ambiguity.

I'd call Sailor Uranus genderfluid but she could be read as butch. But she's not 'just' butch. She's not 'just' anything.

Current Music: "Me and My Husband," Mitski

I did promise I would repost and compile my Frankenstein essays and posts from elsewhere as I am beginning work on my Frankenstein project. I'll start out with one of my most popular posts that's not a shitpost, even though I don't think this has much place in the analysis I'm working on:

In Frankenstein none of the narrators have real interpersonal relationships with each other but instead only experience each other through parasocial ones. All their relationships are built on one-sided interactions and observations rather than true reciprocity. The creature observes the DeLaceys at a distance and only knows his creator through his research notes and builds Frankenstein’s persona that way — Frankenstein only knows the creature’s horribleness from his appearance, distant sightings and one long, uninterrupted storytelling session — and Walton only constructs Frankenstein through Frankenstein’s retelling of events and the haze of his own loneliness. We yearn for Frankenstein to be a father to the creature or Walton to be a partner to Frankenstein the same way the creature yearns for his mate. We desperately want to make these imaginary relationships somehow real and meaningful despite the impossibility of them — the desires and expectations put on these relationships before they even begin are so high that they will never be satisfied by a real person who has only just become aware of a relationship already in progress. In the end, the DeLacey’s reaction of horror to being watched for so long is the only reasonable and realistic one to a relationship like this attempting to be fulfilled. The female creature is crushed like our hopes for them under the weighty expectation to be a perfect lover before she even exists to love.

Posted on April 8th, 2022 @brain-depoistary

Anyway, since writing this I don't think my opinion has changed much on this and while it is interesting within the context of today's social media etc. I feel like the extreme isolation built by this structure of storytelling and relationships is more in support of greater points than the point in itself, though I can see how on a site like tumblr this would seem profound and go somewhat viral (not really -- as of right now 153 reblogs and 334 likes).

Current Music: "TOMORROW (Dance Version)," Todrick Hall

I suppose I don’t have to actually ask for permission from anyone here but I’m thinking at the very least reposting the literary analysis essays I’ve posted on tumblr on the novel Frankenstein here, and maybe some notes/excerpts from my large Frankenstein project here once I have any.

I saw a post on twitter wondering about when we were getting “The transmasculine Whipping Girl” and though I don’t really think this is the next Whipping Girl per se, the thesis of the project (which I was thinking of as a book, then a site, but now I’m back to book again) as being how Victor Frankenstein is widely villainized for having the same problems as modern transmasculine people, and the reason why these problems are seen as unsympathetic is because he is silenced both inside and outside the book and assumed to be incapable of having these specific problems as a man. This project was put on hold, in large part because even with JSTOR access research was very hard because I don’t know how to do it. For example, somehow even for a major character of a famous 200 year old novel, trying to search for “Victor Frankenstein Disability” only dredged up analyses of the creature as an abandoned, disabled child and nothing about the main narrator who is constantly bedridden, collapsing, hallucinating, etc. to the point of dying at 27 years old.

I know there’s still research to be done but some other writers have encouraged me to go do it anyway because I might actually be the first person to say these things. I don’t feel that’s especially likely and feel like it would be embarassing not to cite them, but maybe I should go on anyway.

Current Music: “Compliance,” Muse

As the hellsite has been dying I've been up to my usual shenanigans there as long as it will hold out (my mastodon instance has been down all day) and I've found a very bizarre yet thankfully somewhat trivial discussion to get caught up in instead of the rampant -isms constantly directed at me.

The discussion is based on this very bizarre statement about Viktor from the show Arcane while people were arguing about the Jayce/Viktor ship -- and that is that Viktor is somehow "cold and professional".

I don't care if people actually ship JayVik (though the morality police coming after shippers for shipping them because of Jayce's "like a brother" comment "means it's incest coded" is deliriously stupid if it's not actually straight-up in bad faith, which I'm sure it is), but the idea that Viktor is somehow "cold and professional" is so contrary to what actually happens in the show that I'm sure we could not have watched the same thing. The guy tried to explain sneaking a near-exile into a lab as some kind of intimate tryst, he openly berated the majority-shareholder of their company, shrinks away from spotlight and shirks professional responsibility to work on personal projects, waxes openly sentimental and mournful about his impending death, and this is not even getting into the tender looks he gives Jayce at every touch that the shippers keep obsessing over. Viktor is absolutely NOT cold or professional. He has wide range of expressions and body language like the other major characters in Arcane, which is one of the show's major strengths and definitely worth analyzing. VIktor's expressions read more as passionate which is an interesting contrast to his frankly slimy habit of doing whatever he pleases when he thinks everyone around him isn't paying attention. I think if he wasn't the blorbo du jour or if the things he was doing this way were more unsympathetic in nature people would point this out more -- but as it is, people weirdly do not mention this part of his character and kind of seem to ignore it, and when wanting to find character flaws go digging in his League of Legends character profile instead.

No seriously, if I talked to the majority shareholder of my company this way my ass would be fired so fast...

Anyway, back to the original comment, "cold and professional." It's a very weird comment unsupported by the text -- we know that viewers will see what they want to see. Viktor's a man, white, in STEM, and he's one of the few characters with a thick accent and that accent has specific stereotypes associated with it. Possibly part of the 'professional' comment is due to the fact that we see essentially nothing of his personal life except a flashback and use of experimental drugs and even those are still 'sciencey'. We have certain weird assumptions about men in STEM, about emotions even in general. Anger isn't an emotion, and with a broader brush only actual tears are the sign of 'getting emotional', which we never see Viktor do. I wonder if the 'cold' comment has to do with him not being demonstrative with typical displays of affection -- while he's obviously receptive to Jayce touching him with casual affection, he never seems to initiate it himself, but that seems more evidence of some kind of culture clash or at best taken as evidence that they're not really an item, but his response is never cold.

I assume there is something of a Rorschach going on here. He has a lot of cues that viewers are primed to read a certain way. Are you paying enough attention to see what's actually there?

It's like the same discussion I saw elsewhere on Tumblr earlier this week, about Daphne from Scooby-Doo weirdly enough. Every new iteration of Scooby-Doo claims that they're doing something new with Daphne, that they're making her 'actually competent' and not 'just the hot one' out of some sort of misguided 'girl power' message, failing to account for how in EVERY iteration of Scooby-Doo was competent with useful skills even if she was not as technically inclined as Velma. Instead of paying attention to anything actually occurring onscreen, she's a teenage girl who's attractive and interested in fashion -- that must be all there is to her.

With Viktor, I don't know if it's because I grew up with these kinds of guys that I know there's way more to them than what media and even they themselves may want to project -- my dad was an engineer, my grandfather was an architect, my brother tried to go into medicine, my uncle is a trekkie, I'm a programmer myself, my family a few generations back came over from central and eastern Europe, etc -- but I kind of don't think that's it, because that's not really a super common environment, and it makes me wonder about things I've experienced from others. People have such a hard time reading my emotions and expressions to the point it often feels malicious. It makes me wonder if it's a neurotypical/neurodivergent thing going on here. Apparent 'masters' of reading body language, aren't they supposed to be? Every time a new 'body language' article is published online it's about how to tell if someone's being 'deceptive', perhaps making people search for paranoid readings of bodies and expressions instead of reading the plain text right in front of them. Or maybe it's like the 'empath' trait described in other pop psych articles -- someone has already decided this person's emotions for them so there's no need to look at their actual face and body to get what they're feeling, and if they say something else, they're obviously lying.

I don't know. I may have more thoughts on this later. Something is afoot.

Current Music: "Compliance," Muse

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The Male Hysteric

Entries tagged with analysis

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On The Bechdel Test

A Thought On Liminal Pools

Sailor Uranus's Gender... Again

Frankenstein: Parasocial Relationships

Future Frankenstein Posts

Viktor Arcane, "Cold and Unemotional"