broken-nosed gods

I can understand not being asexual. I can even sort of get my head around enjoying real-life romance. But apparently my limit of personal comprehension* is not being a lesbian. I have no idea what that's like! I can't imagine it! How do people not get ridiculously excited about ladies doing ALL THE THINGS? With each other? I want all my favorite female characters to run away and get married to each other and be happy, and I want to surround myself with excellent ladies both real and fictional and stay that way forever. I can't imagine wanting anything else.

This post is brought on by a) the exceedingly late hour and b) the following events: earlier this evening I was listening to Monstrous Regiment for the nth time, and re-re-realizing just how much I ship Polly/Maladict, and how much I ship that kind of pairing in general, and how much harder I ship any kind of pairing when both chatacters involved are female (and/or genderqueer). Then I read a bit of a fic about an m/m ship that hits all my dudeslash kinks, and in the middle of doing that I had a stray thought about ladyslash which sent me into a literal flailing fit of LADY FEELINGS and how much there need to be more ladies in everything, especially ridiculous epic love stories with big sprawling plots (which I suppose Monstrous Regiment sort of is, if you tilt your head and squint, but the fic I was reading was not). I know people probably get flailing DUDE FEELINGS moments, but I've never had them and just can't imagine having that intensity of feeling about something that doesn't contain any ladies. I get good happy feelings from my favorite dude characters and celebrities (Tyler Posey I am looking at you), but it's just not the same at all. The scale is totally different.

Also, sometimes I am reading/watching something about dudes doing dude things and having manpain and stuff I don't care about, and I literally say out loud "whatever, you're not even a lady." (Even if I'm not particularly invested in something, I feel more invested if there are female characters involved. If it's just male characters? Eh.)

Of course all of this is all bound up in my reactions to sexism & such, but I think it's fair to say a large part of my character and preferences in general are a direct or indirect reaction to sexism and related things, e.g. oh, girly-girls can't be serious? a) fuck you, I'll be as girly as I want, and b) fuck you, I don't have to be serious, there's not a law.



*Well, I also don't really understand being a dude, or not caring about clothes, but those are just some of those things other people are interested in that I am not. But I just genuinely do not grok not being All About The Ladies.

Ugh, shark week. ( (My favorite euphemism!) )

I really hate it when sci-fi works have people blowing up planets. It's always just a device to show how evil the villain is and give one of the main characters some cheap pain. The authors don't seem to get how enormous of a tragedy that sort of thing should be—it's not just the people, it's the history, all those books and art and the old buildings everyone walked past a thousand times. I actually really hate it when anything big and important gets destroyed in fiction, because FUCK YOU I WANTED TO READ ABOUT THAT. All the things I love are the things that get blown up to prove a point. But planets are the worst, because they are all of those things at once and more than the sum of their parts, and their authors never, ever treat their loss with enough respect.

(The one exception, of course, is 'Graduate Vulcan For Fun And Profit', which is perfect in every (heartwrenching) way.)

I am in no way an expert on Shakespeare. I have watched perhaps five of his plays, and read another one or two. I have read an excellent book on them (which, sadly, I cannot at present recall the title of). But here is my opinion, which I for some reason feel the need to share.

I don't think they deserve all the acclaim they have been given.

Not half of it. They are not bad, aside from the standard issues (sexism, racism, ableism, etc) of the period; they are well-phrased, though by no means as well as any number of things I could link you to given half an hour's notice; they are fairly entertaining, but not overly so.

They do not move me as I must assume -- given the amount of passionate discussion I have seen -- they move other people. Not as  春雨 or Adonai or The Journey West or they shall have stars at elbow and foot  or Orhan Pamuk's books do. Perhaps this is because I am so used to novels and the closeness they give to the story and the character; plays are more distant, and I am still unused to that. Perhaps this is because I am so thoroughly modern and not good at dealing with things that aren't. Maybe I'm so jaded I just can't care very much about stories written for white men. Maybe I'm just not a fan.

I do not mean to diminish them. They are great stories; I simply do not think they are terribly good ones. And that's fine. Things don't have to be very good to be great! Look at Harry Potter. Look at Star Wars. Shakespeare's work has had such a huge effect on English -- and by extent Western -- literature and language and popular culture that you can't turn around without running into it. All the world's a stage, is this a knife I see before me, there are more things in heaven and earth. Its greatness is not in the works itself so much as the mark they have left upon the world, all the quotes and references and books written about them.

Like so many other things, I think the true grace of Shakespeare's plays is in their fandom.


(Linkspam thursdays will return eventually. Really.)