Posts Tagged Joss Whedon

DragonCon Parade

We started our Saturday out with the parade, as always.  The parade is always a wonderful exhibition of all of the best costumes DragonCon has to offer.  This year, there were huge contingents of superheroes, steampunks, and Ghostbusters. At least two of those groups could easily be explained by the world record attempts scheduled for later in the day. As for myself, I was the steampunker in the audience taking the pictures.  I’ll be putting up a gallery of all of the pictures I took this weekend on a separate page, to keep this post from getting too image heavy.

From there, we went to the James Randi panel, which was absolutely wonderful.  Randi is such a treasure, and I’m glad we got to see him. Since not everyone there would be as familiar with his work, he explained the purpose of the James Randi Educational Foundation and the million dollar prize.  He opened the floor up to questions, most of which were focused on the “woo” that people attempt to scientifically prove, and fail to do so, in pursuit of the prize.  Randi discussed how the people involved fool not just their customers, but also themselves. He used the example of dousing for this, where many of the dousers believe that their ability is real and, even when proven otherwise, will find excuses as to why so that they can continue to believe so. Randi’s main point, throughout the panel, was that each person who is encouraged to think critically is another victory for the skeptical community.

Afterwards, we headed over to the Walk of Fame to see who was over there and to get some dinner at Ray’s in the City, which turned out much better than our meal last night.  We had to eat a bit early, because we were heading to the Browncoats: Redemption premier that evening, and we expected the line to be ridiculous. (We were right, it snaked around three floors of the Westin!)

I had purposely kept my expectations for the movie low, knowing that it was done with an extremely low budget and, for the most part, volunteer work, but other than a few sound issues, the movie was really good. It kept to the spirit of the Verse that Joss Whedon created, without stepping on the story or characters that all Browncoats have come to love.

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• Skepticism Alive and Well at Dragon*Con (randi.org)
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I read a lot. At any given time, I might be reading several books at once, and I average finishing somewhere around three books a week.  And since it seems to be time for such things, I decided I’d give a little list of the favorite books I read this year.

These books may not have been published this year. They might’ve been republished in a new edition, or won some awards that brought them to my attention, or they might’ve just been sitting on my waiting-to-read stack for a while, but each of these I read for the first time this year, and would recommend to anyone.

1. Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
   Winner of the Newberry and countless other awards and medals this year, and of course written by my favorite contemporary author, this is one of the best examples of what makes Neil Gaiman so great. His books may exist in the realm of the fantastic, but they are a prime example of just how much truth can exist in fiction.
2. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
   This is available on Doctorow’s website as a CC licensed e-book, for those with empty pockets, and it’s definitely worth the read, and the purchase. Cory Doctorow is one of the best emerging authors in the sci-fi/fantasy/speculative fiction genres. There’s nothing pulp about any of his work, and Little Brother, written for an adolescent audience, is just as pointed in its commentary as any of his others.
3. Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
   This is written by the same woman who wrote The Time Traveller’s Wife, which I have not read.  This book is about the “life” of a young woman buried in Highgate Cemetary in London during the Victorian Era. (There did seem to be a lot of good ghost books lately…) Obsession is the major theme of the book, with each character seeming to have his or her own version of it, from obsessive love to obsessive hate and everything in between.
4. Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? by Neil Gaiman, art by Andy Kubert (Pencil), and Scott Williams (Ink)
   As usual, my favorite graphic novel of the year was written by Neil Gaiman,  though this is a departure from my usual Sandman love. I’m usually a Marvel fan, when it comes to comics, but this gorgeous hardcover edition of Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? was too beautiful to bypass, and proved to have a wonderful tale within. It answers the question of  what happens to the world, when a bat dies.
5. Serenity: Better Days by Joss Whedon and Brett Matthews, Art by Will Conrad, Ink by Jo Chen
   It’s unusual for me to have two graphic novels on my list, but these two were awesome enough for it. Of course, I’m a rather fervent Browncoat, but even putting fan-bias aside, this is an excellent comic.  Perhaps, with the television executives unwilling to give Joss Whedon the free reign he needs to produce truly great material, comics will provide a place for us to find the great writing that we all love him for.

In the earliest beginnings of the vampire legend, back with Paladori and Stoker, the legend was a metaphor for rape.  The vampires were inevitably aristocratic and attractive, the better to lure in their victims.  The act of feeding was monstrous, just as monstrous as the rape it represented, and just as horrible for the victim.  The victims would either die or be turned into monsters,  just as a woman, in those times, once raped would be better off dead, for she would be seen as a monster in the eyes of society, something unclean and defiled.

Fast forward to the future, and Anne Rice gives us a new breed of vampire, one which is capable of remorse.  Louis, despite being the narrator and protagonist of Interview with the Vampire fell flat as a character partially because of his broodiness.  Lestat, monstrous and murderous and the constant trixter, was the more interesting character throughout the series.  I continued to get disgusted with Louis just as Lestat seemed to for his eternal pouting and refusal to accept that he’d taken a step up the food chain.

At this point, the victims were still very much victims.  The embrace of the vampire was such that it causes ecstasy in the victims to the point that they desire it rather than fighting it.  When Louis took mercy on a child, he only created a worse monster than that which had killed her.

Even then, the embrace is a metaphor for sex in which the vampire has all of the power, even when the victim is at least partially consenting.  The ecstasy of the embrace works like the date-rape drug, allowing the vampire to feed without worrying about the victim fighting back.

Move forward a bit further, and finally the victims of these monsters find a way to fight back, through Joss Whedon‘s Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  The victims have their own advocate in Buffy, who is exactly the thing the vampires like to eat best, a beautiful young woman. But along comes Angel, a vampire that I got just as disgusted with as I did Louis.  Brooding, pouting, and prone to heroics, he’s a vampire with a soul, but that soul and that inability to feed on anything more than sewer rats makes him toothless, and toothlessness in a vampire, following the old metaphor, is equivalent to impotence.  This is particularly true in the case of Angel, for it is sex that triggers the loss of his soul, turning him back into the monster.  I liked him better when he was Angelus.  At least then he wasn’t going around with a ten-ton sign around his neck saying:

“PITY ME! For I am hungry and surrounded by food, but cannot eat!”

The correlation between a vampire’s inability to bite and impotence continues throughout the series with the introduction and “de-fanging” of the vampire Spike through a behavior modification implant.  When he discovers that he cannot partake of the tasty morsel presented to him in Willow, they have a discussion not akin to what might follow when a man attempts to have sex and finds that he cannot perform, with similar anxieties on the part of both the victim and the monster.

However, this is not a universe where the victim is helpless, even those  without superpowers, and after consoling the impotent vampire, Willow breaks a lamp over his head and escapes.  Damsels in distress in Joss’s world don’t wait around helpless and hoping for rescue; they rescue themselves.

And I get disgusted and annoyed with these toothless, impotent, brooding vampire.  They can’t or won’t allow themselves to be what they are and instead try to be something resembling a nobler and more self-sacrificing version of human.  Even while de-fanged and souled, Spike of BtVS was much more attractive and much less annoying of a character because he never stopped being a vampire. Even with a soul, even when he was fighting on the side of good, he was a ruthless and unapologetic killer.

With the Twilight vampires, the victims are once again unable to fight for themselves as they had been throughout a brief period with Buffy.  Gone is the independent, strong, and back-talking heroine, the heroine in these novels is weak and dependent on super-powered and dangerous creatures to protect her from other super-powered and dangerous creatures.  The damsel in distress is back to waiting for her hero instead of saving herself, and this time the hero is the monster, the rapist, castrated.

The metaphor may still work as it always did, as a warning against pre-marital sex, but what exactly does it mean now that we are encouraging girls to put their  trust in monsters and be happy little damsels waiting for a protector to save them?  After all, not all of the monsters out there are defanged or celibate, no matter how attractive they might appear.

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I’ve gotten moved over to my own domain and gotten all of my posts imported, now all that needs doing is a little customization of my theme and to get all of my articles, stories, poems, and papers linked up for my writing portfolio page. For my faithful subscribers, thanks for hanging in there while I got everything moved and set up. You’ll be able to find me a little easier now!  For the new folks, welcome! Let me give you a bit of an introduction. I’m a writer, a gamer, and pretty much an all-around geek. I’m also a girl. Go figure.

You can follow the little link above for my writing portfolio (still in progress), if you’re interested in reading some of my fiction or articles.

You won’t find me claiming to be any sort of expert in anything. I’m still learning. Hopefully I always will be, and I’ll be able to take you on that trip with me as I do so.  What you will find here are my thoughts on things I come across in life, my opinions on the world around me and, of course, my favorite forms of entertainment. I try to be an objective critic, but when it comes to some things, I have the tendency to go completely rabid fangirl…

Especially if it involves Joss Whedon. You have been warned.

Thanks for coming, and if you like what you read, thanks for staying long enough to do so!