seryn

Corrvin asked me to post about this outside of our private conversation.

She had a situation at work where training failed and asked me, "Seriously, who doesn't know that's an emergency?"

I said there is a book by Catherine Asaro. In it the main character goes up to the main receptionist at a government building. This is on a planet she doesn't normally live, which doesn't have a high concentration of her rare specialty, and no one else is going to need this service, ever. The character has a rare moment of introspection when she realizes that the receptionist was trained for this specific situation even though it was so unlikely to happen that people would go their whole careers without it happening. This woman is an augmented super soldier who carries a hand-held nuclear-powered weapon and she wants to see the "heart bender", their equivalent of a shrink for people who have been augmented. It's not the time you want to have your receptionist say anything but, "Of course, [insert directions]."

Now, when I see something that probably should be obviously an emergency situation where there was a failure in training, I think, "Your planet blows up."

When I needed to learn to balance on one foot for tai chi class, I stood on the concrete retaining wall to an outside staircase. If I fell, it would have been catastrophic. But I knew I wasn't going to get there until there were consequences I could see for failure.

This is why I worry about people who don't read books and who don't read fiction. There are things you can't have happen in real life but being able to see how they play out in the extreme can be clarifying.

I'm sure the people who like historical non-fiction think the same thing about me being the lazy-ass reader that I am, because I'm not conscious of the historical repetition, nor am I more than nominally conscious of the mistakes that have been made previously.

But I'm also thinking about Mercedes Lackey and how she managed to create a whole series of books where gay and lesbian characters were just who they were.... and they could carry a series anyway. Without it devolving to humor so no one was upset. Vanyel was the dominant character in his series and his situation was almost never funny. It changed my mind because I'd only seen the caricatures before this, the campy excessive kinds of people who feel like they're so different they'll never blend and they might as well confront the world all the time. But it felt antagonistic to me--- anyone who is campy and "humorous" all the time, who can't ever be serious or taken seriously, is someone I don't want to know because it's not grown up of them. It's hard to respect someone who wants to be acknowledged for their grown-up decisions when they don't act like they deserve that respect. Vanyel, despite being a fictional character, despite being a bratty kid when we first meet him, is a regular person who happens to be gay. He wasn't extraordinary because he was gay and really fucking annoying about it, he was extraordinary because he did extraordinary things and died a heroic death in the process.

It's one of the things that bothers me when I complain about a trope in fanfic... like the recent spate of "chastity is a virtue for girls" stories. I much prefer the ones where women get a power-boost from sex. And there have been those. To a certain extent, the point of having fiction is to explore things being different.

Asaro has psychiatrists her characters can see without any flack, compared to the regular world where mental health issues are an embarassment to most people and treatment of them is severely restricted by most health insurance.

Lackey has gay people being just like everyone else.

And I want to see stories where characters say contraception makes the sex better. I want to see stories where men and women both enjoy sex and there isn't a societal expectation that women pretend otherwise. I want to read books about characters who are happy and live happily ever after, when they don't toe the line of societal expectations. That means no "divorce means you can't fall in love again", it means no "childless couples are miserable and divorce over it" (Which is always ironic since most divorces seem to be caused by the stresses from adding children to an unstable relationship.), it means people who want to be different fight their battles but that's not the extent of who they are.

Reading means I can see how someone else solved that. It means I can think a problem through without risk to myself or the situation. I wonder if the people who don't read at all still think about things which are outside their normal spectrum.

I'm shopping for a new fandom for fic. I think I might have tapped out what I'm willing to read from Harry Potter. HP has a lot of adult characters, and a pretty dominant sub-group which is writing non-Weasley pairings. But lately I've actually been reading Harry/Draco. I hate that pairing ( Read more... )

I tried reading in the Iron Man fandom, but there just aren't enough characters. There might have been more options if the fandom seriously predated the movies.

That is, actually, my problem with Spider-Man. The movies sucked compared to the concept I remember from 1975-era cartoons. It's that Dopey MacGuire guy.

I like superhero stuff. It's probably what I like most when I find it in HP too... someone who for whatever reason is way more powerful than everyone around them and decides to use that for good even though the people around them are assholes.

Magic-based worlds would be just fine because ( cut for potentially NSFW wordage )

Absolutely NO historical fandoms. I watched a bit of the original Life On Mars; that was within my lifetime and women were treated ghastly-ly. So anything Victoriana or even steampunk is going to grate on my nerves.

Generally I think I'd be happier with something that has book canon instead of just TV or movie. I read NUMB3RS fanfic for a while early on, but there just wasn't anything to it. The people writing couldn't do a good mystery or fantastic math or good detection, so they did relationships and there wasn't enough characterization to pull that off.

I read most of the literature books that I did read in school. Sometimes I feel like I should read more classics, but it usually seems like the only books that make it to classic status are the ones which are incredibly depressing and morose. I think I could do that if I were in a discussion group, but even then only if it was a, "Read the next 5 pages silently and then we'll read aloud. Then we'll discuss it." I don't read really depressing stuff when I'm alone for the same reasons people don't watch scary movies by themselves at 2am--- it leads to exaggerated effects.

But everything I was forced to read in school has ended up being either a connection point socially or allusionally useful. I like being able to say things like, "Margaret Atwood's nightmares are not supposed to be 10 year plans."

My reading habits are pure junkfood comparatively to what education demanded. But sometimes I read something really good, like John Brunner's The Crucible of Time, or Sherri S. Tepper's Grass. Both of which were a real struggle to finish, but completely paradigm shifting for me.

I can often tell when I'm reading something which ought to become a classic, just based on how "vegetable-y" it is. I think that's what confuses people who think Philip Pullman's stuff is worthy of mention... it was just nasty flavored. But just being nasty doesn't make it literature.

I think there are a lot of people who think that about Dickens and Austen too, that they were popularist hack writers who are considered classics now because all their works are bitter-flavored.

There are a lot of science fiction works that should be much more widely read than they are, just because they explore a lot of sociological ideas in ways that have become foundational. (Unfortunately a lot of science fiction is also horror, and many groups seem to take those as fundamental guides to how the world should progress as well.)

Recently I've found Sherlock Holmes stories to be vastly more interesting than they had seemed as a child because of how brilliant Holmes seems when I have historical context for the relative information he had.

However, most people only consider books to be important or pivotal if they are non-genre works. That exacerbates the depressing aspect because there is no way to create a portrait of the world after the issue under discussion has been fixed. Even if a non-genre book clearly illustrates a solution, there is no petrie dish provided for intellectual exploration of the idea and often there is no means by which the solution can be implemented at all. So non-genre books have to be about unresolvable problems and thus must be depressing.

I believe the reason most people think depressing books are really profound is because most people are happy, so having a detailed emotionally contextualized woe that grabs the readers by the soft throat with its teeth means the reader really feels it. For many people that level of sheer depression is a novel experience, they don't personally feel that, so to them, it's a phenomenal thing. The author has created brand new emotions that "real people" do not feel. Since I often feel that way, a really excellent literature book that makes me feel the characters' woe can actually be psychologically dangerous to me. I don't see much reason why books that show me how happiness feels are not considered classic literature. But it's like watching a great actor in a role that seems normal, it's impossible to tell how much of that is acting. Actors themselves know this, so they often strive for villainous roles which showcase their talents visibly. Books that convey positive emotions successfully are as successful as the classical depressing books, but the majority of people don't notice because they feel no difference.

If you catch me on a bad day, I'll say it's because the majority of people are shallow. I'll also say that authors who can reach readers by creating a negative emotional context are sadistic. On a really bad day, I can do it myself. If I am sufficiently enraged, I can sadistically share the woe. I am quite proud of that, not the being sadistic part (which I consider a failing), but the ability to share an emotional context. I stopped writing largely because I cannot stand to read my own stuff--- in Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, there is a scene where they take an enormous chocolate bar and beam it through to a TV where it can be taken as a normal hand-size bar. When I write something gripping, the emotion that comes through is the hand-size version. But when I re-read it myself, it brings me back to when I was feeling the giant-size version. Since I tended to write to highlight the negative things, when I re-read a successful story of mine, it feels heart-crushing to me. Actually, that's how I identify a successful story.

I don't have any books I am currently reading. I don't even have any that are really pending. I have a stack of books that I haven't read, but I either got them for my SO or he's read them and panned them as unworthy. (He reads about 2.5 times faster than I do. I seem to have maxxed out my reading speed at about 60 paperback pages per hour (unless it's a pulp romance those are about 80.) It takes some serious effort to keep up the supply of reading material.)

Someone posted in books a question about what we're currently reading and I wanted to participate but could not. I'm hardly likely to make more friends when I'm off in this corner by myself, after all. I guess I could lie, and since I've reviewed 5 books in the past 10 days, it might even be believable. But there's the problem that if I publicly claim to be reading something it will color people's impressions of me and the dreck I have left is hardly worthy of my reputation.

I've been reading fic today. I can make it big on the screen and I can sit up while reading without my arms getting tired. I found, (well, through a friend giving me a direct link) a secret cache of evil!Dumbledore fic. (Clell65619's favorite stories are almost all evil!Dumbledore....)

That's one of my big mental progress points after years of immersion in fic (but not fandom, the constant squee hurts my brain) the ability to see when we're being sold a bill of goods. Books are almost always written centered around the hero, so we tend to ascribe heroic attributes and make excuses for the main character regardless of merit. We're told over and over in Rowling's Harry Potter books that the Weasleys are good people, but there really isn't any evidence to support that. We're told that Dumbledore has the "greater good" in mind, but his obvious bias caused a lot of damage to the cause repeatedly. And finally, the overall premise, that the intolerance of muggles and those of less magical heritage is wrong. If you think about it from a purely mathematical standpoint, having a 10% influx annually of immigrants who are given no help in acclimatizing or even basic ground rules for societal expectations... that is something to fear because it will destroy your community.

I've noticed that I'm finally doing this with more of my reading. I no longer blithely accept the given perspective. It makes a lot of books easier to put down and never pick up again.

I've also noticed that I'm applying this your perspective is not necessarily the truth principle to my interactions with people. It makes me less likely to be wounded by people who are supposed to like me. There's nothing like no longer believing that people don't mean to hurt you to make their fingers reaching for your proverbial buttons obvious enough to allow dodging of the jabs.

It's bizarre to me now that I could have been so naive.