Beyond Selidor

I missed a post yesterday because I was completely physically and mentally exhausted, and could do little more than lie on the couch. I'm not really sure why — I'm not sick, just really, really tired.

In any case, I'm back with the fandom meme, Day 10:

J: Name a fandom you didn’t care/think about until you saw it all over the internet.

I generally don't get into things solely on the basis of 'the internet,' although I use my Twitter feed mainly as a source of book recommendations, and used to watch a lot of TV shows based on the recommendation of thelxiepia.

One instance when I did discover a new-to-me fandom which became one of my favourites on the basis of the internet was in 2012, with Pretty Little Liars. At that point I was following Whedonesque, the fan news website for all Joss Whedon shows. It was mainly a news aggregator, gathering links to any article, interview, or blog post about Whedon, Whedon shows and films, or actors who had been involved with his shows in the past. Generally I didn't pay it much attention, but for some reason, a link to an interview with Bianca Lawson caught my eye, and I was curious enough to click through. Lawson was playing one of the love interests of the main four girls in the show (yes, she was in her thirties and playing a character in high school, because Bianca Lawson does not age), and was being interviewed about the fact that this was a teen show that treated the f/f relationship as no different to the other three girls' relationships with boys. (As the show progressed, that became debatable, but at least in it early days it got a lot of hype for supposedly having good representation of lesbian and bi girls.)

The way the interview described the show caught my interest — I've always loved shows about insular, claustrophobic small towns/communities where a child is murdered or goes missing, and it exposes everyone's secrets and shows how every other person is, to a certain extent, responsible. I immediately began watching, and watched through to the bitter end, although my love of the show had diminished a lot by the final few seasons and it felt more like grimly hanging on rather than watching out of genuine love or enthusiasm. But in the early seasons, it really was excellent, and I'm glad I was curious enough to click on that link to the Bianca Lawson interview!

( The other days )

So, the last time the show revealed A, I predicted it would be Byron Montgomery and it turned out to be Mona Vanderwaal. I’m just saying that I’m not very good at this, so take my prediction with a massive spoonful of salt.

Nevertheless, I like to post my predictions publicly so that I have a record of them to refer back to. As such, I have come to the conclusion that Caleb Rivers is A.

( Cut for PLL ramblings )

Day Twenty: Favourite female antagonist

Mona Vanderwaal (Pretty Little Liars)

I just noticed that this meme (which I copied from someone else's journal) uses US spelling. I've gone through and changed it on this entry, so from today onwards it will be British spelling, but I'm not going to go back and change every other entry. So just imagine those letter 'u's in 'favourite'.

Pretty Little Liars knocks it out of the park in terms of female characters. It's got a great quartet of heroines, complex female love interests, mothers, sisters, female friends and frenemies, all of whom are given rich interior lives, and believable (at least within the soap operatic universe of PLL) motives, fears and aspirations.

And its female antagonists are something else. The show rests on two mirrored themes: female friendship and female enmity, and I could've picked any one of a handful of complicated, antagonistic girls for today's portion of the meme. I picked Mona because I find her thrilling to watch.

She is cruel, but with the capacity for kindness, mentally unstable but perceptive when it comes to understanding what drives other people, observant, watchful and chaotic all at the same time. In this show, which in its essence is about teenage girls making and remaking themselves and trying to control other people's perceptions of them and the stories they tell about themselves because they are unable to control anything else, Mona reigns supreme. She transformed herself, she manipulated others into believing so many lies, and for several years she was able to control her own story. She is one of the few characters in the series with the guts to stand up to queen bee (and master manipulator) Alison DiLaurentis, and one of the only characters able to see through the lies the quartet of protagonists tell about themselves.

Janel Parrish playing Mona is an absolute joy to watch, and I hope to see a lot more from her in the remainder of the season, and the series.

( The other days )

Day Six: Favorite female-driven show

Orphan Black and Pretty Little Liars

I'm cheating today, because I honestly couldn't decide between the two. I think I like both for their emphatic, relentless, female-driven character. They are both unapologetically shows about women's stories, and they portray all kinds of relationships between all kinds of women and girls (although both shows could stand to be a bit less white). Each show abounds with mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, female antagonists, romantic relationships between women and so on. There are male characters, but they are very much secondary or tertiary, and neither show is particularly concerned with telling their stories, except insofar as they affect the stories of the girls and women. Female characters' stories drive the plots in both shows, and both celebrate these characters' stories.

I think the appeal of both shows to me lies in the unflinching way they look at how society tries to control, claim and shape women. In Orphan Black, the clones' bodies and lives are literally not their own, while in Pretty Little Liars everyone from shadowy bullies behind a computer screen to the local police and the girls' own fathers tries to lay claim to the girls' lives, attribute motivations to them, and manipulate them into something more manageable. And in the face of these repeated assertions that these girls and women are not their own, both shows depict their female characters as fighting back, taking up space, shouting their truth and their stories from the rooftops, believing and supporting one another, and trying to reclaim their lives for themselves. In both shows, women and girls' lives and anger and stories matter.

( The other days )

Troian Bellisario tweeted that they were shooting the Pretty Little Liars season finale for over thirteen hours. That's dedication! I hope it's amazing.

I had a useful and productive meeting with my supervisor yesterday. For the first time ever, I feel that the end is in sight for my PhD. It's going to be such a massive relief. My supervisor and I also had a very frank discussion about what I planned to do once the thesis was finished. I was honest with her and said that although my current feelings about the PhD (namely, frustration and anger) were probably colouring my attitudes towards academia a bit, I'd pretty much come to the conclusion that it was not for me. She had some helpful suggestions about what to do next, and some possible contacts that may be useful in the field in which I want to work, which was great.

(On a related note, I really admire my supervisor a lot. She's been married to another academic for ages, and they only managed to live in the same country for the first time about four years ago. They have two kids who are trilingual. She's well-respected in her field without having been drawn into any of the stupid disputes and bitchiness which sadly plague it. Most importantly, she is a really good communicator, which is actually not all that common among academics. She supervised me for my MPhil as well as my PhD, so I've been working with her for five years, and she has always really impressed me with her ability to deliver constructive criticism that leaves you feeling inspired rather than crushed. She's kind of my model for How To Adult.)

Last night, Matthias and I went to a Halloween party at our friend C's house. Australians don't really do Halloween, and I was surprised to discover that it was a thing in Britain, but in any case, C is from the US and hosts a party like this every year. This year, the idea was to spend as little money on costumes as possible, for which I am grateful. I had been really stumped for ideas, but in chat my sraffie friend Michael mentioned that the thing he always notices about me is my bright, colourful clothing, which led romen_dreamer to suggest going as a rainbow. So then Matthias went as a pot of gold, which involved carrying a bowl of chocolate coins around all the time. In the end we spent about five pounds on some ribbon and the chocolate coins, which was great.

C's husband works for the US military, which means they are able to buy food at a nearby US military base. This is greatly appreciated by our other friends from the US, as it means they get access to food from home that isn't otherwise available in the UK. I myself particularly enjoyed the blue corn chips C had bought!

The party was pretty low-key. We just hung around and chatted, while cheesy horror films played in the background. Towards the end of the evening, people got out the Wii and started dancing, but I missed most of that as we decided to leave around 11 since Matthias had to work the next day. Incidentally, today is his last time working at his old job: he started it as a temporary thing to earn some money while he was doing his PhD corrections, and somehow ended up staying for three years. But he recently got a new job working in an academic library and was finally able to quit. There was nothing particularly wrong with the old job, just that it was kind of unchallenging and unlikely to go anywhere, career-wise, so we're both very happy that he's able to move on. His old work gave him an Amazon gift voucher and a half bottle of champagne as a going-away present, and we're definitely going to crack open the champagne when he gets back from his other job tonight. (He currently has three different part-time jobs.)

That's basically it from me. I'm spending the day at home, alternating between editing my own work and proofreading an article for someone else.

I am an absolute sucker for meta. It's kind of why I internet. There's been a lot of great stuff posted recently, but I'll limit it to just a few things that are either particularly timely, or relevant to my interests. Consider each link to be full of spoilers for whatever it's discussing.

Abigail Nussbaum is one of my favourite bloggers. She has a curious and articulate interest in a lot of things that I also like to think about, and although our thinking rarely lines up completely, she always opens me up to new interpretive frameworks for the texts she analyses.

Her most recent post, on Scandal, is great.

Rhimes methodically dismantles the assumptions that lie at the core of all of her work--assumptions about love, about her characters, and about who we're expected to root for. Rhimes shows are characterized, as I've said, by outsized emotions and big speeches that extoll the characters' virtues. Scandal is the show that takes those big feelings and bigger words and asks: what if those emotions are twisted and unhealthy? What if those big words are nothing but spin? What if the characters who we've been told are heroes are just selfish, clueless cowards?

I also highly recommend her post about Sharon Kay Penman's The Sunne in Splendour and Philippa Gregory's Wars of the Roses novels. I enjoy Penman's work and dislike Gregory's, but I think the point Nussbaum makes is correct: partisan historical fiction is undermined if authors refuse to allow their darlings any flaws, or if they need to make their antagonists into manipulative, evil villains with no redeeming qualities in order for their heroes to remain unsullied.

In her novel Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel tries to do some of the same things as Gregory and Penman--to rehabilitate a historical figure usually cast as a villain, in her case Thomas Cromwell, and to draw attention to the ways that women used power in periods that officially gave them none, and to the dangers of doing so. Mantel could have made the choices that Gregory and Penman do. She could have made Anne Boleyn a blameless woman in love, or Cromwell a saint driven to evil acts by a conniving woman. Instead, Mantel recognizes what neither of these authors seem to--that to look for good guys and bad guys, and to root for a particular side, in a dispute like the Wars of the Roses is a fool's errand. Instead, she focuses on her characters' humanity. Her Anne is not an appealing figure. There is little romance between her and Henry VIII, and as he grows tired of her and she grows more desperate, she seems to shrivel up until there's nothing left but ambition and arrogance. Nevertheless, she is still human, and Mantel doesn't judge her for her choices or ambitions. Her Cromwell, too, is more than a hero or a villain (though in my reviews of Bring Up the Bodies and its prequel Wolf Hall I've taken Mantel to task for going too easy on him and downplaying his less savory actions). He has many admirable qualities, and though over the course of the book we watch his soul atrophy, and the worst in him emerge as he engineers Anne's death, we never lose sight of the good that is still in him.

Ferretbrain is another fabulous source of meta, and its essays are enhanced by the thoughtful and detailed responses and discussions they tend to garner in the comments. I've recently enjoyed Arthur B's post on The World's End, although I don't think I came out of the film with quite the same impression that he did.

On the one hand, this could be a really neat subversion of that Hollywood individualism cult I was mentioning earlier. As Gary King's own backstory gruesomely illustrates, sticking your fingers in your ears and refusing to grow up doesn't actually get you anywhere. People like to believe that as humans we are independent and will never knuckle down and sacrifice our freedom, but actually we do it every day - that's precisely what you do when you agree to be part of society. We might not like the society we have, but to change it - or to forge an alternative - we still need to co-operate as part of a community. We are social animals, after all, and if we point-blank refuse to be part of any society or community, and equally refuse to sacrifice any of our freedoms for the purposes of rubbing along happily together we end up in a sorry state - look at Gary King, look at the Unabomber.

And I'm probably outing myself as someone who has utterly appalling taste in TV, but Dan Hemmens' post on the recent season of The Apprentice is just brilliant.

It's very easy to look down on Apprentice candidates, because they do consistently make the sorts of elementary mistakes you would expect from a tired six-year-old. People were pointing this out pretty much as soon as the first episode aired [...] What I thought I'd do in this article is go through series nine, episode by episode, and talk a bit about what the candidates had to do, why (nine times out of ten) there was no way any sensible human being could actually be possibly expected to succeed at what they were asked to do, and to look a bit at the strange, almost mystical thinking that seems to go into a lot of the conversations in the boardroom.

There was a big reveal in the last episode of Pretty Little Liars. Even mentioning who is interviewed in my next link would be a spoiler, so don't click unless you're up to date (or don't care). In any case, have an interview with two people involved with Pretty Little Liars by Samantha Highfill.

On a related note, I have a link to a bit of meta by Tumblr user prettylitteliarsforeverbitches about the reveal, and what it might mean. Again, spoilerific.

In case it's not obvious, I really want to talk about PLL with someone...

Pretty Little Liars is the kind of show I just eat up. You know the type: teenage girl disappears from a small, close-knit community, and all are somewhat culpable or involved. Over the course of the series, secrets are revealed, and we discover the extent to which the on-the-surface idyllic community is messed up. Veronica Mars, Twin Peaks, Night and Day, that sort of thing.

Anyway, tomorrow is the Season 2 finale, so I thought I might as well set out my predictions in advance. It's not the end of the series, so I imagine most questions will remain unanswered, but I want my thoughts recorded so I can go back to them when the series does end.

Be prepared for spoilers for Pretty Little Liars, as well as the three other shows mentioned in the first paragraph.

( warning: spoilers )