zvi likes tv

There is a comment meta post at fem_thoughts, which you should look at and see if you have thoughts (any kind of thoughts! Of whatever length or thoughtfulness!) about femslash and things around femslash.

Some threads of interest to me:

• Word Choices in Smut
• femslash production
• Defiance and Sex
• Favorite Tropes as Applied to Femslash
• The women of White Collar squee fest
• The limits of "encouraging" femslash
• changing fannish boundaries

I posted two things there that I wanted to pull into my journal, which are not really about femslash or the topics above. Point 1, about my favorite narrative OF ALL TIME

I don't know if it's a trope that we see in fandom so much, but it's definitely common in the source material, and it's the Breakfast Club/Beauty & the Beast, where people who wouldn't choose to be together are thrown in with one another by circumstances beyond their control, and they then have a shared understanding of the world that can't be really explained to outsiders.

Also, I have just figured out why I am so gaga for Teen Wolf, JFC.

Point 2, about women on Teen Wolf

The thing that I find extremely frustrating about Teen Wolf's approach to gender is that you have a lot of Minority Police Captain syndrome going on, where women are named as being in charge, but then for various story reasons are effectively powerless.

• Laura Hale is a dead body who was the Hale pack alpha before the series started.
• The Argents claim that women are their war leaders, but Victoria Argent wasn't introduced in the series until several episodes after her husband Chris in season 1, and is immediately undercut by her father-in-law Gerard when he appears, and Allison functions as titular leader for a handful of episodes while always dancing to her grandfather's tune.
• Last but not least, we are repeatedly told that Lydia Martin is a queen of the social scene, but we never see her wield that power over anyone except Jackson and Stiles, and, by the time we see her attempt to use it, her juice has evaporated because of that one time when she was assaulted by a psycho at prom and then ran away from the hospital and wandered the woods naked for, like, two days.

Reading Kathryn Schulz's Why I Despise The Great Gatsby was the first time it ever occured to me that someone might read that book because they enjoyed it.

( I don't like Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby but I have high hopes for Luhrman's ).

This entry is all just a long way round to saying I think Schulz's essay was fabulous, and brought out some great points about how the book is a moral failure. Also, h/t to smartbitches_feed.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses - Half a Moon 2011 by zviLikesTV

Show Notes:

halfamoon
Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos
Dangerous Liaisons (1988), directed by Stephen Frears
Les Liaisons Dangereuses (2003), directed by Josée Dayan
Valmont, directed by Milos Forman
Cruel Intentions, directed by Roger Kumble
Se plaire by me

jain won meta from me, and she asked to me write about threesomes. My apologies for missing the deadline.( Some Thoughts about Threesomes )

I like to read the original before I read the remix, because then I feel like I am not missing the point of the remix, or, at least, I am not missing the point of a really great remix.

These are the things that are going on in a really great remix:

1) The remix comments on, complicates, refocuses, argues with, or underlines a part of the original.

2) The remix is a great story in itself.

3) The remix is still a great piece of fanfiction for canon, i.e. it speaks to something in canon as much as (or more than) it speaks to that original story.

I will toot my own horn and say that I think the Whore remix achieves all of those. I think that Athosian Woman (the silver chromatic remix) achieves these three, also. Probably also some other stories of mine which have been remixed, but that's the one I think of off the top of my head.

So, when people say that they don't read the original story at all from a remix, I feel like they are interrogating the text from the wrong perspective. How can you figure out if a story is a good remix if you don't read the original?

This is akin, I think, to reading fanfiction for canons you don't know. This is going and reading a work which has been written for an audience familiar with X body of knowledge, but you don't have that body of knowledge. It's not that you can't get anything from such an exercise, but you are going without getting all that you could be from the exercise.

This is, of course, complicated by all of the fanfiction out there which suffers from severe attenuation from its source. This doesn't have to be any two guys, it can just be really elaborate world building in the fanfiction. And, in remixes, you get the problem of too much fidelity to the original, where it seems as if you are, in fact, reading the original story twice, and, also, too much difference from the original, where the original fic functions more like a story prompt than a source material. I think I have managed to avoid the doubling issue, but I know I've done the story prompt version, with, for instance This Sleepover Thing (Official Subtext Loop).

Maybe I will do reviews of the remixing in Remix Redux 10 later this summer. I like talking about that sort of thing.