Not woman enough for you, ’ey?

Not too long ago I received an email from someone complaining that
Griffen “looks like a man.” Like so:

The author went on to express their aggravation with this state of
affairs: clearly I was capable of rendering the expected womanly
form. They suggested I seriously revise Griffen’s look.

Well, I was a bit flummoxed, so I sent out an email to some cohorts,
including my esteemed editor, outlining the dilemma and some possible
responses on my part. Much to my delight, Erika Moen leapt into
action and sent me this possible redesign for Ms. Stoyka:

Perhaps a name change is also in order: Chiffon, maybe?

Cross posted at the Dicebox Forum.

ADDITIONAL

Bill Mudron has offered up his own interpretation of Griffen Medea.

Bent

Saw Bend It Like Beckham last night with Kip and Sara, and I found it absolutely charming. Almost as charming as a cat in a neck tie:

The movie dealt with gender roles and culture roles, but nothing as extreme as this:

Okay, okay, all kidding aside, I liked it, it was fun. It was delightfully unpretentious and upfront in what it wanted to do. In fact, I’m a little puzzled with the reviewers who were looking for a groundbreaking statement on culture and gender—but it did provide a gentle reminder that, yeah, unfortunately, certain regressive attitudes are still in place. Because they are, I’m sad to say and stereotypes usually have a basis in reality. I mean, I’m always stunned when I witness family and friends spout certain cliches as if they were working from script.

Anyway, nothing in the movie nor the Bitch, interview with writer and director Gurinder Chadha was trying for a movie that would shake your fundamental beliefs about culture and the world we live in. The Bollywood musical remake of Pride and Prejudice that she is currently working on, now that’s an entirely different story�

(Oh, and those you want to equip your kitties in the latest hip-hop fashions[literally, look for the bunny ears] you can go to this Japanese language site, Pet Office.)

/

So, the most recent Bitch has an article on the culture of fanfic, “Fan/tastic Voyage,” by Noy Thrupkaew, which, as usual, has a heavy emphasis on the slash aspects. Though it’s a good article, and exactly the type of cultural phenomenon that Bitch covers, I was a bit surprised to see it. I mean, I had just assumed they would have touched upon this topic already (no, I haven’t read every issue).

It just all seems old hat to me. Though long part of fan and geek culture, I hardly was in the thick of it—yet I knew of slash fanfic for over ten years now. I mean, Becca’s journal directed me to a Globe and Mail article several months ago about slash fiction entitled “If Frodo Loved Bilbo” (though, really, shouldn’t it be If Samwise Loved Frodo…?). And there is a very good book about fanfic that was put out in the mid-90s called Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins that I read a long many years ago, which I was a bit disappointed that Thrupkaew didn’t even mention in her article.

Not that the whole thing isn’t still worth discussing, I just want articles that aren’t mostly “hey, look at what people are doing!” I know that there has been a huge boom of slash fiction with the widespread use of the internet—but even that was a few years ago. Still, I found the Bitch article interesting enough. Thrupkaew took a nice approach in trying to understand the appeal of writing slash by speculating on what type she would write.

Thrupkaew also got at what I believe is the appeal for hot man-on-man action for some women: not the fact it’s safe to fantasise about men or that male sexual desire is the dominant paradigm, but that it is an erotic experience women can’t experience firsthand, and so there is large appeal to explore on the dynamic. I would even go further to say that if you primarily like boys in your bed, than why not two for the price of one? And, as she points out, there is the fact that the most developed characters on any given TV show tend to be male, that’s it’s rare to find one, let alone two fully realized female characters to admire and latch on to. Notable exceptions being the Joss Whedon family (Buffy, Angel, Firefly) and to some extant other SciFi shows such as Farscape and Star Trek: DS9. And, of course, there is Xena and La Femme Nikita.

Though not a huge follower, I like slash and fanfic, or, as I really haven’t read that much, I like the fact that it exists. I think it makes perfect sense and really the creators of these shows (and book and comics) should be flattered and pleased that people are doing this. It means they suceeded, that their stories have gotten under their audience’s skin and are part of their personal mythos, if only for a little while. Heck, my friends and I will do this in a mild way when discussing a show we all watch—not go as far as plotting whole scenarios, but musing on a characters motivation, their next possible action, how they interact with the other characters and so on.

It’s not unusual for me to graze slash sites. Like I said I’m not a big reader of the stuff; I’ve probably only read about ten all the way through—and a couple were actually well-written, with appealing scenarios. But I am endlessly fascinated by the pairings people come up with and the devices they use to orchestrate their bed romps. My favorite actual fanfic pairing is Joxer/Ares, God of War. My favorite speculative pair is Statler/Waldorf—you know, the hecklers from the Muppet Show. I know David Chess has gotten searches for Jellicle Cat Slash—which just boggles the mind. And then there are the places I just don’t wanna go—like Bill Gates/Steve Jobs.

Probably the most wretched turn fanfic can take is the “Mary Sue” syndrome, something that Thrupkaew does touch upon. This is when the writer none-too-subtly interjects her- or himself as a character in the story they write, usually as a powerful peer of the main hero. Mary Sue is actually a fairly recent term for me (though Kip swears it was mentioned in Textual Poachers. I knew of the concept, though, and it always makes me squirm in pitying embarrassment. I just knew them as twinks, or practioners of tiny sex.

I first encountered the term Mary Sue in Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s blog, Making Light, in the entry “Marching Mary Sues” (everything is better when it’s marching, even moreso when it’s a calvacade) It’s a great entry—beyond directing me to the MaggieFic’s Handy-Dandy Mary Sue Generator, it has one of my favorite lines ever: “If this power could be used for good, it wouldn’t be this power.” It also references the comment section of an earlier post that not only supplies one with the search phrases to turn up gobs of fan fic, but has a hysterical account of a Mary Sue at Hogwart’s.

I found the Mary Sue Generator fun, though I did misunderstand the intent at first; I just charged right in without reading the instructions. There are attributes and then blank word fields—I thought one entered the various attributes and then a little story would be genrated—a limited one, like Mad-Libs or They Fight Crime. But you actually just generate the attributes of your Mary Sue, which is actually entertaining enough—especially since I could get results very close to what I first hand-entered: Emerald eyes, raven tresses, an intrguing scar as opposed to a clever scar, though the closest I could get to “empathy out the ying-yang” was plain “empathy.” I have to say I didn’t know “Heiress” was an occupation and I was amused by the newly revealed relationship to a major character “Madame Hooch‘s Shady Ex-Lover”—but I actually decided to go with “Han Solo’s Catholic School Classmate.”

You asked for it

Well, some of you anyway. The Dicebox
Forum has opened at Talk
About Comics, all courtesy of Joey
Manley (no relation).

It was something I had to think about doing and—you might have
noticed—take a poll for. Why? Well, a post to another
comic’s forum speaks to half of my trepidation:

There’s no direct linkage between the quality of a strip and the
volume of its message board. Witness, for example, that Canadian strip,
which shall remain anonymous, where the geeks are always standing around
with folded arms. Its message board is a damn chat room.

At the other extreme, there’s Chris
Baldwin’s friend’s strip (Dicebox), which is incredibly
beautiful and richly strange and does not have a forum, and in fact seems
designed to thwart one.

I love this comment, found via the hits it directed to Dicebox.
But it made me disinclined to launch a forum.

However, between the time I received the email informing me that the forum had been opened and when I got around to actually checking it out, there was already one post, so I felt better (thanks AntiEntropy). But my response actually leads me to the other part of my hesitation. Where as I am happy to respond and answer questions, I don’t care to be overly explicit, especially if I feel it will be made clear later.

Not that I won’t indulge in elaborate debate or discussion about
certain non-spoiler aspects of Dicebox.
One of my favorite extended email exchanges was with a reader named Alex
over the various symbolism contained in the illustration for the official
Dicebox Homepage. Not only was it great fun, it helped convince
me to exchange two of the symbols between Molly and Griffen. (Anyone wanna
guess which two? The correct answer will get an original drawing from
yours truly.)

So there you have it. (And I sincerely hope those you voted for the forum will actually post.)

The side effects of spring fever

Deciding I had spent just about enough time in front of the computer, I slipped out to bop around the Pearl District and beyond. Eventually I found myself at Reading Frenzy, a common enough thing when I’m feeling restless at work. Browsing,
I discovered that Joe Matt’s latest collection is called Fair Weather (ah well) and was startled into laughter by an art book with a blue delft china AK-47 on it’s cover. (still not sure
why I laughed)

I ended up leaving with the latest Bitch(the theme being obsessions) as well as the latest Colors
(the theme being food). As if I have all this freaking time to read. As if I didn’t have all those magazines Kip and I subscribe to through the mail at home waiting for me to more than glance at them. Oy.

I tell ya, it’s a good thing I take the bus into work and am inclined to taking baths. Otherwise I’m not sure if I’d ever get to read. Oh, right, and doing cardio at the gym, when I’m not distracted by political messages.

The main book I’m reading now is The
Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade by Wendy
Doniger, which, for those of who check out my about me page on occasion might have noticed that this is a book I’ve been “Planning to Read” for about seven months. And I’ve had it out from the library even longer.
I was just so reluctant to start it. I mean, I adore Doniger’s writing, which is engaging, and her books and usually touches on everything I like from a non-fiction culture studies book– myth, symbolism, social history, sex, gender and sexuality. Two of her books: Women,
Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts and Other
Peoples’ Myths: The Cave of Echoes are among my favorites. As with most academics presenting their polemic, I don‘t always agree with her conclusions, but reading her work has always been an entertaining and thought provoking experience. But I just couldn‘t bring myself to start a 500 page book that focused on a plot device beloved by Shakespeare.

I finally took the plunge and as this book also deals with doppelgangers, animal brides and grooms, somnambulists, cross-dressing as well as theories of defilement and divinity and much more, I am happily two-thirds of the way through. And, as usual, there is a heavy emphasis on the tales and folklore of India.

Many of the non-fiction books I read reference and reverberate off each other. Not surprising as about eighty percent of them deal with what I listed above and then I steer towards books on tricksters, fool, shamanic practices, death, the human body, the human mind, liminal spaces—not to mention women specific
cultural studies. So I’m not to surprised in knowing quite a few of the authors she quotes through out—Marina
Warner, Thomas
Laqueuer, Midas
Dekker, Margorie Garber and so on.

But I was surprised when she made an observation that somehow resonated with the book that I am casually reading concurrently with the Bedtrick, Pharmako/Poeia
by Dale Pendell, a book that falls into another category of book I read, ritualistic psychotropic drug use and the various cultures it exists in.

The passage from the Bedtrick is using an analogy of the Biblical bedtrick story of Rachel and Leah (and Jacob) in association to the approach taken by the designers of medical drugs:

(Roald) Hoffman first likens the strategy of
drug design to the Trojan horse…and then goes on to describe how a drug
fools the disease into thinking that it, the drug, is actually the body on which
the disease wishes to feed….Hoffman and (Shira) Leibowitz then turn to
the metaphor of two bedtrickster sisters, Rachel and Leah, suggesting that the
NK (natural killer) cells might be renamed NL (natural lover) cells. “How
much more appealing to deal with L cells (after Leah) which mimic R cells (Rachel
cells), snuggling up to unsuspecting bacteria. Immunological terror can be turned
into erotic trysts, battles into orgies. As Laban set up his daughter for his
duplicity, so drug designers craft molecules that deceive…”

This passage just seemed to resonate with something that Dale Pendell said. I searched Pharmako/Poeia back and forth to find what might be like calling to like before realizing that what I was thinking of actually came from an interview of Pendell conducted by David Levi Strauss and Peter Lamborn Wilson for Cabinet
Magazine:

DLS: In Poeia, there’s a beautiful passage about “a power greater than the poppy.” And later on, you write, “The first poisons were love philters, potions to ensnare the heart. Other seductions came later: knowledge, the Elixir of Life.” Do you think this is literally true?

DP: Yes, I think so. We’re speculating, but the etymological basis is certainly there. And looking at ancient classical books on magic, so much of it is love magic. And in popular magic, love charms are so often the major thrust. Bury a lock of hair before your door, and she will come to you. I think looking for eternal life was a later development. [laughter]

DLS: Immortality can wait, baby.

DP: Love is really the last socially acceptable form of divine madness. I’mworking on a piece using the Poison Path methodology on love and desire. Looked at as a drug, love is certainly more dangerous than anything else out on the street. It kills more people, and inspires more murder and mayhem, than any
other substance by far.