jmtorres: Image of dessert. Text: The cream pie of justice flies one way. (dessert)
A fun-filled weekend of fun has been had! And it's still a holiday tomorrow!

On Thursday night after [personal profile] niqaeli got off work, we drove out to LA to visit [personal profile] echan and [personal profile] jetpack_monkey. An all-night trip; we hoped to get there before the morning rush so I left 21 minutes from the end of the first episode of BBC's Sherlock, which [personal profile] traykor had put on while niq was still at work. Because those 21 minutes might actually matter to whether the freeways were totally clogged or just impenetrably labeled. Never mind spoilers, imagine being 3/4 of the way into any iteration of any Sherlock Holmes story and having to walk away. We arrived on [personal profile] echan's doorstep and despite being dead tired, I asked if we could put it on (I figured we'd watch it from Netflix, turns out they own the DVD). So we did. I have now seen Sherlock. Whoo.

On Friday, [personal profile] niqaeli and I slept in weird bits on and off but not at the same time as one another mostly, and [personal profile] echan came out as genderqueer on the internet, which I had known about for some time and [personal profile] niqaeli hadn't and wow, it was a relief to be on the same page as my braintwin finally. ([personal profile] jetpack_monkey's reaction, which [personal profile] echan IMed me about a couple weeks ago, was an adorable sleepy "Not that surprised. Still my [personal profile] echan." *heart* He is a sweet husband.) Also on Friday, we went out for sushi! At some point, we watched the Tik Tok vid for vampire Nikola Tesla from last year's Club Vivid and I explained in detail what was going on for [personal profile] echan, who has seen about five Sanctuary episodes, out of order. There was dinner from their favorite 24-hour delivery service because apparently most things in downtown LA close at like, six (including Starbucks! I've never known a Starbucks that closed that early!). Then the household (which also includes [livejournal.com profile] diannelamerc and [livejournal.com profile] lizbetann) decided to watch Being Human UK while niq and I variously went to sleep and passed out. Naturally, having fallen over before midnight, I woke up at about one in the morning and put some Dresden Files on (I watched three episodes! I remember what happened in some of them! I laughed at Netflix's description of Harry as ethics-challenged, because he seems to have a fairly strong personal ethical code to me! but maybe he fails it up later? who even knows).

On Saturday I did not wake at six in the morning like niq, who had fallen down and stayed down instead of Netflixing in the middle of the night, but I did manage to pull myself out of couch for trip to Little Tokyo with her and [personal profile] echan. I had a honeydew melon smoothie, then we went to bookstore and niq got lots of origami paper, then we had enormous bowls of noodles and niq forgot that my tolerance for alcohol is significantly lower than hers, so yes, half a bottle of sake will get me tipsy.

After that we went to Santa Monica: I had expressed interest in beach (any beach) and niq wanted to go to British import shops/a restaurant for tea in the area. Both beach and tea were lovely. Like, half an hour on the freeway + forty minutes finding parking + a good ten minutes of walking across the deepest beach on the coast to dunk myself in the ocean for fifteen minutes (priceless). Neither niq nor echan came in more than knee-high with me (though I full-body hugged echan when soaked to hear zir squawk), both feeling that the water was much too cold for my shenanigans, and it was cold? but I'd been expecting it to be cold and had sort of over-anticipated it so it wasn't as cold as I actually thought it would be? So for me it was pleasant. And wave-diving is fun. Mostly if you dive under waves right it rolls over you and you come back up behind it a few seconds later. Once I hit my dive wrong and got tossed around in the turbulence of the breaker a bit more and came up laughing in glee, so much so that I startled a woman nearby that I hadn't known I'd washed up next to into laughing with me. I, I sometimes forget other people are there when I'm staring out at the wild, wide ocean. On a wading beach, no one much comes out as far as me (you have to be waist-to-chest deep to get waves big enough to dive under), and also I have sort of um. Great transcendental fierce pagan joy that possibly puts me in an altered state with the ocean? Although part of that is wave-diving related endorphins. Even when you do the dive right, you end up with sore shoulders, and when you're standing there letting the little ones hit you waiting for the big ones, you end up with sore thighs. The ocean's like, big. It's all-encompassing and humans are so tiny and you get a bit battered. Endorphins: apparently I was kind of stoned for tea.

(For the record: it is possible I am not a traditionally sane person. Don't try this at home?)

I have always thought I would like to live by the sea. I think I must be part selkie. And I currently live in a desert and my families of blood and choice both live here so I don't know if I'll ever leave, really. But we fantasized about everywhere we would have residences if we won the lottery during tea and I think having a villa on the Mediterranean would be nice.

After that, we went to see My Chemical Romance. Apparently people had been standing in line since like, noon, and so we got there after the line had gone in, around eight, resigned to standing nowhere near the stage but frankly okay with with having done other things besides camp out for the show. [personal profile] echan noted that the mass of people in front of the stage was very tightly packed and not moving at all, no one leaving for drinks or food or bathroom or anything, fairly completely impermeable. Then during the opening number Gerard Way went crowd-surfing and I yelled in zir ear, "Now you know why." They'd been waiting for their opportunity to touch him.

Since I am apparently incapable of not snarking to the internet, I tweeted a fair amount during the show. Er, so I have a twitter account? It is [twitter.com profile] decontextual, I um. Never mind. Here:

[Re the opening act] "Get that girl up onstage, I'm gonna eat her!" "Performance would probably be improved by onstage cunnilingus."
Friendly fans. At top of stair letting people coming up pass before I go down. A dude hugs me and says I smell nice. Seems stoned not scary.
The song "the only hope for me is you" sounds slightly less creepily psychotic when sung in concert to fans.
As per your request: you're a bad bad bad bad man, G-way. #mcr [I actually like House of Wolves a lot, but hahahaha I just. Watching him crawling all over the mic stand...]
"you ready *mumble*" is part of the song permanently in performance??? #mcr [re "Vampire Money"]
E says re Destroya: they burned the dictionaries first? #mcr
Okay sometimes I enjoy them unironically. #mcr [Re Teenagers]

Lost my bet on what their encore would be; they went back to Black Parade to close out the show rather than pulling out Sing.

We tried to go to a bar with food after the show, but that didn't work out well. We ended up getting food from Famima!! which I wish we could have in Valley of Hell, but wiki says they closed like half their test sites and now exist solely in downtown LA. Then we fell down.

Come Sunday morning, brunch was delivery, much hugging was hugged, and niq and I got on the road about 1:30. We plotted many terrible things to do to Ivan on the way, which also involved doing terrible things to Gregor. Having Illyan in my head is oh, my God, a trip and a half. *flail* I cannot even describe. Eventually there will be fic. I hope. The shortish snippet I was going to try for wants to be about 8-12K because Ilyan's going to cross-reference everything. Cry. Yay. Something.

My calves, my thighs, and my shoulders are all sore and tired. When I lay down I can feel my legs vibrating. When I get up it hurts. Muscle aches everywhere. I mean, I was expecting this? Walking, walking in sand, swimming, more walking in sand, more walking, standing at a concert for two and a half hours, then driving several hours will do that to you. (Interestingly my legs didn't hurt while I was driving, only when I stopped. Yet I kept stopping to stretch them out, because I was afraid they would like, calcify in driving stance.) Also that whole paragraph up there about endorphins is pretty hilarious to me now. But I've almost entirely gotten my hearing back after only a day! (Concerts. Concerts are loud.)

Plotting for future trips in both directions proceeds apace. OCEAN. In related news: I am interested in becoming a touring fangirl and driving to visit people I have met on the internet. Contemplate this entry and imagine all the fun you could have with me!

argh

Nov. 17th, 2010 02:55 am
jmtorres: From Lady Gaga's Bad Romance music video; the peach-haired, wide-eyed iteration (Default)
The inside of my brain has decided to list a great number of insults and slurs applied to Betan hermaphrodites throughout the nexus. Because if I'm going to write Bel, apparently I should know.

(Bel's attitude is that yes, this is societal problem, but by and large, been there, done that, got the T-shirt, at this point no one's calling Bel anything Bel hasn't heard before. So occasionally I'm introduced to new ones when Bel turns on sarcastic bastard mode and says stuff like, "Yes, I've got the combo pack" or "oh yeah, herms'll get you coming and going.")
jmtorres: From Lady Gaga's Bad Romance music video; the peach-haired, wide-eyed iteration (Default)
OH MY GOD I hate using the "it" pronoun for thinking persons, regardless of the established syntax of the canon, but I can't get a single sentence into writing about Bel without needing to use "it." DAMN YOU BUJOLD.
jmtorres: From Lady Gaga's Bad Romance music video; the peach-haired, wide-eyed iteration (Default)
[personal profile] happydork wrote an interesting entry examining why her own writing didn't reflect the diversity of characters she wants to read about. I thought both the entry and the conversation it sparked were fascinating and I encourage you to go look at it and post your own thoughts because I want to see what more people think!

I look back at the last dozen stories I've written and find I have a similar problem with focusing on the love lives of white dudes despite my broader interests. I think for me the socialized programming to accept the white dude perspective as normative in fiction is something I have to think about to overcome even though my intellectual beliefs concern greater representation of a variety of perspectives in fiction, both fan and media, to the end of normalizing being a not-white/not-dude/not-assorted-currently-normative-states.

fuck

Jun. 27th, 2010 01:17 am
jmtorres: (irene adler)
So I found a song that would be perfect for calling out the dead women issue on Supernatural. Except that I'm tired and I don't want to make that vid and it depresses me and I'm tired of making issue vids and.

Fuck.

Damn it, I'm going to go work on the spreadsheet. If I'm making this thing, I'm backing it up with some fucking numbers.

If only dust could talk
What would we hear it say?
Before it's brushed aside
Just as it's swept away
It's just the evidence
It's of no consequence
It's only flesh and bone
Why don't we leave it alone?
jmtorres: animation: Supernatural 4.09, Ruby gasps as she wakes up Coma Girl. Text: COMA GIRL LIVES! (coma girl)
When tallying death tolls, should we count demons and hosts seperately?

When tallying screentime, should already dead people (ghosts, zombies) count automatically as torture/gore/scare porn or should it matter what they look like (see 5.15, 5.16)?

ETA per niq: Relatedly, how should we class gender on demons? Should it be based on the host we see them die in, or should we be taking a look at what different kinds of hosts we seem them in and what kind of host they take most?

ETA2: Blood goatee: gore porn? not gore porn? ETA3: Also, bloodplay, as in Ruby cutting herself up for Sam's delectation, etc: gore porn? not gore porn?
jmtorres: animation: Supernatural 4.09, Ruby gasps as she wakes up Coma Girl. Text: COMA GIRL LIVES! (ruby)
So in the long saga of Supernatural women who die of either fire or being stabbed in the womb, we've caught a couple of exceptions in the season two finale two-parter, All Hell Breaks Loose. The lesbian is not stabbed or set on fire! She is hanged from the neck until dead. Ava is also not stabbed or set on fire! Jake snaps her neck. Lots of necks for girls in this episode.

On the other hand, there is one person in here who dies of stabbing. That would be Sam. And because he lacks a womb, he has to be taken from behind.
jmtorres: (slut)
One of the temps at my work this season, back from last busy season, is an old, retired guy who works seasonal jobs because he's bored, as far as I can tell. Within the first two hours he was back, he called me Girl, Honey, and Babe. I am not a manager, but I close the store, and I have been a permanent employee for four years, which makes me like five echelons higher than him. Our relationship is not close. He has no reason to think he should be able to--or should be able to get away with--calling me these things.

I couldn't make myself tell him to his face not to do it. I don't know why. I feel like I should have been able to just tell him to shove it. Five seconds after, every time, I wanted to. I did not. What I did do was bitch to my coworkers and bosses, none of whom particularly wanted to confront him either, but the store's 2IC (and highest-ranking male employee) did call the old guy into the office and tell him that in our company's work environment, Honey, Sweetie, Babe, etc were not appropriate and he needed to use his Misters and Ma'ams. I was there for this reprimand, although my boss didn't point me out as the person who had complained against him, and the office is fairly open and full of people in and out.

All in all, I am happy with that outcome. From everything I have discussed with my coworkers, I was not the only person this man was making extremely uncomfortable, I was just the only one who was willing to complain to management about it. I'm not sure everyone understood my problem, though, because I have had to listen to a couple of rationales for this guy and because the treatment I received after from regular coworkers I consider friends pissed me off.

First:
"Oh, he's old, of course he'd call you Girl." Uh, no. I recognize age/experience as a valid social disparity but in this environment I am professionally his superior. You can argue that these equal out, and I am fine with that: he could treat me as an equal and call me by, oh, my name, maybe? I do not believe that his age is worth more than my job title. I definitely do not feel that his age and his sex are worth more than my job title because I do not believe that men should be privileged above women and I think this is goddamn relevant, because the names he was calling me made the issue very much that he was a man and I was a woman. He's made male coworkers of mine uncomfortable as well, but not using the same terms. Girl. Honey. Babe. These are belittlements to be applied to women, in assertion of male privilege.

"But I call you Honey all the time!" That's nice. However, you and I have known each other for a couple of years now, so you have earned some familiarity with me. Also, you are a woman, so I do not feel you are asserting male privilege when you call me Honey. Also, you are both older than me and in a higher position at our workplace than me, both of which are disparities I recognize the validity of. If you were (female,) younger than me, and, say, a mere cashier, I would probably think you were a sassy little punk if you called me Honey all the time; since you are not, it passes by me as unremarkable. Because you are female and not male, I do not feel as if you are perpetuating male privilege by calling me Honey.

Second:
So I do have informal relationships with most of the regular employees at my job. We call each other a lot of things. There's one cashier who calls me Bitch. Today she called me Honey, and when I jumped a mile, she told me I had to be expecting that today, given I had called out our sleazeball temp to management. What? No. Then my boss (female one, not male one) called me Sweetcheeks, continuing in the vein of mocking the situation. I said no, no that's not how it works, no: you should not be shaming me for calling out a harasser. If I was the only one who felt secure enough to complain formally and get the guy reprimanded, I, who couldn't make myself tell him off to his face, what kind of message do you think it sends to everyone who wasn't brave enough to say anything to anyone, for you to behave like this? If you shame people who speak up about harassment, even in jest, you make it so no on wants to speak up. You contribute to an environment of harassment, genuine, non-jesting harassment, because your actions serve to silence victims of harassment. I wasn't pissed off for myself, I was pissed off for the context and the people around me. I don't care if you're my friend, it is inappropriate to shame someone for stopping harassment, so you will not say these things to me.

I was not this eloquent at work. I wish I had been. I think I managed to get the message across, though.

Sigh.
jmtorres: Utena and Anthy kissing, Revolutionary Girl Utena. My prince has come. (femme)
There's a patch of my scalp that's a little tender right now, because I was bleaching the hell out of my streak (I'd let the roots get out a couple of inches) to re-dye a new shade for the wedding. I'm only using 30 peroxide, not anything rougher and tougher and salon strength, so getting my hair bleached enough to take cool colors takes a few runs--the first go gets me from dark black-brown to vibrant orange; the second to a paler orange, around where I can drop a magenta or red on it; the third bleaching gets me to a light gold that can slide under violet, though I'd probably twitch at trying to get it under blue, because blue will green out on you. (Two or three more runs gets it to proper platinum, but I don't so much do that all at once--it's just what happens with the length of the streak when I'm working on the roots.) So all told I spent a cumulative two hours with bleach in my hair tonight, and yeah, my scalp is sore.

Beauty is pain, right? /irony

(In an ideal world I would just naturally have a white streak up front like Rogue or Sam Beckett, and when I felt like dyeing it an accent color to go with my dress and my mood as I periodically do, I wouldn't have to bleach it first.)

My mother likes my streak bleached but undyed; she says I look like a marbled cake with blonde and brown hair. I did that look for a while when I first got up the gumption to bleach the streak--and it took gumption; when I told my mother on the phone, because I was away at college at the time, my lead-up made her think I'd gotten a tattoo or something permanent, because I really thought she'd disapprove like crazy. Maybe that's why I didn't finish the job with the dye, then, and yeah, it felt unfinished, the bleaching's always just to make a canvas for the color. But I really did feel that my mother wouldn't get it, would make me feel guilty about it--not for doing something non-conformist with my hair, no. For using beauty products, for falling prey to societal pressure to do things that are bad to my body to try to look pretty.

I think I'm the wannabe punk child of a wannabe hippie flower child.

Growing up, I absorbed from my mother that: make-up is a waste of time and clogs your pores and by the way, lipstick is to make your mouth look like labia; leg and pit hair is natural and women in Europe don't shave it off, so why should we; that mustache ain't going anywhere no matter what you do to it (this was probably my mother's longest hold out in the vanity department, she was bleaching her mustache long after she'd called it quits on a lot of other regular beauty work); heels will screw up your feet and back; Barbie is not a natural shape and not one to aspire to--I nearly added it's okay to be fat, but that one didn't quite stick, because my mother did pressure me to diet with her all the time. By the way, we're both still fat. I think she still tries to lose weight. Eventually I got her to leave me out of it. My stance is I don't want to work specifically to be thin; if I lose weight because I'm working my ass off, then yay, but I'm not going out of my way for it. This seems to me to be the natural extension of everything else she taught me about rejecting society's urges to prettify, tempered with an acknowledgement that all false images of what health is aside, I am actually fatter than is healthy.

So there's all of that. The anti-pretty, where pretty is defined by glossy magazines and Hollywood movies. Except that on some level, I do still want to be pretty, even though I know how false all of that is. The first time I acted in a theatre show in college and the director showed us how to put on make-up, not street make-up, pancake make-up, but you know, with cheekbone shaping rouge and eyeliner to make your eyes big and dark, everything exaggerated for stage--I looked in the mirror and thought, "I'm pretty," and I hadn't known that was possible, I hadn't ever thought of myself as pretty before.

I didn't start wearing street make-up. I don't do that for everyday life. There are occasions when I'll do measures of it for performance, and I don't necessarily mean stage performance, because not all performances are the official kind. Part of my rebellion and part of my queerness is that I don't do that performance for men--the most frequent occasions are Club Vivid at Vividcon, which has an overwhelming majority of female attendees. But pretty isn't who I am on a day to day basis, and though pretty still gives me a little surge of guilty pleasure, I am content to look like what I actually look like here in real life.

Except for the hair.

Here's another thing about my hair: getting my hair braided, especially braided in some fancy, intricate way by someone else, is a guilty pleasure for me. I don't know why; braiding doesn't fall under the same stigma of pretty in most cases for me--I braided my mother's hair when I was a kid, and it's not load-the-chemicals-on alteration of self that she taught me to rail against. But there despite that sanction, I still feel like a pretty, pretty princess when someone does my hair, and feeling like a pretty, pretty princess is a guilty feeling for me. Ironically, it's an act of defiance against my (personal/familial instead of societal) norms to ask for it.

And then there's the bleach and the dye. It has been eight years since the first time I bleached my streak in; I have been inconsistent about maintaining it (see also: a couple of inches of roots) but it's been part of my self-image ever since. I guess that's an act of defiance against my personal/familial norms too, but one specifically designed to be outside the conventional definition of pretty too: unnatural colors, and just the one streak, not the whole head of hair. But it makes me hugely uncomfortable on a philosophical level that I have to buy into artificial beauty products to do it. I have this tender patch on my scalp right now, reminding me that everything my mother taught me to resist in the idea of hurting yourself to look different than you are because society thinks you should. There's a push-pull of how I want to look and how I look without alteration and how I want not to look specifically because the world says I should want to look that way. It's hard for me to sort out. I can't quite solve it; the contradiction is rooted somewhere primal in the construction of my personality.

I have a whole hell of a lot of identity tied up in my hair. The other day at work I said something about being butch, regarding my badassery at moving boxes of books--mostly in jest, because the butch/femme binary is not quite synonymous with my issues and not really how I think of myself. My boss said I'd need to cut my hair off if I wanted to look butch and my automatic answer was No. I also said that short hair is not a requirement for being butch and it's an attitude more than a look and that my boss was being reductionist and on some level I believe all of that and on some other level, that was all rationalization for that instant answer, No. No, my hair's not going anywhere. There's too much me there.

But a me I need to manipulate, to alter. Why is that? What is it about me that I need to look different from what I am?
jmtorres: Faith tortures Wesley. Text; Pretty when you bleed. (blood)
Vid: She Walks
Fandom: Dollhouse
Song: She Walks Over Me by Hole
Vidder: [personal profile] jmtorres
Download link (please right-click or ctrl-click to save): http://houseoftorres.dreamhosters.com/vids/jmt-dollhouse-shewalks.avi (23MB) (link updated 19 May 2019)

My Dollhouse vid is an angry vid.

Read more... )
jmtorres: T'Pol in the white version of the non-uniform, under Vulcan's orange skies (t'pol)
1. I finished watching Enterprise!

2. Alas, my love affair with the trashy holonovel is not over. I'm reading fic. None of it is what I'd call good fic, which is why I'm leaning heavily on comedy--a well-formatted comedy can live without a plot and with mangled characterizations, whereas drama with the same flaws make me stab the back button.

But my actual second comment was a related issue to the bad fic: I keep trying to figure out what woman on Enterprise Archer might be talking to who would be considered blonde (not T'Pol, surely not Hoshi), only to realize he's talking to Trip. You guys! Blonde with an e, girl!Trip. Blond without an e, boy!Trip. Continually referring to characters by their hair color instead of their name, so last decade.

[personal profile] niqaeli and I discussed it and girl!Trip is awesome and I want actual fic about her (as opposed to whoops, stop calling boy!Trip the blonde mmmkay?). She's totally queer. Like, not completely lesbian, about the same ratio of hitting on alien women and bonding in highly suspect ways with Archer and Reed as the next Trip--but she is queer, and self-aware about it, which means she totally calls Reed on his shit, Reed being the least self-aware queer in the history of Starfleet. Also, she's about ten times less ass-hatty about the one-night stand with T'Pol. In my head her name is still Trip which means she's probably actually also still Charles Tucker III because her father so desperately wanted a son to carry on the line that he gave his daughter massive issues to carry around. Fun times! Is there any chance this story has actually been written? Is there any chance it's any good?

Seriously

Jun. 23rd, 2009 12:54 am
jmtorres: Faith tortures Wesley. Text; Pretty when you bleed. (victim)
I am not sure if it is merely symptomatic of film in America or society in general or if my professor's selections of movies to analyze for gender are skewed a particular way but jesus christ I would like to be able to write an essay about film without talking about rape.

Like, not even rape culture. Just specific incidences of rape or sexual assault.

What the fuck.
jmtorres: From Lady Gaga's Bad Romance music video; the peach-haired, wide-eyed iteration (Default)
Star Trek linkspam III: the search for more money! Wow, I am not mixing my references at all. I haven't been keeping tabs open as religiously since [personal profile] ysobel saw the movie. I think this is most of the meaty stuff?

[livejournal.com profile] liviapenn writes about how Uhura's role expanded in the new movie, and Kirk, Spock, Bones and Uhura is the new OT4.

[personal profile] niqaeli did some compare and contrast on characters in Prime and Reboot.

[personal profile] butterfly has some meta and some fic recs. And more fic recs here. And even more.

In general I am not linking to fic at this point because of the sheer volume (other than mine mine you should go read mine), but I want to point out [personal profile] bravecows's The First Time, which is totally world-building exploration of race meta in fiction form.

[personal profile] beatrice_otter wrote about how the Vulcans will likely proceed, based on their culture.

[personal profile] niqaeli wrote about some non-obvious changes in reboot, such as Vulcan society and when Kirk as born.

[personal profile] seperis analyzed a lot of Reboot changes.

[personal profile] ysobel pokes at plotholes and timeline issues.

Discover Magazine posted a tangentially related Rules For Time Travelers.

[profile] catalysticat picspammed about Captain Pike and has made several posts about enlisted ranks in Starfleet.

DW comms: [community profile] star_trek_flashfic, [community profile] vulcanreforged
LJ comm: [livejournal.com profile] startrek_crack

[personal profile] zvi posts recs, Spock characterization spec. Also she wants to know how Uhura could have been more awesome, as she was already awesome. She has more fic recs. She's pissed at K/S fic that makes Uhura disappear.

[personal profile] coffeeandink has a list of reactions ranging from self-advertised shallow to deeper criticisms.

[livejournal.com profile] yahtzee63 has a talky Spock muse.

Journey to Drabble is a Star Trek Reboot Drabble Challenge.

[personal profile] kate dissected the movie score vs previous trek theme songs at a level waaay above my head.

Vids: (some of these I like a lot, some I consider to be conversation pieces)
--Closer v2, a remake of [personal profile] killabeez and [personal profile] tjonesy's TOS vid with Reboot footage
--Steady as She Goes, TOS vid for which I believe the premise is: the crew of the Enterprise will never have a successful relationship with anyone else, because they're all doing each other.
--Stuck to You, upbeat Kirk/Uhura/Spock OT3 vid.
--We Go Together, team vid for Reboot (works better at a metatextual level than a contextual level, in my opinion)
--Kobayashi Maru, about how Kirk and Spock are defined by so much death in Reboot

Depressing

May. 3rd, 2009 04:16 am
jmtorres: From Lady Gaga's Bad Romance music video; the peach-haired, wide-eyed iteration (Default)
Watching any vids about women I can get my hands on is depressing. I have had to use to phrase "there's too much rape in this one" far far too often. WTF, fandom. WTF, Hollywood. WTF, modern society.

once more!

Apr. 22nd, 2009 12:39 am
jmtorres: animated: Amanda and Lucy from Highlander: The Raven. Kiss kiss. (kiss)
Hey, all, this is your gentle reminder that there's a mere two days left to suggest vids for Vividcon themed shows. Whether you're going to vividcon or not, you should consider throwing your vids, your best friend's vids, your favorite vids ever into the ring.

Here at the Bechdel Show, I am especially excited to hear your suggestions. I also totally want your premiering vids if you are so inclined, but even just your favorite vid ever about a couple of gal-pals is made of win.

Suggest at the form!! Leave me a comment! Email me at juliette dot torres at gmail dot com. You have the power to make our show awesome.
jmtorres: Utena and Anthy kissing, Revolutionary Girl Utena. My prince has come. (femme)
[livejournal.com profile] vividcon is looking for suggestions for themed vid shows! More specifically, we, your exalted VJs, are looking for suggestions for our themed vid show, The Bechdel Test.

Here's the official blurb:

In 1985 in the comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel gave us this test to evaluate gender equality in a movie: 1) it has to have at least two women in it who 2) talk to each other about 3) something other than a man. This vid show is about the spirit of the Bechdel Test, showcasing vids about two or more women interacting and relating with each other, in ways that don't have anything to do with men. Femslash optional.


This is awesome, right? Girls, girls, girls! We are all about the ladies! We want your mother-daughter, sister-sister, student-teacher, best buds, archenemies, lesbian lovers vids!

We welcome all suggestions! We welcome vids you've seen, vids you've made, vids you are inspired to make just for us! We would really really love to see that, actually, to see people making more vids about women for this show, and for the celebration of women in fandom. What women in your fandom need your loving vidding attention? Would you, could you, premiere a vid with us?

To suggest a vid, go here: http://www.vividcon.com/suggest.cgi

Important dates to know:
--ETA: April 23rd date correction!/ETA: suggestions end! So run go suggest stuff now!
--June 1st: all themed show vids are due, so if you're gonna make one for us, this is when you have to turn it in!

Go! Suggest! Vid! http://www.vividcon.com/suggest.cgi

Your loving VJ sisters,
[personal profile] jmtorres & [personal profile] niqaeli
jmtorres: Utena and Anthy kissing, Revolutionary Girl Utena. My prince has come. (utena)
[livejournal.com profile] j_crew_guy linked me to a thread containing, among other things, a theory on how the Utena movie could be interpreted as a sequel to the Utena series (rather than a retelling).

One of the other things is a discussion of Anthy, the evil witch, we hates her, precious. People talking about getting enjoyment out of the million swords of human hatred scene, and how she deserved it when Saionji hit her because she just stood there and took it, and how Saionji must have been right to do so because he was so honorable in other areas of his life.

That's what inspired the title of this post.

side note about Saionji )

To me, if you see Anthy as an evil witch, you've missed the point of the series. You've missed the revolution.

Anthy is called a witch because in the societal trap they're in, any woman who has any independence or exercises any power (ie, is not a victim or "princess") must be a witch. Anthy-the-witch and Anthy-the-victim are perceptions, based on restrictive gender roles, and the revolution is about overthrowing the rules that say that's all she could be.

Utena starts the process of subverting the gender roles by becoming a prince (actually, it could be argued that Juri is the first step of this subversion, masculinizing herself in kind of a "lesbian = man in a woman's body" way, and Utena progresses by desexualizing the definition of prince; a prince as a strong human being as opposed to a straight-man-or-a-lesbian). However, changing the rules so that a woman can be a prince (or a man could be a victim or witch, though why would they want to be?) is not enough.

The key is that Utena cannot save Anthy, and in the end Anthy saves herself. It's not enough for Utena to be a prince; she's not really saving Anthy as long as Anthy is still a princess. You have to toss out the entire paradigm: no more princesses, no more witches, no more princes, because princes are the counterpoint to princesses. If you don't victimize people, you don't need people to save them.

And that's the fucking revolution.

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jmtorres: From Lady Gaga's Bad Romance music video; the peach-haired, wide-eyed iteration (Default)
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