Morpheus Strip: Dream Lovers

This is the first in a roundtable on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. Suat, Tom, Vom Marlowe, and Kinukitty will be along later in the week with their takes on the series as well. (Update: And you can now read the complete roundtable)
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I loved Sandman back when it came out in the late 80s/early 90s, and I’ve probably read the whole thing through at least a couple of times. However, it’s been a while…partially out of nervousness. I strongly suspected that the epic wouldn’t hold up on rereading.

And…yeah. It doesn’t exactly hold up. I reread the entirety of “Fables and Reflections” and skimmed through a couple of the other books (“A Game of You” and “The Kindly Ones” especially, I think.) Part of it is the art, which bounces around inconsistently and is often just not especially good. There are undoubtedly some very nice walk-ons — Bryan Talbot’s creepy take on the giant, cadaverous Persephone was memorable, and, as Suat recently pointed out, the P. Craig Russell “Ramadan” story is pretty spectacular. But then you’ve got atrocious efforts by folks like Kent Williams.

No wonder he looks startled; he appears to be improbably made out of rock. Maybe he’s related to the Thing?

Aside from the inconsistencies in the art, though, the real problem is that my former enthusiasm for Gaiman’s writing has dimmed a lot. I can still appreciate his cleverness and the care of construction…but after a while, both of those virtues are pushed so enthusiastically and unilaterally that they start to feel oppressive. After a while you start to almost want to plead — please, somebody, anybody, could you just once say something that doesn’t come back a panel, or a page, or several issues down the road with an ironically profound or profoundly ironic twist? Could we have a story end without a smug little O’Henry meets dumbed-down Borges twist? Could everybody just for a fucking second stop talking?

The thing that crystallized my irritation with the series was Nuala. She was a fairy with a glamor that made her appear as a beautiful woman, but in actuality she was kind of a dumpy elvish little thing. The fairy gave her as a gift to Dream for some reason or other (maybe to try to get him to give them the key to hell? I can’t remember exactly.) Anyway, she fell in unrequited love with dream, and ends up nervously and apologetically causing his downfall. She’s a sad, sweet character. I liked her.

But as I was sort of skimming over her story again it occurred to me that, while her unrequited love is certainly poignant, it’s also weirdly unmotivated. That is, we certainly do feel her pain and sadness to some extent…but we never really get much of a sense of her love. What about him appeals to her? Does she think he’s beautiful? Is it his (on again off again) kindness to her? His power? There don’t have to be individual or even clear answers to these questions, obviously, but they’re never even asked, much less answered. For Gaiman, Nuala’s love is an almost magical fact; it drops onto her and possesses her, and that’s all we ever really need to know about it.

And that’s how love functions throughout the story. Gaiman almost never, that I can remember, actually bothers to show love as a functional, or even dysfunctional, relationship between two people. Instead, it’s just another plot device, a story element to push the action…or, more accurately, the words. In “A Game of You” the cuckoo casts a love spell by talking; in “Brief Lives” Desire does more or less the same thing.

That seems to be how Gaiman sees love; a verbal whammy that comes out of nowhere to make a clever point or set up a clever scene, rather than as an actual relationship which is maybe worth exploring in its own right. Destruction accuses Orpheus of loving the idea of Eurydice more than the actual person…but is that really Orpheus’ failing? Or is it Gaiman’s? Certainly, Gaiman never shows the couple in a tender moment — Eurydice gets more time with a Satyr in the narrative than she does with her supposed love. And the big love affair of the book, between Dream and Thessally, occurs almost entirely off-screen..ostensibly because doing it that way is clever and surprising, but maybe actually because Gaiman has no idea how to deal with an actual love affair and is scared shitless to try. Certainly, the hints of the romance we get sound deeply unconvincing — when they’re in love they walk about idyllically among the bowers prattling sweet nothings, making some of Dream’s attendants uncomfortable; when theyr’e out of love it rains a lot because Dream is throwing a tantrum. Gaiman is clear that these are cliches, and he’s making fun of them because they’re cliches…but that doesn’t change the fact that he doesn’t seem able to deal with love in anything but cliches.

There’s actually an analogy here with another, more recent tween phenomena: Twilight. In both, there’s a lot of darkness and angst, which gives an exciting frisson of danger even as it distracts from the things that an actual adolescent might really find dangerous or threatening. In Twilight, the danger of vampires and blood and werewolves and melodrama all stands in for, and obscures, the looming, oncoming reality of adult relationships and sexuality. In Sandman, similarly, the pretension and the cleverness and the angsty melodrama seems, at some points, like a magician’s trick; the left hand is bobbing and weaving and throwing out fireworks so that you don’t notice (except with a kind of unacknowledged satisfaction perhaps) that there’s not much at stake in the right.

Though that all sounds kind of harsh, I’m actually not against this kind of tween repression categorically; in the Twilight series ( which I’ve mentioned liking before) I think the sustained effort to avoid looking at the obvious ends up energizing the series; it’s both winning and squicky, a kind of pop sublime. In Sandman I’m not sure it works so well. On the one hand, Gaiman is in some sense obviously a better writer than Stephanie Meyer. Though, as I said, the cleverness is irritating, it is, nonetheless, often actually clever, and he does manage to come up with some genuinely creepy twists (the treacherous stuffed toys in “A Game of You”) as well as some moving ones (Nuala’s story for example, as I mentioned above.) Meyer is not as bad as she’s sometimes claimed to be, but I doubt she could have pulled off either of those things.

On the other hand…Sandman is way more pretentious than Twilight…and the distance between the pretensions and the delivery is sometimes painful. For instance, there’s this panel:

Ah, those harem maidens…so exotic! So poetic! So unaccountably possessed of the sweaty metaphorical unease of a randy 13-year old trying to look impressively sophisticated!

It’s significant too, I think, that the so-thoughtfully entreated king declines the request. In Twilight, the heroine and hero eventually do, in fact, after much deferral (and marriage) have sex. This is in itself problematic; the whole tension of the series rests on the balance between safety and desire which is more or less vitiated when everybody gets what they desire and ends up safe. Gaiman is more canny; Dream, elaborately and with much fanfare, refuses to alter the structure of the series. Rather than change he decides to kill himself. Gaiman makes the “change” in question specifically about responsibility; Dream is not willing to give up his duties as ruler of dream, and so his only way out is death. But one has to wonder — is it really his (quite amorphous) duties that are at stake? Or is it something else? His ex-lover and Nuala more or less engineer his final downfall, his realm is torn apart by the furies, a rampaging feminine archetype — and the way they taunt him at the end is borderline sensual. “We are destroying the dreaming. Can you not feel it?” “Yes I can.” But then interrupts the foreplay, and Dream scurries off into oblivion, leaving one more fraught relationship we don’t get to really explore. Like a cadaverous Peter Pan, he never grows up, never has to stay with Wendy, and never gets out of the dream.

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Update: Suat’s post is now up.

Update: Vom Marlowe and Tom weigh in.

Update: And Kinukitty finishes up.

Soooo Dreamy

I’ve just started the fourth Twilight novel, now, and I have to say, I’m really pretty into them. I think the third was maybe the best one. There’s a pretty great conversation where Edward explains that he wants to wait to sleep with Bella until after their married because he’s worried about her soul…and, okay, I’m a big sap, but I thought that was really sweet. And then, at the end, there’s a pretty great moment where he says, more or less correctly, that his efforts to protect her have all gone horribly awry and he’s an idiot and they should just do whatever she wants to do. I don’t know; there are a bunch of moments like that. He starts to seem vulnerable for the first time in this book, and human, which makes their relationship more real.

I’m still processing it…but I definitely like it way more than Harry Potter…and, I mean, it kicks most of Marvel and DCs output all to hell. There’s not even a comparison there.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #13 (with Bonus Twilight Nattering)

I read the Twilight novel this week as well as Wonder Woman #13. And after finishing both, I have come to a conclusion. Girls like to read about pale, cold, spooky guys.

marston wonder woman

Yes, that’s right, this is the issue with Seal Men! (Not to be confused with Mole Men.) Anyway, the Seal Men are badguys rather than love interests… at least theoretically. It’s a little hard to tell, honestly. The head Seal Man does seem to have some kind of frisson with WW: there’s some mutural complimenting going on here, for example:

marston wonder woman

And then, at the end, the Seal Men renounce their evil ways and agree to worship Venus, in return for which the women they’ve oppressed agree to cook for them.

marston wonder woman

It’s kind of fun to think about what Marston would make of Twilight, actually. As I mentioned in my review of the movie, Twilight is obsessed with safety — vampire Edward is always talking about how he wants to keep human Bella safe. In fact, Bella’s major trait is that she’s accident prone. She’s incredibly physically clumsy, constantly endangering herself and others in gym. But that’s the least of it — she’s actually a magnet for danger. First, of course, she has some sort of superpowerful attractiveness for Edward in particular, which makes him want to bite her (because isn’t that what all tween girls secretly want?) And, of course, in later books, she’s also beloved by a giant werewolf with self-control issues. But more than that, she seems to really and truly attract everything dangerous within like 100 miles. In the first book, she’s almost gang-raped in a town that we are told (somewhat gratuitously) has no crime. Then she meets up with another vampire, and he too, decides that it is the goal of his life to drink her blood. At least in the second book she starts to actually take steps to put herself in danger (Edward leaves her, and she goes all bad girl), so it’s not all left up to chance…but even so, it’s pretty excessive.

This is a plot device, of course; we’ve got to have some vampirey super-stunts in here, after all. But it’s not *just* a plot device; it’s part of the wish-fulfillment. That is, where boys fantasize about being the heroic savior who sweeps the damsel in distress to safety, girls fantasize about being in danger so that the super-hero can come along and protect her. Bella isn’t actually a weak character; she’s very strong-willed and stubborn, and she’s pretty smart (not Elizabeth Bennet smart, as one snarky writer noted, but that really seems like a cruelly high standard.) In a lot of ways, she’s stronger, or at least more vivid than Edward, who is always a bit too unreal and perfect as much more than an over-perfect paper cutout. But she can’t be too strong, or the fantasy doens’t work; she’s got to have a weakness, and that weakness is physical. She’s not only weaker than the vampire; she’s weaker, physically, than everybody. She hurts herself playing volleyball.

It’s kind of amazing how blatant this is…and how it seems to have been this blatant forever. That is, you look at Twilight, and female physical power, or lack thereof, is absolutely front and center in gender relations. And you look at Wonder Woman, written sixty years earlier…and it’s the same thing. Marston’s fantasy of female equality is absolutely centered on his insistence that women can be as strong as — no, check that — can be stronger than men. This is the case for WW herself, obviously, but Marston also presents it as true more generally; inspired by her example, the Amazons perform amazing feats, for example.

marston wonder woman

In both Twilight and WW, too, women’s weakness is fairly explicitly linked to male insecurity. That is, both Twilight and WW seem to assume that women are weak more or less as a sop to male egos. Edward is obsessed with keeping Bella safe…so much so that he veers right over the line between cutely attentive and creepily stalkery; he has major, major control issues, which Bella more or less, and the narrative absolutely, caters to. And those control issues are supposed to be attractive from a female perspective. That is, the book’s fantasy is of having someone so into you that they want to keep you from all harm. Which is a fantasy which obviously requires you not to be able to take care of yourself.

Marston analyzes relationships in the same way, though he comes to somewhat different conclusions. In the first place, he’s a good bit more merciless in his assessment of the gap between male ego and male reality:

marston wonder woman

This is Steve diving into icy cold water in his boxer shorts to save WW. And, of course, this is played for laughs, with the shivering and the striped shorts and the fact that we know that WW doesn’t need the himbos help. And, indeed, Steve just gets himself in trouble:

marston wonder woman

For Marston, men are ridiculous when they try to be strong rescuers. Which is why WW refuses to marry Steve:

marston wonder woman

To have a relationship with a man, you have to pretend you’re weaker than he is. So far, Twilight and WW seem to agree. But Twilight differs in assuming that you should choose the relationship, while WW chooses the strength.

On the one hand, Marston does actually seem to be rejecting male-female relationships altogether; thus, perhaps, his obsession with female only communities. Another one pops up here, and is introduced and explicated in one of Peter’s most ravishing pages:

marston wonder woman

This is essentially a pagan, female recasting of the Garden of Eden. In this version, women don’t cause the fall; rather, they are so worthy that they are placed to rule alone in Eden, where they appear to propagate happily without the help of men at all. And when the dark, evil Seal Men do show up, it is they who are the tempters, luring women into their dark realm (what this luring consists of exactly is delicately passed over.)

The thing is that, of course, Marston doesn’t *really* hate men. It’s just that, what he wants as a man, is more or less the same thing that Bella seems to want as a woman. He wants someone to protect and control him, basically; as I mentioned, once the Seal Men submit to Venus, they and the women can live in peace, and the women will even cook for them (Bella is an excellent cook as well, perhaps not so coincidentally.)

Masochism, in other words, does appeal to both men and women. One of the things that appeals about a relationship is that you get the chance to be weak and have somebody else take care of you; you get mothered, and have somebody setting down laws and limits because they love you, not because they are just (which is a more stereotypically male mode.) Because Stephenie Meyer is female, Mormon, and (I think) conservative, and because Marston is male, a crank, and radical, the way the masochism works out in terms of gender politics is pretty different. But I think the impulse for, and the pleasures of, the fantasies are pretty similar

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Just to add: this is one of Peter’s most impressive issues to date. I don’t have much to add to my already ga-ga enthusiasm for his work, but I did want to reproduce a few more pictures. So here you go:

marston wonder woman

His animals as always kill me. That cloth in the lower-right panel is also something pretty special, I think.

marston wonder woman

The way he blends detailed linework with goofy cartooning is really phenomenal; he reminds me both of Winsor McCay and somebody like Uderzo here. It’s ravishing slapstick.

marston wonder woman

As I’ve said before, I wish I knew who did the color work on these. It’s some of the most beautiful effects I’ve seen in comics, I think. I love the dark color palette in a lot of these underground scenes.

marston wonder woman

Notice how the fish and the water swirls complement the patterns in WW’s costume. He really was the only one who’s ever been able to make anything out of that outfit.

And finally: beware the Walrus Idol!

marston wonder woman
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Obviously the whole once a week thing with these isn’t quite happening…but I am going to finish them eventually, damn it. So 14 will show up at some point…maybe even next week, if I’m lucky.

Harry Potter: WTF?

I’ve been reading Twilight, which isn’t bad; I may do a review at some point next week. In poking around the Internets though, I found this quote from Stephen King:

“Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”

I don’t know that I think either Meyer, or Rowling, or (for that matter) King are especially good writers if we’re talking about prose style (which seems to be what King is talking about.) King has lots of good ideas; Meyer seems to really plug into something important about female adolescence in a way that’s particularly blatant, and I can see why that’s appealing.

But J.K. Rowling — I really don’t get it. The Harry Potter books are fine…but I don’t see why they should be more popular than any number of similar, and probably better, fantasy-books-for-kids (Patricia Wrede’s excellent Enchanted Forest series, for example — or the Lloyd Alexander books, or what have you.) So…anybody have a theory? I’m honestly curious; I just can’t figure it out.

Super Edward (Female Creators Roundtable)

This is the first post in a roundtable on female creators here at HU. Tom, Miriam, and Cerusee will have posts up on this topic as the week goes on.
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As threatened, I did in fact see the Twilight movie this weekend. It was actually a good bit better than I thought it would be. I Admittedly, all the actual suspense and vampire stuff is incredibly clichéd – the good vampires vs. the bad vampires; the oh-so-painful need to keep from sucking human blood…the darkness! The tragedy! It’s Buffy light, which is saying something. Even the effects are mediocre and half-assed for the most part. Still, there were good parts. I’m not especially in to the pale slight goth-looking thing myself, but I have it on good authority that if you are, Kristin Stewart is something special. Moreover, her acting was quite good — she manages to come across as both painfully awkward and definitively intelligent, which is not all that easy to pull off. Indeed, the cast as a whole is a lot less cringe-inducing than you might expect. Partially I think it’s the director, Catherine Hardwicke (who also did the very decent Tank Girl movie) who seems to have a real talent for awkward high school interactions. The moment where one of Bella’s friends is asking her to the prom, and she’s so fixated on staring at Edward that she doesn’t even hear him is pretty priceless. Meeting the families was quite funny too…the vampire clan is both cute and freakish, and Edward’s exasperation with them is about exactly what you’d expect from a regular 17 year old dealing with a regularly weird family. I wished more than once that Stephanie Meyer had just written a teen high school drama without all the fantasy crap.

Though, of course, it probably wouldn’t have been popular enough to get made into a movie in that case. The movie seems almost scientifically designed to appeal to the tween-girl hindbrain. Several commenters over at this Robot 6 roundtable noted that the relationship dynamic between Edward and Bella is extremely creepy – and, yep, that’s the case. He’s a complete romanticized stalker, breaking into her house every day for weeks to stare at her sleeping, constantly talking about how his love for her compels him to hurt her. When he first sees her, he stares and stares and stares and is utterly creepy.

So right; encouraging teen girls to romanticize their stalkers — bad. Except that…the whole point of the story, what’s exciting about it, is that Edward will never hurt her. In fact, he won’t even have sex with her. He’ll barely kiss her. There’s a scene where he shows up in her bedroom, and he makes her hold still so he can kiss her…and things start to get hot and heavy, and he leaps away from her, bashing into the wall of her room. Then they spend the night talking, until she falls asleep in his arms. Her mom asks her “are you being safe?” at one point and the irony is that she isn’t, of course — Edward’s anything but safe! But the bigger irony is that she’s being super, ultra, duper safe. No condoms needed here. You might as well say that the story is fetishizing virginity as that they’re fetishizing stalking. Indeed, the whole point seems to be that they’re fetishizing both. The appeal is that you have all the darkness and danger and sex and lust you want, all the magic irresistible power of female sexuality – and its all utterly defanged. You can be dangerous and cool and sexy and stay completely safe and untouched.

What’s funny about the Twilight/San Diego Con flap, in fact, is that, if Twilight belongs anywhere, it’s at a comic convention. It’s the perfect female power dream complement to the male power dream inaugurated by Siegel and Shuster, and still running Superman is a fantasy for boys about having secret power and being invulnerable. Twilight is a dream for girls about having a secret lover who will keep you invulnerable. They’re both utterly transparent and infantile and clueless; Superman wears his underwear on the outside and that’s supposed to be tough and glamorous? Edward drives a Volvo and plays baseball and that’s supposed to be dark and cool? But that cluelessness is also a kind of innocence, and a charm. I don’t necessarily want to read the Twilight books, and lord knows I don’t ever need to read another Superman comic. You could argue that either vision is damaging or dangerous, as you could argue that any fantasy is unhealthy and unrealistic, I guess. But I don’t know. I was a kid, and, for that matter, a tween. I can see the appeal.

Update: Cerusee posts on Ordinary People, Jane Austen, and Zombies.

Twilight: Con and Con

I’ve become embroiled in a bit of a to-do over at Brigid’s Robot 6 roundtable on Twilight and the San Diego Con. I thought I’d move my response over here, partly to give readers here a chance to watch me burble, but mostly to avoid hijacking poor Brigid’s thread anymore than I already have.

All right…so for those who haven’t been following the brou-ha-ha… At the con, there’s going to be a showing of the new Twilight movie. That means there will be a lot of tween girls at the con. Some fanboys are concerned that these tweens will ruin things for the “normal” fans. Several female comics bloggers replied hey, screw you fanboy. And who can blame them, really?

Anyway, Brigid, as I said, had a roundtable amongst her cobloggers at Good Comics for Kids to talk about why the fanboys need to buck the fuck up (I don’t think she’d put it that way, but tha’ts the gist). And, as I’ve indicated, I’m with Brigid and co — buck the fuck up fanboys! But I was a bit taken aback to discover that one of the fanboys singled out for chastising was…our own Tom Crippen. As you may or may not remember, Tom expressed reservations about manga and geez, the fangirls do not forgive or forget. Kate Dacey called him on the carpet:(in the original post, and with slightly more detail when pressed in comments) for calling shojo manga “girl’s stuff” and for saying it had a “kindergarden feel”.) In comments, Melinda Beasi added that such language “insulted and belittled” the women who read shojo.

So that’s the state of things. I’m going to go off on a bit of a tangent now, but I’ll get back to poor Tom and his belittling, never fear.

One of the more interesting points raised in comments on the roundtable thread is that virtually nobody actually thinks Twilight is all that good. I haven’t read it myself (though I’m hoping to see the movie this week.) But most commenters agreed that it was not especially well written and that the central relationship was creepily abusive and dumb…not necessarily the sort of thing you’d be eager for tween girls to read.

So how do you defend the fans of a crappy piece of art? Several possibilities were floated. Brigid suggested that fans of Twilight don’t necessarily agree with or fall for the book’s message:

But just because people read something doesn’t mean they buy it wholesale or take it as a model for their own relationships. Part of my daughter’s reaction to Twilight was her distaste for the relationships portrayed in the books. They gave her a chance to think about different types of relationships and articulate her own feelings, which I think was a valuable thing.

This is pretty much the cultural studies argument; pop culture is empowering because marginalized groups creatively take what they want from it and leave the rest. I have to say, I find this argument pretty hard to accept. I don’t doubt that some girls do read the novels critically and dislike bits of them. But I don’t think the books and movies have become bestsellers because the fans think they’re dumb. They’ve become bestsellers because fans like them, and their questionable relationship advice too. Or, to put it another way, pin up art wasn’t popular with guys because they liked to deconstruct the male gaze.

Robin B. says “We need to trust in the people that read the books, whatever messages the stories may send, to be smart about what they take away from them and apply to their lives” — but why do we need to do that? People (not excluding me) are often stupid and make horrible choices on a fairly regular basis. People (again, not excluding me) are often quite untrustworthy. I’m willing to accept that young girls aren’t dumber than anyone else…but everyone else is plenty dumb. If, for the sake of argument, we say that these books tend to encourage abusive relationships, why should we assume that the girls who read them are not going to learn some unfortunate lessons from that? Because, you know, and not to blame the Twilight books specifically, but…tween girls in this culture, do, on occasion, find themselves in abusive relationships for real. And sometimes they think those relationships are okay, or their fault. And one could argue that there are media images and cultural products that contribute to that mindset. Which isn’t to say “ban the Twilight books!” But it is to say, if you think they contribute to those images, maybe you don’t need to necessarily make excuses for them either.

In any case, Robin B. goes on to explain a more straightforward method of separating fans and work:

It’s a question of dismissing people, here, not the works themselves, and I think that’s the real problem for me. I can hate Dan Brown’s books (and I do) but I would never dismiss a Dan Brown fan just because they like Dan Brown.

Which sounds reasonable enough; just hate the consumable, not the consumer. Except…well, let’s go back to Tom.

Remember, Tom was accused of calling shojo manga “girl stuff” and of referring to the art as having a “kindergarden feel.”

Put aside for the moment that shojo is, in fact, by definition, girl stuff. And further put aside the fact that it is deliberately and extravagantly cutesy — big eyes, flowers, often weird fetishization of infantilized characters (a lot of shojo has extremely weird issues around childhood.) Put aside all of that. The point here is that Tom was doing with manga exactly what everybody says should be done with Twilight fans. He didn’t call anyone a kindergardener; he said the art had a “kindergarden feel.” Further, went out of his way to make it clear that he was expressing his own personal distaste for the material without insulting the readers of it (on the contrary, he was actually saying that he had missed important things, and asking for recommendations.) Tom never once says anything, positive or negative, about manga fans; he confines himself entirely to to talking about the comics. And yet, he’s still being held up as an example of evil intolerant fanboy pilloried for being “unwillingness to try and understand why manga—or, for that matter, Twilight—appeals to girls”. This even though Tom repeatedly throughout the roundtable *asks for manga recommendations* — and even expresses interest in and appreciation for, some shojo art.

So a couple of points here. First, I think this shows fairly clearly that, no matter who you are, there’s a strong urge to circle the wagons when your fandom is assaulted…or even mildly poked. This can play out in various ways, depending on power dynamics, history, and the relative personal vicissitudes of those involved. You can get borderline racism (as with that disco record burning thing in the late 70s). Or you can get unpleasant connotations of misogyny, as with the male fans whining about women at their con. Or you can just have fairly innocuous internet bickering. I don’t think for a moment that these reactions are morally equivalent…but I do think they spring from similar impulses. And it makes me kind of wonder how all those teen girls would respond if you went up to them and said, “You know, Twilight is really sexist and bad…but yeah, you go girl!” Would they really be entirely pleased?

I just want to touch on one other thing before finishing up. Kate Dacy quoted one thing that really irritated her from a male commenter on Valerie D’Orazio’s blog:

“And now, you want to talk about the TWILIGHT fans. Hell, Val they aren’t even fans of the story. They just want the actors. If it was just author Stephanie Meyer there, and no movie, no actors, the turn out would be just about nil.”

Dacy said in response “What bothers me most is the underlying assumption that girls (and women) don’t know how to be proper fans, that they’re only there for the hot guys and couldn’t care less about the books or the creator.”

On the one hand, I absolutely agree with Dacy: the comment is insulting, and also just wrong — I’m sure the fans would be incredibly psyched to meet Meyer. After all, without any doubt, some significant percentage of those fans are *writing Twilight fan fiction themselves.* Quite possibly explicit Twilight fan fiction.

Because you don’t need the hot actors to have a prurient interest in your fandom. There are other erotic levers that can connect you to your obsession. Indeed, I think it’s worth wondering whether there are anything *but* erotic levers. Vampires. Romance. Vampire romance. Hot guys, hot girls. Where exactly is the non-prurient bit? Or, alternately, if you will — manly men in skintight costumes engaged in intense, sweaty mano-a-mano combat. With the occasional preposterously clad, pneumatic heroine thrown in for good measure.

In a consumer society, consumption is a fetish. The fetish is an object you invest with power and worship — but that power is *your* power. It’s not you, but at the same time its the most important part of you. Arguments about fandom get so hot and heavy because they aren’t just about what you like or don’t like; they’re about power, love, gender, self, identity. Respecting people even as you disrespect their consumer choices is a laudable goal in some sense. But people aren’t so easy to locate. They’re not just taking up space at the con. They’re in the books or comics they read, the horrible relationship advice that causes them to swoon, the cheesecake they lasciviously drool over. They’re in their ideas. And some of those ideas (tween girls aren’t normal; abusive relationships are cool) deserve to be mocked.

Update: Over on the other thread, Brigid had an interesting take on the kindergarden thing:

Are we talking about apples and oranges here? Hello Kitty has a kindergarten feel. Fruits Basket, not so much. In fact, I think most shoujo manga is not so much cutesy as hopelessly sentimental. Vampire Knight made me feel like I was back in high school again, so much so that I stopped reading it because I’m done with high school emotions and had no desire to relive them.

If anything, the guy manga has more of a kindergarten feel because a lot of it features girls who look very childish—as I write this, I’m looking at Amefurashi, a shonen manga, which features a girl who looks like she is about 10, holding a whip. I don’t see much of that sort of character design in girls’ manga. The page layouts are often quite complex in shoujo manga, and the characters look and talk like teens/adults.

I should add that I”m grateful for the discussion Brigid and her co-bloggers put together, It gave me a bunch of things to think about, and I enjoyed the chance to kibbitz in comments and here. I’d urge folks to check out their blog, Good Comics For Kids.

Update 2: I talk more about Twilight here/