Assorted thoughts update #1 (for real this time)

[fitia]

A lot's been happening in my life, none of which I'm feeling very motivated to vent about, so as always I use my nerd space to rant about nerd stuff. I've been reading a lot of Ace Attorney fan takes lately, throughout Tumblr and Twitter, and I've read both interesting meta and... more frustrating discourse that comes up frequently.

Barok van Zieks from The Great Ace Attorney: Chronicles is a fascinating and yet deeply frustrating character, not only within the story he exists in, but also through the way he's discussed by fans of the series. There's no getting around the fact that a character whose primary flaw is virulent racism is bound to be polarizing, but I do wish conversations on that topic were a lot more productive than they currently are. Inevitably, the fandom instinct is to measure the degree to which a character is "problematic", and how forgivable they are for it, which means that any and all discussion circles around this and no one is able to talk about this in ways more interesting than whether one can be reassured that they can enjoy a character in peace without having to self-flagellate about liking them at every mention. Are you people not exhausted with this.

In fact, I've become increasingly convinced that no one on either side of this discourse actually understands how racism works. Which is very frustrating to watch, as someone who has a lot of criticisms for how TGAA handles the topic, but who also thinks that analyzing fictional works is incredibly low-stakes and not of utmost importance when it comes to activism in the long-run. I'm basically watching people get unnecessarily heated over a game about cartoon lawyers while misunderstanding and misrepresenting a very real tool/system of oppression that has tangible and bloody consequences in real life. Perhaps we shouldn't be doing media/cultural criticism if we're going to do it using the framework of character and shipping wank, which does not lead to any productive discussion at all...

I'm considering doing a write-up on this topic at some point, without illusions to changing people's minds but maybe to inspire conversation on the subject that's actually interesting, that begins with proper understanding of the mechanics of racism and also that takes the limits of certain forms of storytelling into account. I have considered letting it not matter to me as much, but I really do think that racism is too prominent a trait in this particular character for it not to be discussed, and besides, everyone keeps bringing it back up anyways so it's clearly still relevant a discussion to have.

But anyways. Aside from that, I've been doing some interesting reading/research:

• I finished a book called Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Identity and Empire by Stephen Arata a few weeks back, which is a historical literary study on degeneration theory in the late nineteenth century: specifically, it discusses an analyzes narratives of "decline" as depicted in the popular literature of the period and as written by famous authors, all concerned with writing about anxieties of class, the body, and the empire in different ways (whether in a critical approach, or in a demonstration of the author's own anxieties). I thought it was a pretty engaging and fascinating read, especially when it came to the examination of the various authors. I especially enjoyed the chapters on Oscar Wilde and Robert Louis Stevenson, the latter especially for how he argues for The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as being a critique of the bourgeois class, reflecting Stevenson's own cognitive dissonance over potentially rising into it with his professionalization as an author. I think people should check this one out if they haven't!
• I haven't finished Titus Groan since I last talked about it (I'm so slow at reading... sob) but I'm definitely beginning to rank Mervyn Peake up there as one of my favourite prose-writers. He has such a clever but unexpected way with words, and it makes up for much of the ways that his writing is (at least, to me) pretty unsubtle. He just makes it work! I wish my vocabulary was as extensive as his.
• God I wish it were possible to learn new languages instantly in order to make research for my writing projects that much easier. That said, I've been finding some really cool detail tidbits on cultural aspects of the first Sino-Japanese War and the Boer War for something I'm currently working on. Here's a fun link to a picture + woodblock print of the Meiji Emperor's procession to Tokyo, where he eventually moved in permanence, after the end of the former. Here's another picture someone uploaded of older members of their family during the celebrations in London after the relief of Mafeking. I love looking at the more human details of history.

Comments

[seaglassgarden]

fictions of loss seems interesting! id be curious to see how much of the victorian logic overlaps with similar sounding anxieties in the u.s. today

[fitia]

Oh, definitely! While I'm not American, I am on the very American-dominated internet very often, and a lot of what I was reading in the book mirrored a lot of discussions I'd been seeing on the "decline" of culture, of literature, etc. Pretty fascinating stuff.