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Dec. 3rd, 2012 12:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretGreat Shabbos at freeradical42's apartment. Beautiful Shabbos dinner with great people and interesting and wide-ranging conversation, then a quiet winter afternoon boardgaming with some of my favorite people in the whole world.
One of the goyish guests at the shabbos dinner asked us to share our thoughts on what Shabbos meant and why we observe it, and it was fascinating and inspiring to see people pull together all sorts of different intellectual traditions on the question. It is weird how great it can be sometimes talking Judaism with goyim, how they force you to reconsider your core assumptions.
Yuletide proceeds apace. Which means I haven't written my story yet. :P But I wrote seventeen hundred words yesterday. Surpassing the word limit always makes me feel strange. Theoretically, I could put 'the end' on the story and turn it in. This would be a bad plan, but... I could? Unfortunately this means I feel like I can relax. It takes some of the pressure off. Several times I've sat at the twelve or fifteen hundred word point of a longer story that only needed to be a thousand words for a week or two waiting for the motivation to actually write the real ending.
Finished reviewing canon. There is a good deal of it and it has a particular tone I'm trying to capture, so I wanted to go over all of it again to try to absorb the tone. This story is looking like it'll be reasonably plotty, which is kind of surprising since I haven't written a plotty story for Yuletide since '09. Actually, it could end up scarily plotty. How do people balance conflicting story threads?
The text has a particular visual effect that I find arresting and want to imitate, (oops, I admitted the text has a visual element. That narrows it, well, not at all. It could be any sort of text. Novels have visual elements sometimes, especially the kind of novels I read. :P) and am struggling to figure out how. I played with multimedia in last year's Yuletide and it was well-received, and it might be appropriate here, but do I want to be the guy who does multimedia fic every year for Yuletide? I feel like that gets tiresome, even if it's well-done.
Unrelatedly, I have finished all of the Sgt. Fury comics that are on Marvel Digital Unlimited, which is only the first 23 issues. I feel like a bad comic geek for saying so, but the switch from Jack Kirby's art to Dick Ayers's is noticeable, and Ayers is a definite improvement. I know we're supposed to canonize Kirby, who was so brilliant and so creative and innovated in comics so much, and who allegedly got screwed by Stan Lee or something, but... I'm sorry, Ayers really brings the Howlers to life. They stop being cartoonish stereotypes and start being people.
Also, Stan Lee, how do you alternate so inconsistently between horribly, incredibly racist and stunningly thoughtful and sensitive? In the 'jungle' issue Gabe dresses up like an African 'medicine man' and starts speaking broken English! And I'm not sure whether to be angry at Lee or be glad that this is such an anomalous moment for an African-American character who usually gets a much broader range of character roles that aren't delimited by his skin color.
I want more Howlers now, so I suppose I'm going to move on to Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD now. In which Nick Fury inexplicably acquires an eyepatch and a razor and a job at a spy agency but remains the psychotic, paranoid hardass he always was.
Oh, another word on an unusual issue. The series was famous for killing off a main character in issue 6, an unusual thing at the time. The message of that moment was that death could come at any moment, and nobody was safe, except maaaaybe Fury. Issue 18, which I had been spoiled for, has another death, though perhaps not as unusual of one. Fury's girlfriend Pamela is killed in an air raid on London.
And ok, killing off girlfriends is a tradition in comic books and other media that think about male feelings before they think about female feelings, but the complexity of the relationship between Pamela and Fury before she was killed was such that I thought the death was really effective as a story itself. It blurred the already eroded home front/war front distinction. Fury and his Howlers are never safe, and neither are their families. Suddenly all of Dum Dum's jokes about the old ball and chain back home seem less offensive, and Dum Dum's wife becomes a person, her absence drawn in relief to Pamela's absence.
And the other thing that happens after Pamela's death is that the war becomes personal. I've already written about how Fury is an actual decent human being who prioritizes liberating the camps over abstract military targets, but Fury is still like Aldo in Inglourious Basterds, a white Christian American who has nothing personal at stake in the war and who uses people who do to achieve his ends, both moral and military. Izzy and Gabe are basically Basterds in all but name. This changes after Pamela's death, and Fury becomes permanently a different man. He becomes judge, jury, and executioner, and he violates the rules of war at will to punish those who violate the rules of war, like a Nuremberg Batman. And that's all about manpain, of course, but it's also about questioning the rules of war, questioning the idea of a just war, questioning what it means to be a soldier. Fury's bottom line isn't Bruce Wayne's "My parents are dead" or even Erik Lehnsherr's "You killed my mother". It's "You were bombing innocent civilians and my fiancee was killed." (My defenses of Erik have tended to read "You were experimenting on innocent civilians and you killed my mother" as implicit in the death by reichsmark, but that was always me reading subtext, which is why everyone argues with me when I advance the theory. With Fury, that's the text.)
freeradical42's apartment. Beautiful Shabbos dinner with great people and interesting and wide-ranging conversation, then a quiet winter afternoon boardgaming with some of my favorite people in the whole world. One of the goyish guests at the shabbos dinner asked us to share our thoughts on what Shabbos meant and why we observe it, and it was fascinating and inspiring to see people pull together all sorts of different intellectual traditions on the question. It is weird how great it can be sometimes talking Judaism with goyim, how they force you to reconsider your core assumptions.
Yuletide proceeds apace. Which means I haven't written my story yet. :P But I wrote seventeen hundred words yesterday. Surpassing the word limit always makes me feel strange. Theoretically, I could put 'the end' on the story and turn it in. This would be a bad plan, but... I could? Unfortunately this means I feel like I can relax. It takes some of the pressure off. Several times I've sat at the twelve or fifteen hundred word point of a longer story that only needed to be a thousand words for a week or two waiting for the motivation to actually write the real ending.
Finished reviewing canon. There is a good deal of it and it has a particular tone I'm trying to capture, so I wanted to go over all of it again to try to absorb the tone. This story is looking like it'll be reasonably plotty, which is kind of surprising since I haven't written a plotty story for Yuletide since '09. Actually, it could end up scarily plotty. How do people balance conflicting story threads?
The text has a particular visual effect that I find arresting and want to imitate, (oops, I admitted the text has a visual element. That narrows it, well, not at all. It could be any sort of text. Novels have visual elements sometimes, especially the kind of novels I read. :P) and am struggling to figure out how. I played with multimedia in last year's Yuletide and it was well-received, and it might be appropriate here, but do I want to be the guy who does multimedia fic every year for Yuletide? I feel like that gets tiresome, even if it's well-done.
Unrelatedly, I have finished all of the Sgt. Fury comics that are on Marvel Digital Unlimited, which is only the first 23 issues. I feel like a bad comic geek for saying so, but the switch from Jack Kirby's art to Dick Ayers's is noticeable, and Ayers is a definite improvement. I know we're supposed to canonize Kirby, who was so brilliant and so creative and innovated in comics so much, and who allegedly got screwed by Stan Lee or something, but... I'm sorry, Ayers really brings the Howlers to life. They stop being cartoonish stereotypes and start being people.
Also, Stan Lee, how do you alternate so inconsistently between horribly, incredibly racist and stunningly thoughtful and sensitive? In the 'jungle' issue Gabe dresses up like an African 'medicine man' and starts speaking broken English! And I'm not sure whether to be angry at Lee or be glad that this is such an anomalous moment for an African-American character who usually gets a much broader range of character roles that aren't delimited by his skin color.
I want more Howlers now, so I suppose I'm going to move on to Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD now. In which Nick Fury inexplicably acquires an eyepatch and a razor and a job at a spy agency but remains the psychotic, paranoid hardass he always was.
Oh, another word on an unusual issue. The series was famous for killing off a main character in issue 6, an unusual thing at the time. The message of that moment was that death could come at any moment, and nobody was safe, except maaaaybe Fury. Issue 18, which I had been spoiled for, has another death, though perhaps not as unusual of one. Fury's girlfriend Pamela is killed in an air raid on London.
And ok, killing off girlfriends is a tradition in comic books and other media that think about male feelings before they think about female feelings, but the complexity of the relationship between Pamela and Fury before she was killed was such that I thought the death was really effective as a story itself. It blurred the already eroded home front/war front distinction. Fury and his Howlers are never safe, and neither are their families. Suddenly all of Dum Dum's jokes about the old ball and chain back home seem less offensive, and Dum Dum's wife becomes a person, her absence drawn in relief to Pamela's absence.
And the other thing that happens after Pamela's death is that the war becomes personal. I've already written about how Fury is an actual decent human being who prioritizes liberating the camps over abstract military targets, but Fury is still like Aldo in Inglourious Basterds, a white Christian American who has nothing personal at stake in the war and who uses people who do to achieve his ends, both moral and military. Izzy and Gabe are basically Basterds in all but name. This changes after Pamela's death, and Fury becomes permanently a different man. He becomes judge, jury, and executioner, and he violates the rules of war at will to punish those who violate the rules of war, like a Nuremberg Batman. And that's all about manpain, of course, but it's also about questioning the rules of war, questioning the idea of a just war, questioning what it means to be a soldier. Fury's bottom line isn't Bruce Wayne's "My parents are dead" or even Erik Lehnsherr's "You killed my mother". It's "You were bombing innocent civilians and my fiancee was killed." (My defenses of Erik have tended to read "You were experimenting on innocent civilians and you killed my mother" as implicit in the death by reichsmark, but that was always me reading subtext, which is why everyone argues with me when I advance the theory. With Fury, that's the text.)