Wiscon: Saturday
28/5/08 15:23![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomySaturday
I have a rarely-fallible internal alarm clock that wakes me up at 7:00 Eastern time, 6:00 Central. So I made it to all the morning panels, but I had to have my caffeine first. (Oh, duh; I hadn't even considered the hour's time difference when thinking about why I crashed so early at night.)
First panel was "Balancing creativity and the day job," which was fun, fine, and neither exceptional nor exceptionable. It hit me, though, that I don't really have a problem carving out time for writing; I have a problem deciding whether I want to write as a career, write as a hobby, write when I feel like it, or what.
Next was "Soylent Green or Just Plain Soy?", which![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
littlebutfiercewas on. It was a good, educational panel with good people and some interesting discussion of various technological ideas (aquaponics! Vegetables in space!). I did miss "Porn Crushes the Patriarchy!" so this is a note to myself to look for a report at some point.
I went to the farmer's market, but it was too late to get there before the crush of people, so it wasn't a very pleasant experience.
Then, "Navigating the Id Vortex." (By the way: yes, I did panels back-to-back-to-back all weekend.)coffeeandink was on that one. For all that it was a discussion of "kinks" and "squicks," it was in a very G-rated context, talking about hot buttons in characters and narrative and the vortex of shame/vulnerability/desire that is associated with even these G-rated kinks. And manga vs. Western prose fiction; I'm reminded of flemmings's essay on "Shameless Setteis and Mary Sues. It wasn't really discussed in the panel and that may be for the best, but I do get this sense that manga permit an unrepentant self-indulgence that you hardly ever see even in genre fiction, never mind literary fic. Very good panel that only scratched the surface of what I want to think about this so I'll have to think some more.
"Curses! YA Villains Unite"
I came to this panel just for Cecil Castellucci, who is awesome. Sharyn November is also awesome. (To be honest, I wasn't the biggest fan of the Tamora Pierce book that I've read... but she was very good on the panel too.) OH and Castellucci said that she had written or was writing a fantasy novel! So, yay!
The panel discussed the ways that YA fantasy sits between children's and adult fiction. So it permits more shades of gray, more possibilities for villains to be redeemed or even to have been on the right side all along, compared with children's fiction. At the same time, the whole coming of age process requires coming to see the flaws in oneself, or perhaps in one's heroes. Sometimes the main character's greatest enemy is herself.
The Best Friend Betrayal (as in Fushigi Yuugi) was a trope that came in for examination: on the one hand, it's such a huge issue in adolescence, figuring out who your friends really are and facing their betrayals. But on the other hand, it really undermines the possibilities for female friendship-- Miaka in FY starts with a female best friend and winds up with a boyfriend and a guy-harem.
"Does it have to get boring before it gets good?"
The summary asks: "Does there have to be a pop culture saturation of a certain kind of genre--a laying of the groundwork--before we can get the kind of detailed and finessed dissection and resurrection of tropes that [World War Z and Soon I Will Be Invincible] pull off"?
To my disappointment, the panel talked less about this concept at an abstract level and more about zombies and superheroes. Because I think that yes, it DOES have to get boring before it gets good [in certain specific ways.] There are certain books (I'm thinking of "A Companion to Wolves") that are built as deconstructions of familiar tropes done badly or thoughtlessly. There are other books that are parody and don't really make sense without a groundwork of genre tropes to build on. Maybe it's just the kind of reader that I am, but I tend to be really interested in these kinds of intra-genre conversations! And when you have had a genre develop for years and years, you get this whole toolbox that you can work with and use as shorthand. The example I got from anime class is still my favorite: Cowboy Bebop uses elements of science fiction and westerns to signal that the characters are never in the right present moment; they're always longing for the past (westerns=nostalgic) or hoping for a better future (science fiction). Before you can do something like that, you need to have enough science fiction, and enough westerns, out there so that people know what the visual signals mean (and I can pick up on that even if I've never seen a western). And you don't get to that point without a lot of bad science fiction, and westerns.
Dinner! Yay! Dinner was at an Afghan place withheresluck, mystickeeper, littlebutfierce, coffeeandink, oyceter, and I think that's everybody. I had never had Afghan food before. I had spinach and potatoes and Basmati rice. Spinach, sure enough, I like better raw, but Basmati rice always rocks.
And then the semi-spontaneous panel on shoujo bodies. I don't know if I should've gone to this one because everyone was much better informed than me. (Seriously. There were at least 3 people who knew more about takarazuka than I do.) I am not up on my shoujo reading!
Manga recommendations:
Princess Princess
Love Fights
Vampire Requiem
Afterschool Nightmare
I don't remember a lot about this panel, other than that it was really really smart. We played around with how gender is performed and constructed especially in cases where someone's "real" gender is somehow dubious or mutable. (Or even when you just have crossdressing). And then there's the manga that start out focusing on a female main character but drift over to the love interest's angst as the story progresses. (Mars was used as an example, but doesn't Kodocha fit this pattern too?)
And then I went home. And fell asleep. The end.
I have a rarely-fallible internal alarm clock that wakes me up at 7:00 Eastern time, 6:00 Central. So I made it to all the morning panels, but I had to have my caffeine first. (Oh, duh; I hadn't even considered the hour's time difference when thinking about why I crashed so early at night.)
First panel was "Balancing creativity and the day job," which was fun, fine, and neither exceptional nor exceptionable. It hit me, though, that I don't really have a problem carving out time for writing; I have a problem deciding whether I want to write as a career, write as a hobby, write when I feel like it, or what.
Next was "Soylent Green or Just Plain Soy?", which
littlebutfiercewas on. It was a good, educational panel with good people and some interesting discussion of various technological ideas (aquaponics! Vegetables in space!). I did miss "Porn Crushes the Patriarchy!" so this is a note to myself to look for a report at some point. I went to the farmer's market, but it was too late to get there before the crush of people, so it wasn't a very pleasant experience.
Then, "Navigating the Id Vortex." (By the way: yes, I did panels back-to-back-to-back all weekend.)
coffeeandink was on that one. For all that it was a discussion of "kinks" and "squicks," it was in a very G-rated context, talking about hot buttons in characters and narrative and the vortex of shame/vulnerability/desire that is associated with even these G-rated kinks. And manga vs. Western prose fiction; I'm reminded of flemmings's essay on "Shameless Setteis and Mary Sues. It wasn't really discussed in the panel and that may be for the best, but I do get this sense that manga permit an unrepentant self-indulgence that you hardly ever see even in genre fiction, never mind literary fic. Very good panel that only scratched the surface of what I want to think about this so I'll have to think some more. "Curses! YA Villains Unite"
I came to this panel just for Cecil Castellucci, who is awesome. Sharyn November is also awesome. (To be honest, I wasn't the biggest fan of the Tamora Pierce book that I've read... but she was very good on the panel too.) OH and Castellucci said that she had written or was writing a fantasy novel! So, yay!
The panel discussed the ways that YA fantasy sits between children's and adult fiction. So it permits more shades of gray, more possibilities for villains to be redeemed or even to have been on the right side all along, compared with children's fiction. At the same time, the whole coming of age process requires coming to see the flaws in oneself, or perhaps in one's heroes. Sometimes the main character's greatest enemy is herself.
The Best Friend Betrayal (as in Fushigi Yuugi) was a trope that came in for examination: on the one hand, it's such a huge issue in adolescence, figuring out who your friends really are and facing their betrayals. But on the other hand, it really undermines the possibilities for female friendship-- Miaka in FY starts with a female best friend and winds up with a boyfriend and a guy-harem.
"Does it have to get boring before it gets good?"
The summary asks: "Does there have to be a pop culture saturation of a certain kind of genre--a laying of the groundwork--before we can get the kind of detailed and finessed dissection and resurrection of tropes that [World War Z and Soon I Will Be Invincible] pull off"?
To my disappointment, the panel talked less about this concept at an abstract level and more about zombies and superheroes. Because I think that yes, it DOES have to get boring before it gets good [in certain specific ways.] There are certain books (I'm thinking of "A Companion to Wolves") that are built as deconstructions of familiar tropes done badly or thoughtlessly. There are other books that are parody and don't really make sense without a groundwork of genre tropes to build on. Maybe it's just the kind of reader that I am, but I tend to be really interested in these kinds of intra-genre conversations! And when you have had a genre develop for years and years, you get this whole toolbox that you can work with and use as shorthand. The example I got from anime class is still my favorite: Cowboy Bebop uses elements of science fiction and westerns to signal that the characters are never in the right present moment; they're always longing for the past (westerns=nostalgic) or hoping for a better future (science fiction). Before you can do something like that, you need to have enough science fiction, and enough westerns, out there so that people know what the visual signals mean (and I can pick up on that even if I've never seen a western). And you don't get to that point without a lot of bad science fiction, and westerns.
Dinner! Yay! Dinner was at an Afghan place with
heresluck, mystickeeper, littlebutfierce, coffeeandink, oyceter, and I think that's everybody. I had never had Afghan food before. I had spinach and potatoes and Basmati rice. Spinach, sure enough, I like better raw, but Basmati rice always rocks. And then the semi-spontaneous panel on shoujo bodies. I don't know if I should've gone to this one because everyone was much better informed than me. (Seriously. There were at least 3 people who knew more about takarazuka than I do.) I am not up on my shoujo reading!
Manga recommendations:
Princess Princess
Love Fights
Vampire Requiem
Afterschool Nightmare
I don't remember a lot about this panel, other than that it was really really smart. We played around with how gender is performed and constructed especially in cases where someone's "real" gender is somehow dubious or mutable. (Or even when you just have crossdressing). And then there's the manga that start out focusing on a female main character but drift over to the love interest's angst as the story progresses. (Mars was used as an example, but doesn't Kodocha fit this pattern too?)
And then I went home. And fell asleep. The end.