http://shetterly.blogspot.com/2012/05/problem-with-final-girl-phallic.html

The "Final girl" is the girl or woman in horror films who is the only survivor, who either ends the evil or escapes. Carol J. Clover popularized the name. Wikipedia notes, "During the final girl’s confrontation with the killer, Clover argues, she becomes masculinized through "phallic appropriation" by taking up a weapon, such as a knife or chainsaw, against the killer."

I do wonder about people who see phalluses everywhere. As Freud noted, sometimes a pipe is just a pipe. The final girl does not become masculinized—she takes charge of her life by using what's available to save herself. Symbolically, she comes of age. The change has nothing to do with masculinity and everything to do with adulthood, where we must kill monsters and then live with our wounds.

Wow, a TV show finally gets it right!

The series finale of Awake was stunning, and actually made it a perfect miniseries! (Also, it was one of the very few times I’ve ever seen that kind of ending work.) Well done, everyone involved!

Originally published at Nicholas Kaufmann. You can comment here or there.

We just watched the latest (I think) episode of Legend of Korra, “The Aftermath.” I’m continuing to really enjoy this show for a number of reasons.

MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD

Pacing: One of the things that bugged me was the love triangle between Korra, Mako, and Asami. It felt, not necessarily cliche, but easy. It’s an oft-repeated trope, one that could push characters into more cardboard, stereotypical roles and — if other shows are any example — drag out for far too long.

Instead, Asami’s character quickly developed more depth and conflict. The plot moved along, changing her role in the story. The conflict between Korra and Asami progressed through conflict into understanding and sympathy. I loved the quiet moment at the end where Korra tells Mako, “She’s going to need you.”

I’ve seen that pacing elsewhere, and I appreciate that the show doesn’t seem to get bogged down. There’s always a sense of movement.

Lin Beifong continues to be awesome. In many ways, I think she’s my favorite character. Partly because she’s an older woman kicking all sorts of ass. Partly because she, more than anyone else I’ve seen, seems to take full advantage of her bending abilities. The firebenders throw fire. Earthbenders throw rocks. Beifong, on the other hand, manipulates metal cables like Spider-Man, grows blades from her armor to punch through mechs, and seems to push the “What else can I do with this?” angle.

Complexity: The scene with Tahno’s character really jumped out at me. This is a character who’s introduced as a full-on asshole. He’s arrogant, he cheats, and you really wanted Korra to kick his butt in the tournament. Instead, the White Falls Wolfbats won … and thus became the targets of an Equalist attack.

In the next episode, you see Tahno without his powers, and he’s utterly broken. Korra feels for him. She knows what he lost and how close she came to losing her own bending. It was a fairly short scene, but that’s all it took.

The relationship between Tenzin and Lin Beifong is another interesting example. Their history, the contrast of their apparent discomfort with how well they work together in a crisis … I have no idea where that’s going, but I like the dynamic, and at this point I’m trusting the show not to go somewhere overly cliche with it.

While there are certainly characters who seem flat-out Evil, at least at first, I appreciate that things generally aren’t presented in a simplistic black-and-white way. Neither people nor power are simple, and this show respects that fact.

The Animation: This is a very pretty show, particularly in the way it portrays movement and the grace of the different benders. I get done watching, and other cartoons suddenly seem clunkier.

Trusting the Viewers: I was trying to figure out how to phrase this last bit, and “trust” is the closest I can come. I’ve never seen a single episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender, but it hasn’t stopped me from enjoying Korra. It doesn’t surprise me that they wanted a show that could welcome new viewers as well as old, but it struck me that there just isn’t a lot of exposition or hand-holding, period. There’s no talking down, no assuming that things will be too complicated or difficult to understand. Elements are explained as they become relevant to the story.

I know there are things I’m missing from Avatar, but I can catch up on my own, and I like that they don’t slow down the story to spoon-feed information.

In Conclusion: Okay, I get it. I’m officially a fan, and I have added Avatar: TLA to my list of things to catch up on (when I find the time).

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

Yesterday waa a fine day. I got up too early, to be driven to the airport by lillypond, a/k/a my sister. The flights to Detroit were uneventful, other than being about 40 minutes late getting into DTW. I was able to start digging in to revising the Going to Extremes outline on the plane, plus answering a ton of email. Also had several pleasant conversations with various fellow travelers.

Arriving at World Steam Expo was an interesting experience. It's been years since I walked into a Con cold, not knowing anyone or anything. (I think I know maybe two or three people here.) So once I got settled, I hung out in the lobby and talked to various folks. Eventually I fell in with low persons (a/k/a The League of S.T.E.A.M.), who led me into bad ways (a/k/a Abney Park). Strong drink was consumed, and gutter language was used. A few regrettable incidents may have occurred. I went to bed highly entertained around 2 am, which is the latest I've stayed up in forever.

Plus as a special bonus, I ran into @howardtayler, who in addition to being a brilliant cartoonist and storyteller, is also well on his way to becoming one of my favorite people anywhere, ever.

My schedule today consists of a massage. Oh, how shall I cram it all in?

See some, all or none of you around this joint.

Your Friday moment of zen.



the_child about age 9, 2006. © 2006, 2012, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

The current photo series is from my 'favorites' file, hence the dates jumping about



This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Brief reviews of several short stories, including my own "'Hello,' said the Gun"

Writing Across Gender — A very interesting piece about gender, writers and fiction. Snurched from this blog post by beth_bernobich, who has some insightful comments on the topic.

Calvin and Hobbes on creativity and inspiration — Heh.

Cars That Fired Our Love-Hate Relationship With Fuel

Vintage ice cream trucks

Africa and Australasia to share Square Kilometre Array — That's a mighty big kilometer.

Where did dogs come from? It turns out we don't really know

Carbon in rocks from Mars comes from volcanoes, not life — Nearby minerals confirm a high-temperature origin deep within the planet.

Accusations that climate science is money-driven reveal ignorance of how science is done — The government, the argument goes, is paying scientists specifically to demonstrate that carbon dioxide is the major culprit in recent climate change, and the money available to do so is exploding. Although the argument displays a profound misunderstanding of how science and science funding work, it's just not going away. Huh. Ignorance. Among science denialists. Inconceivable.

Black Voters Evolving On Marriage Equality — Ta-Nehisi Coates on the intersection of race and gay issues. I'd really like to have lunch with this guy some day.

CNN host probes Tony Perkins: ‘Why do homosexuals bother you so much?’ — Read this. The intellectual and moral bankruptcy of Perkins' illogical response neatly reflects the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the conservative anti-gay crusade as a whole. (Snurched from Slacktivist Fred Clark.)

The Proposed Auction of Ronald Reagan's Blood Isn't Surprising — And lo, Republican hagiography becomes literalized. (Via threeoutside.)

?otd: Are you a little teapot, short and stout?

---

5/25/2012
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (Going to Extremes proposal)
Body movement: n/a (airport walking to come)
Hours slept: 6.75 (solid)
Weight: n/a
Currently reading: Shattering the Ley by Benjamin Tate; Of Blood and Honey by Stina Leicht

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2012/05/quick-useful-sandman-slipcase-post.html

So, I've been reading Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, which is a quasi-pornotopia. Sex is utterly everywhere in the book, and it's post-capitalist—no scarcity and quantity becomes quality. There's a lot of fetishistic counting of orgasms, doses of semen and urine, etc. Being a Samuel Delany novel, the sex largely involves sucking off dirty and/or homeless guys, dickcheese under foreskins, ass-eating, piss-drinking, and lots of happy strangers. I had to take a break for a while—not because of the incest or the discussion of licking dried shit out of assholes, but because of the nose-picking. And the eating of mucus. And the sharing of mucus. And picking other people's noses.

For a break, I read The Primal Screamer (a recent quote of the day entry!) by Nick Blinko, and Green Girl by Kate Zambreno, both of which were fantastic. They also had some similarities—the main character is observed and manipulated by the narrator; that action is seen in bits and pieces, as though through to hands worth of laced fingers; both are thematically obsessed with another creative medium (music in Primal, film in Girl); both are set in England. In these attributes, they are also utterly different than Spiders, which carries on in a straightforward manner, offers minute detail, finds non-libidinal activity suspicious, and doesn't just take place in the US, but is all about it. And eating snot for sexual purposes.

I'll get back to it in the morning. At 800 pages, I actually left it at work rather than carry it on my commute while reading the other titles. I'm told the mucophilia gets a break about 400 pages in. We'll see...

Regular readers may remember the time when my father met Tom Cruise and taught him how to fake operating a crane for The War of the Worlds. Well, yesterday, he met Katy Perry, also on the pier. She gave a private show for Fleet Week, and my father was involved on hanging a banner on one of the cranes—"Gloria" is the crane's name.

According to my sister who reported the claims of my father to me, Katy Perry managed the hanging of the banner herself and made him re-do it a few times to get it right. This was difficult work, as the banner was pretty high up. Later, he dropped a box of flags from the cherry-picker he was in, sending Perry running for safety. All went well though, and Perry got into her ridiculous outfit and put on a show for the sailors:

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware


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