Spiritual Death and Cookies: Pride 2012

So, Pride 2012 has been accompanied by some news stories – some that show how it’s working, and others that show why it’s still necessary.

There are plenty of inclusive, sensitive people who think that battles against –isms have largely been won. Depending on your circumstances, you might find it’s easy to forget sometimes. You learn in school that men and women are equal and that we now know black people are just as good as white, even if some people whose views do not reflect our own treated their ancestors horribly hundreds of years ago. You learn about gay rights, and the massive disparity between the bigotry-ridden past and the progressive present.  You learn that things are different now, and that even if there’s still work to be done, they're getting better and better.

There is a myth of progress afoot in schools and popular history. We are invited to remember the wrongs of our ancestors, to examine them, (believe we) understand them, and make a theatre of warning from them so as not to be repeat them. We learn little of how they are repeated all around us every day. This has the effect of placing them squarely in the past, and we are encouraged to remember them as painful chapters from a history that we use to congratulate ourselves on how far we’ve come. 

Hopefully we wise up a bit as we get older and begin to understand something of how the world works. Still, if we are privileged enough, we can dismiss some of the most noxious forms of bigotry as so much background noise from a lunatic fringe that's on its way out.

Until the hard reality of this "progressive" present intrudes, of course, as it must. So you’re kind of shocked the first time you hear your disabled friend’s stories about the fucking vile shit people have said to him while he’s been out and about. You sit there nonplussed while Carol Sarler tells you what women are for (spoiler: it’s childbearing. Women who don’t want to be baby-machines are “weird”). You listen with growing depression as your younger relatives join the older in tirades of bile against Gays On the Bus, stare when the old white woman in front of you at the train station starts racially abusing the Indian ticket officer. You watch the bubble burst and think, “Have we really not come further than this?” 

Events like Pride are a mixed bag - of both progress made, and endemic bullshit yet to be conquered. Let’s start with the good. JCPenney have been in the news recently: earlier this year, they were publically called out by vigilante homophobes One Million Moms, whose actions here seem to revolve overwhelmingly around their morbid recurrent nightmares about gay sex.

Pictured: a homosexual, after corrupting your children and feeding off of their innocence.

OMM weren’t happy that the store was using openly gay Ellen Degeneres as its official spokesperson. JCPenney stood by their choice, telling OMM that Ellen reflected their values of unity and diversity, and politely insinuated that OMM could go fuck itself. Not long after this, the store followed up with a Mothers’ Day advert featuring two moms.

OMM were now really pissed off. When the gloves came off and the bigots came from far and wide to point the trembling finger of accusation, JCPenney responded to the homophobic backlash with a metaphorical finger of their own. This one took the form of a Fathers’ Day advert starring two dads, a real-life couple.

 And not a single fuck was given that day.

 

However sadly, JCPenney's slightly awesome trolling only tells one half of the extremely nasty story that is society's treatment of the LGBTQ community. Later on June 26^th, the Oreo Facebook page posted a rainbow-filled cookie in honour of Gay Pride. And once again, while the response was reported by Oreo to have been mostly positive, it also brought out the people who remind us why Pride is still necessary when this post:

 ... spawned these responses (among others):

 FOR JEBUS.

Meanwhile, the Salvation Army found themselves at the centre of a shit-storm that has left them tripping over themselves to passive-aggressively, sort-of-almost apologise, after an interview with Major Andrew Craibe, the Salvation Army’sTerritorial Media Relations Director, in Australia. According to the linked article, Craib made the following comments during the radio interview:

Ryan: According to the Salvation Army, [gay people] deserve death. How do you respond to that, as part of your doctrine?

Craibe:  Well, that’s a part of our belief system.

Ryan: So we should die.

Craibe: You know, we have an alignment to the Scriptures, but that’s our belief.

………

Ryan: … you’re proposing in your religious doctrine and the way that you train — this is part of your training of your soldiers — that because we’re gay, that we must die... I mean, how can you stand by that? How is that Christian?

Craibe: Well, well, because that is part of our Christian doctrine –

Ryan:  But how is that Christian? Shouldn’t it be about love?

Craibe: Well, the love that we would show is about that: consideration for all human beings to come to know salvation…

Ryan Or die…

Craibe: Well, yes.

I love it when people talk about aspects of their faith that make them uncomfortable as though they have nothing to do with them. "Look man, it's not me, it's the CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE". Oh really? Well in that case, fuck you twice, for not even having your own individual reasons for being full of hate.

The SA weren’t done, though – there was still a whole world out there to salvation from its own gayness. The only thing more quease-inducing than the interview itself was the half-arsed "Love us, we're LIBRULLS!!" disclaimer they added to their FAQ afterwards, in response to the controversy Craib’s comments generated:

Do Salvation Army full members believe, as per the Salvationist Handbook of Doctrine, that practising homosexuals should be put to death? Why, or why not?

Salvation Army members do not believe, and would never endorse, a view that homosexual activity should result in any form of physical punishment. The Salvationist Handbook of Doctrine does not state that practising homosexuals should be put to death and, in fact, urges all Salvationists to act with acceptance, love and respect to all people. The Salvation Army teaches that every person is of infinite value, and each life a gift from God to be cherished, nurtured and preserved.

Why include in your handbook the Romans text from The Bible, which indicates that God insists that homosexuals deserve to die?
This is a misunderstanding of the text referred to. The Scripture in question, viewed in its broader context, is not referring to physical death, nor is it specifically targeted at homosexual behaviour. The author is arguing that no human being is without sin, all sin leads to spiritual death (separation from God), and all people therefore need a Saviour.

Isn’t this inherently anti-Christian, to believe people should be put to death?
The Salvation Army Australia Eastern Territory acknowledges that the response in the interview has led to a serious misunderstanding of our teaching and that clarification should have been given during the interview.

The Salvation Army believes in the sanctity of all human life and believes it would be inconsistent with Christian teaching to call for anyone to be put to death. We consider every person to be of infinite value, and each life a gift from God to be cherished, nurtured and preserved.

Do you feel you owe an apology or explanation to all those gay and lesbian volunteers and people your organisation supports?
The Salvation Army sincerely apologises to all members of the GLBT community and to all our clients, employees, volunteers and those who are part of our faith communities for the offence caused by this miscommunication.

"Uhhh... love and respect to all... every human life a gift... *some semi-audible rambling to effect of "why y'all keep going on about butt-sex, clearly the author was referring to SPIRITUAL DEATH"*... All a huge misunderstanding... no human being without sin... apologise to the LGBT community for sounding like we want you to die when actually, we just want to save you from the SPIRITUAL DEATH of your unnatural lifestyles... so, we cool now, guys? Guys?"

Both strides and stark reminders pepper Pride, as they do all marginal movements. But although it's hard to get starry-eyed over the motives of corporations in these times, it's at least nice to know that tolerance is becoming as profitable a line to toe as bigotry. Fuck it, I'm feeling sentimental, and the colours in that cookie up there take me to a world where every food company follows JCPenney’s and Oreo’s example, and the “spiritual death” of sharing a world with PURE GAY EVIL becomes actual death from starvation on the hunger strikers’ own self-righteousness. It will be glorious: rainbows will adorn the sky, and lions will lie down with lambs, and NOT fuck them because the lambs haven’t grown into sheep yet and gay # paedophile.

Happy Pride!

George R. R. Martin’s Identity Politics: Or, The Many Levels of My Hatred of Sansa Stark

***WARNING: contains spoilers for both the TV series and the novels.

A Song of Ice and Fire gives me a big nerdy happy - from political wrangling to zombie hordes to fight scenes that have my inner twelve-year-old punching the air, there’s a lot to like. Pretty high on this list is the brilliant Tyrion Lannister, whose narrative contains some of the most poignant passages to be found about the dehumanizing nature of prejudice, in a culture that is utterly mired in its poison.

Oh yeah, and he talks exclusively in zingers.

In an early exchange with Jon Snow, Tyrion tells him, “Let me give you some advice, bastard: Never forget what you are. The rest of the world will not. Wear it like armor, and it can never be used to hurt you”; when Snow demands to know what he could possibly know about being a bastard, Tyrion replies, “Every dwarf is a bastard in his father’s eyes”. By equating the bastard’s plight with his own, he creates a point of connection against a dominant social discourse that makes outcasts of many, from the whores and the bastards to the handicapped and the queer. And from the illicit gay relationship between Renly and Tyrell, to the company of criminals and unwanted sons turned soldiers known as the Night’s Watch, considerable space is afforded to such marginal voices.

In this spirit, the novels locate heteronormative patriarchal structures as the site of misery: both political and forced marriages are the norm, most of the marriages shown are unhappy in some way, and bastard children both rife and unashamedly marginalized by the culture that creates them. And casual, institutionalised violence against women is a huge part of this culture, in which forced marriage, rape and sexual slavery are common. There’s even a guy who gets his rocks off by releasing women into the forest and hunting them like animals. 

Something I have in no way considered doing to my friend Mike, the next time he shows up unasked, empties my fridge and smokes all my weed.

I don’t necessarily think that Martin always nails these marginal voices. For example, I don’t think he’s particularly good at female characters. He’s not terrible, either: Arya Stark is great, and the Lady of the Thorns is so magnificent I wouldn’t mind being her when I grow up (I have a strange but deep affinity with really crotchety old people).

However Daenerys, Cersei and Catelyn Stark bored me rigid on the page. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed their chapters when something was happening with the story – battles, political wrangling, possibly a bit of pillaging – but when events took a break in favour of the characters’ general inner life, their voices were kind of… bland. To my mind, all three are far more interesting and sympathetic on the screen, mostly because Emilia Clarke and Lena Heady in particular are absolutely brilliant in their roles. In the novels, Cersei starts out with the ghost of a human side (such as it is) buried underneath her villainy; but as things progress this degenerates into a two-dimensional portrait of someone who’s so evil it becomes frankly cartoonish. Heady skilfully draws out this human side amidst the general vileness of Cersei, while Clarke adds a layer of steel to the initial vulnerability of babe in the woods-turned-warrior Daenerys. Both actors vastly improve characters whose narratives were mediocre on the page.

Granted, his depiction of the Dothraki is… orientalist, shall we say.

Word.

But this is at least somewhat balanced by the fact that the more European-based culture of the Seven Kingdoms is no less brutal or violent than that of the warrior tribe. Indeed, Daenerys finds an acceptance and identity among the latter that was completely out of reach among her ‘own kind’, whose own culture brutalizes women just as savagely as that of the raping, pillaging horselords.

I'm not trying to claim that it’s a ground-breaking work of identity politics or anything - there are still unfilled spaces and outright problems. Figures from non-European cultures are depicted mostly through their interactions with overwhelmingly white characters from the Seven Kingdoms; the Dothraki, despite being a major presence throughout the series, depend entirely upon Daenerys’s narrative for their place in the story, with no voices emerging from within the horselord culture itself.

In addition, Cersei’s honey-trap with Lady Merryweather is the only significant interlude on lesbian sexuality, and its primary function is to cement Cersei’s status as a scheming whore who will do anything – ‘and Martin means anything’ - to get her way. Meanwhile, the relationship I mentioned between Renly and the Knight of the Flowers takes place entirely off the page. (In fairness, I have no idea whether Martin stayed away from queer sexuality because it makes him uncomfortable on some level, or simply because he had no direct experience and didn’t want to offend by running his mouth on something he knew little about on a personal level. The show added a scene with Renly and Tyrell in an unambiguously homoerotic context, which was welcome and needed.)

But shortfalls aside, there seems to be an honest attempt to bring in marginal voices from all over both the cultures he draws upon, and the elements of prejudice within them which endure today. And in all the brutality and violence of medieval culture, the most disturbing thing of all is its echoes in how we live today. The burnings, lynching, stonings, and hangings which form some of the most savage passages still occur daily around the world, and many of the shocking injustices the series depicts are still going on, from political corruption and exploitation of the ‘smallfolk’, to the rape, child abuse and violent deaths of millions. The series also magnifies the prejudices that recent years have tempered in western society– racism, sexism, homophobia, stigmatization of disability, etc. – into the stark and unapologetic forms that our culture’s own recent past is mired in.

Much of it is sensationalized to the point of gratuity, of course; part of the guilty pleasure of the books is the way they revel in their own excesses of violence, sex, ritual and arbitrary custom. The fight scenes are wish-fulfilment awesome, the fucking’s dirty, and the magic hammy enough to satisfy the most stalwart of nerds.

However, problems aside, I’d at least judge that an honest effort has been made to engage with plurality and marginal voices. And provided a piece of art doesn’t try to pedal ideology that’s outlandishly ignorant or downright offensive, I don’t always disagree with people who defend it against the charge of lacking intellectual substance by going, “Yeah, but it’s not supposed to be a sophisticated exploration of cultural nuances – this right here is about some zombie fucking bears.”

Well… all right, only one zombie fucking bear. But still, zombie fucking bear, which I think we can all agree is automatically awesome.

So basically, I accept that with its excesses come problems, but overall I’m generally comfortable with the intent as I perceive it. Yet, when it comes to the character of Sansa, I felt like it just started wallowing in its own excesses to a point that became annoying, given that it’s in her chapters that gratuitous violence and sadism meet the series’ weakest characterization.

If you feel voyeuristic reading Sansa’s passages, it might be because the books offer her up as nothing more than the site of a suffering which is meted out with incessant authorial sadism. We are shown an innocent, who believes in all the ‘right’ things for a girl of her age and class – love, honour, romance, chivalry. Then we are shown her being systematically destroyed before our eyes. First her supposed handsome prince proves to be a vicious sociopathic little shit, who eventually executes her father in front of her; she is nonetheless expected to marry him and lives as a hostage of his scheming mother’s in dread of her first period, at which time she will be wed to him. Meanwhile, he spends their pre-nuptial days days forcing her to look at her father’s head on a spike, trying to publically strip her before his uncle intervenes, and having his knights beat her.

It’s not the fact that she doesn’t fight back physically that makes her character so frustrating – in fairness, she’s cornered and outnumbered. It’s the way she remains mentally passive and naïve throughout, a little too long after she’s learned the hard way that life isn’t fair. Her beliefs are exposed as a sham very early in the series, but she never quite learns the lesson, to the point where it’s starting to become unclear how stupid she could possibly be. She simply continues to exist, clinging to her courtesies, smiling through the tears and hoping for a better tomorrow: a state of affairs that continues long after becoming ridiculous.

And it’s even worse in the TV series. Sophie Turner’s Sansa is just as dull and irritating, but with an edge of spoilt brattiness that was missing from the sweet airhead of the books. While book-Sansa saves her sniping for her little sister Arya and is considered a total doll by everyone else, series-Sansa is petulant and rude to pretty much everyone around her.

 Seriously. Even her face is whiny.

Reading the books, something I noticed is that Sansa doesn’t mentally direct her passages with her own thoughts as much as the other major characters; her chapters generally revolve around protracted accounts of other people’s physical and mental abuse of her, rather than a strong inner voice addressing us. And the potential impact of her horrific situation is diluted by this very blandness of her character. She’s too boring and underdeveloped to really attach to; ergo, it’s hard to care when others brutalize her. It gets old fast.

In A Clash of Kings she’s offered the chance of escape by the Hound, who asks her to flee with him; but she of course merely shits herself on the inside while smiling politely at him, as is her custom. She doesn’t go, because although he is the only person in her new life of horror who has ever shown her any kindness, he’s also a dangerous and downright intimidating figure who often frightens her when in his cups. He is also sexually threatening towards her, to the point where she imagines him to have forced a violent kiss upon her before he flees, and later confesses to Arya that he seriously considered raping her. In fairness, sitting that road trip out might have been one of her better decisions.

 He doesn’t exactly come over as the kind of guy who’d see a girl home safe.

So instead, Sansa sits back and waits for a true knight. However, Ser Dontos comes to her dressed, fittingly, as a fool, and frequently slobbers over and kisses her when drunk. His far more overt sexual interest is masked in courtly language, as he calls her Jonquil and waxes sentimental about her sweetness; but it proves just as predatory (and far less honest) when it is Dontos, this knight who has promised to save her, who betrays her. Instead of being spirited away to the medieval equivalent of a safe house, she is sold out to Petyr Baelish, who paid Dontos to bring her to him.

Also, while all this is being set in motion, Joffrey is regularly threatening Sansa with rape - even after she has been forcibly married to his uncle.

 For the love of god, someone buy the girl some pepper spray.

So the gallant saviour has proven just as much a myth as the happily-ever-after with the handsome and virtuous prince. Yet Sansa still does not reject it completely, believing herself reasonably safe with Baelish, who styles his own sexual interest in her as fatherly concern. She continues to cling to Baelish as her friend and saviour, despite the distinct flickers of sociopathy that even she can’t entirely miss; like the way he lights up when he talks of power and manipulation, and the time he tried to kiss her in the snow.

And the murder. That, too.

That she stays with Baelish even after seeing him kill her aunt is fair do’s - she has, after all, few other options (and to be fair the mad bitch did just try to throw her out the Moon Door). The main problem is that, occasional perfunctory fears for her life and maidenhead notwithstanding, it fails to occur to her with any real clarity that Baelish might not really be her friend. Arya would challenge him, question him and watch him. Sansa on the other hand simply figures, “Well, he’s amoral, sinister and inclined to betray those around him at the drop of a hat, but he’s always been nice to me…” In fairness, we already knew she wasn’t the best judge of character; but it’s still a bit of a stretch to believe anyone could still, after all the betrayals she has experienced, be that naïve.

Sansa is literally nothing but the embodiment of a trite archetype: the gleefully sadistic destruction of the innocent. Which is fine if it comes attached to something interesting: all the content in the world can be written on the back of a postage stamp and all that. But it doesn’t. This function aside, she is completely characterless - even her own mother can’t think of a more potent description of her personality than, “She’s sweet, and she likes songs and lemon cakes.”

Pictured: Sansa’s hopes and dreams.

I guess that’s why her chapters got old for me so quickly. It reminded me of American Psycho; where a characterless narrator directs the story, even content that should be shocking quickly becomes tired and dull. It’s one thing to depict the circumstances of a person utterly trapped by forces they are helpless to fight, or even fully understand; it’s another to make this character so boring.

I Carp Because I Love: A Disclaimer

So I sat down earlier to write a post about A Song of Ice and Fire. I have an unreasonably deep affection for both the book series and HBO’s Game of Thrones: I love the mountain men, the zombies, the direwolves, the epic battles and gloriously pretentious speeches, the howling landscapes of the North and the Grecian-Medieval opulence of the South. But when I tried to shit out something to that effect, I somehow seem to have ended up with some reflections on the series' identity politics that quickly morph into a lengthy rant on how much I hate Sansa Stark, detailing the ways in which the character sucks and is terribly written. I got to wondering how that happened.

 Apart from the obvious, I mean, like her stupid whiny fucking FACE.

                      

I’ve always believed that it’s important to be critical and interrogative of art in general, and of the things we enjoy most of all. We are all inclined to forgive faults in things we love – which is fine, but we need to know what they are before we can do so with any degree of lucidity. Otherwise, we might find ourselves reaching the point where we can’t tell an artist’s best work from their poorest – it all becomes identical under the umbrella of uncritical habitual loyalty. People simply decide, “Yeah, I like South Park/Doctor Who/whatever”, to the point where they fail to notice the slow slide into stale concepts and overused jokes, or gaping plotholes and rampant self-contradiction. Some even get pissy and defensive if you point them out.

Take the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who, who made their first appearance in the brilliant episode Blink. As well as being some of the most genuinely scary monsters in Who history, these guys have a pretty cool premise: appearing in the guise of stone angel statues, they can only move when no one is looking at them. The statues usually cover their faces, hence the name “the weeping angels”, to avoid accidentally being seen even by one another. As the Doctor puts it, “They're quantum locked. They don't exist when they're being observed. The moment they are seen by any other living creature, they freeze into rock. No choice, it's a fact of their biology. In the sight of any living thing they literally turn to stone. And you can't kill a stone. 'Course, a stone can't kill you either, but.... then you turn your head away. Then you blink - and oh yes, it can.” (Blink, written by Stephen Moffat.)

But here’s his advice in a  later episode, in which Amy is surrounded by weeping angels and is unable to open her eyes: “You can’t stop them in their tracks by looking at them? No problem. Just… pretend like you can see. I’ll guide you on this little monitor thingy. It’ll be just like Knightmare, yo!” (Flesh and Stone, also written by Stephen Moffatt. Well... I may have paraphrased. But honestly, not that much.)

I seriously can’t tell you the arguments I’ve had about this. The other side’s counterpoint is usually some variant of “Well it’s fantasy, rules are fluid, get over it”. I WILL NOT, because they know she can’t see them because if she could, they would be physically unable to move. The very fact that they are not forcibly frozen TELLS them that she cannot see them - those are Moffat’s OWN WORDS and you can take that to the fucking bank. I am right about this and fuck you all for being too dumb to see that you're being taken for FOOLS.

 Pictured: my White Whale, and the ruination of every party I've attended since FaS aired.

However, despite my strong feelings on this and other such pointd, I love Doctor Who with a ferocity that means I'll probably never stop watching it no matter how ridiculous the storylines get, how poor the writing, or how annoying the sidekicks.

My friends often accuse me of being ornery when I pick apart things they (and I) like. I prefer to think of it as refusing to eat shit along with my art, but whatever; you say potato, I say fuck you and learn to distinguish an artist's best work from the product of their withering contempt for you as a person. 

Anyway… that’s essentially my way of telling you that just because I might from time to time tear something apart, ridicule its plot devices or make fun of its stupid name, it doesn’t mean I’m not secretly a massive geek for it. Things should be pulled apart, even if they're things you love. Artists should be called bullshit on if they try to feed you shit that doesn’t make sense within the bounds of their own stories. Suspending disbelief is central to enjoying fantasy, even more so than other art forms, but that doesn’t mean you get to create an intricate world with its own set of rules only to flagrantly ignore them when you can’t be bothered to accommodate them any more. It’s lazy, annoying, and implies very strongly that you think your audience is stupid.

This is what I want to tell people when they get pissy and jump to the defence of plot-holes or annoyingly generic stock characters or whatever, on the basis of “Lighten up”. It’s almost as though the reasoning goes: You are making fun of something I like; therefore, you are making fun of me; therefore, you are being arrogant and treating me like I’m stupid. But this is the whole point of what I’m saying. Take the Doctor Who example above. I love DW too. The subtext of my ranting is not that you’re stupid for liking it; it’s that Moffatt  sure seems to think we’re all freaking idiots, who won’t notice if he just skates over a total change of rules with no explanation. (Speaking of, Walking Dead, I’m coming for you. Just as soon as I run out of weed.)

And in that so-called contrary spirit that isn't really, I should probably note that I consider Moffatt’s work on Doctor Who during the Russell T. Davis years to be among both the best Who and the greatest things ever... fair do's and all that.

Dear Self-Proclaimed Nerds: Please Stop Trying to Make a Subculture Out of This Shit

Nerd: a derogatory slang term for an intellectual but socially-impaired, perhaps obsessive person who spends inordinate amounts of time on unpopular or obscure pursuits, to the exclusion of more mainstream activities. Nerds are considered to be awkward, shy, and unattractive. Thus, a nerd is often excluded from physical activity and considered a loner by others, or will tend to associate with a small group of like-minded people. As with other pejoratives, nerd has been reappropriated by some as a term of pride and group identity. ~ Wikipedia

The word used to be an insult; only a few years ago, it stood for trainspotting, social ineptitude and glasses that left the wearer utterly without dignity. Things are different now – the 2000s saw a huge influx of superhero movies, and The Dark Knight was the highest grossing movie of 2008. DC, taking advantage of the accompanying surge of interest in comic books, rebooted their entire line in September.

Fantasy put in a strong appearance too, with the hugely successful Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies. The Dark Materials trilogy also became a sensation (although the movie franchise was mercifully abandoned after universal agreement that the first film was a fucking abortion). Meanwhile, massive advances in gaming created intricate and graphically beautiful products that inspire as much discussion as art-house cinema among fans. Nerd has gone mainstream.

And so many self-proclaimed nerds hate this fact like poison.

It’s pretty much an accepted fact that all subcultures, however subversive they might initially appear, will ultimately be broken down, repackaged, and sold back to us in watered-down junk form by marketers and corporations. It happened to hippie, punk, goth, grunge - and now, some nerds believe, it’s happening with Their Shit.

No names mentioned or anything.

The increased use of technology in everyday life has made computer aptitude a more or less mandatory form of interaction, rather than a signifier of social ineptitude. The image of the thirty year old nerd listening to metal in his mother’s basement and ruling only the interwebs is an unflattering throw-back to a not-so-distant past, when those who went online for their social interaction were commonly assumed to be horrible at real life. Today, though, mention that guy and we picture Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerman.

And I suspect that that’s what a lot of the self-proclaimed nerds are pissed off about: as soon as the label ceases to be an insult and starts to gain positive connotations, it’s taken from them and put on like a Spiderman T-shirt by the same borderline-illiterate trendies who picked on them in school. It’s being diluted and sold right back to them, via people who disdained it just a few years ago.

But here's the thing - nerd is not a subculture. So... you can quit guarding it like a dog with a bone. It's a term with very little meaningful currency nowadays - and in fact, by trying to make it into an esoteric little niche for Clever People, you only create a target out of it for the very marketers and corporations you're implicitly bitching about when you get bitter about the fact that shit you’ve loved for years is suddenly popular.

So far I’ve only mentioned certain types of nerdery, because there are many out there that I’ve never even heard of. Just last week, for example, I discovered an Otherkin community dedicated to educating the world on metaphysics.***


*** Yes, seriously. 

Because the truth is, nerd fodder stretches from J. G. Ballard to Joss Whedon. It doesn’t outright exclude anything on the basis of ideology, and it certainly doesn’t carry with it any guarantee of intellectual greatness; just one more reason people who use it as a self-congratulatory implication of how smart they are get on my nerves. The label applies to quantum physics fanatics and a Doctor Who junkies alike. Nerdy things can be just as dumbed-down and banal as mainstream.

Again, no names mentioned.

Today, nerdy no longer automatically means intellectual; geekdom unites professors of philosophy and Spider-Man fans. More than ever in this information age of ours, there can be no one thing that makes a nerd, when we have access to so many things one can be nerdy about: there are online communities for lesbian comic fans, white supremacist songwriters, straight female authors of slash fiction, middle-aged academics, and anime sneeze fetishists. Its identity politics are not ruled by a single dominant discourse. The trappings of Geekdom are too many and their creators too varied in background and beliefs for that.

That’s not to say it isn’t guilty of the same bullshit as the mainstream at times, of course. There's a strong interest in marginal voices, but it’s by no means a utopian, colour-blind or gender-indifferent world. And for all its indie pretensions, it's not without market domination either - DC could undoubtedly buy and sell most of the comic producers in the States.

But part of the allure of nerdery is its fascination with marginal voices, idiosyncrasy of vision, and the excitement of discovering little-known gems by veering off the beaten track. And that will always happen, because – again – nerd is not a subculture. It is a word sometimes applied to people who may be into one or more of an immense variety of interests. Virtually everything that attracts enough interest will become commercialized in the end, but there will always be those small groups of people seeking originality.


And with the internet at your disposal, you will never run out of things to discover. They made a bad movie out of your favourite comic? Then go read The Bobcats, or Daisy Owl, or any one of a million others floating around the interwebs made by talented individuals whose names you’d never have even heard if this was even ten years ago. It's not like the inclusion of nerdy shit in the mainstream is killing that impulse that keeps people making this stuff - all it’s done is give them a forum. Corporate interests still hold art to ransom, but this is far from a new state of affairs; they always did.

So get over yourself. Geeking out over something doesn't make you a superior being. It just suggests a good deal of knowledge about a particular topic, alongside a passion for it that’s strong enough to make you gibber like an overexcited preteen, carried away with excitement and praise and love.

I don't pretend to understand all of it.

Getting the arse about people discovering things you liked years ago is ridiculous - just judge mainstream efforts on merit instead of onanistic anti-populist snobbery, and enjoy the upsides. I mean, do you want to bite the hand that fed you The Dark Knight and Frozen Planet?

"Yeah, that's what I thought, bitch."

Or do you want to count down to season 2 of the awesome Game of Thrones, and root for HBO to do a similarly good job on American Gods?

Appeals to self-proclaimed nerds to remember their core identity as the REAL discoverers of this shit, and contempt for poseurs and wannabes who enjoyed the Watchmen movie without ever reading any Alan Moore, seem to suggest that nerdery is something to be hoarded; some currency by which we real fans can judge ourselves superior to others. Yes, it can be annoying when people eat up commercialized versions of things you like whilst actively resisting superior but lesser-known works. But hating people who creamed themselves over Mark Steven Johnson’s Daredevil, because they didn’t read the comic back when they were a teenager, is missing the point.

The point is to hate them because the screenplay was poor and you’ve taken dumps with more charisma than Ben Affleck.

Let's be clear: I’m not such a hippie I'm suggesting we do away with judgment altogether. If a book, movie, comic or whatever is genuinely shite, then it’s your civic duty to berate it loudly.


But if the reason you’re pissed off is because you’ve loved it for years and a lot of other people now love it too, then quit bitching. As far as I'm concerned, that just means all the more people to favour with my incisive commentary and witty observations.

Surely that which excites you should beg to be shared. Instead of bitching about the Mundanes stealing Our Shit, shouldn’t we be excited that so many people have fallen in love with geek-gone-mainstream things that are actually really fucking good?

Because there really is a lot of awesome stuff out there. And if you’re complaining about others encroaching on your territory, then... are you sure you really like this stuff? Because maybe it’s just me, but when I fall in love with something, I want to share it with everyone I’ve ever met. When seized by the enthusiasm of a new discovery I will send you links, make you sit and watch clips from the internet, orate a thesis on my interpretation of its message, and just generally become monumentally boring on the subject.

Because when something lights you up – I mean really hits you right in the sweet spot – don’t you just want to show it to someone? And isn’t it an absolute pleasure when you find a fellow nerd with whom you can rhapsodize about something you thought you were alone in liking? To paraphrase that paedo teacher in The History Boys, it's like a hand reaching out across time and space, and taking yours.

Pictured: wisdom. Also, boy-love.

Fairy Tales with Dubious Morals: Part III

Rumpelstiltskin 

A miller is called before the king for an unspecified reason, and to make himself more impressive, lies that his daughter can spin straw into gold. The king deals with this obvious dick-waving in the most reasonable way possible: by locking the girl in a barn filled with straw, and telling her he will execute her if he doesn’t  return to find it full of gold in the morning. 

 “Look, kid, nobody is mad at you. But your daddy told the King he grew the best turnips in the kingdom, and until we check he wasn’t bullshitting his Lord and Sovereign, you gotta just sit here with me. You don’t want your king being lied to by peasants, do you? Good boy.”

So there she is, locked in the barn, weeping and probably wondering whether she’ll be hanged, stoned or broken on  the wheel like a bug. Enter Rumpelstiltskin, a small hobgoblin-like creature, who asks why she is crying. Upon learning of her plight, the hobgoblin offers to spin the straw into gold for her, in exchange for her necklace. The deal is made, all parties keep to their end, and in the morning the miller’s daughter is not decapitated.

The king is pleasantly surprised to see all the gold in the morning, and as a token of his gratitude, does the exact same thing to the girl the following night. Locked back up in the barn with an even bigger pile of straw, she again begins to weep (I hear recurrent death threats can have that effect). But she’s saved once more when the hobgoblin turns up and does the job in exchange for her ring this time. Again, everybody goes to bed happy.

The next morning, the king is so impressed with this even bigger pile of gold that he immediately demands another - and promises the girl that if she can pull it off a third time, he will marry her and make her his queen. Presumably the proposal itself is the height of romance, what with him locking her in the barn threatening her death if she fails as it’s being made.

“It’s okay, honey, this just symbolises how I’ll break your fingers one by one if you ever lie to me.”

 (Source: Ken Fotos) 

The hobgoblin shows up to bail her out again. But the girl is now out of jewellery, and has nothing to offer him  in return. So, in lieu of bling, he asks for her firstborn child. Realising that she’s quite attached to her head, the girl agrees, and the king marries her the next day after finding the third pile of gold. 

They reign together happily, and no mention is made of domestic abuse despite the king’s overt sociopathic tendencies thus far. A year later, their first son is born, and the queen is so happy that she forgets all about the deal. Before long, however, the hobgoblin shatters her new-found royal bliss when he comes back to claim the child as agreed.

 

Proles can be like that. Motherfuckers always want paying.

The queen weeps at the thought and offers all her wealth if he will let her keep the boy, but the hobgoblin is adamant, declaring that living things are more dear to him than all the treasures in the world. Eventually, though, she weeps so piteously that he concedes somewhat; if she can guess his name within three days, he will let her keep the child.

  

“Awww, don’t do that. You knew the deal. C’mon, stop crying... it’ll be all right... Oh, for fuck’s sake. Aight, here’s what we’ll do.”

For the next two nights the queen lies awake thinking of every name she can, but never gets it right when the hobgoblin shows up to hear her guesses. So eventually, she does what any mother who is also a queen would do, and dispatches spies to find it out. One such messenger returns to her on the third night and reports to having seen a hobgoblin through a cottage window at the edge of the forest. The queen realises that she is saved when she hears that the creature was dancing around, singing that the queen will never guess his name is Rumpelstiltskin.

The next day, the queen tries this name. The hobgoblin cries, “The Devil has told you that! The Devil has told you that!”, and flies into such a rage that he literally tears himself in two.

 

I know what you're thinking, and yes: exactly the fuck like that.

The Supposed Moral

Actually, this one’s kind of on the monster’s side. The king is immediately established as a tyrant and all-around dick when he responds to a miller’s boast by threatening the life of his innocent daughter. And when he marries the girl, it’s implicitly out of greed – he does it because he believes she can spin straw into gold. Let’s hope he never asked her for an encore.

The king plays fast and loose with the lives of others, and more importantly, he forces the miller’s daughter to do the same by relinquishing her as-yet-unborn child to save her own life. The hobgoblin, a rustic forest-dweller living outside of their code, is the only one whose actions suggest that living things are truly more precious than riches to him – the king marries out of greed for gold, the miller’s daughter effectively becomes a queen by selling her firstborn. Rumpelstiltskin, however, will not be bought off.

And, leaving aside his goblin-like appearance, look at what he actually does: he shows up like a guardian angel and twice save a peasant girl’s life in exchange for some comparatively minor payment.

Granted, he also demands her firstborn with the same matter-of-factness. But it’s at least strongly implied that he does this in a children-are-a-gift kind of way, rather than a Saw II kind of way. And he is moved enough by the queen’s grief to give her another shot – it’s true that it doesn’t exactly make the prospect of giving up her child any less painful, but you know what? He didn’t have to do that shit. He’s played fairer than anyone else in the story.

The Actual Moral

So the king is a dick, while the 'monster' actually isn't so bad. But what about the protagonist?

The tale initially places our sympathy with the miller’s daughter, for the terrifying and unjust situations that the actions of the king and her father put her in. Even when she gives in and promises the hobgoblin her first child, we can sympathise; the child doesn’t exist yet and is no more than a distant possibility to her, whereas she is really in this barn and really going to die.

Trouble is, the girl is no longer so innocent when she becomes a queen. Corruption rules, and power brings the realisation that it’s actually no big deal to promise the moon when it’s convenient, and renege when it’s not. 

All the easier if you’re dealing with someone in a less privileged position than you. As a miller’s daughter, she was helpless; but as the queen, she suddenly finds herself able to deny the forest-dwelling hobgoblin. Power both corrupts and enables - she can’t stop him from reclaiming his dues by force, because he’s magic. But being as she’s now a queen, with minions and everything, she can stop him with some good old-fashioned subterfuge. And it doesn’t matter that she cheated, and she knows she cheated, and he knows she cheated – there’s no come-back. It’s just tough shit for the little man. The ruling classes will have their will of you, and do you out of your payment if it suits.

 I for one am grateful to be living in a time where such inequalities and injustices now allow for proper legal redress.