Random acts of Ranting

Withdrawal

PETERMBALL Journal ,

Please let it be known that I’ve been good this week. I mean, there was no writing worth speaking of, but I made it through the various things required of me without blowing people up with my INVISIBLE MIND LASERS, even though parts of the week were frustrating enough that I only endured the passage of time by pretending I truly did have said mind lasers and slipped into a mental debate about the ethics of using them to eliminate pesky annoyances. The next time I’m locked in the room with disciples of positive thinking for three days, there will be no internal debate. I’m just going to channel my inner Ming the Merciless and destroy the goddamn world. This may be an overreaction, but I’m like that, really. Hyperbole and overreaction are my default state, and the next time I won’t be polite when I point out that it takes 21 days to form a habit shit is fucking wrong. I suspect that there are people out there who it helps, but three days of motivational workshopping is enough to make me wish I was dead. Or other people were.

Also, I really miss coffee. I mean, I’ve been up three hours, and I’m already in dire need of a nap.

What I’m Watching: Xena, Warrior Princess

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , , ,

So I’ve been watching the first seasons of Xena for the last couple of days. Largely I blame Tansy Rayner Roberts for this, since I borrowed the DVDs from a friend after reading the Xena Rewatch Notes on her blog. I can recommend going and checking those out, should you want to follow an in-depth discussion of the first season, for although I’m enjoying the show I’m primarily going to note the three things that are really, really bugging me.

Surprisingly, it’s not the casual relationship to history – I’m totally down with the mix-and-match approach to myth and historical reference points. It’s not the dodgy CGI monsters either (although I’m struggling to figure out where the hell the bat-winged, skeletal dryads came from in one of the early Season 2 DVDs). It’s not even Gabrielle, who is irritating for the first half of the season *with a damn purpose*. It’s not even the complete disregard of the laws of physics that occur during the fight choreography.

No, I’m irritated by a couple of very specific things. Basically, they go something like this:

1) Why is Xena a Warrior Princess?

Seriously, this is bugging me. I get that Warrior Princess scans better than any of the more obvious sub-title options, but I can’t quite figure out why she isn’t just a Warrior, a Warlord, or even a Warrior Queen. I mean, princess of what? Where’s the damn the lineage? And if you get to pick your own title, why pick the secondary role rather than selecting a title at the top of the damn hierarchy? I could probably have lived with this if it was just a sub-title for the show, but it keeps coming up in conversation. Secondary characters call Xena a Warrior-Princess a couple of times throughout the season, and at least once she’s used it to reference herself, so it’s obviously a thing. A real thing, in the setting. And I just don’t get it.

2) Fights where people balance on things

I mean, seriously, there are a half-dozen of these over the course of the season. And I could maybe understand it as a motif thing – there’s a certain balancing act going on in Xena’s character – but they rarely play it as such in the same episodes where they actually depict the emotional balancing act. And I suspect I’d be totally put off if they did tie the two together, for it would be twee and obvious, but at this point I don’t trust the show to be doing this kind of thing with subtlety.

3) The Use of Christian Mythology

Not because I feel any particular attachment to Christian myth or ideology – I don’t – but the realities of pitching of a television show to a contemporary audiance mean that it’s very hard to treat the mythology in the same way as the other myths due to the frothing-at-the-mouth-and-complaining factor that’ll inevitably follow. There are still the occasional moments where this is handled well, but by and large things take a downhill slide the moment a character talks about having a new, singular god.

12 Days ’til Worldcon

PETERMBALL Journal ,

Or as we in Australia like to call it – the day we head out and vote. I did my civic duty a few hours back, so now I’m waiting things it in tentative fear about the possible result.

Elections are always a time of fear for me. I’m a fairly moderate lefty whose spent most of my adult life enduring the seemingly endless reign of the Howard Years when the country routinely decided they preferred a very different ideology at work running the country. And I’ll be honest here – in most of those years I could at least respect the country’s choice on some level. One of the things that always struck about Howard was that he was the kind of idealist that people seem to think of as the exclusive domain of the left; he just idealised a very conservative viewpoint. Even when I railed against him for being an evil fucking bastard, there was at least the belief that there was some kind of thought and passion happening there.

I can take no such comfort should the Coalition win this election. There’s a visceral dislike there, but with the number of people on my blog roll banging on about Bret Easton Ellis’ trip to Australia recently I’ve finally put my finger on why he bothers me so much – I can’t shake the feeling that the main difference between Tony Abbot and American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman is that one of them bangs on about Huey Lewis and the News quite a bit and the other has a 50% chance of being PM of Australia by tomorrow morning.

I could live with a Right-wing idealist. I could live with a ring-wing idiot being managed by folks in the background. For a few months last year I was actually looking forward to an election that pitted Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull against each other, which was possibly one of the few combinations of major party candidates that meant I’d go into the election with a feeling of excitement rather than reticence. It’s the prospect of a national leader whose using a veneer of civility to cover a heart of grade-A, whack-a-mole crazy that’s filling me with fear at the moment, and I suspect that the traditional Election Night drinking will start any minute now.