Warning: Dangerous Kinksters and Gamers!!
Dec. 28th, 2007 09:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qosAs I mentioned recently, my sister's belated birthday gift to me was the season one DVD collection of the tv series Bones, which is about Dr. Temperance "Bones" Brennan, a beautiful, brilliant, Queen of Swords type forensic anthropologist who solves murders with hunky, intuitive FBI agent Seeley Booth. The primary supporting characters are Brennan's team: a specialist in spores and slime who's a conspiracy theorist as well as being secretly wealthy, a geeky genius kid who is Brennan's protege, and an artist who does facial reconstruction from skulls and holographic sequences of possible murder scenarios. They're a quirky, brilliant group, and fun to spend a few hours with. Since I don't usually watch series television, it's an anomaly for me to be spending an hour or two on the couch each evening since Christmas Eve watching it.
The relentless parade of macabre human remains and murder reconstructions -- not to mention back-to-back episodes about murdered kids -- may also have had an impact on my mood the last few days, but that's not the point right now.
The point is two episodes which made a point of featuring -- in the worst possible light -- two subcultures to which I belong: bdsm practitioners and role playing groups.
It's not surprising that the first was villified and the second mocked for being delusional and then villified. They're easy, cheap shots.
Kinky killers are colorful characters, and even their protests of consensual participation can be made to sound slimey. In this case, our straight-arrow good guys agreed that if the bad guys were able to have good "normal" sex they wouldn't need the kinky games to get off, thus demonstrating their own sexual as well as moral superiority to the kinksters. The villainous characters wore tacky clothes, and seemed more amused and turned-on by their arrest than worried. Everything about them was portrayed as sleazy and slightly nuts.
In the same vein, when they discover a group of teenage kids who dress up as comic book characters (they looked more like Masquerade players to me), the kids are portrayed as considering their characters more real than their actual identities, and are labeled by the good guys as potential Columbine shooters. When the only girl in the group (who has blue hair) talks about being involved with the deceased, she does so both in terms of their characters and their real identities, which gains her more rolled eyes and pitying head shaking. That one particularly made me wince, because I have more than one good friend I can talk about in terms of both character relationships and personal friendship -- without mixing the two up, thank you very much.
Interestingly enough, I felt more personal offense at the way the gamer kids were portrayed and judged than the way the kinky folks were. It seemed to me to be disingenuous that a tv show would mock the ability of others to submerge themselves in story and escape for a while into another world, another identity.
Of course, normal people don't dress up in costumes and pretend to be heroic characters. Normal people sit on the couch and watch other people pretending to be heroic. Right?
I guess this post doesn't have much of a point except to observe my own reaction to the two episodes. I've never taken things like this personally before, never felt personal indignation that there wasn't the slightest suggestion that even if these characters were bonkers, they weren't representative of their entire groups. Go ahead: write stories about kinky killers and delusional kids. They exist. But there are far more sane, law-abiding members of each group. Not as much fun to write about, I know -- but at least acknowledge that your colorful characters are the lunatic fringe.
This evening I'm sorely wishing I saw a few more stories about smart heroes who happen to like kinky sex, or geeky kids whose amazing research skills and sincere aspiration to heroism solve a murder, and I saw fewer cheap shots at vilified caricatures designed to make protagonists -- and viewers -- feel disdainful and morally superior.
I'm sure it's only a matter of time before I'm treated to an episode in which creepy, "delusional" witches are involved in a murder involving poisonous herbs or an athame.
I can't wait. . .
The relentless parade of macabre human remains and murder reconstructions -- not to mention back-to-back episodes about murdered kids -- may also have had an impact on my mood the last few days, but that's not the point right now.
The point is two episodes which made a point of featuring -- in the worst possible light -- two subcultures to which I belong: bdsm practitioners and role playing groups.
It's not surprising that the first was villified and the second mocked for being delusional and then villified. They're easy, cheap shots.
Kinky killers are colorful characters, and even their protests of consensual participation can be made to sound slimey. In this case, our straight-arrow good guys agreed that if the bad guys were able to have good "normal" sex they wouldn't need the kinky games to get off, thus demonstrating their own sexual as well as moral superiority to the kinksters. The villainous characters wore tacky clothes, and seemed more amused and turned-on by their arrest than worried. Everything about them was portrayed as sleazy and slightly nuts.
In the same vein, when they discover a group of teenage kids who dress up as comic book characters (they looked more like Masquerade players to me), the kids are portrayed as considering their characters more real than their actual identities, and are labeled by the good guys as potential Columbine shooters. When the only girl in the group (who has blue hair) talks about being involved with the deceased, she does so both in terms of their characters and their real identities, which gains her more rolled eyes and pitying head shaking. That one particularly made me wince, because I have more than one good friend I can talk about in terms of both character relationships and personal friendship -- without mixing the two up, thank you very much.
Interestingly enough, I felt more personal offense at the way the gamer kids were portrayed and judged than the way the kinky folks were. It seemed to me to be disingenuous that a tv show would mock the ability of others to submerge themselves in story and escape for a while into another world, another identity.
Of course, normal people don't dress up in costumes and pretend to be heroic characters. Normal people sit on the couch and watch other people pretending to be heroic. Right?
I guess this post doesn't have much of a point except to observe my own reaction to the two episodes. I've never taken things like this personally before, never felt personal indignation that there wasn't the slightest suggestion that even if these characters were bonkers, they weren't representative of their entire groups. Go ahead: write stories about kinky killers and delusional kids. They exist. But there are far more sane, law-abiding members of each group. Not as much fun to write about, I know -- but at least acknowledge that your colorful characters are the lunatic fringe.
This evening I'm sorely wishing I saw a few more stories about smart heroes who happen to like kinky sex, or geeky kids whose amazing research skills and sincere aspiration to heroism solve a murder, and I saw fewer cheap shots at vilified caricatures designed to make protagonists -- and viewers -- feel disdainful and morally superior.
I'm sure it's only a matter of time before I'm treated to an episode in which creepy, "delusional" witches are involved in a murder involving poisonous herbs or an athame.
I can't wait. . .
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-29 07:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-29 07:56 am (UTC)it's a webcomic, but here ya go, I'm reading the archives for the first time now. Bi, poly, and kinky! Meet Maytag, the jester!
http://www.flipsidecomics.com/
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-29 02:50 pm (UTC)I say to Chris, "Oh, here we go again..."
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-29 04:52 pm (UTC)Yes, I remember seeing episodes like that -- and I can just imagine how it's felt to you.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-29 06:46 pm (UTC)The only sentence I disagreed with! :-)
I think there are many good and important points here.
One thing this post got me thinking about was: what sorts of genres and stories require the construction of "villains" -- that is, "bad guys" towards whom we are supposed to feel only anger or disgust. And isn't it interesting that the geek-oriented genres (fantasy and sf) often solve this problem "bloodlessly" by creating non-human villains (demons, vampires, Sauron - Spotlight of Evil, evil robots, clones (oh, wait...um, George...clones are people, remember?), and of course evil aliens). Mainstream genres, by contrast, have to make use of stock-character villains, which often turn out to be stereotypes of unpopular, and not infrequently "weird", groups.
Of course, normal people don't dress up in costumes and pretend to be heroic characters. Normal people sit on the couch and watch other people pretending to be heroic. Right?
Which brings me back around to the distinction between geek and mainstream genres. Joss Whedon has said repeatedly that he intended Buffy to be a cult show, that it was very consciously designed to build exactly the kind of small but loyal and (above all) intense fan-base that it has. (In fact maybe that's the difference: geek media has fans; mainstream media has viewers.) The point being that some media is intended to play only a trivial role in the lives of those who view it, while other material is addressed to an audience that can embrace it in a very different way. What's interesting here is that you're highlighting how mainstream media portrays the consumers of geek media...which the producers feel they can safely do, because the typical consumers of mainstream media are (a) not those people and (b) are a little "creeped out" by those people.
Hmmm...makes ya think.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-29 07:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-29 08:48 pm (UTC)Yeah, they're kinky gamers. Fuckin' WEIRDO kinky gamers.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-30 07:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-31 04:04 am (UTC)Thanks for the link.
I just read the first three chapters and will probably read more.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-31 04:15 am (UTC)