Category: The Ramble (page 170 of 462)

S.L. Huang is one of those authors who, if she ever wants to pull up blog space here at terribleminds, she’s welcome to with nary the blinky-wink of an eye. Her posts prior — one about defending big boomy popcorn fiction and another about unlikable women protagonists — are just so damn good. This one is no different. Behold: manpain.

* * *

Watch out, feminism incoming.

There’s a fan term called “manpain” that fascinates me. It refers to the phenomenon of a media property that excessively and self-centeredly focuses on a male character’s angst after tragic events happen to the people around him. As the linked Fanlore definition says,

“I’m a dude, this is my pain, this is the REASON FOR ALL MY DOUCHITUDE, BEHOLD MY EPICNESS AND DESPAIR … sometimes it leads to sitting in the dark, brooding.”

(Or just think of any scene in which a stoic Manly Man gazes into the distance as a single crystalline tear slides gently from his eye.)

When this trope is in effect, The Man’s pain is the one we are focused on, as readers/viewers, and meant to sympathize with. If his family is murdered, if his girlfriend is turned into a vampire — it is still his pain we are shown, his drama that is the important fallout.

There’s an even more disturbing subset of manpain that starts to set itself apart after you see it enough times. It’s the “Man Is ‘Forced’ To Make A Horrible Choice That Hurts Someone He Loves Just To Wring Angst For His Own Emotional Journey” trope.  For instance: Tyrion is “forced” to rape Tysha, and we see how  tragically that affects him. The Doctor is “forced” to ravage Donna’s memories to save her life, and we focus on how sad and despairing that is for him.

I have a love-hate relationship with this trope, because I have to confess that a character being “forced” to do something awful can, when well-executed, be one of my all-time favorite means of deliciously wrenching emotion. But there’s no denying the troubling trend that we so often see men being “forced” to do horrible things to women, and afterward, the woman disappears and we focus on the pain of the man. His pain. The pain he has because he did something horrible to HER.

And she’s gone from the narrative.

There’s something so very fucked-up about that.

To be sure, some of the gender imbalance here probably comes from there being a gender imbalance in protagonists — we’re naturally focused on the protagonist, and the protagonist is disproportionately a man. But even when a woman has to make a horrible choice and do a terrible thing, it tends to be framed differently. See when Buffy had to kill a re-ensouled Angel at the end of Season 2 — we don’t get to sympathize with her single stoic tear over swelling orchestral music as she stands in the rain, tragic and romantic and remade. Instead, she’s severely depressed, her friends turn against her, and instead of striding off into the distance in a swirling long coat to be a lone dark knight, she has to come back and try to fit herself back into her old life — where her friends immediately start yelling at her about having their own problems.

Oh, yeah, and Angel comes back. And gets better. And gets his own TV show where he is the definition of manpain and can brood into next century with all the focus on his angst forever.

I’m still waiting for Tysha and Donna to get their own shows.

In Plastic Smile, the fourth book of my Russell’s Attic series, I set out with one of the subplots to do something very aware and very specific: to take a typical Manpain scenario and tell it from the opposite point of view (and hereafter will be some spoilers for the book). Cas, my main character, meets someone from her past who did something horrible to her — because, as he sees it, he had to; it killed him to hurt her but he had to; the guilt has eaten him up forever but he had to; yadda yadda etcetera MANPAIN.  If this book were told from a different perspective, that same male character would be the Epic SF Hero Filled With Angst, brooding in the dark as we feel his moral anguish, and Cas would be a distant, grievous memory.

Instead, she punches him in the face.

It’s interesting, the responses I’ve gotten on this character and this scene. Male readers have tended to be neutral on the arc and the character or even view him as weak. Whereas female readers have almost universally come back with, “OMG I HATE HIM SO MUCH YEAH CAS PUNCH HIM IN THE FACE PUNCH HIM AGAIN!!!”

Of course, a few first readers on one book aren’t enough to draw empirical conclusions. But what I can say is this: it’s a pervasive trope, and at least some of us are really dang tired of seeing men given sympathy for the awful things done to women.

It ain’t your pain, dude. It’s ours.

SL Huang majored in math at MIT and now uses it to write eccentric superhero novels. The box set of the first three Russell’s Attic books is on sale for 99 cents through July 11, and the fourth book is available now. Online home: http://www.slhuang.com and @sl_huang on Twitter.

ELKA BARELY REMEMBERS a time before she knew Trapper. She was just seven years old, wandering lost and hungry in the wilderness, when the solitary hunter took her in. In the years since then, he’s taught her how to survive in this desolate land where civilization has been destroyed and men are at the mercy of the elements and each other.

But the man Elka thought she knew has been harboring a terrible secret. He’s a killer. A monster. And now that Elka knows the truth, she may be his next victim.

Armed with nothing but her knife and the hard lessons Trapper’s drilled into her, Elka flees into the frozen north in search of her real parents. But judging by the trail of blood dogging her footsteps, she hasn’t left Trapper behind—and he won’t be letting his little girl go without a fight. If she’s going to survive, Elka will have to turn and confront not just him, but the truth about the dark road she’s been set on.

* * *

Hands-On Research is the Best Kind

There are a lot of survival elements in The Wolf Road and while I devoured a dozen such TV shows, read the SAS Survival Handbook cover to cover, and drew on my memories of holidays in the Canadian wilderness, nothing beats hands-on experience. There’s nothing like sleeping in the woods, under a shelter you made yourself from branches and leaves, with a fire you also made yourself (without matches or a lighter, may I add) blazing just outside. It’s the kind of full sensory experience you can’t really read about. Well, you can, but doing it yourself is way more fun. To write The Wolf Road, I undertook a three-day survival and bushcraft course where I learned, among other things, fire-making, shelter-building, trapping techniques and preparing game. I wasn’t about to shy away from skinning a rabbit. What kind of survivalist would I be if I got squeamish? Elka, my main character, is far from squeamish. She’d have laughed me out the woods if I got all precious about it. So I skinned that rabbit, and gutted those trout and pulled the head of that pigeon and did it all in the name of research. It was utterly invaluable in creating – I hope – an authentic experience for Elka and for the reader. From now on, as much as possible, I’ll be getting my hands dirty for my writing.

Don’t Be Afraid to go Dark

The Wolf Road takes some pretty nasty turns (see what I did there?). There’s a lot of violence and sometimes quite visceral, brutal scenes and because I was writing in the first person, I couldn’t shy away or fade to black or switch POV. Those scenes and experiences are what shaped my character. Elka wasn’t the same after she was chained to a table or had her ribs broken by a bastard with a crowbar. I felt like glossing over those scenes would be doing my character and readers a disservice. We need to see the dark to appreciate the light. I needed to have the absolute worst most awful terrible things happen to Elka so when something good happened, she grabbed on with both hands, dug her heels in and didn’t budge.

The Setting is a Character Too

And it needs to be developed. It needs to be that chosen place or time on purpose, for a reason. You set your story in London, it’s got to feel like London and won’t be right set anywhere else. You set a story in medieval Spain, I’ve got to be able to smell it, taste it, feel like I’m living in it. The setting for The Wolf Road is a near-future British Columbia. I tried very hard to evoke the wilderness accurately and fully. I learned to take my time immersing the reader in the world, building the atmosphere of the land and the wild and I hope it paid off. In one of my favourite books, Wuthering Heights, Bronte brings the moors to life. She uses the weather to great effect, makes the reader feel the cold and the wind and when you read her descriptions of the heath, you can almost smell it. That’s always stuck with me and something I wanted to really push in The Wolf Road. The weather especially is such a wonderful vehicle for conveying all kinds of things; emotion, passage of time, danger, foreboding. I found the way Elka interacts with the landscape and the wildlife to be such a huge part of her character that the setting just had to become something just as important and well-rounded.

Watch TV and Movies. A Lot.

Of course you should read too, you’re not getting out of it that easy. Jeez. I may get drummed out of the Writer’s Club for saying this and you all may think I’m cheating, but I’d rather watch a TV show or a movie for research than read a book on the subject. I purposefully avoid similar books – fiction and non-fiction – when writing a story. I don’t want to know how Awesome Writer described a forest, I want to see the forest and describe it myself, which is where the gogglebox comes in. I watched dozens, probably hundreds, of hours of Discovery Channel shows on Alaska and Canada. So much so it became something of a problem in my house. I didn’t much care for the people but when you can’t hop a plane to the Yukon to see what the rivers look like when the ice melts or how the rain clings to moss in the spring, these hour-long windows into that world become invaluable. Being able to visualise my setting, characters, clothing, everything, and then put it all into my own words is so important for me.

I Should Always Trust My Gut

This is probably the most important lesson I learned from writing this book. I’d written four novels prior to The Wolf Road, or was it five… They will never see the light of day until my great-grandchildren unearth them in an attic and try to make a quick buck. They’re not terrible but I wrote them wrong. I wrote what I thought people would want to read, rather than what I thought was best for me, my characters, and the story. I suppose I wrote for the market, with a beady commercial eye, thinking ‘this was popular in this book/movie/tv show, so I’ll put it in my book and we’ll be quids in’. You can guess how well that worked out. In those previous novels I’d tried to follow someone else’s rules and second-guessed my decisions based what someone else may think is best. Not with The Wolf Road. That baby is all me and all gut. I learned to follow my instinct and more importantly to trust that instinct was right for what I was trying to achieve with the story, something I’ll be doing for every book I write from now on.

* * *

Bio: Beth Lewis was raised in the wilds of Cornwall and split her childhood between books and the beach. She has traveled extensively throughout the world and has had close encounters with black bears, killer whales, and great white sharks. She has been, at turns, a bank cashier, a fire performer, and a juggler, and she is currently a managing editor at Titan Books in London. The Wolf Road is her first novel.

Beth Lewis: Website | Twitter

The Wolf Road: Amazon | Indiebound | Goodreads

So, uhh —

*clears throat*

That’s pretty cool, huh.

*wibbles*

As revealed on The Star Wars Show today.

Book’s available January 31st.

And what’s available next week?

Life Debt! Book Two! Ahhh!

*runs around swatting at invisible Sith with an imaginary lightsaber*

*hits a lamp*

*breaks a tooth*

ALSO HEY LOOK

There exists a special edition of Life Debt from Barnes & Noble — and if you procure this very special edition, you will obtain awesome posters featuring (gasp) The Millennium Falcon and (double gasp) MISTER BONES:

I’m really very geeked and love that Del Rey put these together.

Let’s see, what else?

I will be at SDCC in support of the book. I’ll post my schedule when I get it.

I’ll be at Doylestown Book Shop in Doylestown, PA promoting Invasive and Life Debt on 8/17.

And I think that’s it for now.

I HAVE NOW PERFORMED BLOGGAGE

*explodes your face with lasers*

Yesterday, I watched Batman Vs. Superman, Ultimate Edition.

Mistakes were made.

I have archived my thoughts here for you all to see them.

*disclaimer: if you’re the type of person who cannot grasp that sometimes people don’t like stuff you like or like stuff you hate and that makes you want to get on here and yell at me about it, spoiler warning: don’t bother*

Let us begin. There may be spoilers, if you can comprehend my gabble.

* * *

this movie’s gonna be so dark I can barely see anything, isn’t it

“There was a time above… a time before… there were perfect things… diamond absolutes. But things fall… things on earth. And what falls… is fallen. In the dream, it took me to the light. A beautiful lie.” — what the sweet hot hell does any of that mean

OH THANK GOD I never knew how Batman’s became Batman omg his parents died I HAD NO IDEA ha ha lol jk —

Seriously, though, do we need to revisit this particular point of torture porn every time we have a Batman movie. We get it. We know. And by the way, Batman needs to be more than just the death of his parents. It’s a huge event in a boy’s life, but it’s myopic to focus on this again and again and again and again. Has nothing else of value ever happened to him?

(wait, I like the conceit of the gun’s hammer breaking the pearl strand though — I know the pearls overall are Miller’s inclusion, but the hammer breaking them, is that Snyder’s? Gotta give Snyder points for style)

(also as a sidenote, we need to get miles away from Frank Miller’s view of things in comic book film and TV — let’s find some competing visions from other creators, yeah?)

oh wait we’re in africa

I’m sure this will be handled really gracefully and not at all racistly and with all the gentle aplomb of Michael Bay stuffing your grandmother full of explosives and using her to blow up an M1 Abrams tank

OH GOD IT JUST OCCURRED TO ME ZACK SNYDER IS KINDA LIKE A MORE PRETENTIOUS MICHAEL BAY — like, Bay is Budweiser, but Snyder is a super-bitter IPA that claims to be craft-brewed but it’s really just made in the same tank as the Budweiser beer

jimmy olsen is

OMG jimmy olsen just got got

that seems really cynical

LIKE HERE IS A BELOVED CHARACTER FROM SUPERMAN HISTORY ha ha ha fuck you fan-nerds I just put a bullet in his head BOOM who will I kill next OH LOOK IT’S KRYTPO AND ACE THE BAT-HOUND AND wham I just drove them over with the Batmobile motherfuckers oh it’s Aunt May from SPIDER-MAN how is she in this movie IT DON’T MATTER because I just pushed her in front of a city bus and we watched her die in super-slick 4K slow-mo

god it’s really early in this movie and I have too many thoughts

let’s move forward a bit

*clock spins, calendar pages fly off the wall*

JESUS GOD THIS MOVIE IS 47 HOURS LONG

so here are some observations

first, Snyder hates Superman

hates him — like, just detests the very idea of Superman

He treats Superman as if he’s this angry, aloof Narcissist who really doesn’t like having his actions questioned while at the same time being perfectly comfortable questioning everyone else’s actions — he’s dour-faced and full of rage and not much fun

Which is the other thing — this movie is a humorless, joy-sucking vampire

Like, there’s almost zero levity, no jokes, no light, no warmth, just the dark shine of Zack Snyder’s soul katana slicing its way across your heart and your love of these characters

Batman has already killed a buncha dudes, either directly or by proxy

And the dialogue is inflated and pompous without saying much — it’s like that opening line, There was a time above… All of it is wrought in such a way to sound dramatic and thick with theme, but it’s hollow word salad garble-dookie that actually says very little at all, and does very little for character motivations.

Why are these characters doing anything?

Why is Lex Luthor doing any of this?

oh god he’s annoying

oh hey it’s Wonder Woman

oh hey she’s gone again

I’M ON HOUR 52 PLEASE SEND LIQUOR AND HOAGIES

this actually really reminds me of the Transformers movies — it takes a beloved geek fan property and does a lot of smashy-smashy action while pretending it’s about these BIG HEAVY IDEAS and while simultaneously milking any of the actual fun out of it because if it feels fun then it’s not GRR HMM SERIOUS BUSINESS

hey remember how much fun Guardians of the Galaxy was

or any of the original Superman movies

I mean jesus this movie makes WINTER SOLDIER look like ANT-MAN. Winter Soldier is full of sturm and drang and yet the characters get to have character moments and be funny and tell jokes and even in the middle of fighting each other they shine brightly whereas these superheroes are mostly just dull clods of hard dirt thrown at one another again and again

this movie is just a series of scenes

I’m not sure they really connect

They lead into one another but they don’t have narrative chain of consequence — they’re more like dominoes falling than storytelling

I mean, there’s a plot, but that’s all, it’s just a sequence of events

And my, what an incomprehensible sequence it is

WHAT IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING

I’m trying to figure that out again and again — I’m sitting here thinking, what is happening, why is it happening, why are these characters doing the things they’re doing, and I got nothin

tired

so tired

ON HOUR 67 PLEASE SEND SUCCOR IN THE FORM OF A SMOTHERING PILLOW

okay, I’m being over dramatic — I’ll say this for Snyder — first, he’s stylish as a motherfucker, and if he were simply directing it rather than actually imprinting himself upon it, this movie might work with a different script — second, he actually does all right by Batman. In fact, I’d argue he really never wanted to make a Superman movie and was just doing that so he could sneak his way into the Batman canon. He handles Batman well, and Affleck is actually a rock-fucking-solid Bats. (I’d also argue that wossname is a very good Superman, too, were he given a better, cooler, funnier, more noble superman to play.)

That scene in the capitol is pretty cool, if grim

why am I doing this

wait is that the flash

what did he even say

okay he’s gone again? is this a flashpoint thing?

how does lex luthor know all this shit

he knows everything, he knows who these characters are, he knows everything there is to know about Zod and the Kryptonian ship — he knows everything, and yet the one thing I don’t know is why he’s doing any of this

It’s like Luthor is filling a trope — I AM VILLAIN AND SO I WILL DO VILLAINY IN THE FORM OF AN INCOMPREHENSIBLE AND WILDLY OVER-COMPLICATED SCHEME

I mean seriously, his whole plot is — what? I can’t even talk it out, because I feel like it makes no sense. He wants Batman and Superman to fight. So he spends limitless resources and pulls a thousand puppet strings to make that happen, but couldn’t he have done that faster? His whole end goal is STEAL SUPERMAN’S MOM AND THREATEN SUPERMAN WITH HER DEATH TO GET HIM TO DO WHAT HE WANTS. So do that, instead, dum-dum. But the larger point is, why? Why does he have a hate-boner for Superman? Does he hate Batman, too? What is the end game? What is the motivation? How does he know anything at all about Doomsday? Why would he even unleash Doomsday? I need a clear line of thought between his scheme and how the result benefits him — this film has no interest in letting me know the stakes or the motivations, it’s mostly just a 179-hour excuse to get Superman and Batman to punch each other

and can we talk about that

can we talk about how even that was an epic letdown

LET’S SEE HERE, uhh, Batman has a MECHA SUIT (cool) and Kryptonite canisters and a fucking Kryptonite spear — and his opening move is like, machine guns and sonic waves? And Superman’s opening move is a hard shove? Superman could easily oh I dunno, wrap a girder around Batman’s suit and be like, “Now we talk,” and Batman’s opening move should be like HEY HAVE SOME KRYPTO GAS AND NOW A SPEAR IN YOUR CHEST except why is he trying to kill superman? Like, murder him? What’s the logic there? Superman is a god-like figure, but mostly does good in the world — like, he’s not flying around squeezing kittens to death. Why is Batman’s response to MURDER HIM? Not trap him, not stop him — but straight up impale him? Batman is a fucking psycho. (And by the way, the whole SUPERMAN MAY HAVE KILLED THAT AFRICAN VILLAGE conceit is completely toothless. It is unconvincing that anyone would buy it or that there is any evidence at all — further, it barely matters if people believe it, as it doesn’t really affect Lex’s scheme in the first damn place.)

The resultant fight between the two superheroes is so brutal and bestial — it’s these two titans throwing each other through things instead of trying to end the fight. Then when Batman is triumphant, he drags Superman around torturously. Batman hates Superman. Snyder hates Superman. OMG ZACK SNYDER IS BATMAN

so back to doomsday

spoiler warning: doomsday is just one of the cave trolls from LORD OF THE RINGS

it’s like Snyder just downloaded a Cave Troll Program and was like, “boom, doomsday, done”

maybe they ran out of money

ugh the women in this movie are mostly just props

Lois starts out strong but really does nothing and affects little and is a hostage in the end

Martha has mom lessons to grant but says nothing and does nothing and is a hostage in the end

Wonder Woman is cool — aaaaaand utterly devoid of anything resembling character or agency — she just shows up to be cool with her sword and that’s literally it. No sense of who she is at all. She is the epitome of the Strong Female Character — OH SHE’S SEXY AND HAS A SWORD AND CAN FIGHT SUPER-RAD AND SHE’S COOL AND ALOOF AND

oh did we mention she’s totally secondary to the men?

the movie is over now

superman is dead-ish

but he probably didn’t have to die?

like, couldn’t he have just given that spear to Wonder Woman instead of being a sacrificial martyr — like, “HEY, WONDER WOMAN, YOU SEEM REALLY STRONG AND AWESOME HERE CAN YOU DELIVER THIS SPEAR INTO THAT CAVE TROLL’S RUBBERY CGI BODY, COOL, ME AND BATS ARE GONNA BE BACK HERE SIPPING SOME HERBAL TEA”

okay hey it’s a funeral now

batman is all like, I FAILED MY GOOD FRIEND SPIDERMAN and wonder woman is like HIS NAME WAS SUPERMAN and Batman is like SHUT UP WHO ASKED YOU HIS NAME IS CLERK KORNT AND HE IS SPIDERMAN AND I FAILED THIS GUY WHO IS MY FRIEND EVEN THOUGH I HATE HIM AND TRIED TO KILL HIM BUT IT’S COOL BECAUSE OUR MOMS HAVE THE SAME NAME AND SO NOW MARTHA IS OUR SAFEWORD WHEN WE SEXPLAY

and then they’re like, NOW WE FORM THE JUSTICE LEAGUE BECAUSE I DUNNO, WHO FUCKING CARES, IT’S IN THE SCRIPT, CALL ZAN AND JAYNA AND THAT FUCKING PURPLE MONKEY IT’S TIME TO GRIMDARK THE WONDER FRIENDS — ZAN IS A FASCIST AND JAYNA IS A HEROIN ADDICTED SUPERMODEL AND THE MONKEY HAS A ZOMBIE VIRUS and wonder woman just roooooolls her eyes

Batman says: “Men are still good. We fight, we kill, we betray one another, but we can rebuild. We can do better. We will. We have to” which is a lot different from when he said “I bet your parents taught you that you mean something, that you’re here for a reason. My parents taught me a different lesson, dying in the gutter for no reason at all… They taught me the world only makes sense if you force it to” and also when he said “Twenty years in Gotham, Alfred; we’ve seen what promises are worth. How many good guys are left? How many stayed that way?”

so earlier he’s a cynical jerk and somehow now he has hope for mankind and the good in all men but that transition literally has no cause or reason

earlier he also says: “You’re not brave… men are brave. You say that you want to help people, but you can’t feel their pain… their mortality… it’s time you learn what it means to be a man.” wait is Bats an MRA –

BATMANPAIN

ugh jesus why did I do this to myself

the movie is over

I really don’t know what happened

I want to describe it to you — like, not the plot, but the WHYs of the plot

and every time I try, a line of blood creeps out of my nose

It’s not that the movie was bad? It sounds bad. But parts of it are interesting and hang together well, and Snyder has a directorial style that I actually like — but he always seems to hang it on movies that are just utter shitpants. I mean, SUCKER PUNCH may very well be my least favorite movie of all time? And yet, his DAWN OF THE DEAD reboot is masterful. But this one, B VS S, it’s about a thousand hours too long. It’s not fun, it’s not funny, it seems to actively hate the characters or at least have a huge erection for MAKING SUPERHEROES SERIOUS. It’s sound and fury but signifies nothing. I can’t tell you who these characters are, or what they want, or why they are who they are. Everybody is intractable and ego-driven and nobody has a conversation — in Winter Soldier, at least the characters spoke to one another. Conflict came out of those conversations. Here I don’t even know where the conflict originates.

OH WELL

fartman versus spooperman dawn of just-ass ha ha ha am I right

*sob*

I heard the Ultimate Edition made the movie better

maybe it did

oh god what was it before

I should’ve listened to my own damn advice

I’m gonna go build a time machine to get those four years of my life back

bye now

*crawls inside a cardboard box*

Yesterday I told a sordid tale of joggerly woe on Twitter, and the request came (to my great surprise) to Storify it for all to see. So, I have done exactly that.

Please to enjoy this TMI cautionary tale.

Last night, I had insomnia.

It’s not a usual problem, and I don’t expect it to continue, but last night — it indeed plagued me, and it was the kind that unspooled itself further every time I thought HEY I’M NOT SLEEPING AND I’D SURE LIKE TO SLEEP.

So, I think it’s appropriate to make today’s theme one of INSOMNIA.

Insomnia must figure in your story in some way. Feel free to be flexible or creative in how it applies. In fact, creativity and flexibility are desirable qualities for a fiction writer, mm?

Length: ~1000 words

Due by: July 8th, Friday, noon EST.

Post online somewhere.

Drop a link back here so we can read it.

DON’T SLEEP

GET WRITING