Television – Shoshana Kessock

Falling/Burning: Hannah Gadsby, Nanette, and Being A Bipolar Creator

July 12, 2018 by Shoshana, posted in Personal, Speaking Out, Television, Writings

[[Note: trigger warnings for mental illness, bipolar disorder, medication, and some spoilers for Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette.]]

These days, I call it burning, but for most of my life, I called it flying.

It’s that feeling when you’re wrapped up in a writing project so hard you look up, and half a day has gone by. You haven’t moved, you haven’t drunk or eaten or talked to anyone. You work and work until your knuckles hurt, and there are words flowing out of you, and you can’t stop until it’s all done. Then you look up, realize what time it is, and fall over because the words are done for the day and you’ve been doing it. You’ve been flying.

That’s what writing when you’re me feels like.

Well, a lot of the time. Some days it’s just normal. I get up, I do my morning routine (take my meds, get some grub, boop the cat, check my email, mess around on Facebook) and then it’s off to the word mines. And on those days, they are indeed the word mines. I check an outline, I write notes, I putter around, I get the words going however I can, tugging that little mining cart up the hill towards those far-off paragraphs and… y’know, this analogy has gotten away from me. I digress.

Those are the hard days at the job because that’s what it is – writing, like making any art, is a job. It’s craft and talent and passion rolled up into one ball. It’s doing a thing you worked hard to learn to do the best you can. You’re capturing those weird little ideas rolling around in your head and making them into words, then lines, then paragraphs, and somehow they’re all supposed to reach out to someone who reads them and make their brains go POOF, I LIKE THIS. No pressure or anything, writer, just take the ephemeral and translate it onto a page. You make it happen as best as you can.

Then, there are the other days. The days when BLEH becomes BANG. The days when something just clicks and comes roaring down the pipe inside my brain and it’s all I can do to get to my computer because it’s ready to go and that’s it. Get out of the way.

I call it burning these days because that’s what it feels like: like there’s an idea inside me burning its way out. But when I was younger, I called it flying. What I really meant was controlled falling. Like there was a tornado going on and I would leap off something and ride right through the middle of it, all the way up, chasing words. Because that’s what it felt like for me, rolling on through the manic energy that comes with being bi-polar.

There’s a lot of folks who equate the manic energy of being bi-polar with the creative spark that drives artists to brilliance. They point to so many great artists in history who lived with mental illness and say, “there it is, that energy, that’s what made them great!”

Except for so many artists, mental illness didn’t make them great. It made them ill. And if they weren’t careful, it made them gone.

Hannah Gadsby’s blockbuster comedy special “Nanette” was billed as exactly that: a comedy. She was meant to get up on stage, make some jokes, and entertain us all on Netflix. Instead, Gadsby delivered what I can only call a commencement speech for comedians, a bait and switch that took the audience from laughter to silence and ultimately to a standing ovation. Gadsby, a queer comedian with a career going back over ten years, started her performance with a fairly standard routine, drawing in the laughs. Then she started explaining how jokes worked, about how they increased tension and then broke it into laughter.

Then, she stopped breaking the tension. And just rose it higher and higher by telling the truth.

She spoke to her audience about a lot of things. Her family, and what it was like coming out to them. About violence, about triggering subjects. She broke from the funny parts of her routine a little over halfway through and talked about quitting comedy because she was tired of making people like herself, a lesbian still fighting with some deep shame issues, into a punchline. I watched in spell-bound silence as Hannah Gadsby deconstructed comedy to its most basic building blocks and rebuilt them into a soapbox, a grand forum where she read the audience a monologue of pain and vulnerability, her farewell to wisecracks and the opening of perhaps a new chapter of honest, open speaking in her life. She was out to speak her truth, and by the end, I was in awe.

It was somewhere in the middle where she told people to fuck off when telling artists to “feel” for their art that I felt the ground open up beneath me a little and I cried.

vangoghmuseum-s0031V1962-3840 — Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh

She talked about Vincent Van Gogh, the artist who suffered during his life from mental illness, self-medicated, was treated by doctors and struggled to succeed despite his obvious impossible talent due to his sickness. She talked about her knowledge of his life, thanks to her art history degree, and how he only sold one painting his entire life – not because he wasn’t recognized by his community as a genius, but because he struggled to even be part of a community due to his illness.

And I thought of the flying and the hard days at the word mines. I thought about the days when I heard the tornado in my head and couldn’t make the words get to my fingers. I thought about the frustration, the depression, the difficulties talking to people about what it sounded like inside my skull some days when I could barely pay attention because of the rush of words and ideas.

Hannah Gadsby told people artists don’t have to suffer for their art, and I’ll forever thank her for having the guts to stand up and say that to the world. Because I used to believe it was true.

When I was sixteen, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder type 2.

I came from a family that didn’t really get what being bipolar meant. My parents tried to get it, but when I’d do something irresponsible, it was always because I was ‘bad.’ I tried to explain how it was impossible to keep my whirlwind mind straight sometimes. How it was a battle against depression to get up in the morning and go to class. When I flunked in school, I tried to explain why, when I overcharged my credit card on a manic binge, when I cried for days and couldn’t stop. But those were the bad days. And the good days – those were the days I could take on the world, where no one could stop me, where I was manic off my head. I was out of control.

I went to a therapist when my school suggested it to my parents. The therapist took one look at my behavior and referred me to a psychiatrist, a loud and overbearing man who listened to me talk a mile a minute for fifteen minutes, heard my symptoms, and pulled out a giant prescription pad. I started taking the drugs he gave me but received no explanation about what being bipolar really meant. He never explained what behaviors were unusual, or what could be attributed to the illness, or any coping skills or resources to better understand my situation. He gave me pills and saw me every two weeks. I knew almost nothing about what was going on with me but was even enough to realize I needed more information.

So? I went online.

Because my family didn’t know much about bipolar disorder and my doctor wasn’t telling, I learned a lot from the internet. Those were the wild and wooly early days of the internet, when it was the 90’s and everyone was in AOL chat rooms and the world was a wacky, wacky place. It was on the internet I found a community of roleplayers that eventually led me to the career I have today. It was also where I got a LOT of bad advice about mental illness.

I read a lot of stories about people being overmedicated or given the wrong medication. I heard stories about people being committed by their families if they didn’t hide what was wrong with them. But I especially came across the same story over and over from people who had been medicated. “If you go on the drugs,” they said, “the creative drive goes away. You’ll lose that spark inside you. If you want to be an artist, stay away from medication. It’ll kill your art.”

I didn’t believe it. I was taught doctors were to be trusted. And besides, I knew I needed help. So I took the drugs the doctor gave me and fell into the worst confluence of events you could imagine. Because the medication the doctor gave me DID kill my creativity. It also made me sleep too much, have no emotions whatsoever, destroyed my memory, and made me gain tons of weight. And every time I brought this up to my doctor, his answer was to add another pill to balance out the others or up my dose.

I didn’t realize it until later, but I had a bad doctor. What I did know was at the height of this medicine dance, I’d spend my days sleeping, or staring at a television, and feeling nothing at all. I couldn’t even cry. But maybe worst of all, I struggled to create. I couldn’t find that spark inside me like I used to, that flying feeling that gave me inspiration. In the moments when I could feel something, it was the overwhelming terror of going back into that stupor once again.

This went on from the time I was seventeen, when I was so messed up I dropped out of high school, until I was nearly 19. In between, I struggled to get my GED so I could at least get into college and proceeded to flunk there too due to the medication’s impossible weight on my mind. I went through so many ridiculous emotional issues I can’t describe, but all of it was through a curtain of medication so thick I can barely pull up memories from that time.

The times my emotions would push through was during what I discovered later were hypomanic phases, mood swings so strong they butted through the haze and made me wildly unstable. All the while I struggled to get my life in order, and every time I did, it was under a fog of badly managed medication, or through the adrenaline of mania so strong I could barely function. I didn’t understand I was badly medicated, of course. All I knew was everything was falling to pieces, all the time, and I couldn’t feel a solid, real emotion long enough to care.

So in 2002, in one of those moments of emotional lucidity, I made a decision to stop taking my meds. I suddenly thought: the internet is right, this is a horrible, horrible mistake. I trusted my experience and my terror and I stopped taking my meds.

And well, to quote one of my heroines from the time, Buffy:

What followed were ten years of the roughest, rockiest, unbelievably manic, altogether difficult experiences of my life. I had bouts of going back on medication, but would always stop for one reason or another. I’d make excuses but each time it was the same thing: I convinced myself I didn’t feel right on the medication. That I couldn’t feel that creative spark I so relied on as part of my life. I was afraid of going back to that medically-induced haze I’d been in before. I hid from it and kept riding the tornado, every day. And like any tornado, my instability left chaos and destruction in its wake.

I can’t say I regret those ten years. They taught me a lot. I regret a lot of the horrible decisions I made, the people I hurt, the situations I got into where I got ripped up myself. I have memories I’ll never forget, instances of realizing too late I’d gotten into something because of my mania that led ultimately to disaster.

But I remember the creative highs. The way I could just fly like the wind and produce 12,000 words in a night. How I could map out entire novels, series of books, all the things in the world I thought I could create. I wrote papers, read whole book series, stayed up for days on end, played role-playing games from morning until night, and never, ever saw anything wrong with where I was in life. Because I was living that artists life and I thought, hey, this is me. This is who I am.

I know now the truth: that was the illness talking. The living high on life, throwing caution to the wind, tornado voice? Is the manic voice. And unless tempered with medication and coping mechanisms can lead to disaster.

From 2002 until 2012 I remained largely unmedicated. And those ten years are, in hindsight, an unspoken cautionary tale of someone not flying, but falling without recognizing the drop in altitude. A tale of someone on a corkscrew through rough weather, catching fire all the way down.

I went to grad school in 2012 and thank god for so many reasons that I did. It’s not even my education I laud when I think of those years, but a single day in November 2012. I’d only been in classes for two months and already I was starting to lose it from the stress. The day I broke down with a massive anxiety attack after a critique from a teacher, hiccuping with tears and hyperventilating in a bathroom, I walked across the street to the health clinic and got an appointment with a mental health counselor. There, a very nice man named Bob talked to me about my experiences, about what I knew about bipolar disorder.

Bob told me some truth about where I was at and what I needed. He said he was surprised I’d gotten as far as I did going the way I was. He listened to my fears about going on meds and what had happened in the past. Then he calmly explained how he was going to give me medication and we’d work together to find what worked.

The first day I took medication, I woke up in the morning and the tornado was quieter. Not quiet, but less a twisting funnel of noise and more of a loud echo. I called up someone who was then a friend (who had experience with the medication I’d started taking) and broke down crying. I asked him: is this what normal felt like? I had no idea it would get even better.

Six years later, I’ve never been off my medication a single day. And I’ve graduated from grad school, survived a brain surgery and being diagnosed with two serious chronic illnesses, ending up using a wheelchair, running my own business, becoming a writer, and too many personal ups and downs to count. Each of them I tackled with a surety in myself I never could have before, because I was no longer screaming through a tornado all the time. More importantly, I’ve spent those years creating games and writing work I’ve made with deliberateness and careful consideration. When I create, it was no longer controlled falling, but dedicated flight on a controlled course. Well, most of the time.

I won’t say everything became perfect after I started medication because I won’t let blogging make a liar out of me. Being bipolar is a constant system of checks and balances. These days, I fight against needing my medication adjusted a lot, against depression and anxiety, mania and hypomania. I still end up flying some days, sometimes for days at a time, because as time goes on the body changes and you have to adjust to new needs, new doses, new medication.

Coping mechanisms change, life situations go ways you never expected, mania and depression rear their ugly head. But the day I went on medication was one of the greatest days of my life, because it was the day my creative spark stopped becoming an excuse to keep putting up with an illness that was killing me.

I did some research online (now responsibly!) about artists who were known to have fought with mental illness. Google it some time and it’ll be a stark look into some suffering for art you might not know about. People know about Van Gogh, but what about Beethoven and David Foster Wallace, Georgia O’Keefe and Sylvia Plath, Goya and Cobain, Robin Williams and Amy Winehouse. I did research and discovered artists like Mariah Carrey, Demi Lovato, Catherine Zeta Jones, Vivien Leigh, Russell Brand, Linda Hamilton, and of course Carrie Fischer all have/had bipolar disorder. Their stories, their struggles, are well known.

I read books about people theorizing about the connection between mental illness and creativity and shake my head. I don’t need to know the connection, because if there is one, it doesn’t matter to me. I take my medicine and work my craft at the same time because I don’t need to suffer as an artist. I don’t need the mania to take flight and reach inspiration. I can do that on my own.

5628f1c61400002200c7a8d1 — So speaketh the General, the Princess, Carrie Fischer

Mental illness and the struggle against it is one I’ll tackle for the rest of my life. But to quote Hannah Gadsby: “There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.” The day I started on my journey to getting better by taking medication, by denying the world my suffering and instead gave myself permission to live healthier while making art, was the day I started rebuilding myself into the strongest version of me. Every day, one more brick, with every word I write, I build myself higher.

And so I offer a special thanks to Hannah Gadsby, and her brave “Nanette,” for reminding me of how important that choice was to my life. For reminding me I owe nobody my suffering to make what is precious to me, and that a creator doesn’t need to push aside their own mental health to be hailed as an artist. Thank you, Hannah, for your strength. May you find your inspiration wherever you walk.

Fandom Behind Trauma: DC’s Crisis On Earth X

November 29, 2017 by Shoshana, posted in Politics, Television

When this week started, I didn’t think I’d be writing about the Holocaust. In the current political climate with actual Nazis walking the streets of our country with impunity, it seems to be coming up more and more. Still, I didn’t think when I sat down to watch four of my favorite TV shows do their yearly crossover that I’d be confronting this particular historical nightmare.

I should have realized. I should have been prepared. For weeks now, the CW’s four DC Universe superhero shows – Supergirl, Flash, Arrow, and Legends of Tomorrow – have been advertising their once a year, four-episode crossover. I’d seen the commercials where commandos in uniforms reminiscent of the old SS of yore crashed the wedding of Barry Allen and Iris West, with all their superhero friends in attendance. “I hate Nazis,” said Arrow, Supergirl, and Flash in the commercials, before the epic ass-kicking began. I knew the crossover was going to feature Earth X, an alternate reality where the Nazis won and subjugated the entire world. I just didn’t know how far the show would go, or how much it would affect me.

Hi, I’m Shoshana, and I’m the granddaughter of a survivor of Auschwitz. And this is how Crisis on Earth X gave me an epic anxiety attack.

[[Please note: This article will include spoilers for all four episodes of Crisis on Earth X, as well as have discussions about the Holocaust and its atrocities that may be triggering. Read on with this warning in mind.]]

Anyone who knows me knows I’m a huge comic book fan, so it’s no surprise I’m an avid follower of all four of DC’s CW shows. I’m a firm believer that in an age of grim-dark reinterpretations of superheroes, the DC TV shows have retained the joyous, adventurous flavor of the original comics while still being innovative for a new modern TV audience. It stands as a nuanced set of shows that go from light-hearted and fun (Legends of Tomorrow) to often dark and brooding (Arrow) and even politically conscious and reactive to today’s real-world issues (Supergirl). Flash is the show I turn to on my worst weeks to find a ray of humorous, heartfelt hope, bolstered by the camaraderie of Team Flash and the exuberant performance of Grant Gustin as Barry Allen.

Yet when I heard this year’s massive crossover would handle the Nazi-focused Crisis on Earth X story arch, I was hesitant. For years, Nazis were the ubiquitous punching bags of media, right alongside zombies. Hell, I think people felt more emotional connection and empathy for the undead, who truly had no say in their unfortunate plight. Nazis are a representation of everything corrupt in the world, the choices made by portions of mankind to sink to depravity through fascism, bigotry and disregard for empathy and human life. The cookie-cutter, two-dimensional Nazi became an easy punching bag in comics, movies, and video games, an easy antagonist to point to as the ultimate evil so no consumer would have difficulty with blasting them out of existence. Or punching them in the jaw.

In today’s political climate, however, it seems the sentiment of ‘punch a Nazi’ has become a controversial one for some reason. With the rise of fascist thought in America, the struggle to embrace a ‘live and let live’ mentality has brought some to talk about Nazism as if it was an acceptable philosophy rather than an abhorrent one. Articles like the recent on in the New York Times profiling the everyday Nazi have been steps, inadvertently or otherwise, towards normalizing fascists living in America today. When ‘alt-right’ leader Richard Spencer was decked in the face on live television by a masked anti-fascist activist, beneath the cries of support there was an undercurrent of actual sympathy. Nazis have become, to some part of the population, sympathetic. (By the way, if you’re having a bad day, just watch this gif a few times, it always gives me some joy).

Now I trusted the progressive writer teams of the DC shows to take on the issue of Nazis well. Of every show on television right now, Supergirl has come out as the most reactive to the horrors of the regressive Trump America, going so far as to almost directly referencing issues going on (such as taking up the term “nasty woman” with a stare-into-the-camera defiance I love) and include more inclusive, progressive storylines with gusto. I wasn’t worried about their handling of the material.

I was worried about me, as a viewer. I was worried it might be too much.

As a little girl, I grew up on stories of the Holocaust. It was almost impossible to miss them in the Orthodox Jewish community where I grew up. Everyone was only one or two steps removed from a Holocaust survivor. They are our neighbors, our family members, people in our synagogues, working in businesses. They are grandparents, just like mine were. My grandmother Nora survived Auschwitz while my grandfather, who died before I was born, survived Treblinka. And in our community, there is a saying: never forget. To us, it isn’t a slogan, but a way of life.

And so from an early age, I heard stories, unimaginable stories, impossibly horrific stories. I saw films. I read books. I went to museums and saw evidence first-hand of the nightmares. I read first-hand accounts. And I met survivors. I talked to my own grandmother and watched her have nightmares. I learned about the twenty or so family members she lost, the life she left behind. She tried to shelter me from the worst of it, but it was impossible to avoid.

I started having nightmares after seeing Holocaust films the first time I saw Schindler’s List. I was staying at a friend’s house and went to bed after the film only to wake up screaming. I had those nightmares after seeing several other movies, and after going to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel. After watching the first episode of The Man In The High Castle I couldn’t sleep properly for three days. Though the show seemed well done, there was no chance I could watch. I avoided ads for it. I grew furious when someone in their promotional department thought decorating an entire New York train car with the Nazi symbols to advertise the show was a good idea. I wasn’t avoiding the issue of the Holocaust. Far from it. The stories lived so far under my skin they’d rooted in and become a haunting I couldn’t shake.

There is an idea when discussing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder called secondary trauma, which is defined as “when an individual is exposed to people who have been traumatized themselves, disturbing descriptions of a traumatic events by a survivor or being exposed to others inflicting cruelty on one another” (Source: Wikipedia). There have been discussions of how the horrors of WWII have continued to pass down their traumas to the next generation and how many people are carrying these secondary traumas into their lives. So it’s no surprise when I mentioned these nightmares to a therapist that she told me this was a form of secondary trauma, one I carried from my family’s history.

And in a way, strangely, I was okay with it. I believe forgetting the past means we can’t help but repeat them, and as our political climate has shown, we’ve got to be vigilant. Sure I’d love to avoid waking up shouting, but it isn’t a consistent problem. I’ve taken my joy at shooting the hell out of Nazis in the last few Wolfenstein games, and love seeing Indiana Jones punch the hell outta Nazis in his movies. But every once in a while, something comes along and pushes the wrong button. And then there’s a tightness in my chest and an anxiety rolling through me I can’t deny.

I sat down to watch Crisis on Earth X and suddenly, I was having a serious problem.

The first two episodes of the crossover, Supergirl and Arrow, went off pretty well. The wedding of Barry and Iris (FINALLY) was something I’d been looking forward to for a while. Seeing all my favorite characters coming together and even talking about their problems (Felicity and Oliver’s relationship drama, Alex’s recent break-up with her girlfriend Maggie Sawyer, and Kara’s loss of her boyfriend Mon-El) were all awesome. Supergirl herself Melissa Benoit flexing her fantastic singing voice during the ceremony scene was a brilliant call-back not only to her time as a Glee star but to the Flash/Supergirl crossover musical episode from earlier this year.

Then, of course, the Nazi’s attacked and it was time for some super-hero ass kicking. And make no mistake. The fight scenes were incredible. The shows really blew out their special effects budget to make every single character have a moment to shine, even taking special time to highlight the non-powered characters using their talents to add to the fights. But as time went on, something started to creep into my skin, especially when the super-powered Nazis showed up. It turned out the general of the Nazi armies, Overgirl, was none other than an alternate world version of Supergirl, and the Fuehrer himself, inherited after Hitler died in 1994 on Earth X, was none other than the doppelganger Oliver Queen himself. Both fought our heroes, emblazoned proudly with the SS emblem on their chests, and that’s when my stomach started to clench. Hearing actors I adored playing evil versions of themselves spouting horrible bigoted, ethnic-cleansing level shit was difficult.

But nothing was as hard as the end of the episode of Arrow and episode 3 of the four-parter, where our heroes were transported to Earth X.

There are images that haunt me from the Holocaust, images people seem intent on resurrecting in every movie and even on memes across the internet. The image of people behind barbed wire, their hair shorn down, skinny and starving and wearing those striped uniforms with those horrifying Stars of David on their chests. And in the episode of Flash, our heroes end up inside one of those very pens alongside emaciated, terrified people. They stand in their super-suits alongside people being held for cleansing in a concentration camp, large as day on my TV screen.

And that’s when I started to panic. My chest got tight. My face got warm. And I really, really wanted to turn off the TV.

Screenshot from *Crisis on Earth X* episode 3

The show does nothing to hide the horror of the plight of the prisoners. Jackson (one half of Firestorm from the Legends) asks a prisoner what the pink triangle on his clothing was all for. The prisoner (later discovered to be freedom fighter The Ray) replies, “I loved the wrong person,” intimating the pink triangles marked queer prisoners. Stars, not shown on TV until later in the episode (presumably for effect), indicated Jews. All held together, all in those damned striped uniforms.

I paused the episode three times before I could get through those scenes. As the heroes talked glibly about escaping, the doppelganger of Detective Lance, now a high ranking SS officer, comes in and confronts White Canary, his daughter from another earth. When he asks her why she’s in the camp when she is the epitome of blonde hair/blue eyed perfection, she tells him she is gay. He says he cleansed his own daughter for just the same “deviance” before ordering the heroes taken out, presumably to their deaths.

There are some images like I said. One is the mass graves of Europe, the pits where prisoners were lined up and shot and left for dead by the hundreds. And this doppelganger SS Lance led the heroes to the edge of the same kind of pit and lined them up to face their end. This is about when I had to nope out for a few more minutes once more. Because this was a scene out of my nightmares, and it was happening to characters I loved in a comic book TV show.

I got up. I took a walk around. I drank some water. I wanted to get through this episode. I wanted to see how my favorite heroes would kick the hell out of these Nazis and show them just what fascist mass-murderers got. It was vicarious, it was meant to be, and I wanted to see it to the end. But there was an off-note to me, something not sitting well in my stomach – something besides the obvious secondary trauma.

It was the glibness. When put beside these images of ultimate horror that haunt my dreams, the superheroes I love looked tawdry and disrespectful. They seemed oddly unaffected by the horrors around them, disregarding the human suffering by focusing on their own objective. Few moments showed a real connection to the enormity of the nightmare around them in these scenes. The heroes looked uncomfortable, but their dialogue was removed, the lofty pronunciations of writers trying to gloss through an unbelievably traumatic moment with blase pronouncements of how humanity has harmed one another throughout history in the worst ways.

Even Professor Stein, a character who the writers have gone out of their way to show is Jewish, and Sarah and Alex, both queer characters whose sexuality is prominent in the series, only get moments to address the nightmare of what they’re witnessing. And then they’re off to save the day with grim determination and square-jawed heroics, never once truly interacting with the prisoners around them. In their escape, they leave behind a concentration camp full of people surely soon to be murdered who are used as nothing more than props to make a point.

And there, I discovered, was my problem with the episode and with the intended emotional moments. The Holocaust was used as a prop. It felt cheap. It felt out of sync, out of step, out of place, and not nearly as respectful as it was trying to be.

A single moment made the show all the harder to watch. Heroic Oliver Queen pretends to be the Fuehrer to sneak into the Earth X base and is tested by SS Commander Lance for his identity. They bring out a prisoner: Earth X Felicity Smoak, Oliver’s love on Earth 1 and a known Jewish character. And this, folks, is when I finally had to nope for a while. Because seeing one of my favorites Felicity, in the pajamas with the yellow star of JUDE on her chest, on her knees about to be executed by a Nazi, was too much.

When he called her a “Jewess” I paused to take deep breaths. This was painful. This was triggering. And in my mind, this was over the top. Felicity talks about being taken prisoner for sharing her bread with kids in the camp. “They were starving,” she cries, as the writers ignore the fact that there needs be no excuse for why an SS commander would hold a gun to her head. In reality, she’s a Jew. Nazis needed no excuse to execute Jews. They were missing the point. And they were using a serious trauma to do it.

There were moments of real emotion, real connection. When the rebellion leader, doppelganger of Supergirl’s Wynn, talks about saving his earth, the actor gives a surprisingly emotional performance, hammering home to the heroes who want only to return to save their earth that he must protect and save his earth, where people are dying in the same conflict their grandfather’s fought. And Felicity’s declaration to the Fuehrer on Earth 1 that her grandparents didn’t survive the Holocaust to see their world fall to Nazis was, though short, impactful.

Still, it was during the course of the somewhat convoluted storyline that I discovered problem two with the crossover. Because at the end of the day, we know the heroes would win. That’s how these stories go. They’d go home, they’d defeat the Fuehrer and the General (they did), and they would share a wonderful ending (which I won’t spoil because it is great). But once again, Earth X is put in their rearview mirror, while those background characters would continue to be slaughtered while the resistance fights on. The Ray returns to help, but otherwise, our heroes return to their regularly scheduled broadcast. And I was left with a hitch in my chest, some nightmares on the schedule for that night, and an odd taste in my mouth.

Because punch Nazis all you want, but Holocaust victims and their memories are not props to drive home an agenda. And that’s where this episode went.

In the end, I watched the end of the crossover. I crowed when the heroes kicked the hell out of the Nazis with beautiful special effects style. I loved every second of watching the ending. And frankly, the payoff felt strong despite my issues. The fact that the Nazis are annihilated by a team of diverse heroes including people of color, Jews, and queer heroes was not lost on me, and the show worked hard to nail that home over and over. But by the end of the night I came out feeling shakey, and while others I spoke to seemed excited by how thoughtful and well-done the show had taken Nazis in general, I was left unconvinced. Hell, I was left with the need to work off some anxiety. I stayed up late. I wasn’t really okay.

The message of the Crisis on Earth X crossover is a relevant one and an important one today in our world: Nazis can rise and we must face them no matter the cost. The show does not baulk at the message and instead stands firmly with our heroes united against this unholy threat. But where I’d been concerned about nuance being lost, I found those concerns justified. Did the show need to take the heroes in their lavish costumes to a concentration camp? No. Did they need to put Felicity on her knees and call her Jewess? No. And did they need to leave behind Earth X as an after-thought, left to its perpetual war without regard for closure for the audience? No.

There were, in my eyes, other ways that would have felt more compelling, more complete, and less exploitative. And while I credit the team for trying very, very, hard to get this right, I think they missed the mark by just a little. Or at least it seems that way for me, someone who didn’t sleep well last night.

Disability Erasure And The Apocalyptic Narrative

August 28, 2017 by Shoshana, posted in Criticism, Film, On Writing, Television, Writings

This week hasn’t exactly been a fantastic time for me. Losing a parent can really make you get stuck in a maudlin, even slightly dark frame of mind. So it’s no secret that seeing photos coming out of Hurricane Harvey of elder folks near drowning in a nursing home due to lack of evacuation and inability to move well put me in a foul mood. It also got me thinking of conversations I’ve heard over the years about disability and the end of society.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. You and your friends are sitting around and having some beers, and the conversation turns to the apocalypse. Maybe you’re watching The Walking Dead, or reading Divergent, or even going to your favorite post-apocalypse live action roleplaying game. But in between talking about what happens if Daryl dies on the show and exchanging larp armor suggestions, someone inevitably brings up what they would do in the event of the apocalypse. Doesn’t matter what the apocalypse cause: zombies, an outbreak, Donald Trump. Everyone gets to play the “what would I do in the case of society’s end” game.

I used to indulge in this game myself with my friends. But these days, when the subject comes up, I get very quiet. Because there’s only one answer:

I die.

I’ve read a lot of apocalyptic fiction in my life. From The Stand to Alas, Babylon, I’ve gone through the gamut. It’s a fascinating genre, really, considering what the fall of our civilization would do and what would happen to our plucky band of intrepid protagonists. How would they struggle? Who would survive? I used to identify with the hard-working protagonists, enjoying their constant battles and sacrifices. I, like so many others, put myself into the perspective of the struggling hero. I never thought I’d be one of the people left behind. The reality is, however, I’d be one of those who probably perished in the first few days/weeks/months, the footnotes in the Roland Emmerich movie who isn’t even in the credits with a name, who stares at the incoming giant wave or alien attack with the defeated, accepted resolution that this is the inevitable end.

As a disabled woman, disaster epics, apocalypse fiction, and post-apoc tales aren’t a vicarious thrill for me anymore. Theoretical zombie apocalypse escape plan BS sessions with friends aren’t amusing anymore. They’re an exercise in facing my mortality.

I grew up thinking I could handle anything. I was a young woman who largely lived out of my backpack, ready to grab it and go on a regular basis. When I read about characters in end of the world stories, like The Passage, The Road, Swan Song, or any of the countless others en vogue for the last thirty years, I always put myself into the head of the protagonist. I thought in their situation, I’d strap on my best sneakers, grab supplies, make sure I had my friends and cat food, and survive, me and my cat and my friends/family, together.

The reality of this vicarious thought exercise changed dramatically as I developed serious health problems. Chronic health issues like mine require continuous medical care, including a regiment of medication three times a day. Prescriptions, of course, run out, and when the corner pharmacy has been annihilated by a horde of zombies, there’s no more medication to keep me alive. Within days of running out of pills, I’d end up in some serious trouble. A lack of my painkillers would send me into serious, dangerous detox, while the lack of my endocrine medication would lead to a complete collapse of body systems. Within days, I’d be suffering. Within a week, I’d probably be dead.

And that, dear readers, is without considering the difficulties of locomotion for me in a wheelchair during a societal breakdown. I have difficulty navigating the crowds at New York Comic Con, or walking through New York City due to potholes and breaks in the sidewalk. Imagine off-roading in my wheelchair during a hectic evacuation, either pushed by one of my friends/family/a stranger or riding in the electric wheelchair until the battery runs out. I think about the protest I went to after the Eric Garner shooting, where we marched up the middle of 6th avenue. Two buses blocked our way, and three people had to stop to lift my wheelchair over the tiny gap between vehicles. Such a small thing, but in an emergency so deadly.

This personal look into how reliant I am on society to stay alive has been an eye-opener for me. In a world were destabilization is so much closer than we ever thought possible, I look for solace to literature to relax, and realize how many of the narratives I enjoyed before leave a bitter taste in my mouth. I reread The Stand and came to Stephen King’s chapter where he outlined all the people who died in the collapse of society post- Captain Tripps. And after so many of them, he wrote: “No great loss.” It always gave me the shivers. I’d be one of those people, probably, slowly dying in the face of the end. No adventure to go meet Mother Abigail. Just toodles, and hoping my life didn’t earn me the “no great loss” title in the end.

And so it brought me back to the inherent problem about post-apocalyptic narratives: they are, by nature and design, ableist in the extreme. Apocalyptic fiction doesn’t just embrace the erasure of the disabled and medically compromised, it normalizes their obliteration. It presents stories where we’ve re-embraced survival of the fittest as the only moniker and lionizes those who overcome hardship through leaving behind the injured and ill.

Worse, these stories accept the death of those who are disabled as not only the norm, but as a heroic sacrifice to the survival of the healthy, a gift the disabled and ill can bestow on their fellows. Most of these stories have at least one or two examples of people who commit suicide to keep the disabled or ill person from becoming a drain on resources, or to keep them from suffering too long. While people battle furiously over things like doctor assisted suicide in the real world, they’re willing to accept disabled folks taking themselves out of the equation as an inevitable, even noble, deed in society collapse fiction. And it says something very eerie about how people look at the disabled in these stories:

In a stable society, the disabled are tolerated, if not welcomed. In the face of disaster, they are a liability, and one to be excised for ease of the able-bodied.

There are exceptions to that narrative, stories that stand out for the characters willing to stand up for those less able. One of my favorite scenes from the first season of The Walking Dead comes when Rick and his band of friends encounter what they first believe to be a group of thugs in Atlanta. The scene is uncomfortable in that Rick and his (mostly) white friends immediately size up the other group, made up of mostly people of color, as a threat, with the narrative implying they believe they’re gang-bangers and criminals. (They’re known as the Vatos gang).

nursing-home2_480x270 — Addressing casual racism AND ableism. Why I fell in love with The Walking Dead.

However, the story flips the whole thing on its head when we discover the ‘thugs’ are actually protecting a building full of the elderly and infirm. The Vatos are cooks, janitors, and family members of the elderly who refused to abandon the patients when the able-bodied staff fled. They are willing to face the hordes of the undead to protect the elderly who cannot flee easily, even in the heart of besieged Atlanta.

Logan 2 — Logan cares for Professor Xavier despite both physical and mental health issues.

This caregiver narrative is often absent from apocalyptic fiction, as the notion of care of those less able is relegated to characters deemed salvageable or valuable to society. Protagonists will focus on the rescue of children over those who are disabled, seeing them as the future of society, while those who are injured or disabled might be a drain. Only those disabled characters who are seen as highly valuable are fought for and preserved, such as in the case of Mother Abigail in The Stand, wheelchair-bound Vriess in Aliens 4, Professor Xavier in Logan, or even Bran in Game of Thrones (which can be considered an apocalyptic tale considering the White Walkers invasion). These characters require effort to be expended to keep them alive but are almost always preserved only because their abilities are deemed too highly valuable to lose. Otherwise, care is often withheld or deemed a drain.

furiousa-602x366 — Furiosa: the heroine we need and deserve

What’s often frustrating in these narratives is the way adaptive or assistive devices are treated, as if they are equally burdensome and do not allow characters to navigate the world with greater ease. Characters who could continue to be included in narratives are often set aside or sacrificed because other characters don’t even bother to seek out assistive devices like braces, crutches, or wheelchairs. This makes characters who utilize such devices so important in fiction. A prime example of a character whose assistive device is included but never overly emphasized is Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road, whose missing arm is replaced by a metal one. She is a prime example of a disabled heroine who is not only not marginalized, but who thrives as the movie’s protagonist.

hershel — Hershel took over Dale’s amputation storyline on the TV series after Dale was killed the previous season.

I particularly appreciated Dale in The Walking Dead comics for this reason. Originally able-bodied when he joined Rick’s group at the beginning, Dale (spoiler alert) loses a leg during the course of the flight from the zombies, and though it gives him trouble, he remains a part of the group. (In the television series, the storyline is transplanted onto Hershel). Seeing someone with mobility issues still included as part of the group as opposed to being discarded was a major sticking point for me in loving Kirkman’s comic and eventually the TV series.

The-100-season-2-episode-4-camp-Raven — Raven in the Arcadia camp post-injury.

Another fantastic example is Raven from The 100. The former space-dwelling engineer becomes badly injured during the course of the show, her leg and back permanently damaged. Though she can walk with the help of a leg brace, she is slowed down and in constant pain. Raven struggles with her new challenges, considers ending her own life, and ultimately faces her new disability status with a grim finality, realizing that at any moment she could lose her life due to her limitations. Still, she survives each season with determination, supported and bolstered by her friends, who do not let her give into depression. In fact, few characters in the show are as resourceful or vital as Raven, who is supported by others in her role in the community. Raven is a wonderful example of a narrative that embraces the disabled, rather than obliterates them.

Yet there are more stories which sweep away the disabled than embracing them. And what’s worse, the idea of the disabled being abandoned is lionized, given a sort of solemn acceptance. It’s known the disabled need to be forgotten, left behind. The able-bodied in the stories often embrace how painful and awful it is to lose someone because of their medical situation or disability, but largely move on with a sense of acceptance. It’s accepted, of course, that the fittest move on, and don’t try to waste resources on their differently abled friend. There are countless scenes where someone must be sacrificed to help the rest of the group survive, and more often than not it is the cruel “I tell it like it is” character who points out the disabled/ill person as a drain on resources who should be chosen. And though the others moralize, in the end, they often agree. The message becomes clear: the differently abled are expendable.

More often than not, these scenes include some kind of noble sacrifice moment, where the disabled/injured/ill person looks deep into the heroes eyes and asks to be left behind so they can help the group. They stop fighting, stop trying to survive, ending the drain they put on resources with solemn acceptance, the last heroic gesture they can make. This is often mirrored in zombie stories when a single person is bitten and they calmly pick up a weapon to end their lives, the generous actions of a person trying not to inflict their sickness on others. Yet while some stories have heroes fighting to save the zombie-infected person, few have heroes fighting to keep their diabetic friend alive.

Go-on-without-me — “Leave me, Master Luke!” Even C-3P0 in *Star Wars* has that disabled martyr complex.

An example of a scene that faces down this issue comes from The Stand. King introduces Stu Redman as our everyday hero, a caring soul who becomes the heart of the survivors on their way across the country to meet the magical Mother Abigail. In the first scene of Part 3 of the TV series, Stu is elbow deep in a man’s guts, trying to remove a burst appendix on a cold concrete floor. Stu is no doctor but does his best without anesthetic and with nothing but a medical textbook to guide him. And though his patient dies, Stu at least attempts the operation rather than let the ill man die without a fight.

redman1 — Stu attempts an appendectomy in The Stand Part 3.

This instance, however, just like the zombie bite, is an example of an onset illness, meant in the narrative to convey the fragility of human health when there are no hospitals, no safety nets for the often changeable human condition. But more chronic, ongoing illnesses are treated much differently in these stories, often signaling an accepted death sentence with no attempt at treatment.

Physical disabilities might be badly treated in apocalyptic fiction, but equally marginalized in these stories are those with mental illness. Already often badly used in fiction, the mentally ill are often portrayed as not only a drain on society but a danger to those around them. Those with mental illness or neuro-atypical status become an outlying wildcard in the apocalyptic survivor stories, playing the role of simple sidekicks, quirky but unstable comedic relief, or else hampering burdens to the survival of the group. While these stories highlight the heroes often suffering from things like PTSD and depression, rarely are conditions like these treated as illnesses to be addressed. Instead, they are dangerous shifts in personality to be treated with “tough love” scenes as other survivors cajole the character to get over it, get stronger, move on. Those that don’t are often killed off, a victim of their own emotional instability.

Those portrayed with chronic, less environmentally-contributed mental illnesses are usually treated far worse in the stories. Apocalypse stories often include someone with mental illness to throw in the magical crazy prophet trope or the unstable person who will endanger the group. Rarely is their mental illness addressed as treatable, or even manageable, and the ‘crazy’ character often becomes a casualty of the story, perishing due to losing control of themselves to their ‘madness.’

Defiance - Season 2 — Pilar McCawley as played by Linda Hamilton

A well-explored version of this story happened in the TV show Defiance. Set in a post-alien invasion Earth, new frontiersman Rafe McCawley tells his children their mother Pilar died rather than admit he left her behind due to her mental illness. After society fell apart, Pilar could no longer get treatment for her bipolar disorder and became erratic. Rather than face handling an unstable Pilar, Rafe takes his children and leaves. Pilar survives, however, and later comes back to reunite with her family. She becomes a villain of the show, however, as her bipolar disorder makes her do inappropriate things like, oh, kidnap her daughter’s half-alien baby. But while the show attempts to show characters empathizing with Pilar’s situation, it also showcased the show’s protagonists turning on Pilar, calling her crazy and eventually killing her while she was in the throes of her mania.

Her death in the show too closely mirrored the violence so often perpetrated on the mentally ill in our world when they act out inappropriately. And this is one of the good examples of well-explored mental illness characters. Many others are far, far worse.

It’s no secret that fiction of any kind reflects the anxieties of the times. In the 50’s it was the body snatchers, mirroring the fear of invasion and infiltration by the Russians. In the 70’s and 80’s, it was concerns over rampant consumerism and wanton behavior that bred our slasher film fascination, and the 2000’s are all about fears of society collapsing in the face of global terror and societal instability. Yet what does it say about our society as a whole when our fiction is not only about people trying to survive such collapses but embraces survival of the fittest as the rubric for that fiction’s heroic journey?

Too often the disabled are set aside in our society, considered burdens and drains on resources. Yet while most at least show basic discomfort with the marginalization of the disabled, our apocalypse fiction envisions futures where the disabled not only don’t exist but go heroically to their deaths so as not to be a bother in times of trouble. The concept smacks of an insidious undercurrent of near eugenics-level categorization of the disabled and chronically ill most would find distasteful when called out in the open. No one wants to admit they accept the disabled as a burden. Yet there it is, in the stories about our most difficult times. In those stories, the disabled are deprioritized and erased from existence, sacrificed at the feet of the able.

I’ve stopped indulging as much in apocalyptic fiction lately. My own medical status has made it difficult to enjoy stories in which I would be annihilated pretty quickly, or else considered selfish for trying to survive. Instead, I look for stories like The 100 when people with disabilities are equally valued and fought for, and not just treated with pity but embraced as integral to the continued survival for their skills, experience, and contributions to society.

I envision if there was a zombie apocalypse, I’d be there, whacking zombies in the head with something and then zooming along in my wheelchair until my medicine runs out. There’d be no noble “save yourself!” from me unless necessary due to circumstance, and not because I would be a ‘burden.’ Instead, I’d strive to be a comfort and an ally to my friends and those around me, contributing to the whole as I do in my everyday life, right up until the end. Would that the fiction I consume had the same confidence in me as I try to have in myself.

Death and Violence in Media and the (De)volving Face of Evil

August 7, 2017 by Shoshana, posted in Criticism, Television

I got into a discussion recently about everyone’s favorite polarizing television series, Game of Thrones. I’ve been a fan of GoT, full disclosure, since reading the books way before the series. And that’s not my attempt at nerd-checking latecomers to the franchise, not at all. It’s my way of saying I was familiar with the problematic content from way back before HBO put up its panoply of sex scenes and 100% more brothels. I was ready then for the backlash coming when people discovered Martin’s fantasy world was hostile in every way to women, children, and pretty much any minority group.

But, I’ve stuck with the series, both in books and on television. Mostly because I believe you can like something and still criticize it for its startling problems (though man, did you challenge me a lot of the time with some of those egregious choices, HBO). And in my mind, that doggedness with the series has been rewarded ten fold by the choices the writers have made since deviating from Martin’s material. Since the new book has not come out, the writers simply had to expound on their own material to create an ending for the series. And since they deviated, the show has reached a new level of female equality, complicated writing for nuanced women characters, and a marked, nigh 100% drop in violence against women and rape in general (with one exception which highlights the murkiness and problems with anything besides enthusiastic consent).

Still, one has to look back at the past of Game of Thrones and recognize its flaws before this shift, and perhaps consider the reasons for the hackneyed use of violence against women, children, animals, and minority groups as a mainstay of the series. It’s made me think about the way in which people have pointed to media violence over the years and the commentaries made about ‘violence in media is harmful.’ While I don’t believe, as many conservatives did and do, that media is brainwashing people into being less empathetic, violence-driven human beings, I believe it may have had an impact on our storytelling techniques as time goes on.

Simply put: when violence is so prevalent in our media, how does one distinguish the everyday violence from the truly heinous?

How does one hallmark the true faces of evil?

Ned_Stark — This is our introduction to the series, to one of our heroes. Decapitating someone.

I’ll continue to use Game of Thrones as an example, because truly it has some of the best cases to make about gradations of evil in a story. To be frank, Westeros is a place full of monsters. And I’m not talking about the White Walkers. You’ve got people of various degrees of moral degradation, from the everyday soldiers who find rape and mistreatment of women (and generally any peasants, etc) as okay, to the heinous actions of characters like King Joffery. Even gloriously heroic characters like Jon Snow are callously sexist, for example, and Ned Stark opens up the first book by executing a man who has run away from the Night’s Watch on the wall, which is pretty much the worst frozen place to spend your days. (Granted, Stark does show emotional depth for how he treats this killing, which marks him as one of the better characters of the series). There’s gradations of evil and it gets pretty blurry at times what characters you’re supposed to root for, when they do really problematic things. And while that’s part of having complex, flawed characters, a startling trend can be seen in the books of graduating examples of horror used as hallmarks of a villain’s… well, villainy.

When everyone is a murdering, sexist, awful murderer person, how do you know who is the worst murdering sexist murderer?

The answer, unfortunately, is peppering work with extensive use of the worst kinds of torture, mutilation, sexual violence, and sadism. After all, when everyone is already a murderer, you’ve got to do something to REALLY shock people to prove how one murderer is worse than another.

This isn’t a new issue. I’m a pretty big Shakespeare fan. And frankly, Shakespeare is full of some pretty gross stuff. We’ve got murderers aplenty, with some of the most intense examples of people examining the moral quandaries behind homicide, patricide, regicide, and more in some of history’s most well-known plays. From Hamlet and Macbeth to Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar, there’s deep, intense discussions about the rationalization behind murder, the depravity of the slide towards violence, and the guilt people feel. Those plays are hailed as explorations of violence in deep, character-driven ways.

titus_andronicus_1793_act_ii_scene_3_artwork.tmb-img-912 — The Rape of Lavinia from Titus Andronicus

And yet there are other Shakespeare plays which were criticized for their over-use of violence, such as the exceptionally bloody Titus Andronicus. Titus (famously translated to film by Julie Taymor) is chock full of murder, rape, cannibalism, mutilation, racism, child killing, and more. It goes from one depravity to another, carried on the backdrop of a plot which barely strings together because, frankly, nearly all the main characters are bloody, awful human beings. The main character himself sinks from one depravity to another while enabling awful things to happen around him without much credible reason why.

The play perhaps is attempting to show the escalation of violence and awfulness, but this theme is achieved so much better in other tragedies like Romeo and Juliet, which (while problematic on its own) explores how violence begets violence in a meaningful and better explored way. By comparison, Titus Andronicus feels salacious, sensualizing violence in a way we’re very familiar with today. In Andronicus, violence is so common-place among the characters of Rome that for villainy to truly seem horrific, it must be aggregious. The rape of Lavinia, orchestrated by Tamora and Aaron and undertaken by Tamora’s sons, is a clear example of escalating violence for the sake of showing ‘true depravity’ in a villain. After all, how can you show Tamora as truly awful in a play where the whole thing started OUT with the hero murdering one of his own sons for seemingly no reason? These guys make Caligula look tame, so it’s a giant game of bloody I Can Top That.

Screen-Shot-2012-03-05-at-7.18.20-PM — We’re supposed to root for the raping murderer and his love… um…

There’s something deeply disturbing to me, then, by how commonplace murder and extreme violence has become to narratives, not because of any particular moral outrage. The fictions of the world have been strewn with bodies both harmed and robbed of life for as long as there have been stories. But its the callousness by which we treat that violence that I believe lies at the escalation of a lot of stories into torture-porn territory. If media has made murder commonplace and violence as expected as breathing and exposition, then we’ve set the bar already so high in our threshold for the truly awful that a creator must reach further into the bag of horrors to truly distinguish the truly dastardly in their pieces. And it has made, in my mind, for worse storytelling, as characters sink from complicated human beings into almost parodies of the worst humanity has to offer.

CfnKVvFUMAE6Y2b — And this is one of our HEROES mind you. Tyrion’s casual misogyny and mistreatment of sex workers marks one of his more problematic traits.

And really, I think the trope does us no service in providing us with rich characters in fiction too. It strips away a lot of the moral dilemmas we have in aligning ourselves with conflicting characters when they go to the extremes of behavior. Can you really say you can emotionally side with a character who has gone past murder into child killing, animal torture, rape, or worse? I find it truly hard to align with characters who excuse the actions of villains who are so egregious in their actions. Characters like Jaime Lannister in GoT are charming, to be sure, but he pushed a kid out a window. Cersei Lannister as a villain is written very compellingly but it’s nigh impossible to ignore the things she’s done until she almost becomes a parody of evil.

1_Butcher's Boyc — “I murder innocent puppies! That makes me really evil, right?!”

King Joffery, the evil child king, almost at once stepped over that line on a regular basis, going from a petulant child to a nigh unbelievable cardboard cut-out villain. His truly evil actions were made almost a mockery by how over-the-top they had to make them. He wasn’t evil enough when he was a cruel king, he had to also be a sexual sadist who murders sex workers with crossbows. Because sure, how else are you going to show he’s REALLY bad when everyone around him is just the worst too. You’ve got to make him even hatable by the bad people, so have him murder some innocent women and order the execution of puppies. Sure, why not.

got3102 — “I’m one of the heroes! Only I really kill a lot of people too…”

Murder and violence are no longer the standard line in the sand for villainy. And so with the line moved, what comes next? The truly awful and exploitative. And frankly, the accepting of this as the new line in the sand alienates consumers who find that kind of exploitation distasteful and takes away the possibilities for emotional depth and empathetic alignment. There is no more Lady Macbeth, washing off the blood and thinking deeply about what she’s done, not really. Now the line is heroes trying to justify the murder of thousands, or witnessing acts of cruelty and walking on by without a comment, forget an intervention.

No-Mans-Land-Warner-Bros-Wonder-Woman — When one ladder climb becomes an act of empathy as well as courage.

It’s become so commonplace that when a character actually DOES step in and do something (such as when Wonder Woman in the recent film risks her life to cross the No Man’s Land to free a tormented town in WWI) we see it as an act of above and beyond empathy and courage, rather than the basis of what heroic characters used to be. The small kindnesses, the opportunities for empathy, become so few and far between that it robs us of complicated villains too, turning them into cardboard cutouts, almost too heinous to believe. The face of evil then isn’t the relatable, rationalizing villain, but the person in a race to be The Most Racy And Depraved.

game-of-thrones-deaths-09 — When getting a response of “THAT WAS WRONG” requires a Red Wedding, we might need to talk.

Going forward, I think a challenge for telling better stories in all mediums is to recapture the horror of violence. Not just the horror of murder, but step it back even further. The horror of violence itself is nearly lost. The idea of how monumental it is to pick up a weapon to harm another person has been stripped away by how everyday it has become, how accepted. When TV shows drop dead bodies by the hundreds, it is infrequent for the media in question to highlight that each person in that scene is a person whose life has been snuffed out. “Killing someone changes you” is something often said, but barely ever explored, when in fact the act of taking up arms to do violence is a fundamental shift in the human psyche all but lost in most mediums now. Violence is accepted as a norm, so why explore it further? And so, we lose vital depth to our stories and accept instead new depravities as our rubric for the face of evil.

I’ll admit that as a creator both in fiction and in games, I’m mired in the same cycle of creation which is part of this ever-evolving zeitgeist about the horrors of violence and its relationship to us as human beings. But I’m challenging myself to reconsider a lot of the ways in which the stories I create face violence, and attempt to rethink the casualness by which its included in my work. In a time when criticism about exploitation in media is so high, and rightly so, I think looking at this as a fundamental issue pressing exploitation forward can only help us address this issue and help us perhaps find new ways to tell stories about evil without falling into depths even Caligula wouldn’t easily embrace. Maybe then we might have just a little less rape on television and a little more depth of character.

Your Progressive Media Needs Criticism

August 4, 2017 by Shoshana, posted in Film, Geek Culture, Politics, Speaking Out, Television

I unfriended someone on Facebook the other day. That might not sound like such a big deal to some, but to others you might be going “oooooooooh” right now, because it takes a lot to get defriended from my Facebook. Something fairly monumental. And this wasn’t a stealth defriending either, a “I knew you in grade school but now you’ve become a Trump supporter so bye Felicia” kind of defriending. This was a digital face-to-face over a thread, telling the other person “It’s been fun, but goodbye.”

And it was over, of all things, Twin Peaks.

170203_10_093_RGB(2).JPG — “I’ll see you again in 25 years.”

Folks might not know, but I’m a huge fan of Twin Peaks. Been watching for years. I must have seen the original show three or four times over, plus read the books, and absorbed so much of the lore around the show I’ve got theories that have already proven true. I’m such a big fan, I’m planning a tattoo for the next time I get the chance saying “Fire Walk With Me.” I’m THAT big a fan.

But that doesn’t mean I’m immune to the criticisms I’ve got of the show, particularly about women characters on Twin Peaks. And while the show is meant in many ways as a parody of both itself and melodramatic television and 1950’s small town culture, therefore offering it a strange and unique space for characters to be archetypes rather than entirely characters all their own, there are issues with the treatment of women in my eyes and always have been. And I’m not the only one. Reviews and articles coming in about the new Twin Peaks have echoed a lot of my feelings, from The Wrap, Refinery29, Bustle and, of all places, Haaretz. They all say what I’ve been saying too: David Lynch has a woman problem in his work, and in Twin Peaks it is glaringly obvious and very, very sad.

So after one particularly egregious episode in Twin Peaks: The Return (Episode 10), I put up a single line text about how much I love the show, but how it had a serious sexism problem. And within a few minutes, I was under attack. Not a “I disagree with you” friendly debate. I love those. But a full knock-down gaslighting, insulting, mansplaining, nightmare, complete with “you just don’t understand the series” and “do you even watch the show?” nerd checking. The person in question was clearly agitated, posting rapidly and pointing out how Twin Peaks was full of archetypes (yes, it is), how it is part parody (yes, it is), and if you think that David Lynch is sexist, he can’t be, because he included one of the first trans characters (thank you, yes, not the point) and is asexual himself (um, okay, sure… what?).

It turned out over the course of this bizarre conversation that the truth came out: this show had deep sentimental value to this person, who felt because of that it needed defending. And when I pointed out that their attachment didn’t make it immune from criticism, the comments got nasty. So I said goodnight to a person I’d known for seven years, and unfriended them. Simply put, I don’t need that negativity in my life.

But it brought up an interesting series of thoughts from me, which culminated last night after seeing The Dark Tower. Because boy, do I have a lot of feelings about that movie.

(And here is where I post about a new film in a spoiler-free way. If you don’t want to read about The Dark Tower movie at all and want to see it cold, you might want to stop reading.)

There are few things I’m a bigger fan of than Twin Peaks. X-Men. American Gods. Buffy. The Dresden Files. And then, there’s The Dark Tower. I’ve read the entire book series three times, along with nearly every Stephen King book out there. I’ve seen almost every Stephen King TV show and movie, even the bad ones, multiple times. I’ve tracked the connections between King’s other works and The Dark Tower series and waxed on for HOURS about theories and possible other connections. I’m planning another tattoo, and yes, it’s of the Dark Tower and the words “There are Other Worlds Than These.” Every time someone would talk online about rumors that The Dark Tower was becoming a movie, I’d flip out and wait. And wait. It took years to get the series to film, so when they announced it, I bought tickets the day they went on sale. I was ready.

I watched everyone flip about Idris Elba being cast as Roland because of the color of his skin and rolled my eyes. They made a great choice there, I thought, choosing a man of color for such a traditionally Clint Eastwood, square jaw white guy role. He would rip a hole in the scenery with Matthew McConaughey as The Man In Black. He would be the iconic man on his way to the Tower. He had the perfect gravitas. I would recite the Gunslinger Creed over my popcorn bucket and watch him do the reloading trick and be so happy. I got my friends together, those who were big fans and who weren’t, and I made a day of it. As I said to my friends, to a fan like me, it was like going to church.

And then. I went to the movie. And I walked out so mad. So. So mad.

The Dark Tower movie is bad, y’all. It’s really, really is.

I won’t go into specifics, but other than a few pieces of nerd-dom tossed in that made me satisfied, the film was a run of the mill, fun urban scifi-fantasy film that could have been original if it was anything but named The Dark Tower. It harkened back to the comic book adaptations of the 80’s and 90’s in its surface-level-only understanding of the material, a slick transmogrification of a complicated, gritty, compelling series into a shiny action film full of hackneyed dialogue and atonal characters. Idris Elba, the man who brought you such nuanced, intense performances as Luther was wasted on this movie, and scenes where he and the powerful McConaughey, seemingly ready to flex his muscles but tragically held back by the weak writing, fall positively flat. The two, along with the rest of the cast, are given no room to move in the too-quick, badly edited rush to cram a huge amount of material into a tragically short hour and a half film. An hour and a half for a seven book series ‘sequel’ which reads like a comic book spin-off one shot gone horribly wrong.

I walked out of the film, furious. I sat down with friends afterwards and listed the myriad ways the movie had failed not only Dark Tower fans, but folks in general. My friends who didn’t know the books said it came in as a solid ‘okay’ action movie without the context of the original material, which I suppose gives it some salvation. But for a fan like me, it was like watching someone piss away the opportunity to make a new Lord of the Rings. Give me a Peter Jackson three movie trilogy, each three hours long, where you have to race to the bathroom in between scenes because you’re sitting so long watching it. Give me the depth of Mid-World, the Tet Corporation, the Gunslingers of Eld. Give me the epic battle between titanic forces I’d been waiting for. Instead, I got a cartoon.

deadpool-2-domino-zazie-beetz-twitter-01-480x520 — She looks awesome and people were complaining about her hair. That’s some coded racist BS there folks.

I went online to put up a single lined comment on my Facebook: “This movie has forgotten the face of its father.” A lament to what could have been. And I got the most curious response to a friend in private messenger. It said I shouldn’t complain, because at least the movie cast a man of color as the lead. That made it important. To which I agreed yes, it did make it important. Actually, in the age of white washing roles, just days after the internet flipped its collective trolling shit over the awesome Zazie Beetz, a woman of color, being cast as the traditionally comic book pasty Domino in the upcoming Deadpool 2, seeing a man of color playing this iconically white as heck role was powerful. I mean, Roland Dechain is meant effectively to be the descendent of Arthur Eld, the King Arthur of his land. He carries guns made of Excalibur. He is THE iconic hero. Choosing a man of color for the role was a great, progressive move.

It didn’t save the film, however, from a) just being bad and b) from sucking in other ways regarding progressive representation. For example, towards women. It’s not like the original material was super amazing towards women to begin with. I’ll tell you there’s some shit about fridging women in it that could make your hair stand on end, and some sexual violence that’s way, way unnecessary in my eyes. The film flinches away from a lot of the worse stuff because of its shiny, not-too-violent-but-cartoon-violence veneer, but it fails the Bechdel Test and the Fridging Tests like a kid who didn’t study for finals. It found its way to progressiveness in one way, and flunked it so epically in others.

And you know what? That’s okay. I mean, it’s not okay that it failed. It’s not okay that the movie overall was a colossal disappointment.

It’s okay to look at a film like The Dark Tower and point out that while it was progressive in one way, it failed epically in others in terms of representation.

Because just because a piece of media is progressive does not make it immune to criticism. Even, and especially, if it’s your favorite.

I had my own run-in with what I call Favorite Bias when reviews for Wonder Woman came in. On the list of things I’m more of a fan of than Twin Peaks is Wonder Woman. I’ve read almost every Wonder Woman comic up until the New 52 run (which I forgoed because I felt it betrayed the character on pretty much every level). I was planning, you guessed it, a Wonder Woman tattoo (you see a pattern here). I have Wonder Woman t-shirts. I have every graphic novel I could get my hands on. I think I remember more about Wonder Woman comics than pieces of my childhood because, hey, that’s how the human mind works. So when the movie was announced, I was ready to be disappointed. I was nervous, ya’ll, that we’d have another Catwoman on our hands, another Elektra, and that movie execs would use its flop as an excuse to say “Women led comic book movies will fail!” even when women-led movies with kickass protagonists were doing work at the box office (say hey, Furiosa and Katniss).

And then Wonder Woman came out. And it was a joy.

Sure, it had its problems. Heck, I went over its problems in a long, long article. I laid out all the issues it had and why, in many ways, it had come short of true greatness. But all in all, I sat in the dark opening night with tons of my friends and bounced with joy when I saw Themyscira. Once again, take me to church, silver screen. I was home.

593ff1b91d00002900cc2ac9 — They couldn’t give Artemis any lines? Really?

And then I got home, and started talking to other folks, looking at Facebook, reading reviews. And the one thing I noticed over and over were comments about the representation of people of color in the film. Specifically, how nearly all of the non-white Amazons had non-speaking or servile roles. The film, it seemed, had managed to pass the Bechdel test with some flying-ass colors while leaving its representation of POC way, way in the dirt. (And for more on this, check out Harper’s Bazaar’s piece as an example of the conversation out there). A lot of people were lauding the film while commentators, especially POC, were citing the problems the film had. And they were getting a lot of responses saying what I said about The Dark Tower: while the film achieved progressive aims in some ways by being a hella strong representation of a powerful woman on the big screen (and at the box office), it was a massive problem for its intersectional representation.

When I first heard those criticisms, something kicked in my stomach. A nagging rationalization crawled up out of me, saying, “But look! It’s Wonder Woman! It’s a hell of a progressive film! Look at Themyscira! Look at it! That’s woman paradise! The warriors, the culture, just look!” And then I did look. Harder. And I saw the way women of color were being represented. I listened to what people were saying, what women of color were saying. It wasn’t a woman’s paradise. Not for all women. Pretty much just for the white ones.

I shut up. I listened. And (I think) I got it.

These experiences echoed an old fight I had with a friend over Star Wars years ago on my birthday. Star Wars, to him, is his Take Me To Church, a deep abiding nerdy kind of love that nigh transcends understanding. So when I made the mistake of pointing out the shortage of women in the original Star Wars universe during my birthday party one year, I nearly ended a friendship. Because that was his Sacred Bunny, just like Twin Peaks had been my ex-friend’s Sacred Bunny, and Wonder Woman was mine. And though each one of these pieces of media expounded on some serious progressive ideals, it didn’t make it less regressive in other ways.

Plato's_Stepchildren_kiss — We forget this was mind-controlled, y’all.

Did the original Star Trek‘s progressive moments, such as the famous interracial kiss between Uhura and Kirk, erase the fact that it happened on an episode where they were basically mind controlled into having the kiss, making it a product of unwanted sexual attention? Nope. Did the great trajectory of Mako Mori in the plot of Pacific Rim take away from the stereotyping she received as both a woman of Asian descent and as a woman in general? Nope. Did the great representation of queer characters on The 100 let us ignore the tragedy that was the destruction of its most stable queer relationship in the tradition of the Killing Queers trope, ala Buffy‘s Tara? Nope. Did the unbelievable awesomeness of the John Wick series ignore that the protagonist’s wife is (spoiler alert) Fridged for his story to have emotional trajectory (and y’all, it’s not all about the dog)? Nope. And don’t get me started on the Orthodox Jewish banker stereotype from John Wick 2, just don’t.

It is okay to like something and find it problematic. But moreover, it’s okay to recognize that a piece of media can be progressive in some ways and deeply problematic in others.

In fact, I’ll go one further. Progressive media should not and cannot be immune to criticism. By allowing ourselves to be caught up in a piece of media’s progressive moves in some areas, while blatantly ignoring or downplaying the places where it fails in intersectional representation, we let ourselves be lulled into the false ideology that progression can only occur slowly and that representation is a battle fought for in drips and drabs, as individual causes whose battlefronts often cannot intersect for fear of scaring the conservative whole.

We look at a film which supports a single minority group or underserved population and laud its achievements and sweep under the rug its failures, afraid to rip apart a one-step-forward kind of progression that has clawed our media representations to where they are now. “What, you want it to be everything?” we say, not realizing it echoes the snide comments by alt-right conservatives, who sneer about how the next big movie will replace their tried and true white male protagonist with a queer disabled woman of color just so it can be politically correct. (And yes, that’s some of the bullshit the conserva-trolls online say). We say things like, “We’ve got this far, what else do you want?”

I guess the answer is: more. I want more.

I don’t see why we can’t shoot for the moon, for a movie that not only excels in a single area but serves a better view of the world by being progressive in all intersectional ways. I want movies that have people of color in positions of power, forget just speaking rolls. I want queer representation presented as normalized, for trans characters to have visibility and recognition as part of the world as it is without qualifiers. I want women to have power and agency and representation and for disabled characters to comfortably exist. I want religious diversity and body diversity. Yeah, I want it all. Maybe that makes me a greedy liberal media nerd, but that’s what I want.

But when a piece of media fails us in those ways, when it only comes in second or third in its representation, when it soars to the moon and only lands among the stars, giving us one or two of those representations and lacks the others, I want us to be able to look at it and recognize that fact. I want us to say, “yes, but” rather than “yes, and let’s take what we can get.” It might be infuriating, and to conservatives outside it might look like liberals being divisive within their own camp. But if progressive action in media is not intersectional, just like in other forms of progressive action, then it has not truly achieved its aims. And we can only learn how to improve by recognizing those places where pieces of media, and indeed those places where we creators have failed in our own media, have fallen short of a better, more ideal form of representation.

Despite all this, I’m still going to be a giant nerd for Wonder Woman. I’ve come to embrace Star Wars as a huge part of my geek life thanks to better representation in the new era of films, books, and toys. I watch John Wick with my friends, and love the shit out of The Dark Tower books. I’ve lauded the movements of comic books and comic book films and television to be forward thinking on its representation, loving on my Kamala Khan and Captain Marvel and new, better Wonder Woman storylines while still criticizing the places where things fall through the cracks. I put forward my own work to others and take criticism too, because if I don’t practice what I preach as a creator of media, I’m just a hypocrite. I like my problematic favorites, like Game of Thrones and Walking Dead. I still turn on Twin Peaks every Sunday night, even though I groan into a pillow over some of the choices David Lynch makes.

I’m still a fan. But these days, I expect more. And I’ll keep saying so, until it’s not necessary anymore.

There Is Rape In Our Fandoms, Why Are You Surprised?

May 19, 2015 by Shoshana, posted in Criticism, Television

The internet this week saw a tremendous uproar after this past week’s Game of Thrones episode, “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken.” This is a show that prides itself on its last five minutes being intensely shocking and resulting in furious Monday morning blog posts and fights around the water cooler (or the internet equivalent, message boards and Facebook). Only this week’s fighting has been over something pretty heinous. And this is where the spoilers come in folks, so if you haven’t seen it yet, well, the rest of this article is spoilerific. It will also have discussion of Mad Max in it with some spoilers, so be aware. It will also be pretty triggery for discussions of sexual violence and screen caps from shows that might be triggery, so be warned. Whew, lots of warnings. With that out of the way, here we go.

This week’s episode of GoT ended with the wedding of Sansa Stark, the redheaded young ingenue of Game of Thrones, married to the sadistic Ramsey Bolton. Ramsey, who has been shown to be probably one of the most heinous characters on the show and in the books, takes Sansa to their bed chamber after the wedding and proceeds to strip of her of her wedding gown and rape her. He does this in front of Reek aka Theon Greyjoy, who he has kept as a pet since he tortured and broke him. The last shot of the show is Reek crying his eyes out over the sounds of Sansa’s cries.

This horrifying scene marks yet another deviation the show has taken from the books in terms of plot. In the books, a young servant girl named Jeyne Poole, who was passed off as Arya Stark (Sansa’s sister), was instead married to Ramsey. In the books, Ramsey makes Reek (himself abused into submission by Ramsey) join in as he rapes Jeyne on their wedding night instead of Sansa. The TV show chose to merge Jeyne’s story into Sansa’s to give her the opportunity to reclaim her ancestral home of Winterfell in the north by marrying Ramsey, and therefore giving her a chance to act as a political character on the show alongside her creepy patron Littlefinger. That choice however sent her on a collision course with this wedding night scene and the show’s choice to make it a non-consensual and violent rape.

The response after the show online was immediate and LOUD. Many people have declared that this is the end of their watching Game of Thrones, and websites like The Mary Sue have chosen to discontinue their coverage of the show due to this creative choice by the writers and designers. They make a very good case as to why they’re doing that here. They site the fact that this is a show that has time and again chosen to include more sexual violence against women, has twisted scenes that were different into acts of rape (such as the scenes with incestuous siblings Jaime/Cersei Lannister in Season 4 or Daenerys/Khal Drogo in Season 1). This latest scene has been the straw that broke the camel’s back, it seems, for many viewers who are fed up with the over sexualization of women on the show and the constant return to sexual violence as a plot point for highlighting how evil and bad Westeros and its residents are. I can understand those feelings and concerns one hundred percent, and I am in support of every person who says the show has an issue with overuse of rape and who choose not to watch instead. I am in support of that assessment as well and wish Game of Thrones would stop including countless unnecessary instances of sexual violence against women.

I am, however, surprised at how shocked and shaken so many fans seems to be over this turn of events.

I took to Twitter myself to discuss the situation, but it took a few days for me to unpack my discomfort with some of the reactions that I’ve seen so far. So let’s start with…

Guys: Game of Thrones is full of rape.

Haven't forgotten this so fast yet right? — Haven’t forgotten this so fast yet right?

The world created by George RR Martin, the world of The Song of Ice and Fire series, is a world in which women are considered at best second class citizens and at worst property. They are constantly under threat of having their agency violated and having sexual violence visited upon them. Even characters who are considered the ‘strong’ ones, like Brienne of Tarth, Arya Stark, Daenerys and Cersei face the threat of sexual violence as a matter of course throughout the series. The only women who escape such fates are those who are rescued by men protecting them (Brienne is rescued by Jaime Lannister, who loses his hand in the process) or who rescue themselves (Arya Stark). They often must accept arranged marriages and come to terms with potentially non-consensual sexual situations so that it won’t BE rape (Daenerys deciding to accept the advances of Khal Drogo who she was forced to marry) but overall, the world of Game of Thrones is a hostile place to women in all ways, but especially sexually. There have been more instances of sexual violence against women on the show and in the books than I can even remember, it is so common place. Yet it is this instance of sexual violence, against Sansa Stark, that has everyone angry and shocked.

And I have to ask: why is everyone so surprised?

Westeros was written as a world in which rape is a commonplace event, used as a shorthand to represent the barbarism of the people and the evil they perpetrate on one another. In a world where slaughtering one another over a throne is just another day of the week, Martin and later the TV series need a way to punch through the casual violence to make particular instances strike home even further. Therefore, women are sexually violated because rape is still a shorthand for evil. As the Dothraki used to say in the book, “It is known.” It’s as much a part of the world building as the fact that Winter is Coming.

And for those who have only watched the show and not read the books, it’s been a staple of the show since season one. The show has not shied away from continuing that tradition of sexual violence being an explicit part of the Westeros world. I am not making excuses for that creative choice on the part of the show or George RR Martin but simply pointing out this was the choice and it is known to fans. With that in mind, and with the set-up for Ramsey Bolton as a character, it’s no surprise that the creators chose to put this scene into the show. Sansa inherited this awful scene along with Jeyne’s story arc. Fans of the book knew there was a chance this would happen, and it did.

So why is this the scene that has everyone so up in arms? If the act of rape against a young girl by Ramsey Bolton was so repellant, why didn’t these same up-in-arms fans throw the books away when it happened to Jeyne Poole? Or when the rapes occurred to any of the other characters in Game of Thrones in the previous seasons? I know plenty of people who have said, “I had to put the series away after _____ incident because I can’t stand the violence against women in the books/show” and I support that choice 100%. But for the fans who have stuck with the show until now, I don’t see how there are any illusions left about the nature of the world of Westeros. Game of Thrones is full of sexual violence.

What then makes this scene so shocking? I have to come back to one element of this scene, and that is Sansa Stark.

Sansa Stark Is Not Special

One of the worst moments reading Game of Thrones for me came during the bread riots in King’s Landing. While the Hound rides to the rescue of Sansa Stark and keeps her from being assaulted, another woman character was not so lucky. Lollys Stokeworth is later found wandering the streets, traumatized and naked, after the riots. She had been reportedly torn from her horse and raped by 50 men. She later becomes pregnant and is forced to have her child and then married off to Tyrion’s sellsword, Bronn, who is using Lollys as his ticket to a comfortable life among nobility.

Lollys on GoT Season 5 – Treated better on the show than in the books by far.

This horrific gang rape is an ‘off-screen’ throw away, barely discussed in the book, yet marks as a singular moment when I nearly put down the book. Lollys had never been treated kindly by the narrative – fat shamed and put down for not being as intelligent, she is largely considered a throw away character who is the butt of cruel jokes. She’s an example in the narrative of how badly women can be treated if they don’t have something to protect them: a strong family name, relatives that care about them, beauty, title, or strength of arms. Lollys is fat and considered stupid and a second daughter, so she’s no one.

Sansa Stark on the other hand is not. Sansa is a main character and a darling of the fandom. She is the beautiful daughter of Ned Stark and the tragic lady who discovers that her tender heart and dreams of a beautiful, romantic future are just illusions when she is introduced to the cruelty of the real Westeros. Sansa has grown from that little girl character into a young woman traumatized by her surroundings but resilient against them, biding her time until she can take back what is hers. She has all the hallmarks of a character growing with every book or season of the show.

Sansa is the beautiful, sweet, thoughtful protagonist character. She is not a prostitute or a side character. She isn’t one of Craster’s Wives, wildling women raped by their own father north of the wall. She isn’t Lollys. And that is why I believe, in part, the outrage has been so tremendous. Sansa gets more empathy because she is the character you are meant to empathize with as part of the overall narrative – you’ve lived through her experiences, you’ve taken her to your heart and read scenes through her eyes in the books. Yet in the grand scheme of things, sexual violence is abhorrent on every level. And the uneven distribution of outrage as we’re seeing it now shows an uncomfortable bit of privilege coming out. The other characters whose suffering was considered less outrageous were often sex workers, lower class characters, or characters from outside groups like the wildlings. They’re women that are window dressing. They’re Lollys.

Fans of Game of Thrones have been watching sexual violence being enacted on women as part of the world setting and plot since the beginning of the series. Yet only when it happens to characters we are meant to empathize with is the outrage so great that we hear it echoing across the internet.

That uncomfortable fact brings me to my largest point, and it’s this:

Sexual Violence Against Women Is In So Many Fandoms And We Don’t Shout About It Nearly Enough

The very same weekend that this episode of Game of Thrones came out, Mad Max: Fury Road was blasting into cinemas across the country. A glorious symphony of explosions and feminism, Fury Road is an old fashioned popcorn movie that is gorgeous in its execution and progressive in its storyline. There are fantastic women characters, an amazing and uplifting story about the fight to rescue trafficked women from their abuser, all while watching effectively a two hour car chase with flame throwers and armored vehicles. It is, in short, a fantastic movie.

And the storyline is predicated on a backstory of sexual violence.

The women in Fury Road are victims of sex trafficking, sold to a warlord as breeders so they could produce for him healthy babies. When we first see them, they are cutting off chastity belts with heinous teeth openings to keep anyone besides their owner from having sex with them. These women have been the victims of rape as they were captives who escape because, as they say in the film, “We are not things.”

"You cannot own another human being." — “You cannot own another human being.”

Fury Road, this movie being lauded as one of the most feminist and progressive films, is built in a world full of sexual violence.

Here’s the hard part to swallow: most of our most progressive fandoms have sexual violence against women in them.

One of the hardest scenes to watch in Buffy.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer included a scene where Buffy is nearly raped by Spike. Orphan Black featured the unwilling penetration and impregnation of Helena by the Prolethians. Cylons Athena and Six were nearly raped on Battlestar Galactica. Sally Jupiter is raped in Watchmen. Slave Girl is a formerly trafficked underaged sex slave in comic book series Saga. So called ‘historical’ CW shows like Reign included a rape plot for Mary, Queen of Scots. How about we go old school and talk about The Crow? Or Barbara Gordon’s fate in The Killing Joke? Let’s talk about the rape of Mellie Grant on Scandal. Or every forcible impregnation story on shows like Angel or Star Trek ever. American Horror Story. Bates Motel. Downton Abbey. Vikings. Rome. Hellblaizer. The Walking Dead. Heroes. Sons of Anarchy. Mad Men. Oz. Prison Break. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. 24. I really could keep going.

The torture of Gina, the captured Cyclon Six model, aboard the Pegasus on Battlestar Galactica.

The fact is, sexual violence is laced into so many fandoms. It’s become so common as a theme that I picked up two book series right in a row (Red Rising by Pierce Brown and new fantasy series An Ember In the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir) and both were fantasy worlds where women were raped or had threatened with sexual violence as a shorthand for how evil a male character was. This is the language that threads through our fandoms because when you have people killing one another left and right, a new awful must be created that is worse than death, dismemberment, explosions and slaughter. So you threaten a woman with rape.

The Sansa Stark scene brought to the forefront a very serious problem in our fandoms, in the fantasy worlds that are created. It highlighted the disturbing trend to use rape as a shorthand for villainy, and it made a huge audience face this horrific trope that we aren’t speaking about enough. It brought to the forefront that this issue has been lacing our fandoms for years, and yet we haven’t spoken about it enough as a whole. Some people have been talking about it, sure, and there are lots of blog posts and sites dedicated to speaking out about it. But now the conversation is bigger because it’s in your face with the case of Sansa Stark. Only it isn’t just about Sansa Stark. It’s about the shorthand that pervades our fandoms and the fact that until it until it happens to a character like Sansa, the mainstream of audiences have been taking it in stride. Because it is expected.

Let me repeat that: it is expected that worlds will have sexual violence in them as a matter of course. Even if those worlds are completely made up. It is expected that sexual violence is a norm of life.

We expect that worlds will have rape in it when they are completely made up. Dragons can fly the skies, slayers can destroy vampires, zombies can walk the earth, but we can’t imagine any of those worlds without sexual violence.

And that’s what rape culture looks like.

Rape In Our Media Is A Choice

The fact is, it is not a foregone conclusion that rape WILL happen in a fictional creation. It is not necessary that it is included. It would have been just as easy, for example, for author Sabaa Tahir to say “In my fictional world, where living masks bond to people’s faces and ghuls taunt people from moving shadows, people don’t think women are objects to be raped or threatened with sexual violence.” Instead, the women characters are considered lesser then men, objects to be abused, even when they are supposedly ‘strong’ and ‘important.’ The same goes in so many other fandoms and in the above mentioned Game of Thrones. It is a choice made by the creators, and a choice that we as consumers can criticize and mark as problematic. And it is a choice that often times is made to represent the fact that sexual violence is a real problem in our world, one that can be explored respectfully and with nuanced detail in a fictional work. It is a choice made by a creator. It should not, however, be a default.

But once that expectation is set, it seems disingenuous to me to be surprised when the expectation is there to begin with. If we look around, we can see that the spectre of this issue has chased us all over fandom, and being all shocked and shaken when it happens to the sweet, innocent princess character feels like it ignores the violence done to all the other women in those works. It’s just the worst now because it happened to a favorite and not a prostitute or a villainess in Game of Thrones.

I for one hope that the creators of the Game of Thrones TV series will take to heart the very violent reaction happening in the fandom right now and take a solid look at why and how they’re including sexual violence in their show. I hope they use this event on the show to explore marital rape as a subject and the shared experience of victimization shared by Reek/Theon and Sansa, now both rape survivors at the hands of the same abuser. I await what comes next.

But I think it also behooves fans to take a good, hard look at the fandoms they support and recognize that these subjects have been around and aren’t new, or shocking. It’s been there all along. Each person just has to decide whether their favorite show handled it in a way that is acceptable or not to them.

In my case, I will be watching to see how the show handles the Sansa Stark rape. I hope it ends with Sansa sticking something sharp into Ramsey Bolton. But honestly, a big ol’ shadow could pop up and swallow him whole. Who knows? This is, after all, Westeros.

Say Hello To The Cleaned Up, No Longer Bisexual Constantine

July 16, 2014 by Shoshana, posted in Comics, Television

Comic book fans have been eagerly awaiting news about the upcoming Constantine television series, aimed to premiere this fall on NBC. But this week David Cerone, executive producer of the show, came out to disclose that they have no intention of showing the lead character, John Constantine, as bisexual on the show. His sexuality, along with his healthy appetite for carnal pleasures and his addiction to cigarettes, are all being whitewashed away in favor of a slightly safer version, suited for network television.

John Constantine, one of the longest running characters in his Vertigo comic Hellblaizer as well as in such titles as Justice League Dark, Books of Magic, and now DC Comics Constantine, is a pretty rough character. He is a magician, a former punk rocker, a former mental patient, and generally a right bastard about a lot of things. He smokes, he drinks, he cusses, and he sleeps with whoever he pleases. Along the way he saves the world and folks from demons and other nasties, and not always by doing what is right. In other words, Constantine has been the DC universe’s own magician anti-hero since his debut in 1985. Even in the Keanu Reeves film of the same name, Constantine walked the line between being a good guy and a real bastard. That’s just the character. That’s just John Constantine.

Yet of all the things that immediately get pushed out of the character is Constantine’s sexuality. Entertainment Weekly points out that though network television hosts a serial killer that carves off people’s faces on Hannibal, it seems like the idea of a bisexual, chain-smoking hero just can’t be possible. Let’s think that over for a second. The network would rather allow for a character to rip off people’s skin and show dead bodies left and right in various states of decay and destruction then allow for a show to have a bisexual character who smokes too many cigarettes and likes to get laid. This is taking the whole ‘American culture has more of a problem with sex than violence’ thing a little too far. But hey, that’s our ‘broadcast standards’ (and hypocrisy) for you.

Cerone also noted in his remarks that Constantine’s relationships in the twenty-plus years of comics have mostly been with women, and that his being bisexual isn’t that relevant to the character.

“Within this tome of three decades [of comics] there might have been one or two issues where he’s seen getting out of bed with a man. So [maybe] 20 years from now? But there are no immediate plans.”

I’m intrigued as to how Cerone sees bisexuality as something that doesn’t need to be present until twenty years from now. Is he implying that twenty years from now is when people might feel comfortable seeing a bisexual person on network television? That might not be what he intended by the comment but that seems to be the ugly reality of the fate of bisexual representation on network television. Constantine’s sexuality is part of the character, as much as his trench coat or need for a serious shave. Though it may not have been revealed until later on in the comics, the fact that he is bisexual is a known part of the character’s arch and the fact that it is being ignored by creators in favor of a slightly more palatable character is just another example of how most media ignores the fact that bisexuals exist.

Network television has slowly embraced gay characters on their shows, creating space for narratives that once would have been completely taboo. So why is it that bisexuality is still anathema to so many? This cleaned up version of Constantine seems like nothing more than the typical Hollywood demographic pandering at work. Execs want a hero who guys will admire and either emote into or consider the kind of guy you’d want to go out on adventures with. They also want a character women will go all fluttery about, the kind of hero in a comic book television series that will launch a million fanfics. They do not, however, want to confuse the issue by throwing bisexuality into the mix. That could alienate male viewers who are uncomfortable with the idea of seeing their hero kissing a dude.

Look, I’ve been an avid Constantine fan for years. I own every graphic novel, found every issue that I can to read. I’ve even read the ones that were so gorey they made me queazy. That being said, I wonder how familiar the network is with the subject material they’ve gotten into and how much they’ll be whitewashing away besides Constantine’s bisexuality. They do know they’re telling the story of a guy who consorts with demons on a regular basis right? Where’s the pearl-clutching about that? Who’s going to say ‘won’t somebody think of the children’ the first time Constantine has a conversation with Nergal? Or Satan? The broadcast standards guys might not be too pleased with his other activities, so how much of Constantine is really going to survive? Certainly not a part of his identity, like his sexuality.

And so Constantine will go on television just a little more squeaky clean than before. And once again, the narrative of a bisexual character is cleaned up, and bisexuals find themselves once more invisible on network television.

But at least the face cutting cannibal serial killer demographic has been met, right?

Orange Is The New Black: Body Positive But Not Bi-Positive?

June 18, 2014 by Shoshana, posted in Speaking Out, Television

((Warning: Included in this post are mild spoilers for Season Two of Orange Is The New Black. You have been warned!))

Okay, I’ll admit it: I never thought I was going to like Orange Is The New Black. I heard about it when it first went up on Netflix and thought to myself, “What do I care about the story of some entitled blond chick who goes to prison?” But I was won over by my better angels (aka all of my friends on Facebook and Twitter) and ended up marathon-watching Season One last year. And while I still had very little interest in the adventures of the ‘entitled blond chick’ (aka Piper the Eternal Narcissist), I was absolutely captivated by the rest of the show and it’s amazing characters.

More than anything, I was excited to see a show that was all about diversity in it’s cast and that tackled serious issues about women in prison with such a razor-sharp wit. I think I found my happiness with Orange is the New Black, however, in its body positivity. Because for once we have a show in which the cast isn’t what you’d call the Hollywood standard. It is body diverse and for that reason, absolutely gorgeous. The show gives the audience the stories of a plethora of types of women, from the very young to the elderly, from the absolutely beautiful to the not traditionally so. And instead of relegating those who aren’t your typical television beauty to the background, each of these women are given a place of distinction, their characters carefully crafted to be unique, interesting, heart-breaking and hilarious.

Three characters have appealed to me since the beginning of the series and represent that body positivity in spades. Kate Mulgrew, a particular favorite of mine since she played Captain Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager, plays Red, the Russian cook who rules the prison kitchen with an iron fist and fabulous red hair. Mulgrew’s storyline on the show includes Red’s constant battle with getting older, including her serious back pain issues, her vanity over her hair going grey, and comments about her figure. Though she’s certainly no spring chicken, Mulgrew brings an incredible passion and power to Red that helps fire the show through the second season.

You don’t have to go much further than Danielle Brooks to talk about a body positive character on OITNB. Brooks plays Taystee, an inmate intent on preparing herself for a good job and a better life once she gets out of prison. Though Taystee is often on the receiving end of jokes about her weight on the show, she is proud about her body and gives back as good as she gets. One of my favorite scenes involves her telling a hilarious story about being naked and covered in food on top of a bulldozer. That kind of representation of a sex-positive larger woman on television is more of what I like to see: women joking around, not making jokes out of their weight to get a laugh. There’s plenty of serious conversation for Taystee too, like when she prepares for a job fair in Season Two and gets the receiving end of comments about being larger. The show doesn’t pull any punches about the reality of being a larger woman, and Brooks plays to that content and to the fantastic character she portrays so well.

I think for body positive stories, however, I can’t look any further than Dascha Polanco’s portrayal of Daya. While most fans go crazy for the love story of Piper and Alex on the show, I spend most of the episodes rooting for Daya and her totally forbidden love affair with Matt McGorry’s guard character John Bennett. Sure, theirs is the love that is totally a felony, but Daya is so earnest and Bennett is a super sweet character. It’s such a problematic situation and fraught with so many issues (can a woman give consent when she is in a position of no power? the law says she can’t!) but the storyline is evocative, heart-breaking, and so well done. A friend had told me about the relationship storyline before I started watching (rassum frassum spoilers) and so when I turned on the show, I honestly expected to see Daya played by some traditionally Hollywood body-typed actress. Those are the actresses which, typically, got great love story lines like these. Yet here was Dascha Polanco, a full figured woman, playing Daya and being called beautiful. And there’s no mistake, she absolutely is. Polanco plays Daya with an innocent, sweet radiance that lights up the screen, and makes her one of the prime reasons to watch Orange is the New Black.

It’s for the sake of actresses like Polanco, and Brooks, and Mulgrew that I watch the show. It is for Laverne Cox and her absolutely fantastic portrayal of Sophia, a trans woman in prison, who is breaking new ground for trans representation both on and off screen (check her out on the cover of Time magazine if you haven’t seen). Basically, I watch the show for them:

And one hundred percent not for her:

enhanced-buzz-9307-1373909458-47 — Yes, dear. Yes you are.

This leads me into the part about the show that I do not like, and that is the seeming inability of the show to utilize the word bisexual. For those uninitiated into the Piper Chapman drama-fest, Piper goes to prison and leaves behind her wet blanket of a fiancé Larry. In prison, she meets up once more with her ex-girlfriend Alex, with whom she used to traffic drugs and who Larry knew nothing about. No surprise, Piper ends up hooking up once more with her ex-girlfriend, played by the phenomenal Laura Prepon, and so begins the ‘will they-won’t they’ of the Piper/Larry/Alex fiasco.

A great deal of discussion goes into Piper’s sexuality on the show, which the writers seem to want to portray as complex and nuanced, as all sexuality truly is. However, in most of the show’s exploration of Piper’s sexual identity, they confine the discussion to the terms ‘straight’ or ‘lesbian’ or ‘gay’. Piper herself explains that she likes both men and women (see the above photo) but stops short of using bisexual as a term. In fact, there’s almost zero acknowledgement by many characters that bisexual is an actual choice and that one does not have to choose one way or the other.

One of the most brilliant exchanges in the show about Piper’s sexuality comes when she gets back together with Alex. Larry bemoans the situation to Cal, Piper’s weird but extremely cool and often wise brother.

Larry: So is she gay now?

Cal: I’m going to go ahead and guess that one of the issues here is your need to say that a person is exactly anything.

And with that statement, I think we get more of the showrunner’s feelings on the subject than anything else. The show battles the notion that people are able to be confined to labels, that relationships are more complicated than just one word, and that identity is not built upon a single classification. And in so many ways I applaud that idea, because the world is nuanced and not made up of check boxes on a form. Yet there is a serious issue in my eyes in the way they sweep Piper’s bisexuality under the rug. Her drunken statement above, or her often confused back and forth over whether or not she is gay, is the embodiment of the struggle that many bisexual people go through in this world. The struggle to stand up and not wince when people ask, “So you’re a lesbian?” (as her parents and friends did) or to deal with women who will say that she is a “straight girl” who is just confused (like Alex does at the end of Season One), these are constant issues that bisexual folks face. They are labeled as confused straight people or people who cannot get off the fence and ‘make a decision’ about their sexuality. They are identified as one or the other, straight and confused or a gay and in denial, all the time. These are labels bisexual folks have to deal with all the time. Piper is stuck with them on the show constantly. So if she must deal with those labels, and the writers have no problem dropping them constantly, then what’s the problem with the label of bisexual?

This mixed message of embracing the complexities of human sexuality while seeming almost ashamed of a term that accurately represents Piper’s situation seems curiously uncomfortable in a show that is so good at pushing boundaries. The often awkward conversations on the show between Piper and Larry about the Kinsey scale and being “turned gay” in prison are nothing next to the inability of the show to embrace an identity that is part of the LGBTQ spectrum, a title that is swept under the rug all the time and derided by many. If the show wants to be positive towards bisexuality, it would help if it didn’t seem to want to make the term disappear.

One must at least celebrate that Orange is the New Black is exploring this issue in the first place. For years, bisexual characters were relegated to innuendo or vague hand-waved relationship statuses on shows. I remember growing up realizing that Susan Ivanova on Babylon 5 was bisexual but being so disappointed at how behind-the-hand and indirect the show was about her attraction to the show’s resident telepath Talia Winters. I wanted to see more relationships with women explored by Jadzia Dax on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and crowed when I started seeing more representation on the shows I loved. Now we have Delphine Cormier and her newly discovered attraction to Cosima on Orphan Black, the fantastic Captain Jack Harkness on Torchwood, Doctor Remy Hadley on House, Oberyn Martell on Game of Thrones and Bo the succubus on Lost Girl. Orange is the New Black is joining a long line of shows who are now including bisexual characters. It would however be nice to see, for all its exploration, a level of comfort with bisexuality as an identity label than what we’ve seen so far.

Maybe the idea of Orange is the New Black is to tell us to throw off labels, to ignore classifications, and to embrace the nuanced nature of each person we meet. Yet when bisexuality and the term has been much maligned, white washed, hidden and ignored in the media for years, I’d get behind the show a little more solidly if it didn’t seem so concerned with labeling Piper anything but. Because right now, for all its positive and progressive representation, I will say I’m feeling a serious lack of actual representation here.

(Though I’ll be very honest: I don’t even think if they fixed this that I’d ever like Piper. That would take a miracle.)

Postscript: Included below is a gallery of some of those characters I mentioned above that have explored bisexuality as part of their character portrayal on their shows. This is in no way a complete list of bisexual characters on television, just a few of my favorites. A lot of them, you might notice are from scifi/fantasy shows. That’s because that’s a lot of what I watch. Feel free to comment on some of your favorite representations as well, I’m always interested in hearing about others.