And now for something completely different.

I mentioned I wrote an essay about Daenerys from A Game of Thrones to a friend of mine.  I think the title (which is probably the best thing in the essay) is what made her ask me to post it up.

Anyway, here it is, in its entirety.  For the record, this is completely unedited from when I submitted it to my prof, by which I mean completely unedited in the first place.

I see your penis and raise you three dragons: Development of an independent woman in George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones

            At a quick gloss, George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones might not seem like the most viable feminist text, as it focuses on a medieval nobility where power is firmly in the hands of men: men who rule, men who war, and men who quite often view wives as little more than a chance to forge alliances with one noble house and produce heirs (male heirs, almost exclusively).  However, things are not quite as simple as all that: Martin features characters such as Cersei Lannister, a plotting, intelligent woman who is frustrated with and rebellious against her subservience to men, or Arya Stark, a young girl who purposefully rebukes the expectations of a Lord’s daughter.  Even more interestingly, however, Martin focuses on the young Daenerys Targaryen, whose story occurs almost entirely separately from the greater majority of the novel’s narrative.  Daenerys begins the story as a girl who is utterly at the mercy of her half-mad and viciously cruel brother, Viserys, who threatens her with both physical and psychological torment, whilst wedding her to a tribal warlord in order to garner power for himself.  It follows that initially Daenerys, a girl who is utterly powerless, utterly disenfranchised, is defined almost exclusively by way of her sex, and her biology.  However, Martin plots an interesting course for the young, deposed heir to Westoros, which sees her moving away from such a subservient existence and towards a position of power, respect, and one where she blurs lines of gender and authority.  Her development as a character, then, can be viewed as mirroring the development of feminist ideals, particularly those of critics such as Judith Butler or Adrienne Rich.  Daenerys’ initial oppression almost exactly characterizes some of the issues which are at the heart of second- and third-wave feminism; she is a member of an inferior “second sex” which can be controlled and subjugated by way of men’s “…ability to deny women sexuality or to force it upon them; to command or exploit their labor or to control their produce … to confine them physically and prevent their movement; to use them as objects in male transactions; [and] to cramp their creativeness…”, as explicated in Kathleen Gough’s “The Origin of Family” (58).  Daenerys is situated firmly as a young girl who is being defined by her “…biological role as [a] childbearer,” and in the early chapters this definition frightens and subjugates her (Stanley, Wise 93).  It is, however, plainly presented as something wrong, and her path continuing into the novel generally leads her towards growing independence, appropriation of typical male power, and an embracement of the feminist ideal of a woman who is not dependent upon men, nor harmful to her fellow women.  The ultimate arrival of the narrative is not, of course, perfect, and some issues persist, but on the whole Daenerys’ growth models both the difficulties which feminism highlights, and the solutions it hopes to approach.

            To understand the growth of Daenerys, of course, it is key to take note of just how her character begins, and to further address the specific concerns that her situation highlights.  When she is introduced to the reader, quite literally the first thing she does is to obey an order given to her by her brother, Viserys.  He holds up a dress, and commands her to touch it, which she obediently does.  In other words, Viserys presents a symbol of femininity, and then orders Daenerys to identify with it.  It is absolutely imperative, however, to note that she does not identify with the dress: while she describes the fabric as being softer than anything she could remember, a trait one might normally associate with beauty and attraction, the dress in fact “frighten[s] her” (Martin 28).  Her acceptance of her brother’s tyranny establishes what will be a prominent trend in the earlier chapters of the book: her femininity is forced on to her by a male in a superior position, which terrifies her but is unchallenged, since she has no possible recourse.  Shortly thereafter, he commands her to straighten her posture so that Daenery’s prospective husband will “…see that [she has] a woman’s shape now,” before pinching her nipples and threatening that disobedience will “wake the dragon”, i.e. cause him to rage against her (Martin 29). 

Viserys’ abuse of his sister speaks directly to some of Adrienne Rich’s observations (which were prompted by Gough’s “The Origin of Family”) that men can domineer women by assembling “…a pervasive cluster of forces, ranging from physical brutality to control of consciousness, which suggests that an enormous potential counterforce is having to be restrained” (Rich 1596).  Indeed, much of the early chapters of Daenerys’ arc are focused on that “cluster of forces” which domineer her, not the least of which is the institution of marriage.  In her essay “Who Has the Power? The Martial Struggle”, Dair L. Gillespie examines marriage as a relationship which, while presented as natural and wholesome, enabled men to be the wife’s “…superior, her companion, her master” (65).  However, Daenerys does not look forward to her wedding day with jovial optimism, and does not view it as the natural, happy course for her life to take: she is terrified of her marriage to the towering Khal Drogo, and of the restraint and control she imagines will be inflicted upon her.  What Daenerys fears is the control that men can exert, as described by Rich, Gough, and Gillespie, and a societal structure that will enable her husband to dictate her entire being.  Here Martin is basically informing the reader, by way of Daenerys’ terror and subjugation that such a marriage structure is wrong, and is slipping past societal constructions of marriage as natural by attaching the anxieties Daenerys feels to the grandiose spectacle of his imagined Dothraki culture.  It is only when Daenerys begins to realize that her husband does not intend to subjugate and control her that her fear fades, and it is only then that the reader may view her marriage to Drogo as healthy and productive.

The first moment when Daenerys’ fear subsides occurs when she is given a horse, and is allowed to ride it to Drogo’s pavilion: her fear fades as she rides it, as she becomes increasingly aware that she has control over the horse, that the horse responds to “the slightest pressure with her legs, the lightest touch on the reins”, and that when she moves, the “Dothraki scramble to clear a path [for her]” (106).  In one of the most brilliant lines in the book, Martin writes: “The silver horse leapt the flames as if she had wings” (106).  Precisely who the “she” signifies is left intentionally unclear: Martin is implying that the horse, as a symbol of movement and freedom, has transferred its properties to her, and that she is approaching a sort of freedom even as she advances toward a perceived imprisonment in marriage.  Had Martin then drawn a Drogo who reverted back to the dominance of his wife, this fleeting image of freedom would vanish: however, when Drogo approaches Daenerys for the first time and she weeps, he rubs away her tears, and tells her “no,” which is revealed to be the only word of Daenerys’ language that he speaks (Martin 107).  As they proceed through the consummation of their marriage, Drogo does not absolutely heed Daenerys’ hesitation, but he does proceed “gently but firmly”, revealing a “strangely tender” nature that is comforting to Daenerys (108).  Initially, he only touches and stimulates Daenerys, but when the moment comes for Drogo to actually penetrate her, he says “No?” and “[Daenerys knows] it [is] a question” (108).  This is hugely important, because Drogo is essentially giving Daenerys a sense of agency that she has not had until this moment; however, it is still sustained within the marriage contract, which if we follow the track of writers such as Gillespie is inherently designed to make the husband the superior figure even in a marriage wherein “…the husband recognizes more willingly the independence of his wife’s demands” (Gillespie 65).  Gillespie warns that even a marriage which seems egalitarian can often favour the husband in terms of division of power, due to factors such as legal precedent (which, in A Game of Thrones, materializes as Drogo’s leadership of the Dothraki people granting him generally uncontested authority) (Gillespie 71).  While this does complicate the progression of Daenerys’ character, the later sections of Daenerys’ story feature an event which drastically alters her situation, and opens up interesting possibilities: her husband dies, quite unexpectedly.

By removing Daenerys’ husband—albeit by way of the somewhat questionable method of his death—Martin opens up a new avenue through which Daenerys’ story may proceed.  Immediately following the death of Drogo, his tribe—called a khalasar—splinters into disparate factions, most of which ride off, following former high-ranking members of Drogo’s khalasar, leaving the sick, the young, and the elderly who have no leader, save for Daenerys (758).  Furthermore, Daenerys desperately tries to restore her husband to life—only to have him return as a lifeless husk that is really no more than a sort of zombie (759).  A great deal can be said about this, but I only want to take away that her attempt to return to the family structure fails, and such an attempt is rewarded amply with hardship and suffering, gesturing to a movement away from the traditional construction of the family.  In his removal of the husband figure, Martin allows Daenerys to begin deconstructing the norms which have for so long defined the Dothraki culture she has been immersed in: to further interpret this, we can turn to Judith Butler’s conception of gender as a performative concept.  In Gender Trouble, Butler discusses gender as being not “expressive but performative”, as “created through sustained social performances”, from which it follows that “…the very notions of an essential sex and a true of abiding masculinity or femininity” are essentially constructs designed to reinforce traditional values associated with the sexes (2553).  She further elaborates that stepping outside such norms would open up “…performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality” (2553).

Framing Daenerys’ story—after her husband’s death—with Butler’s theory of performative gender, we can begin to view how Martin is playing with gender expectations, and positions of power for women.  After decisively concluding that her husband cannot be truly brought back to life, Daenerys decides to sacrifice his body, alongside the woman who betrayed her.  As she prepares to burn her husband and the sage woman, she dons “…a vest like Drogo’s”, and assumes a position of power similar to Drogo’s, by offering gifts to her husband’s “bloodriders” (loyal followers and bodyguards), which are initially refused by two of the three men, who say “Only a man can lead a khalasar or name a ko”, and “It would shame me, to be bloodrider to a woman” (802, 800).  However, Daenerys is not deterred by the refusal of the men, displaying a lack of concern for their disapproval of her appropriation of male gender roles.  Even as she does take on these male aspects, she does not utterly eschew her identity as a wife, daughter, mother, or woman in general: references are made to her “milk-heavy breasts”, and she thinks of herself as the “daughter of dragons, bride of dragons, mother of dragons” (806).  As she maintains all of these identities—still while incorporating the aspects of her husband’s power through clothing and custom—she commands absolute power, even where she is greeted by hesitancy and reluctance to obey.  When she is questioned by a knight, Jorah Mormont, she plainly orders him to “Do as I say,” and does not accept any further questioning.  Finally, she places three dragon eggs—originally given to her as little more than decoration—onto her funeral pyre, hatching them by walking into the flames as her husband and the woman who betrayed her die.  By turning an object typically associated with femininity—jewellery—into both children and weapons she embraces her identity as a woman, but asserts herself as one who will have power and agency.  Furthermore, her hybridization of male and female identity is shown to be more potent than typical manifestations of gender might be: Daenerys’ Dothraki followers, after seeing her hatch her dragon’s eggs, become “hers now, today and tomorrow and forever, hers as they had never been Drogo’s” (806).

At the outset of A Game of Thrones, Daenerys Targaryen is presented as an utterly subservient victim of patriarchal male dominance, subjected to near-constant torture by her vicious elder brother.  The next scenes in the novel seem to be leading to an almost nightmarish manifestation of female oppression, as Daenerys is betrothed to be wed to a domineering warlord of a foreign, tribal society.  Daenerys’ oppression almost perfectly embodies the trends identified by Gough and Rich, of women being subjugated by men through the “…ability to deny women sexuality or to force it upon them; to command or exploit their labor or to control their produce … to confine them physically and prevent their movement; to use them as objects in male transactions; [and] to cramp their creativeness…” (Gough 58).  Interestingly, however, the arranged marriage which Daenerys is forced into is not undesirable, and her husband proves to be deceptively tender and understanding.  However, one must not forget that it was an arranged marriage, and that the structure inherent to it puts Daenerys in the subordinate position, as Dair Gillespie notes in “Who Has the Power?  The Marital Struggle.”  Martin takes the somewhat radical approach of having Drogo die, leaving Daenerys to take on his responsibilities as leader of the remaining Dothraki, simultaneously combining aspects of the male gender with those normally associated with the female, evoking Judith Butler’s theory of performative gender.  Notably, the conclusion of Daenerys’ arc in A Game of Thrones does not subscribe absolutely to any one of the feminist theories discussed, and offers no easy answers regarding the problem of women’s power and issues of gender.  Daenerys serves as an embodiment of the struggle for women’s rights, and the difficulties involved in trying to successfully navigate away from the dominance of patriarchal society.

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Leitch 2540-2553.

Freeman, Jo, ed. Women: A Feminist Perspective. Palo Alto: Mayfield, 1975.

Gillespie, Dair L. “Who Has the Power? The Marital Struggle.” Freeman 64-87.

Gough, Kathleen. “The Origin of the Family.” Freeman 43-63.

Leitch, Vincent B., ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2^nd Edition. New

     York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010.

Martin, George. A Game of Thrones. New York: Bantam Dell, 1996.

Rich, Adrienne. Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence. Leitch 1591-1609.

Stanley, Liz, and Sue Wise, eds. Breaking Out Again: Feminist Ontology and

     Epistemology. New Edition. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Time to blow the dust off this sucker

Well, it's been a while....

Mostly, you can attribute the downturn in blog-posting activity due to the pile-up of schoolwork. Essays, final exams, etc. I wanted to do one of those blogs where I record my scattered thoughts while writing an essay, but the one time I did it my thoughts turned out to be disappointingly coherent. I blame the lack of children's cartoons.

A deficiency which will probably persist, since my general to-do list for the summer more or less looks like an HBO Greatest Hits series. Mostly, I want to watch The Wire, since anyone who's so much as seen half an episode has informed me that it's really, really good. Liking really, really good things as I do, I figured it was worth a shot. Also I might try and finish the Sopranos (I never did finish the series) and maybe Deadwood.

More to the point: Game of Thrones! I haven't been this excited about a new tv series since ... well, I can't actually think of a series that has excited me this much, ever. However, I pretty seldom watch TV series (this summer looking to be the exception), so I'll refrain from trying to post any comments on it since I don't really feel well-versed enough in the subject matter to talk about it. Chris Lockett's blog will, I'm betting, provide a pretty cool breakdown of the series: An Ontarian in Newfoundland.

Which brings me back to the whole point that I started writing this, if there was one to begin with. Over the past few months I've genuinely enjoyed this thing. It's provided a fun opportunity for me to smack my digits on my keyboard to produce something hopefully resembling an occasionally funny post, or at least one that's reasonably interesting. But insofar as now there's never really been a general direction for the thing. As I speak, I have reviewed, for example, exactly one videogame, talked about fantasy a bunch, mused a little on my life for no reason other than that it amused me a bit, and have posted more than a few bite-sized funny things (my favorite being this one).

This peregrine nonsense stops now, I say!

(Okay, to step aside for a second: peregrinate is a word which means, apparently, to travel or wander about, typically from place to place. Peregrine is the adjective, which can also delineate being outlandish, strange, imported from abroad, or extraneous to the bulk of what's being said, which makes this aside peregrine. How cool is that? I choose to believe it's tied in with peregrine falcons, though I have absolutely no proof to the positive on that.)

Uh, yeah. I like words. Anyhow, I'm not exactly about to "streamline" or "revolutionize" or similarly "bullshitinate" this blog, but I'm hoping to find a sort of general thrust for it, or at least a feature which I can return to semi-regularly.

That in mind, the one area which I do feel pretty sufficiently versed in to comment on regularly is videogames. I mean, I've been playing them most of my life, and I've played more than a couple. But the reason I don't often have any inclination to look at really popular games is that, honestly, most of them bore me, or if I do enjoy them, they're not stimulating enough to make me want to write on them (exceptions: Bioshock, Final Fantasy, Tales of Vesperia, Minecraft, which I suppose is sort of Indie, and anything Bioware makes). However, for the past few days, I've been on an Indie game binge, using the Xbox's pretty well-engineered Indie platform. I've been going through the big ones, if such a thing can exist in what is pretty generally a marginal category, and I've been enjoying myself. So I figure I might make it a bit of a project to start reviewing the Indie games on the XBL Arcade, separating the chaff from the wheat. The upshot of this is that, honestly, playing these things will cost me somewhere in the region of 80-240 MS points per purchase, so it's something I can do without bankrupting myself or limiting to myself to only games that I'd want to buy, anyway.

Right now I'm playing Cthulhu Saves the World, so hopefully I'll be able to post some thoughts about it when I'm done (which should be soon; the game's addictive as all hell and finals are nearly over).

Am I the only one who always found this amusing?

"Write a well-developed/well-written/well-illustrated/well-something'd essay about..."

It almost suggests that otherwise the student might set out to write a terrible essay. I mean, sure, sometimes they don't give a darn, but I don't think anyone actually thinks to themselves "Well-developed? Screw that! I'm going to write a rambling diatribe on Marlowe from the point of view of a beaver."

...

That would actually be hilarious.

A Modest Proposal

Dear people of the universe,

Replace "random" with "arbitrary" in your speech.

Thank you,

People Who Know What They're Talking About

This always bothered me

This is an entire post about ellipses.

This is how you use one in the middle of a sentence: The red fox … ate a crocodile.

Technically, you're supposed to put a space in between each point, but unless you're writing a manuscript, not really necessary.

This is how you end a sentence: The red fox ate a crocodile ….

The Monster in Videogames

In one of the courses I'm doing this term--The Gothic--we're assigned a group project, which can be on a subject of our choosing. Since I'm not likely going to be able to convince any sizable group of people to write on The Gothic and Videogames, I'm basically retooling the thoughts I had towards the argument and presenting them here. I'm actually completely serious, this is going to be one of those boring critical blog posts.

Anyway, guns up, let's do this. Leeeeeeeeerooooooooooooooooooooooy....

The first thing that must be considered, naturally, when examining the interaction of video game media with any particular genre or group is the precise nature of the video game itself: it is, essentially, a medium which offers direct interface with "the text", putting the player directly into the narrative present. The depth, complexity, and quality of said narrative is not, precisely, important: at this juncture I am not evaluating whether or not video games are good or even qualify as valid forms of literature, simply that they are a form of media with which a great number of people interact, and that their narrative structures do possess certain relevant tendencies which merit attention. The answer to why they merit such attention is, I think, clear, and based in that direct interface that videogames offer: if videogames do possess certain recurrent themes, particularly certain gothic elements, why is that the case, and to what does it speak?

I'm fairly certain I've lost . . . well, just about everyone by this point, but screw it, I'm having fun.

The first issue I'd like to address, and likely the only one within this blog post since I'm already getting pretty ranty, is the presence of the monster in videogames, the themes of transhumanism, and their relation with the player (hereafter referred to as "the subject", quite plainly because sooner or later I will fall prey to jokes about playas and playa haters).

Anyone with even a passing relationship with videogames can easily observe that there is a preoccupation with not only monsters, but with the destruction of monsters, in several senses. Firstly, they are an obstacle to be overcome and defeated, but secondly, they themselves are almost universally portrayed in a state of maddening decay that while simultaneously stripping themselves of their humanity provides them with a brutal ability to inflict harm upon not only the player, but the supposed other aspects of the game universe. These monsters often begin as ordinary human beings, who through application of technology or magic--the two being interchangeable and exclusive only by way of genre, rather than function--suffer a prolonged transformation and subversion of their human natures, often towards some new racial impetus at an utter disconnect from the human. There are typically two types of monsters which emerge from this process, who I will loosely term as the boss-type and the minion-type.

If I ever try and do this in some serious academic environment, I'll just use German words that essentially mean the same thing.

As the more common iteration, I'll focus on the minion-type first, its connotations, implications, et cetera. The examples of such creatures are easily available for reference: zombies in Left 4 Dead and the broad swath of zombie videogames in general, the Chimera in the Resistance series, Super Mutants and those zombie-cousins, Ghouls, in the Fallout Series, and to pick a less modern and likely more surprising source: the Goomba in Super Mario (Goomba are, technically, denizens of the Mushroom Kingdom transformed into monsters as consequence of their service to Bowser).

These creatures share in common the traits I have already discussed: they are modified by way of magic or technology--which are, again, essentially the same thing and carry out the same function--are originally human, and in most cases, retain some gross perversion of the human shape, while utterly lacking any method of communication, articulation, or expression. These enemies are often thrown at the human player in waves, and there is never any suggestion that the murdering of these creatures is unjust--even in the children's game Super Mario. They represent, essentially, perversions of the human form, brought about by an ill-advised intimacy with either technological or magical forces that seek to advance beyond social norms in some sense. At first glance this theory mightn't hold up when presented with the straightforward zombies of Left 4 Dead and its like, but consider precisely who the survivors are: often, humans who had the good sense and wherewithal to find a safe place to avoid the majority of the infections, who avoided temptation such as going to key points like hospitals or police stations, where other humans succumbed rapidly to infection.

This, I think, shines an interesting life on the position of the player/subject. Their character is, most often, a survivor of the great tragedy who is removed from social norms, and set against the waves of monstrous transhumans. Nathan Hale, of Resistance fame, is a soldier often set apart from his squad, and certainly the vast majority of the normal human military, the Vault Dweller (and his/her later counterparts in sequel games) in Fallout is a member of a society which has rejected him/her to face dangers and stand alone in an unforgiving world, and so on. The subject, then, takes the role of the recluse, but the recluse who finds justification in destroying elements of society which have mutated into something undesirable, like cancers which need to be removed. The justification for this destruction is simple, and furthermore the process of destruction justifies the subject's own deficient characteristics: certainly, videogame heroes are far more often than not individuals who would not function properly if they were not given violent, wartime circumstances in which to thrive.

I would suggest, then, that this points to the key fantasy of videogames, that socially inadequate individuals can win favor and affection by dint of their heroic actions against devastating dangers, which are often presented as mutilations of humanity. By shaving away undesirable elements of humanity, the subject is justified in their own bizarre traits. But by this point, I'm getting off-topic.

The minion-type is a massed enemy, a set of creatures which appear in large groups and have no individual distinction, thereby stripping them of any remaining humanity even further: this offers a simple morality wherein their destruction presents no conflicting choice to the subject, and killing them is undoubtedly the correct action. Therefore they function as an "easy out" to justify the character's actions, which in any other circumstance involving excessive violence, would necessitate a great deal of self-examination (that is to say, one does not gun down hundreds of actual people without serious doubt and consequence; or at least, they shouldn't).

This is getting far longer than I originally intended, so I think I'll stop there and continue next Thursday, when I have another two-hour break in which I can freely ramble about utterly irrelevant nonsense.

Whoops

By way of this blog post, I have not, technically, gone a whole month without writing a post. Unless you count February, but it's not bloody February.

I don't really have anything terribly witty to write about right now, but I feel as though I need to post something. So I figure I'll talk about the movie I'm currently watching as I sit in between classes, waiting for my next one to start (presuming it, too, isn't cancelled). That movie is Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, which has been one of my favorite movies for a long time, since I got it for Christmas as a kid (though I thought myself mighty mature and grown-up at the time). Actually, if I were to talk about the first PotC movie, it'd basically go like this:

PotC is awesome.

...

So awesome.

And that's no fun. So instead I'm gonna talk about the sequels to the movie, which have always been a weird spot of contention. On one hand, do I feel that the original movie deserved sequels? Yes. I just didn't think that any of the characters save for Jack Sparrow and perhaps Commodore Norrington needed to be held over from the first film: they were largely just vehicles for the plot to move forward, whereas Sparrow and Norrington provided the real guts of the movie, in my opinion. The face that Will and Elizabeth, two profound bores, will not be returning for the fourth movie, strikes me as a bit of a light in a very dim tunnel, but I'm taking it with a grain of salt.

The sequels do provide a fun distraction, I think, in watching Jack Sparrow interact with other characters, and the degradation and eventual reinstatement of Norrington were spots of interest for me, but unfortunately the rest of the films were bland, cookie-cutter blockbuster material, with no real point or purpose to them. *SPOILERS* I think the mishandling of Will Turner in the sequel films was part of the problem. In the first film, Will was Jack Sparrow's straight man, and could sometimes even be charming and funny. In the sequels, they tried to play Will up as a pirate, and Jack's equal, which failed utterly because the character is, frankly, uninteresting. This is pure speculation on my part, but I would guess that the Will character might be a holdover from early drafts of Pirates of the Caribbean, possibly attempting to blend some of the traditional character elements that Jack Sparrow was supposed to possess into Will's good-natured straight man routine. Frankly, it didn't work.

Elizabeth was even less enjoyable to watch, at least for me. To my eye, she is trying far too hard to be the rough-and-tumble badass fighting chick didn't work terribly well, since not a film or so ago she was running around in dresses all the time (and not prepared to do very much else). The excuse that she learned swordplay from Will comes off about as unconvincing as Will's assertion that he trains with his swords three hours each day. If they wanted to give Elizabeth a bit more clout, she could've used her wits, but then again she tries to do that a couple times in the sequel films and comes off as rather annoying. If they wanted a badass pirate-lady, they should've just introduced a new character.

By this point I'm rambling. I guess my general feeling on Pirates of the Caribbean is that the sequels were sadly mishandled, but they were at least fun to watch Jack Sparrow in action. Nevermind the bloody CGI squid Davy Jones, that's a whole 'nother post's worth.

Hopefully, with the fourth film coming out having gutted about half the cast of the previous movies, maybe the next one'll be better. But I'm not holding out.

The Saddest Story Never Told: Firefly

If you are reading this, odds are you are to some small degree a nerd.

It might be a little thing. Maybe you like the odd fantasy book. Maybe you're fond of videogames, maybe you read comic books. Maybe it's all three. Maybe it's as simple as, you watched Star Wars once and liked it. It does not matter to what degree one is a nerd: it only matters that one is, and in that instance, know that It is coming.

If It has already happened to you, you know to which I refer--probably because of the blog title--but if it hasn't, I regret to inform you that the single-most blended moment of love, horror, delight, fury, and utter confusion has not yet happened to you. Perhaps you think that that one time that chick broke up with you was worse, and she was really the one, you know?

Well, you're wrong.

Of all the experiences nerds share--that first time you watched Star Wars IV (and if you haven't, seriously, what the hell), when you finished reading Lord of the Rings--most are fairly unique to the individual experiencing them. It may be some comfort that It is something that we all experience, in more or less the same way. Because there is no greater pain for a nerd, dork, geek, or general pop culture afficianado. No greater pain.

It is Firefly. It is coming. You cannot stop it. You will not stop it. If It has already happened to you, you know the story. The beginnings are similar. Your friends insist that Firefly is the single-greatest thing to happen to television, that you need to watch it, that Joss Whedon is God, etc., until a point where you hate the very mention of Firefly or Whedon in such an elemental way that to hear their mere mention is enough to send you into an eye-rolling gut-curling fit of grumbling upset. One day, however, you stumble upon one of those friends in the midst of a Firefly marathon, though you might not yet realize it is Firefly. It seems very interesting. There are cowboys, and spaceships.

Seriously.

You ask if your friend has gotten very far into the series. Typically, as though by happy coincidence of the universe, they have not, and they restart. You decide to watch the first episode with them, for kicks.

By the time it closes, you realize there is nothing on this earth that could tear you from that screen. You careen through the entire series, and possibly the film Serenity. Either way, in the rough span of a day, you reach the end.

And then it hits you like a sack of bricks concentrated on your groin. This was cancelled. You look at your friend in disbelief. They sigh and pat your shoulder and say "I know." They have not come to terms with it, either. They never will, nor will you. It is all any of us can do to continue on with that terrible, burning conviction that such a horrifyingly regrettable mistake has been made, that you and yours have somehow been wronged, forever, by the cancelling of this show.

It will never leave you. And every now and again, when your guard is down, when you least expect it, it will occur to you in an instant of sheer rage and disbelief, and you'll be reduced to that first instant of horrible realization that quite possibly Joss Whedon's best series was killed before it grew to the greatness it could have reached.

"Buffy's first season blew," you think to yourself. "Imagine what Firefly could've been."

My Attraction to Squiggly Things

Today, I spent the better part of an hour fiddling around with the gadgets and layout of my blog page. The changes are, no doubt, nearly unnoticeable. There's now a "Popular Posts" section, which really just gives me fodder for self-deprecating humor about the relative popularity of a blog with a readership of perhaps four people. I added a Search bar, because while I doubt anyone else has this frustration as much as I do, I hate when I can't just search for something on any given web page.

I also tinkered with how my labels appear, and added the "Reactions" bit to my post, mostly so that I can see how high the "sexually explicit" numbers can get. However, these are all late additions. The first thing I added to my blog was a pageview counter.

Why did I add it there? I really don't need it. I mean, I can guess the average daily pageview right now: one or two friends who I bully into reading, a couple people who see it on facebook, maybe one or two who get there from my NaNoWriMo page, and me, refreshing about fifty times or so.

Honestly, I added it because it's a funny little line. You'd see a Simpsons character sliding along one in a slightly more surreal segment of a financial episode, or something. And I've always loved those funny little lines with an absurd devotion.

And that's pretty much the reason I need to do anything. Now, it's time for ice cream and A Clash of Kings.