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necessarian) wrote2019-04-19 11:08 am
necessarian) wrote2019-04-19 11:08 am
Entry tags:
the drop point
this is in part an archiving post, because i forgot to cross-post this from pillowfort (which i'm basically not using anymore), and in part an update to that post, because of the magicians. i mention it in the original post and now seems like the perfect time to come back to this. i wish i didn't have to.
content warnings here for discussions of rape, abuse, antisemitism, racism, suicide, and magicians spoilers.
first, the old post:
and now the update, with spoilers:
to be perfectly clear, i have not watched 4x13, and i have no intention of doing so. i also do not intend to continue to watch the show. i've hit the drop point.
as covered in the previous post, i dropped the magicians once before. i was so excited to see that some of my favourite books were getting a show - and i also hoped it would be an opportunity to fix some of the stuff i didn't like about the books. (but that's a whole different essay.) so, i watched up to about 1x07, and then fell behind. before i got the chance to catch up, i heard that julia's rape gave her god powers. this is not how it happens in the books, though she is still raped there, and it's still totally unnecessary. anyway. i found - and still find - the decision that the show made to be disgusting. so disgusting that, at the time, it was enough for me to drop the show.
then, last year, i heard about 3x05. i heard the show was doing good things, that people had high hopes for season 4, and that it was worth catching up. as you can see in the post above, i was hopeful. but real life caught up and once again i fell behind. cue 4x05. suddenly everyone was talking about queliot, and i thought, okay, i need to catch up to see what the fuss is. so, spoiler, the magicians didn't stop being sucky post-julia's rape. julia and martin, as victims, teaming up to become villains? sketchy. woman dies to give quentin a child in 3x05 while the on screen gay relationship remains ambiguous? dodgy. poppy basically raping quentin? shockingly bad! all the like... terrible discussions of consent that just didn't land. the fact that female characters keep getting robbed of agency and nobody so much as blinks. the heavy-handed and lazy flint metaphor. i could go on.
there were good points, though. there were the characters, a lot of them growing and getting development outside their original roles. there was the easy humour, the surprisingly tasteful handling of pop culture references (eliot and margo's coded conversation stands out), the great handling of a massive ensemble cast. there was the fact that most of the time i was involved, i was having fun. then there was queliot. as with these things, it was both more and less than i expected. 4x05 was just, beautiful, really. it breathed life into a relationship i've been invested in in one way or another since i first watched brideshead revisited, as a 14 year old, and subsequently read it. (other people have said it better, but basically eliot is a complete expy for sebastian, and quentin to a lesser extent for charles. brakebills is an expy for oxford. sebastian and charles have one of the greatest doomed gay love affairs of any fiction ever. i am still sad.) i also had a lot of feelings about queliot when i read the books. (never mind that i heavily heavily relate to eliot on a number of dimensions; i am so attached to him as a character in a way i never was to sebastian.) so i guess you could say i was looking forward to queliot getting a look in.
i just... cannot begin to say how disappointed i am with their treatment of this relationship. i think it's hard for me not to wear my shipper goggles in this case, but i really truly didn't expect much. i didn't think we'd get a grand love story. i wasn't going to hold out for a miracle. what i did not think was that we'd get this gorgeous nod to the relationship with some absolutely stellar acting all around, a flash of acknowledgement between the two characters before eliot went back to being possessed, a whole season of quentin being torturously depressed and single-mindedly focused on saving eliot, and then...... quentin gets back together with alice for seemingly no reason other than that her past self was weird and manipulative towards him. quentin gives a monologue about how fillory betrayed him without once mentioning the fifty years he spent there. quentin dies saving eliot and they don't get a proper reunion scene. there's a tacky nod to the relationship in the funeral scene. then quentin is gone for good and eliot never gets resolution to his romantic arc, has to watch a second boyfriend die, and is basically closed off to romantic engagements for the foreseeable future.
what can i say but yikes?
and this is even before i get started on the manner of quentin's death, which i don't think i need to say sends an absolutely reprehensible message. (oh, look, i said it anyway.) i am beyond peeved at how the writers have been saying they wanted it to read ambiguously, but didn't want to send a pro-suicide message. uh, they absolutely did that. i mean, unequivocally, there is no way to read this self-sacrifice as anything other than suicide, particularly in the context of how utterly depressed quentin has been all season. for god's sake. look, not to give out details about myself on the internet, but i am mentally ill. i don't have the same type of mental illness as quentin but it's hard not to feel some sort of kinship when you're in a similar boat. needless to say i am constantly furious about the depiction of mental illness in the media. (and in fandom, but that really is another essay.) the magicians is a show that has done it better than most. so it feels like an extra hard slap in the face for them to turn around and throw away all that good work.
what really gets me is how the writers have been back-patting over this. they think they're soooo clever and edgy for killing their white male lead. (note how they dutifully avoid the appellation "straight" in that interview.) "tee hee, television reflects reality, nobody is safe!!" fuck you! i'm so done with this knowing grittiness. one of the things the books really nailed is quentin's emotional trajectory; growing up from being entitled and using his mental illness as an excuse, to discovering that there are ways of being happy without putting it all on the backs of other people. the show not only failed to deliver us this, it also gave us the horrifying message that suicide is okay, actually, and it's all underwritten by quentin getting to look in on his funeral and see how much his friends cared about him. i mean, this is utterly ghastly! this has taken me almost an hour to type out (granted, in between doing other stuff) because i just can't bear to think about it.
so where am i now, after the drop point? i don't think i can finish my WIP, or any of my ideas. not now, not for a while. i'm going to keep reading fic because it's my life and damn it if i want to i can live in any number of worlds, worlds where quentin lives, where eliot gets to be happy, where he and quentin build a life together. i just don't want to have to think about canon, going on. i can't imagine the magicians without quentin. i don't want to think about how the writers are going to gloss over this fundamental loss, particularly for eliot, alice, and julia, as i know they will. i'm not 100% done with it, and i never will be. because the magicians has become part of my personal mythology, the things i love that make up who i am. i just don't love it anymore, and will only be holding on to the parts that i do love.
if anyone - in the fandom or otherwise - wants to talk, i'm here. let's all look after ourselves.
content warnings here for discussions of rape, abuse, antisemitism, racism, suicide, and magicians spoilers.
first, the old post:
okay. i like the smiths. i like morrissey's music. i've liked the smiths since i was a sad teen who needed sad teen music to build an identity out of. it's music full of rebellious energy, wit, and charm. i have good memories of listening to their upbeat songs on happy days and bad memories of being sixteen and sitting on a train, close to tears, listening to "i won't share you" and trying to get over a crush. the smiths have consistently been one of my favourite bands for years and i'm also into morrissey's solo stuff. i like some of his songs more than i like some smiths songs. i even like his later music, a lot of which is not particularly good.
i'm telling you all this because i want to talk about liking things that are objectively... shit.
morrissey is shit. like, we've always known this, but it's been getting pretty egregious in the last couple of years, as he spouts racist and islamophobic rhetoric and publicly declares his support for ukip. under normal circumstances this is the kind of behaviour that would make me drop someone for good. but these are not normal circumstances. these are circumstances where on the one hand i have music that means something almost inarticulable to me, and on the other hand i have the reprehensible behaviour and attitudes of the person who wrote that music. i can't just stop listening to the smiths because i hate morrissey. i can't even stop listening to morrissey's solo stuff. it's too much a part of me.
sometimes it's easier than other times. i had no trouble deciding i'd never watch another woody allen movie in my life when i first learnt about his personal life. as soon as i heard about riverdale getting weird about indigenous issues in season 2 i stopped watching it. i never liked johnny depp in the first place.
sometimes it's harder. years ago, i stopped watching the magicians when i heard about a particular choice they made with regards to adapting a plotline in the book which involved rape. it wasn't good in the book, but the show made it actively worse. at the moment i'm currently giving the tv show another shot. i still don't approve of their choice, but with distance from my initial enjoyment of the books, i've become more judgemental of that plot point's existence in the first place. i no longer conceive of it as a "lesser of two evils" situation; rather, two things that are pretty garbage, but which i am trying not to let diminish my enjoyment of the other things i like about the magicians.
it's okay to enjoy something that you don't think is particularly good, or right. sometimes you like a piece of media which has some fundamentally horrid content in it. it happens. think critically, but don't make excuses. don't try to talk over anyone who's uncomfortable with it and chooses not to engage because of it. know that you are not beyond reproach.
today there was another big revelation about the depths of badness contained in the few short hours of the fantastic beasts franchise. i won't go into the details here because other people have covered it better than i could. the point is, this morning, not for the first time, i found myself questioning my continued engagement with the harry potter fandom. i've been writing harry potter fic since i was eight - like my love of the smiths, this is an aspect of myself that i would have a great deal of trouble excising. nevertheless, in the last couple of years i've moved away from writing fic in general. (still writing, but mostly original stuff these days.) the problem is that i've branched out into other fandoms, but at the end of the day i always come back to harry potter. there's a world full of possibility that i want to keep exploring.
today i feel like i wanted to leave and never come back. i have questioned this feeling: what about these latest revelations is any worse than what's come before? years ago, i made the call not to watch, support, or engage with the fantastic beasts films in any way. this was because (a) jkr didn't listen to jewish people who called her out on the antisemitic tropes present in the way she writes goblins, (b) doubled down on those antisemitic tropes, and (c) johnny depp. i am jewish. why didn't that push me away from harry potter for good?
the truth is that these things pile up and every new horror climbs on top of those that came before it, making each revelation worse than the last. every fresh bit of bullshit that falls out of the franchise (or jkr's twitter) makes me ask myself: why the fuck am i still here? it's not just fantastic beasts or pottermore or the cursed child; a lot of it is right there in the books, too! the books i loved as a child and build an identity around. i've grown out of the whole "harry potter being my entire life" phase but the truth is that i can still talk on and on about it at the drop of a hat. i still care. i cannot stop myself from caring.
one thing i'm certain of is that i don't want to absolve myself of any responsibility. these things in harry potter have wronged me, people i care about, and issues i care about, and yet i'm still here. that is 100% on me. i have seen all the horrible shit and i've said, that's fine, i still choose to associate myself with this. i can't stop associating myself with harry potter any more than i can stop listening to the smiths and morrissey. for now, i'll keep writing fic because i'll keep having ideas. but that's my problem. and i would not begrudge anyone who were to say, now's the time for me to step back, now's the time to move on.
i'm certainly getting close to that point myself.
and now the update, with spoilers:
to be perfectly clear, i have not watched 4x13, and i have no intention of doing so. i also do not intend to continue to watch the show. i've hit the drop point.
as covered in the previous post, i dropped the magicians once before. i was so excited to see that some of my favourite books were getting a show - and i also hoped it would be an opportunity to fix some of the stuff i didn't like about the books. (but that's a whole different essay.) so, i watched up to about 1x07, and then fell behind. before i got the chance to catch up, i heard that julia's rape gave her god powers. this is not how it happens in the books, though she is still raped there, and it's still totally unnecessary. anyway. i found - and still find - the decision that the show made to be disgusting. so disgusting that, at the time, it was enough for me to drop the show.
then, last year, i heard about 3x05. i heard the show was doing good things, that people had high hopes for season 4, and that it was worth catching up. as you can see in the post above, i was hopeful. but real life caught up and once again i fell behind. cue 4x05. suddenly everyone was talking about queliot, and i thought, okay, i need to catch up to see what the fuss is. so, spoiler, the magicians didn't stop being sucky post-julia's rape. julia and martin, as victims, teaming up to become villains? sketchy. woman dies to give quentin a child in 3x05 while the on screen gay relationship remains ambiguous? dodgy. poppy basically raping quentin? shockingly bad! all the like... terrible discussions of consent that just didn't land. the fact that female characters keep getting robbed of agency and nobody so much as blinks. the heavy-handed and lazy flint metaphor. i could go on.
there were good points, though. there were the characters, a lot of them growing and getting development outside their original roles. there was the easy humour, the surprisingly tasteful handling of pop culture references (eliot and margo's coded conversation stands out), the great handling of a massive ensemble cast. there was the fact that most of the time i was involved, i was having fun. then there was queliot. as with these things, it was both more and less than i expected. 4x05 was just, beautiful, really. it breathed life into a relationship i've been invested in in one way or another since i first watched brideshead revisited, as a 14 year old, and subsequently read it. (other people have said it better, but basically eliot is a complete expy for sebastian, and quentin to a lesser extent for charles. brakebills is an expy for oxford. sebastian and charles have one of the greatest doomed gay love affairs of any fiction ever. i am still sad.) i also had a lot of feelings about queliot when i read the books. (never mind that i heavily heavily relate to eliot on a number of dimensions; i am so attached to him as a character in a way i never was to sebastian.) so i guess you could say i was looking forward to queliot getting a look in.
i just... cannot begin to say how disappointed i am with their treatment of this relationship. i think it's hard for me not to wear my shipper goggles in this case, but i really truly didn't expect much. i didn't think we'd get a grand love story. i wasn't going to hold out for a miracle. what i did not think was that we'd get this gorgeous nod to the relationship with some absolutely stellar acting all around, a flash of acknowledgement between the two characters before eliot went back to being possessed, a whole season of quentin being torturously depressed and single-mindedly focused on saving eliot, and then...... quentin gets back together with alice for seemingly no reason other than that her past self was weird and manipulative towards him. quentin gives a monologue about how fillory betrayed him without once mentioning the fifty years he spent there. quentin dies saving eliot and they don't get a proper reunion scene. there's a tacky nod to the relationship in the funeral scene. then quentin is gone for good and eliot never gets resolution to his romantic arc, has to watch a second boyfriend die, and is basically closed off to romantic engagements for the foreseeable future.
what can i say but yikes?
and this is even before i get started on the manner of quentin's death, which i don't think i need to say sends an absolutely reprehensible message. (oh, look, i said it anyway.) i am beyond peeved at how the writers have been saying they wanted it to read ambiguously, but didn't want to send a pro-suicide message. uh, they absolutely did that. i mean, unequivocally, there is no way to read this self-sacrifice as anything other than suicide, particularly in the context of how utterly depressed quentin has been all season. for god's sake. look, not to give out details about myself on the internet, but i am mentally ill. i don't have the same type of mental illness as quentin but it's hard not to feel some sort of kinship when you're in a similar boat. needless to say i am constantly furious about the depiction of mental illness in the media. (and in fandom, but that really is another essay.) the magicians is a show that has done it better than most. so it feels like an extra hard slap in the face for them to turn around and throw away all that good work.
what really gets me is how the writers have been back-patting over this. they think they're soooo clever and edgy for killing their white male lead. (note how they dutifully avoid the appellation "straight" in that interview.) "tee hee, television reflects reality, nobody is safe!!" fuck you! i'm so done with this knowing grittiness. one of the things the books really nailed is quentin's emotional trajectory; growing up from being entitled and using his mental illness as an excuse, to discovering that there are ways of being happy without putting it all on the backs of other people. the show not only failed to deliver us this, it also gave us the horrifying message that suicide is okay, actually, and it's all underwritten by quentin getting to look in on his funeral and see how much his friends cared about him. i mean, this is utterly ghastly! this has taken me almost an hour to type out (granted, in between doing other stuff) because i just can't bear to think about it.
so where am i now, after the drop point? i don't think i can finish my WIP, or any of my ideas. not now, not for a while. i'm going to keep reading fic because it's my life and damn it if i want to i can live in any number of worlds, worlds where quentin lives, where eliot gets to be happy, where he and quentin build a life together. i just don't want to have to think about canon, going on. i can't imagine the magicians without quentin. i don't want to think about how the writers are going to gloss over this fundamental loss, particularly for eliot, alice, and julia, as i know they will. i'm not 100% done with it, and i never will be. because the magicians has become part of my personal mythology, the things i love that make up who i am. i just don't love it anymore, and will only be holding on to the parts that i do love.
if anyone - in the fandom or otherwise - wants to talk, i'm here. let's all look after ourselves.