What Do We Really Get Out Of It?

    More than anything, I think that the biggest thing that People get out of popular culture, and especially fan culture, is a sense of hope. Creativity isn’t something that is limited to gods in ivory towers, looking down on the masses with contempt and disdain. Sure, that exists too, but it isn’t the end-all-be-all of creative endeavors, and there’s proof of surprise success even in what would normally seem to be this “mass culture”. So forget it. Forget all of that. You can be creative too, random internet-person. Let’s see what you’ve got.

What do you think?

Fan Works - Legitimizing the Source

    I believe that one of the biggest gains to an artistic work or franchise can be found in fan works. From a commercial standpoint, fan works serve as free marketing, and are in some ways a positive feedback loop of people being interested. More importantly though, in a lot of ways, fan interaction legitimizes the original, official works. Especially high quality fan-works are proof that something has inspired the fans to a point where they wanted to create too. Sure, there’s plotless porn and sandwiches flooding the internet, but isn’t that a small price to pay for the occasional diamond in the rough?

    What do you think? Now that the semester has all but finished, are fan works good for creative endeavors? Or does the bad outweigh the good?

Discussion! Leia/R2-D2? - Or - Slash is Great, Guys.

    Now that the semester is all but over, I think now’s the time to ask the fun questions. Out of all of the things that we’ve read for this class, what’s your favorite slash pairing, why is it your favorite, and what kind of pairing is it? I think my favorite kind of pairing is the “Superbro” kind of pairing mentioned by Iris, but I’m still not sure what character pairing is actually my favorite. I think I would enjoy reading a Superbro story for say, Leia and R2-D2, but only because it seems kind of out there.

Getting Things Past the Radar - Scenes Implied Through Context

It should come as absolutely no surprise that I read Cracked, which is why I’m going to link a fairly good summary to what I was referring to in class the other day regarding the fate of Dolores Umbridge. The article is, by and large, Not Suitable For Work. The title “The Five Most Depraved Sex Scenes Implied by ‘Harry Potter’,” should be enough of a hint about that, but in case it isn’t, you’ve now been doubly-warned. It’s worth reading, honestly, but I’ll summarize the points made regarding Umbridge.

    The woods to which Umbridge is dragged off to in the fifth book are populated by a number of magical creatures, and though Centaurs are indeed an established inhabitant of the area, so too are things like giant spiders, so it’s safe to say that the choice of a roaming gang of Centaurs is an intentional one on Rowling’s part.

    The mythology of Centaurs is fairly clear on their generalized goals and actions, and at least one person present for Umbridge’s abduction knows this. To quote Cracked author Jacopo della Quercia, “Hint: It’s Hermione, the character whose main purpose in the plot is to know absolutely everything.” Neither she nor Harry make any effort to save Umbridge from multiple horse-men.

    Umbridge is clearly written to be a character that is hated, but teenagers and teenage girls in the story seem to take no small amount of glee in the fact that Umbridge, upon being found and brought back to Hogwarts, is suffering from a nonspecified trauma and reacts to the sound of mock-hooves clip-clopping with symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

    By all accounts, Umbridge needed to be punished for the things that she’s done and the way that she treated people, but at some point in considering how to go about doing this, Rowling sat down and said to herself, “What about gang rape?” That’s not a punishment. It’s a crime. Having established that there is a wizard prison, that admittedly was not really useful at the time of the fifth book, I think that, maybe, I don’t know, Umbridge should have had to go before that Wizard court they dragged Harry to and then gone to Wizard-Jail. But now, you’d basically have to be Dolores Umbridge to think that Dolores Umbridge still deserved some kind of formal punishment. Hasn't she suffered enough? 

In a single implied scene, Umbridge goes from monster, to victim. But it was just implied, so we still react to Umbridge with hate.

Pottermore Houses

I was absolutely certain that I would get Gryffindor. Especially when I got to the question about encountering the troll who demanded a fight. Of course I would volunteer as tribute. I’m awesome, and in this scenario I’m a wizard. Of course I’m going to fight just about anything I can. And, come on. Everyone's the main character of their own story, and Harry Potter put the frame of reference for "main character" with Gryffindor. Of course I was going to be in Gryffindor.

Then, something amazing happened. I was wrong.

In its infinite wisdom, the Sorting Hat put me in Hufflepuff.

I don’t want to even think about whether or not this is correct, or an accurate summary of my personality. I’m just happy to be a Hufflepuff.

Because it puts me in a position where I can associate myself firmly with this.

So, now that I've gotten the chance to geek out, what House did you get into?

Ever, Jane

I had, in class weeks ago, stated that I was planning a video all about Ever, Jane. Well, the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray. What follows is a rough draft of the script that would have become that video.

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Why Absolutely EVERYONE should be excited for Ever, Jane -

Why The Industry should BEND OVER BACKWARDS to make sure it succeeds -

How elements of game design and immersion form a better storytelling method -

I LOVE THIS GAME ALREADY

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So I’m going to get the English class stuff out of the way real quick, just so that we’re all on a level playing field.

Most of you probably recognize Jane Austen as a name from English class or from overhearing something said by that really smart girl with the glasses, who you completely ignored in high school because she got hit by the hormones part of puberty more than the physical parts and you’re super shallow.

Born 1775, died 1817, Jane Austen wrote Romantic fiction that focused primarily on the landed gentry in England.

It’s important to note that when we say she wrote “Romantic fiction”, most of us are thinking things like Dark Desires After Dusk and For the Love of Scotty McMullet, and to look at all the various adaptations of her work, and how they get marketed, it would be fair to be surprised that that sort of thing is not the focus of Austen’s work. Even Laurence Olivier could not escape from the cold, unfeeling grasp of the marketing department.

In her second novel, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen tells the tale of the Bennet family, and really, it’s bigger than I can describe here. We don’t have time, and if you’re watching this, I’m trusting that you’re smart enough to read. You should really just read it. It’s good for you.

In some ways part of the reason I’m even talking about this is the fact that in a bizarre twist of fate, Jane Austen’s work may have inspired the first modern version of what we call a “fandom”, with so-called “Janeites” being fanatical long before the first Trekkie was even conceived. Some of the first Trekkies may have even been conceived by Janeites, which is a terrifying thought.

What’s not surprising about an author who was only marginally successful in life, exploding in popularity following their death and maintaining a cult-like following for a great number of decades is that Austen’s works have of course inspired a number of adaptations, which all seem to overlook the actual life stuff that happens in her works in favor of marketing a fantasy about things like Dating Mr. Darcy, a brooding gentleman who was probably the reason that smart girl with the glasses was reading Jane Austen in high school.

What IS surprising is that on December 2, 2013, almost two hundred years after Austen’s death, we find ourselves faced with a reality in which a Jane Austen video game may very well become a reality, and I will remind you video game based story-telling has not progressed much beyond its early days of “vaguely representational image of white dude stomps his way through enemies that may as well be turtles.”

    I can hear you all in the comments already talking about games like Final Fantasy 7 making you cry when Aeris died, the big reveal at the end of the second generation of Pokemon games where the strongest trainer you could face was supposed to be your guy from the first generation, and the Bioshock series blowing your mind with things like the mind control assisted suicide scene where they actually take away player control  (“A man chooses. A slave obeys.”) and force you to just WATCH as this guy gets beaten to death with a minigolf club. I get that. I respect that. In fact, I devote much of my academic interests to exactly this sort of thing.

    But the fact of the matter remains that within gameplay itself, the formula has not changed much. Because video games are trying to also be a form of higher media, then I think it’s only fair to look at everything about them in order to judge their worth in a higher context. In a movie like The Lion King, the consumer of the entertainment culture takes a passive role in the experience, and has no input over what happens. By the end of The Lion King, the rather unsettling lesson of “Sometimes, people just need to die for a problem to be solved” can be gained vicariously. Simba is clearly not happy about what he has to do, and through Disney magic he’s absolved of actually needing to be the one to do it, but it still gets done because of him. And we just sit there and watch it happen.

    In a video game, contrary to the passive nature of other forms of entertainment culture, the consumer MUST take an active role, and for the sake of gameplay design, the methods by which a game is played are often the same from the beginning of the game all the way to the end of it, with the only major change being the difficulty of that process. This pretty much means that the predominant lesson of every video game, through its gameplay, is that your road to greatness is absolutely paved violence - and a whooooooole lot of it.

    While I don’t necessarily think that this sort of experience needs to be automatically counted as a mark against the medium (it would be like marking down paintings because they use paint to get their points across) I do think that it’s especially important to take note of the games that go against this idea.

    Ever, Jane bills itself primarily as a Roleplaying game, and while that description of a genre usually implies a Dungeons and Dragons type of game, where warriors and wizards do battle, in this instance, it’s meant more from the sense of immersion and pretend, the playing of a role.

The entire point of Ever, Jane then is to have a world that represents the things that Jane Austen is remembered for in her works, and to support a game-like structure to further facilitate “living” for a little while in that world.

The “stats” that form the building blocks of your character in a roleplaying game are typically things like Strength and Intelligence, but that’s not the case in Ever, Jane, which forgoes the usual formula in favor of things more representative of the themes of Austen’s work, such as Status, Reputation, Happiness, Duty and Kindness.

I can’t even to tell you how mindshatteringly amazing it is that Kindness is even a consideration here. Your capability to do something and the rewards that you can receive from it may very well be determined by how Kind you are.

Even the monetization plan for the game fits into the themes tackled by Austen. Although Ever, Jane is to be a free-to-play game, subscribing (and thus paying per month) is how you go from being a peasant to a part of the landed gentry.

That’s right, gamers. You can literally be a free-to-play peasant.

Sometimes, it really is about money. Sometimes, it’s about who you know, what you know, and what you know about who you know. When push comes to shove, there will be times when you’ll be forced to choose between your personal happiness and your duty.

Put that in any way where it’s stated outright, and it feels like an anvil’s been dropped on your head. Yeah, we get it, after-school-special. There are lessons to learn and you’re here to give them to us. Thanks. Really. I mean that. Sincerely. I really do.

Except those lessons can be some of the hardest to really care about, because they seem so forced. Teach someone a lesson in a way that feels like a game, and maybe they’ll be interested in it.

More importantly, they’ll already have an advantage when it comes time to use that lesson, because they’ll have done the thing already. They’ll already have been faced with the big dilemma, and chosen between self and other.

Anna Quindlen, writer for the New York Times said about Pride and Prejudice-

    “Pride and Prejudice is also about that thing that all great novels consider, the search for self. And it is the first great novel that teaches us this search is as surely undertaken in the drawing room making small talk as in the pursuit of a great white whale or the public punishment of adultery.” -

Please, Ever, Jane. Don’t disappear into the ether. You have such a glorious amount of potential that I’ll be disappointed if I’m not still talking about you ten years from now. I desperately want you to become an example of what game design could be, not an example of the flaws with the Kickstarter formula.

So many other games have us pursuing dragons and adultery. I will totally play a game where the objective is to totally throw the most kickass dinner party.

Reimagining Harry Potter Already; Shifts in Tone

Reimagining Harry Potter Already

I wish I could be academic about this. I really wish I could. So I’m going to try.

But first, I’m going to gush.

As the self proclaimed Video Game Nerd among my group of friends, I have no trouble with also saying that I may have also dabbled in Cartoons.

And yes, because if it exists, the internet will do terrible things to it sometimes;

I present to you, Nacho Punch productions.

Harry Potter Cyber Punk Adventure: The 1980s Anime

Yes. Yes it was as glorious as you don’t want to admit it was.

And in case you don’t think just about anything can get the same sort of treatment;

Star Wars: The Lost 1980s Anime

“But Shane,” I can hear you saying, “These are parodies, if anything. Not reimaginings.”

To which I reply; SHUT UP. THIS IS BEAUTIFUL.

Grand Theft Auto For Kids

I know people who would watch that last one for days. 

I WOULD WATCH THAT LAST ONE FOR DAYS.

Okay. Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system.

I think these are all fantastic examples of the dramatic shift in tone that’s able to be achieved through the processes of either genre-shifts or medium-shifts. Just how different does the Harry Potter story become if it takes place in a Cyberpunk world? How different is the same narrative if it’s told not as a children’s novel written in England, but as as a Japanese cartoon written in the 1980s?

The Star Wars example stays more true to the source material, and shows a more obvious example of how this shift takes place as a part of the transition from American movie to Japanese cartoon. There is a more obvious focus on the emotional concerns of the protagonist (played here for laughs with a joke that relies on the “squick” factor of Luke and Leia’s revealed sibling relationship, and stereotypes about Japanese animation) while simultaneously ramping up the levels of action.

Lastly, that Grand Theft Auto could be converted into a Dora the Explorer style children’s cartoon is, frankly, a phenomenal achievement. Though at the same time, so much is lost in the translation. For all the attention that the media places on the crime “simulation” part of the game series, each entry in the franchise, following the release of Grand Theft Auto III, tries very hard to take itself seriously, and it presents a serious crime-drama narrative.

I’d like to take this as an opportunity to talk about this sort of thing, and to discuss what exactly makes something “lose” a part of itself in rendition or adaptation.

But even more than that, I want you to just link similar videos. Because those were amazing.

Thank you, Nacho Punch, for brightening my day.

Starting with a Normal we Hate

Professor Mitchell-Buck brought up an interesting point in class this week.

Quote: “How many of you even remembered that the first chapter of Harry Potter is all about Vernon Dursley?”

Frankly, the first passage of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is boring. A hateful kind of boring. The sort of boring that audiences have been trained to hate.

Rowling is specific enough to note that this story begins on a Tuesday. Tuesday is arguably the worst day of the week (for anyone not involved in this particular Pop Culture class). The work week has already begun, so there’s no point in channeling a cartoon cat to complain about that, and yet the weekend is still incredibly far away. To top it all off, Vernon Dursley celebrates this boring, uneventful Tuesday by picking out “his most boring tie” to wear. This man cannot possibly be anything good. If the book made any mention of Vernon Dursley in its title, page two would be the point where decisions would need to be made about whether or not to continue reading. If the reader could not make it past Dudley screaming in his high chair, the book would be doomed.

Even when things begin to get interesting, they are only interesting in relationship to the mundane drudgery of everything else that is happening. And yet, in some ways, Vernon Dursley almost becomes a character that we can like through the way that he reacts to the things around him. He’s aware enough of his surroundings and the truth of his sister-in-law that even if he doesn’t want to admit to himself that the cat reading street signs may be more than a trick of the light, he’s able to put the clues together to correctly conclude that Lily Potter’s “kind” are involved in the oddness of the day.

And yet, before we can really get to like this man, who is presented as the worst kind of boring reacting with curiosity to the peculiarities and truth of the world around him, we shift focus to the “Wizarding” world.

While Harry Potter, as a franchise, deals (almost necessarily) with Harry above all others, this is largely a product of the fact that the target audience is children. Certainly this was the case when the book was first released, but now that a number of years have past, the readers who grew up with the books are, well, grown up.

The time between the first chapter and the second is nearly ten years. Ten years of time that is not at all important to the story of Harry Potter; but time that is very significant to Vernon and Petunia Dursley.

All of this is a long way of saying that I would actually really enjoy reading something like Vernon Dursley and The Unwanted Magical Adoption. I want to hate the Dursleys because they’re boring. I do wind up hating them because I’m intolerant of intolerant people. But there are ten years of raising a child that isn’t theirs, that represents any number of harsh Universal truths for the Dursleys, that only add fuel to a fire of their own anger. As it is, the Dursleys have no character arc. They start boring, hateful, and intolerant, and they end that way, with no real explanation why. Perhaps, for a children’s story, this is an important lesson; some people just are the way they are, and there’s no changing that, even if we don’t like them for it. But from narrative, dramatic development, I want to see the Dursleys fail at growth. I want to see them try to understand and raise their magical nephew, and I want to see the things that keep stopping that from being an achievable reality.

The scene we get from Dudley’s birthday touches on this, but even before that, there’s hints of the years of struggle here. One of Harry’s potential babysitters, Marge, is specifically counted out because “she hates the boy”, and when Harry suggests that he stay home by himself, Petunia denies him by snarling and questioning that if they did they would “come back and find the house in ruins” to which Harry specifically says “I won’t blow up the house,” This suggests to me that at one point in time, Harry very nearly blew up the house when he was left alone. “He always sp-spoils everything!” We do get examples of the weird things that happen around Harry, but since the story is told largely from Harry’s perspective, we only see them as examples of the wickedness of the Dursleys.

Did Petunia Dursley cry herself to sleep the night after she cut off nearly all of Harry’s hair? Her and her husband both know the whole truth. This sort of thing shouldn’t have been a surprise to her. Maybe she was always jealous of Harry’s mother, her sister, being able to do crazy things with her hair because she could use magic. Did something happen to Petunia’s hair when Lily was off at school, leaving Petunia effectively bald? Why was this a big deal to her? What was Vernon doing during all of this? Sighing quietly, trying to distract Dudley, and thinking of ways to keep his marriage together?  

And this is what Fan Fiction is really all about, I suppose. I want these characters to have development, or at the very least an explanation. They’re really only a plot device in the source material - easily hated, hateful, intolerable, intolerant people who represent everything that is the sort of normal and boring that audiences have been trained to hate.

But they’re people. (At the very least, they’re characters.) And I want to know why they failed.

Location and Holmes

Last week in class I’d made the comment just after we had our break that may have sounded like the biggest “well, duh” moment of the semester.

“I think that part of the reason that Sherlock Holmes is more associated with English popular culture than with American popular culture is that it’s set in London.”

I’d be easy to write this off as the mad ramblings of a man who’s only half awake and only half aware of what exactly he’s saying, but I’m here to defend my rather innocuous statement.

What follows is an eight minute video from America’s first and only academic comedy website, Cracked, that I think explains what I mean fairly well.

(Fair warning, the video contains content that may not be considered suitable for work environments.)

http://www.cracked.com/video_18436_after-hours-camping-5Bplaceholder5D.html

Essentially, my argument that Sherlock Holmes is English because it is set in London is based on the premise presented in this video, rather than the more obvious connection that London is an English city.

By setting Sherlock Holmes in the city, the stories draw on the various subconscious cultural fears and concerns of the primary intended audience. The city didn’t need to be London, but London was the city most transformed by the Industrial Revolution, and thus the city that changed the most about England and the most about the minds of England’s citizens.

For comparison, modern American crime dramas also fall into the pattern noticed in this video, with a predominant focus on setting in more rural than urban environments. Although Law and Order, perhaps the archetypal American crime show, is absolutely and constantly set in the urban environment of New York City, its focus is on presenting a dramatic narrative about the investigative and legal processes involved in law enforcement. A marathon of Criminal Minds, a similar show that focuses instead on FBI Criminal Profilers and the mysteries of each case that they work on, predominantly sets its episodes in rural and suburban areas. The dramatic tension is primarily on trying to understand the mind of whoever is capable of committing that episode’s crime, and they almost always begin the same. To show the audience a glimpse of the crime that will be looked at, we see the victim or victims, who are usually isolated in some form in a wilderness type area. If not an actual forest or back road, a wide open space near suburbia like a park. Then, the crime happens. We cut to “civilization”, the FBI headquarters in Quantico, and the cast going over the details of the case. Then the game is afoot.

Like Holmes, the focus here is on the mystery, the mind, and an attempt to understand the actions of someone who is, by all accounts, human. The stories, however, are fundamentally American. Yes, they are set in America, much as Sherlock in England, which is why it’s difficult to discuss these details without sounding in some ways like an idiot. But the fact remains that the stories being told are influenced by their setting, and so too then are their characters, which in turn influences just what kind of story they really are.

Sherlock Holmes is English Popular Culture because London, which Sherlock’s adventures are primarily set in, represents so much more to England and its people than just a city.