Muddled metaphors
Aug. 17th, 2016 11:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lokifanSo I haven’t got too deeply into Steven Universe fandom yet, and I don’t think the conversation about Jasper & Lapis Lazuli is the top one right now. But I had an interesting conversation about it at Nine Worlds yesterday. So my reading based on what we have so far is that Jasper and Lapis had an abusive relationship, in which Lapis was the abuser.
Totally happy to expand & discuss in comments/future posts, but that’s not really what this one is about.
It’s about setting something from a fantasy world up as a metaphor for something from ours, and the confusion that can result when your characters’ reaction to the something, while logical within their in-universe laws, messes with the metaphor.
Because we talked about forced fusion wrt Pearl tricking Garnet and Jasper/Lapis, and we didn’t even need to say outright that tricking someone into fusion is an enormously creepy, fucked-up thing and that forced fusion is an allegory for sexual assault, and a pretty on-the-nose one. But then discussing Jasper and Lapis, we got into the question of what’s acceptable in order to save the world - the conversation having started with Rose shattering Pink Diamond and Steven Universe’s exploration of war ethics.
But then that’s where things get tricky, because no one ever saved the world by raping someone. Rape has never been used against a criminal to stop them from destroying people (although it’s certainly been used as a weapon of war). But within the world of SU, that’s what Lapis was doing. (Althouuuugh I would argue that when she’s fighting on a beach, Lapis the incredibly powerful manipulator of WATER does not need to fuse with anyone in order to take them down. But that’s a side-issue.)
It actually reminds me of the many, many conversations Buffy fandom has had about Willow and Tara in S6. Did Willow rape Tara, or not? And I don’t just mean in the sense of mental violation. Willow wiped Tara’s memory of their fight and then they had sex. It’s hinted at in that episode and then made super, super explicit in the next one via “Under Your Spell”. I’ve seen a lot of disagreement on that front and while people are sometimes unwilling to entertain the idea of Willow as rapist because they like her or because women as predators breaks their brain, I do think reasonable people can disagree on this one. And I think that basically comes down to what the metaphor is.
Willow reaches into Tara’s mind and wipes her memory of a fight, and then they have sex Tara would have been unwilling to have otherwise. Is that the equivalent of lying to someone so they’ll sleep with you (“I’m a firefighter and I love cats”), i.e. morally questionable but not assault? Or is it more along the lines of roofies or messing with their meds - using external substances to mess with their mind? (Given S6’s constant magic = drugs metaphor, I lean in this direction, sadly.) Certainly it’s compounding a mental violation with a physical one, but because there isn’t a real-world equivalent things are murky.
I’m a genre-theory kind of girl so I basically look at the context of the rest of the programme to find the most cohesive reading. So in my case, because I read forced fusion as sexual assault and in Lapis’ case unnecessary, and given how SU’s been getting into wartime ethics, I see it as something which effectively brought Jasper down but not something acceptable or that should be part of the Gems’ repertoire - and definitely something I want Lapis to work to redeem herself from. And because Buffy in S6 hammers on the magic = drugs metaphor and deals with superpowered rape as something sordid and depressingly human behind the sci-fi (the Trio’s mind control ray, Spike and Buffy in the bathroom) I do read Willow sleeping with Tara after the mindwipe as assault.
But I also think there’s a lot of room for reasonable people to disagree! And you are entirely welcome to do that in comments/reblogs! I just find this aspect of genre fiction really interesting - when it trades very explicitly in allegory and metaphor, the metaphors getting muddled can really mess things up.
I think it’s a serious problem with Spike’s attempted rape of Buffy, too, and one which is under-discussed. The scene is filmed in deliberately realistic style and he never vamps out. But Spike’s soulless-vampire nature is used as a get-out-of-jail-free card by the programme: he goes and gets a soul, and can be allowed back into the fold. Within the universe I think that’s broadly acceptable, actually - but looking at it from the perspective of the consistent predatory-male metaphor of vampires, most obviously in Angel as post-sex bad boyfriend, it becomes a deeply fucked-up story. Spike was a bad boyfriend who attacked Buffy, but now he’s apologised and changed - and by the rules of the verse, it’s a real change - so he can be forgiven and accepted back as Buffy’s confidante and lieutenant. Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo THIS IS NOT THE RIGHT MESSAGE.
Did I ever tell you guys about me and Tru Blood? I quit a couple of episodes in. Which is not to say everyone should, at all - but it pissed me off. Because it hammers on that vampire = gay metaphor, with lines about “coming out of the coffin” and “God Hates Fangs” and right-wingers talking about how they’re a threat to society. Now the vampire = queers metaphor has a long history, and in this case it was being used to make the vampires more sympathetic as victims of bigotry.
But of course you need to tread carefully with that metaphor, because actually falling in love or having sex with members of your own gender is not like eating people.
Tru Blood had Bill, a dark ‘n’ brooding, polite yet dangerous vampire right out of the Angel playbook - at least in the few episodes I saw. Living among humans and trying to be like them. Then some other vampires showed up, who lived together and weren’t interested in trying to be like human society. They dressed in bright clothes or leather, and one was a man feeding off another man, which put him at risk of blood-borne disease. These vampires called Bill “Mr Mainstream” and told him “you’re doing nothing to help our cause”. They saw no value in his attempt to “dress up and play human”, to “tow the party line”. In the most explicit line, they called Bill’s love interest & our heroine a “breather”.
Bill’s response was to get critical of them “flaunting [their] ways” and to tell Sookie how much better it was for a vampire to live alone - vampires living together become less human, “a law unto themselves”.
Now I don’t know how obvious this would be to someone without the context, but that was a very deliberate play-by-play of some of the conversations within the LGBT+ community. In broad strokes, the evil vamps, who were sadistic and cruel and sexually predatory, played the more politically-queer element: those uninterested in what they call assimilation, who believe there’s value in queer community in itself, that the argument that LGBT+ people are just like straight/cis people is ultimately self-defeating and that marriage should not be the priority in the push for LGBT+ rights.
Bill (appropriately for the upper-class white guy) plays the LGBT+ people who make the argument that they’re unthreatening because they’re the same as straight/cis people and considers living pleasantly among straight people his ideal rather than safely-yet-anti-authoritarian-ly among queers. Who appears to have some shame about what he is, shame which makes him more acceptable.
I mean, those are SUPER broad strokes of a complicated conversation. But you get the idea, and for anyone with awareness of that context, the parallels were unavoidable. And at that point I was just done. Taking the vamp = gay metaphor into a place where those with the strongest markers of queerness, those both unwilling and much less able to assimilate, were also by far the most evil and scary? Where living among those like you rather than cutting yourself off is a sign of moral degeneration?
Yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
I totally don’t think that was intentionally homophobic but I DO think it was 100% a deliberate parallel - they probably wanted it because the queer metaphor was there already, and using those conversations added poignancy to their version of the conversations among a community making itself public for the first time and struggling for legitimacy. Besides, authorial intent is nothing.
So I was just grossed out.
This stuff is so hard. And that’s without even getting into changing what something in-universe is a metaphor for - I actually don’t have a problem with this, but I know a few people who really hated how in S4 of Buffy magic was lesbian connection/love/sex, and in S6 it was drugs.
...I have no snappy concluding sentence, apparently.
Totally happy to expand & discuss in comments/future posts, but that’s not really what this one is about.
It’s about setting something from a fantasy world up as a metaphor for something from ours, and the confusion that can result when your characters’ reaction to the something, while logical within their in-universe laws, messes with the metaphor.
Because we talked about forced fusion wrt Pearl tricking Garnet and Jasper/Lapis, and we didn’t even need to say outright that tricking someone into fusion is an enormously creepy, fucked-up thing and that forced fusion is an allegory for sexual assault, and a pretty on-the-nose one. But then discussing Jasper and Lapis, we got into the question of what’s acceptable in order to save the world - the conversation having started with Rose shattering Pink Diamond and Steven Universe’s exploration of war ethics.
But then that’s where things get tricky, because no one ever saved the world by raping someone. Rape has never been used against a criminal to stop them from destroying people (although it’s certainly been used as a weapon of war). But within the world of SU, that’s what Lapis was doing. (Althouuuugh I would argue that when she’s fighting on a beach, Lapis the incredibly powerful manipulator of WATER does not need to fuse with anyone in order to take them down. But that’s a side-issue.)
It actually reminds me of the many, many conversations Buffy fandom has had about Willow and Tara in S6. Did Willow rape Tara, or not? And I don’t just mean in the sense of mental violation. Willow wiped Tara’s memory of their fight and then they had sex. It’s hinted at in that episode and then made super, super explicit in the next one via “Under Your Spell”. I’ve seen a lot of disagreement on that front and while people are sometimes unwilling to entertain the idea of Willow as rapist because they like her or because women as predators breaks their brain, I do think reasonable people can disagree on this one. And I think that basically comes down to what the metaphor is.
Willow reaches into Tara’s mind and wipes her memory of a fight, and then they have sex Tara would have been unwilling to have otherwise. Is that the equivalent of lying to someone so they’ll sleep with you (“I’m a firefighter and I love cats”), i.e. morally questionable but not assault? Or is it more along the lines of roofies or messing with their meds - using external substances to mess with their mind? (Given S6’s constant magic = drugs metaphor, I lean in this direction, sadly.) Certainly it’s compounding a mental violation with a physical one, but because there isn’t a real-world equivalent things are murky.
I’m a genre-theory kind of girl so I basically look at the context of the rest of the programme to find the most cohesive reading. So in my case, because I read forced fusion as sexual assault and in Lapis’ case unnecessary, and given how SU’s been getting into wartime ethics, I see it as something which effectively brought Jasper down but not something acceptable or that should be part of the Gems’ repertoire - and definitely something I want Lapis to work to redeem herself from. And because Buffy in S6 hammers on the magic = drugs metaphor and deals with superpowered rape as something sordid and depressingly human behind the sci-fi (the Trio’s mind control ray, Spike and Buffy in the bathroom) I do read Willow sleeping with Tara after the mindwipe as assault.
But I also think there’s a lot of room for reasonable people to disagree! And you are entirely welcome to do that in comments/reblogs! I just find this aspect of genre fiction really interesting - when it trades very explicitly in allegory and metaphor, the metaphors getting muddled can really mess things up.
I think it’s a serious problem with Spike’s attempted rape of Buffy, too, and one which is under-discussed. The scene is filmed in deliberately realistic style and he never vamps out. But Spike’s soulless-vampire nature is used as a get-out-of-jail-free card by the programme: he goes and gets a soul, and can be allowed back into the fold. Within the universe I think that’s broadly acceptable, actually - but looking at it from the perspective of the consistent predatory-male metaphor of vampires, most obviously in Angel as post-sex bad boyfriend, it becomes a deeply fucked-up story. Spike was a bad boyfriend who attacked Buffy, but now he’s apologised and changed - and by the rules of the verse, it’s a real change - so he can be forgiven and accepted back as Buffy’s confidante and lieutenant. Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo THIS IS NOT THE RIGHT MESSAGE.
Did I ever tell you guys about me and Tru Blood? I quit a couple of episodes in. Which is not to say everyone should, at all - but it pissed me off. Because it hammers on that vampire = gay metaphor, with lines about “coming out of the coffin” and “God Hates Fangs” and right-wingers talking about how they’re a threat to society. Now the vampire = queers metaphor has a long history, and in this case it was being used to make the vampires more sympathetic as victims of bigotry.
But of course you need to tread carefully with that metaphor, because actually falling in love or having sex with members of your own gender is not like eating people.
Tru Blood had Bill, a dark ‘n’ brooding, polite yet dangerous vampire right out of the Angel playbook - at least in the few episodes I saw. Living among humans and trying to be like them. Then some other vampires showed up, who lived together and weren’t interested in trying to be like human society. They dressed in bright clothes or leather, and one was a man feeding off another man, which put him at risk of blood-borne disease. These vampires called Bill “Mr Mainstream” and told him “you’re doing nothing to help our cause”. They saw no value in his attempt to “dress up and play human”, to “tow the party line”. In the most explicit line, they called Bill’s love interest & our heroine a “breather”.
Bill’s response was to get critical of them “flaunting [their] ways” and to tell Sookie how much better it was for a vampire to live alone - vampires living together become less human, “a law unto themselves”.
Now I don’t know how obvious this would be to someone without the context, but that was a very deliberate play-by-play of some of the conversations within the LGBT+ community. In broad strokes, the evil vamps, who were sadistic and cruel and sexually predatory, played the more politically-queer element: those uninterested in what they call assimilation, who believe there’s value in queer community in itself, that the argument that LGBT+ people are just like straight/cis people is ultimately self-defeating and that marriage should not be the priority in the push for LGBT+ rights.
Bill (appropriately for the upper-class white guy) plays the LGBT+ people who make the argument that they’re unthreatening because they’re the same as straight/cis people and considers living pleasantly among straight people his ideal rather than safely-yet-anti-authoritarian-ly among queers. Who appears to have some shame about what he is, shame which makes him more acceptable.
I mean, those are SUPER broad strokes of a complicated conversation. But you get the idea, and for anyone with awareness of that context, the parallels were unavoidable. And at that point I was just done. Taking the vamp = gay metaphor into a place where those with the strongest markers of queerness, those both unwilling and much less able to assimilate, were also by far the most evil and scary? Where living among those like you rather than cutting yourself off is a sign of moral degeneration?
Yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
I totally don’t think that was intentionally homophobic but I DO think it was 100% a deliberate parallel - they probably wanted it because the queer metaphor was there already, and using those conversations added poignancy to their version of the conversations among a community making itself public for the first time and struggling for legitimacy. Besides, authorial intent is nothing.
So I was just grossed out.
This stuff is so hard. And that’s without even getting into changing what something in-universe is a metaphor for - I actually don’t have a problem with this, but I know a few people who really hated how in S4 of Buffy magic was lesbian connection/love/sex, and in S6 it was drugs.
...I have no snappy concluding sentence, apparently.
no subject
Date: 2016-08-18 07:35 pm (UTC)Considering that Alan Ball actually is gay, I can only assume that it's either meant to be a black comedy in which everyone lives down to negative stereotypes, or it's actually a satire on urban-fantasy fans and writers who woobify traditionally monstrous supernatural figures and treat them as solely metaphors for minorities, sometimes with unthinkingly dubious implications if those monstrous supernatural figures actually still are dangerously animalistic/amoral/autocratic. The politically simplistic idea that all non-human Others are always and exclusively metaphors for oppressed groups and that the only acceptable story about them is the one where they turn out to be totally innocent (but still darkly shaggable) victims of human prejudice.
For example, to go back to your Buffy example, the faction of really extreme Spike fans who were absolutely certain that Spike was the Oppressed Black Man, that all his crimes were him righteously striking back against human oppression, and that suggesting that he needed to be "redeemed" or souled at all made you a racism-sympathiser. I must admit, I'm glad that nowadays there would be rather more pushback to the idea that disapproving of a white man premeditatedly stalking and killing a black woman is racist, because *metaphorically* he represents the oppressed black man and she a KKK lyncher (yes, I saw that argument being made in tones that really were that stark after "Lies My Parents Told Me" was first shown).