truth as triple-edged sword.

Or why B5 may or may not fit a much larger, more insidious pattern. (And why I’m even discussing it.)

Spoilers all the way through everything I talk about, pretty much, except for Season 5 of B5, because I haven’t seen it yet. [ed. Reposted March 2012, because I feel like it’s still important.]

Several points regarding Susan Ivanova and her long, lonely stint in the black:

1) The trouble with asking someone who disagrees to look at the bigger picture regarding women like Ivanova is that the bigger picture isn’t necessarily coherent.
1a) Guess who’s skewing it? Yeah, the ones who will raise a hue and cry every time a woman suffers on TV/in a book/in the lyrics of a rap song/whatever.
1b) Guess where that puts me? Yeah, back at square one trying to explain what got my goat.

2) I can and will change my opinion as I see more of a particular canon.
2a) Donna Noble: still not enthused that she couldn’t at least remember. Much happier knowing it wasn’t just a one-off plot point, that the Doctor cared enough to say goodbye in his own way, and that she got what she would now consider a happy ending. If she can’t have space, it is kinder that she doesn’t know what she’s lost.
2b) Ziva David: like I said, at least she’s found some kind of redemption, and fuck, the boys and Abby at least provide her with close friendship.
2c) Still not happy about Kara or Dee from BSG, though. One has been dead all along and the other eats her weapon. The fuck?

3) Female creators are just as guilty.
3a) Shonda Rhimes, I am staring you dead in the eyes on this one. Cristina Yang specifically got left behind because she wanted a career and Burke was threatened by that, which plays into point 4.
3b) J.K. Rowling should not have written her epilogue before, um, the rest of the series. The characters changed over the years in ways that didn’t suit the epilogue; Ginny was never as much of a nurturer as her mother, for example, yet she’s well on her way to being Molly all over again. Hermione becomes a tool of the very Ministry that nearly ended her life; I would have expected her to learn that sometimes, you have to stay out of the government in order to achieve reform.

4) Part of what influences my reaction to Ivanova having to choose career over personal life by default was that women haven’t been able to enjoy both like men have, by and large. (See also the concept of the mommy track, companies taking a dim view of maternity leave, pressure from peers either to adhere completely to tradition or to break completely. No gender deserves this treatment. Why, then, is it still more acceptable to dish it out to women?)

ETA: vikingwriter @ LJ points out that perhaps men have been having issues in the other direction.

5) Some shows get it very, very right. Turn on USA on a weeknight, for example. ABC’s Castle also handles its girl-whumping with finesse, and for the most part, Doctor Who plays nice. (Long canon, long view.) Even though I am unhappy that Ivanova’s personal life never picked up again (per the short story fixit) and convinced she would’ve been happier dying there and then (suffering has to end eventually), everybody visits hir personal hell at some point.

6) Would I have done things differently if I were behind the wheel? Only some, and not out of some desire to make science fiction into another bastion of radical feminism. I’d have done so because it’s fiction. It doesn’t have to be totally realistic. It is, as Sunshine pointed out to me, an escape. Also, it’s set two hundred years from now; you’d think we’d have gotten over point 4, nu? So if I wanted to drive home the point that some people do have terrible lives, I’d have given that to Lyta, for whom that ending is (irony of ironies) far more realistic. She’s a telepath in a world that’s leery of them at best. She’s also not as atypical in her femininity; you get the sense that she’d be a little more comfortable in a dress, for example, and if she’s the other queer character in the ‘verse, that’s under lock and key. No, I don’t know whether redistributing the misfortunes heaped on one character dilutes the message that they are, in fact, misfortunes.

We are presented with multiple outcomes of the heroic cycle (Joseph Campbell). I like that part. Some elements of the presentation have left me uneasy; some have left me cold. I still want to find out what happens next. My dissatisfaction with part of the whole does not mean the whole must be discarded. I am no less a fan because I question one specific piece of an enormous canon. If that were the case, Doctor Who would no longer have a fandom, would it? Rather, I am dealing with my disappointment by analyzing it half to death. My disappointment. My reaction. You ask me about it, you run the risk of hearing things you don’t agree with. Don’t ask if the answer isn’t the one you wanted to hear.

As always, I not only tolerate discussion of any point I’ve made, I welcome it here: in this post, via words on a screen, with room for hyperlinks and citations and all that crap. Left, right, and center, I am open to seeing what you think. Just don’t be offended if I tell you I have to agree to disagree with you, or if I have to leave a point of yours alone for that reason.

Indigestion

Exhibit A: Garlic bread and marinara sauce. I should not order these things at Abigail’s. Rather begs the question of what I will order — probably just go with the salad bar. That way, my body will not attempt to reject it at four in the morning, throwing me headlong into a panic attack.

Exhibit B: Still processing the B5 thing. I have abandonment issues. I ask your patience. God knows it takes other fans in other fandoms a long time to deal.

Whatever I was expecting of JMS and Babylon 5, it wasn’t that.

All along, during my slow crawl through the seasons, I have kept one mantra front and center in my mind: trust JMS. He has this mad elaborate plan for everyone and everything I will see.

Unfortunately, it’s true. Also, Romeo and Juliet is not my kind of romance.

If you know me, you know that, above all else, Susan Ivanova is my favorite character. — Well, it goes a tad further; I relate to her very well. She doesn’t typically faff around; she gets things done, no matter what must be done. She’s not as caught between worlds as other characters (you want Delenn for the ultimate example; Lyta faces similar choices). She’s what happens after the split, if you will. I imagine once she was very confused, very between, with her mother dead and her father… distant, then dead himself. She found herself a niche in her new place, carved it out, and refused to budge from it.

“God sent me.”

Maybe she was a little bit Messianic in that respect. Maybe she wasn’t too far off: not an avenging angel, but a child of God stripped bare in the material plane, whittled down to functionality by years of uncertainty, loss, and grief. Certainly JMS seemed happy to send her love life all to hell. No, canon is never explicit on the subject of Ivanova and Talia Winters, but what is implicit (and, indeed, some Word of God) is what I thought was the cruelest sort of heartbreak. Trust, and love, and your lover turns into her own evil twin? Oy.

But what happened with Susan Ivanova and Marcus Cole hit me hard.

Because there is something worse than finding out a lover is a snake in the grass. Anger, when it comes out of that situation, can at least be directed at the treacherous bastard hirself. No, the worst kind of loss is Juliet’s, because Juliet isn’t dead. She’s only sleeping. She’s going to need Romeo, Romeo who kills himself for her sake. Romeo who, in this case, didn’t read the fucking manual Franklin left in his logs regarding that infernal healing device.

JMS plans everything. He was going to have that device used on Ivanova all along. One may infer, then, that he never intended to kill her. Bring her to the edge of it, yes, but not kill her for good.

Marcus, through a combination of devotion and stupidity, died to save Ivanova — and wounded her soul-deep in the process. Dying in her arms was selfish. If he couldn’t live without her, he could have waited for her to die properly and joined her in the afterlife. Maybe in time he’d even have found life worth living. Certainly Ivanova was ready to go. She even told Franklin as much. For those whose entire lives are a series of losses, death comes as a respite; Nature may take its course.

Waking up must have been a shock. Waking up to find that, once again, you’re alone in the world, that’s torture. Nobody on Babylon 5 had room in their lives for one lone commander. Londo had a homeworld ready to acclaim him as emperor (and oh, how sorry we all were to hear that) and a place working with the Alliance, along with his unlikely best friend G’Kar. Delenn and Sheridan rode off into the sunset, along with G’Kar’s magic eye, the glorious perv. Even Garibaldi and Lise wound up together.

But Susan Ivanova, who did what she was asked, what needed to be done, and by gum got it done right, had a long, cold career for her troubles. The last time we see her onscreen, she is alone. Oh, JMS wrote a fix-it story later, but by then it was too late for the casual viewer, whose one exposure to this magnificent lady would’ve been onscreen; Claudia Christian’s contract had run out (a thorny situation on its own).

How many of us think to buy magazines about our favorite television shows? Indeed, how many would have known about that before the advent of the user-friendly World Wide Web? So how many walked away from that wondering what the fuck kind of ending Ivanova got? And of those, how many ever found the story that resolved it?

And what kind of message does that send? To me, it was a kick in the gut. The women to whom I relate on television tend to get killed or wind up alone. I had hoped this was the exception. Even knowing that Things Went Horribly Wrong and part of JMS’s master plan got derailed by contractual squabbling, I can’t shake the anger at yet another representation of an atypical woman getting screwed by fate while the normal ones get rewarded for their audacity or misdeeds.

We can’t all be Meredith Grey, or Abby Sciuto, or Number Six, or Delenn, you know. Some of us are Cristina Yang and Ziva David and Kara Thrace and yes, Susan Ivanova. Some of us are different in ways that are not yet acceptable: we are not gentle enough. We have broken from tradition. We have put duty high on our priority lists. We get things done by standing up and doing them. But we have the same needs as that other kind of woman, the kind that breaks the rules while retaining certain desirable traits. We need to be loved. We need to know we’re not alone. We need to not end up believing that everyone we love, everyone who has loved us, will leave; we need to understand that we are not cursed.

I’ve sobbed those words before, just like Ivanova. Since I’m not living in a war zone, learning to trust that I wouldn’t be left was safe. Barring phenomenal bad luck, Beloved and I were going to have a long time to figure each other out — and will. Cristina and her Owen both made it through the Grey’s Anatomy season finale, and so there is time for them, too. Even Ziva’s a citizen of the United States, still working with and friends with Tony. I… will not speak of Kara Thrace; at least she is too dead to care now. I hope. Unfortunately, just as Ivanova was about to look up and think, “Hey, maybe I’m going to be all right,” boom! Marcus delivers her into what is literally a fate worse than death for her.

She is Susan Ivanova. God sent her to win a war. But God didn’t take her into heaven after, and the cold hell of functionality is all that remains.

…

Having been there in a microcosmic way, I will assure you now that I won’t do that. If I have to kill one darling, the survivors will not be left so bereft. I’ve felt like the odd number in a paired-off world. It’s not plot fodder. It’s not pathos. It’s cruelty. I can’t enjoy what happened to Ivanova; I’ve certainly never enjoyed it in other stories. It may well color the way I see that last season. It’s shaken some of my trust, the same way the events of the season before last on NCIS shook my trust, the way “Waking the Dead” was never the same after that ridiculous episode with Mel, Boyd, and the windscreen, the way I’ve quit recommending anyone watch the last season of the new Battlestar Galactica. Ivanova’s ending still doesn’t make enough sense to me to redeem it as part of the bigger plan, and so I’m going into Season 5 with a jaundiced eye.

Trust JMS, but understand that mad elaborate plans answer to the vagaries of real-world interference. Nothing is as sacred as the creator thinks or hopes.

Woe to my opus.

Let’s do a little word problem, shall we?

I had 47 pages. I cut 20. I now have 30. How many did I write tonight, and if I continue at my current pace, how soon will I be all caught up again?

Answer:

47-20=27. If I now have 30, I must have written 3. If I write 3 pages per night (oh, lord, what a joke), in theory, by the sixth night, I’ll be back up to 47.

Speed makes me suck, so I bet I’ll only end up cutting some of those!

That list for those students

Most students entering college for the first time this fall—the Class of 2014—were born in 1992.

I shouldn’t feel old. Inexplicably, I do.

For these students, Benny Hill, Sam Kinison, Sam Walton, Bert Parks and Tony Perkins have always been dead.

Wait, Benny Hill’s dead? Aw, nuts.

1. Few in the class know how to write in cursive. Oh, that’s just sad.

2. Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail. …and how did their acceptance letters arrive?

4. Al Gore has always been animated. If I can remember the Clinton campaign — the first one! — then they can remember dull Al.

5. Los Angelenos have always been trying to get along. And I suppose none of them will know where that statement came from.

6. Buffy has always been meeting her obligations to hunt down Lothos and the other blood-suckers at Hemery High. Uh, guys? Are we talking about the same vampire slayer?

8. With increasing numbers of ramps, Braille signs, and handicapped parking spaces, the world has always been trying harder to accommodate people with disabilities. And failing miserably, but hey.

9. Had it remained operational, the villainous computer HAL could be their college classmate this fall, but they have a better chance of running into Miley Cyrus’s folks on Parents’ Weekend. Oh, they do not.

10. A quarter of the class has at least one immigrant parent, and the immigration debate is not a big priority…unless it involves “real” aliens from another planet. Okay, are we trying to make the Class of 2014 look stupid?

11. John McEnroe has never played professional tennis. Some would’ve argued that when he was still playing. *cough*

13. Parents and teachers feared that Beavis and Butt-head might be the voice of a lost generation. Actually, these kids are too young for Beavis and Butt-head. They’re almost too young for Daria.

17. Trading Chocolate the Moose for Patti the Platypus helped build their Beanie Baby collection. Wrong. These kids would’ve been four years old. Their mothers would’ve cared more.

19. They never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone. Neither did I!

21. Woody Allen, whose heart has wanted what it wanted, has always been with Soon-Yi Previn. *snicker* Assuming they know who Woody Allen is, they’d have been a little young for that scandal.

24. “Cop Killer” by rapper Ice-T has never been available on a recording. …and that’s what mp3s are for.

25. Leno and Letterman have always been trading insults on opposing networks. Though most of these kids are Team Coco.

26. Unless they found one in their grandparents’ closet, they have never seen a carousel of Kodachrome slides. Neither did I. *weeps*

35. Once they got through security, going to the airport has always resembled going to the mall. Man, what airports are they coming from? Mine is still kind of boring.

40. There have always been HIV positive athletes in the Olympics. Thereby causing them to lose sight of what that really means.

44. The dominance of television news by the three networks passed while they were still in their cribs. That’s just stupid. CNN was huge long before 1992.

46. Nirvana is on the classic oldies station. And now you’re being ridiculous.

51. Food has always been irradiated. Ew. Really?

54. The historic bridge at Mostar in Bosnia has always been a copy. Again: and how many of them would know?

56. They may have assumed that parents’ complaints about Black Monday had to do with punk rockers from L.A., not Wall Street. I don’t get it. Someone explain?

57. A purple dinosaur has always supplanted Barney Google and Barney Fife. RERUNS. Reruns reruns reruns.

58. Beethoven has always been a dog. Excuse me. *crawls into a corner and weeps*

65. They first met Michelangelo when he was just a computer virus. More likely answer has to do with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

71. The nation has never approved of the job Congress is doing. I suspect this has been the case for a long time.

74. They’ve always been able to blast off with the Sci-Fi Channel. Not anymore!

Gone visiting

And I’m not talking about me.

Mum and I went for ice cream, to soothe the canker sore up in the back of my mouth, right where the teeth come together on the left. The way we saw it, ice cream tasted better than medicine and would make me happier, too. I was in such high spirits when we got home that I suggested we go to the neighbor’s house; we had received two of their letters in our mail and wanted to rectify the error. While Mum fetched the letters, I gave Adalyne a cuddle and made sure she knew what a sweet girl she was.

So we trotted next door, where we three ladies — Auntie Pat, Mum, and I — sat and talked for a little while the way women will. Auntie Pat’s two dogs came up to say hello, of course. Oh, they’re so beautiful! Both of them are nice and big; one is blond, with lumps and bumps everywhere, and the other’s black like a grim but much nicer. All of a sudden, I saw this little grey shadow in the kitchen, one I knew did not belong there…

…because she had followed me over from my porch!

“Adalyne!” I cried, and got up to shoo her away from the dogs. Auntie Pat has a loose screen, you see, and Adalyne walked right in through the flap. This is the same cat who’ll follow me on my walks, much farther than a few driveways, so I don’t know why I was so shocked that she would turn cat burglar, so to speak. Wherever I go, she’s sure to tag along. She was anxious enough about the prospect, carrying her body low and slinky, but she slunk straight in and would probably have come running over to see me if I hadn’t caught her in the act.

I hustled her outside and tried to shut the door. Of course, she said plenty to me about the prospect of waiting outside, but I did my duty by her and made sure there were solid walls between my foolish girl and Pat’s dogs. We humans said our goodbyes; Pat had to do some last-minute shopping and Addy was waiting on the stoop! On the walk home, she would not let us out of her sight. She didn’t leave our side until we were well up the driveway. Even then, she kind of crept up behind.

No, Adalyne definitely isn’t holding any grudges over the vet visit.

We’re to go back next Thursday evening. We’ll make sure Adalyne stays indoors the whole time we’re there.

A Good Indian Wife

A Good Indian Wife
Anne Cherian
2008

NUTSHELL: This poor book is so confused, just like its protagonists. 3.

Hey! Don’t pick on the book! I suppose a book can’t help what it is — but its writer can, and its writer missed a few of the more obvious novel-writing lessons. Point-of-view changed so often I had whiplash by the third chapter. There’s no real sense of time, or place, for that matter. I wouldn’t have guessed it was still the nineteen-eighties for the characters if Cherian hadn’t mentioned that outright, and her San Francisco is a generic large city with place names pasted on. The narrative cuts off too abruptly at the end; if there’s going to be a sequel, for God’s sake leave us somewhere sensible.

Why’d you even bother with a 3? I liked Leila, the female protagonist. Neel’s a slimy so-and-so and Caroline (Caroleen, like the French) is a caricature of white trash. I finished the book for Leila and no-one else. Bypass this book like a blocked artery.

Sofia

Sofia
Ann Chamberlin
1996

NUTSHELL: Two plots that could’ve been a pair of companion novels, so let’s call it a 7.

Two plots again? Yep, though at least these went together, and knowing that there are two more sequels, they make even more sense. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that when I started reading — or, indeed, when I finished. Oops.

So how would you have done it? Split them by narrator. We have one in the first-person, Giorgio/Abdullah, and one in the third, Sofia/Safiye. Each of the subsequent books seems to focus on each character; let’s make it two doorstops instead and tell all of the story.

And what story is that? So far, Giorgio and Sofia have been taken to 16th-century Turkey, where Giorgio becomes the eunuch Abdullah and falls in love with Esmikhan Sultan, the princess, while Sofia becomes harem girl Safiye, thrown at Prince Murad. Safiye gets herself, Abdullah, and Esmikhan kidnapped by brigands, and when they’re rescued, Murad and Esmikhan’s fiancé, Sokolli Pasha, are ready to kill them both.

…twisted. It’s a long, twisty tale, just how I like ’em.

But not long enough? There’s more to the story. I was shocked to discover I only had a few more pages to enjoy by the time the plots came together and peaked. (Oh, God, how obscene I sound.) So, yes, initial enjoyment was indeed dampened by the abrupt ending. Rest assured that I’ll be looking for those other two books in my library system.

The Adoration of Jenna Fox

The Adoration of Jenna Fox
Mary E. Pearson
2009

NUTSHELL: Holy cow, this is good YA science fiction. 9.5, baby.

Why not a 10? One tiny thread left dangling regarding a secondary character.

But the rest… Is fantastic. I’m making mental comparisons to Peter Dickinson’s Eva and M.T. Anderson’s Feed, both excellent discussions of bioethics themselves.

Is that all I get to go on? You will know, before the plot hits, that Jenna has just come out of a coma following a horrific car accident sometime in the future, and that antibiotics caused the mother of all superbugs to decimate the population some fourteen years earlier. You will also discover that the government has implicated new rules all over the place as a result of this and of further scientific developments. Basically, nobody gets to play God. Anything else would ruin the book.

You’re concise when you’re sleepy. …thanks?

Born Blue

Born Blue
Han Nolan
2001

NUTSHELL: I’m up early, so this will be short. 7 because the writing is amazing, but the story feels… eh.

How so? Because I’m having trouble coming to grips with the fact that Nolan chose to tell the story of a girl who keeps making bad choices. It’s a compelling story, no question, but if I wanted to know about the horrors of the foster care system, I’d read nonfiction.

Does that even exist? It does, but you’d have to raid a college library for that. Guess I’m glad my father plans to teach this fall.

Why did you even finish it? Because Nolan is an amazing writer, and I trust her. I kept thinking, “Oh, maybe Leshaya’s next decision won’t turn out so horribly…” Nope. Every damn time the girl gets a chance to make good, the not-upbringing she had gets in her way. I felt awful for her, and I guess I’m tired of feeling awful for protagonists.

Then why should I read it? Maybe if you’re in the mood for a tragedy?