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metafandom a bit too much lately. But the Female Character Flowchart has been making such extensive rounds that I've started to see it elsewhere as well. It's popping up on facebook, twitter... and I'm fascinated by how, outside of LJ, all of the reactions I've seen have been "Yeah... the state of female characters is pretty sad," whereas most of us in this corner of fandom are up in arms about how some of our favorite female characters got thrown onto the chart or, from a wider standpoint, how the chart implies that any female character that serves a supporting role is not a "Strong Female Character". Some of you might remember my last diatribe on "Strong Female Characters" (which is locked due to real-life things touched upon in that entry, sorry), which mostly boiled down to my conclusion that 80% of the time I don't hold up to most "strong" character standards, so what are we even looking for if real, actual people don't pass muster? (And this happens on the list, too. I mean, Yoko Ono is on it and, as much as she's reduced to a trope in pop culture, she is still a real person.)
And this is where I would wave my hands around and shout "Stop conflating 'strong' with 'well-written' in terms of characters." Nevermind how 'strong' tends to be a masculine ideal and putting the first on the list of traits for a female is counter-intuitive at best... well-written is what matters. (And I can't even get into the whole problem this raises with flawed vs. too flawed. And goodness, once we've determined, in that straight little line that supposedly leads to narrative perfection, whether someone is flawed enough or not they get dumped into the same reductionist morass as everyone else that can't carry their own story or exists as a soapbox for someone's ideas.) So let's say that our gold-star "Congratulations!" category is for Well-Written Female Characters. But I'll be honest here, I suspect that Lara Croft makes it across that fine line at the top, and in a chart where that happens but Faye Valentine and Zoe Wasburne are relegated to substandard status is more than a bit flawed (not that both of those characters don't suffer from writer-inflicted oversight problems). And that's my main argument against the chart. It's more concerned with a war against tropes than it is with what actually makes a good character, regardless of gender, and it doesn't seem to distinguish at all between the different roles protagonists play versus supporting characters.
But I'm determined not to go off on another rant on this stuff. Instead, I want to have a bit of fun with this chart. I've been skimming through it for the better part of a half-hour now, trying to figure out where I fit on it. I mean, I'm constantly going on about how my life has a secret author, after all, so it's only appropriate for me to figure out where I stand.
I'm going to come straight out with my hypothesis (because otherwise I will never manage to organize this entry at all). Because if you take your own life as a story, where you fall on the chart depends entirely on how you cut it. Every story is just a piece of a whole world (that's why fanfic has a place to flourish), and all of the characters in it technically have their own individual story going on. And I think this is something it's fair to assume for every character, whether the writer actually manages to portray that or not. I mean, let's face it, one-dimensional and stereotypical characters do serve a purpose (though I'm certainly not going to argue that they're always going to be put to good use). And, honestly, look at the people in your life that you only sort of know. The check-out guy in the grocery store with the weird haircut, the bank teller you always see, the boss you have that shares random out-of-context personal details. Are these three-dimensional characters? No, not from your point-of-view. But are they not real people? (Without straying into philosophy here, guys.) I like to think that there are three dimensions to any character, even if we don't get to see them, and that's the way I view most fictional characters. If it's not there, I tend to make up the rest, and that's probably why I forgive so much I shouldn't when it comes to writers messing things up.
So. Back on track here, a character's role and dimension depends on how you slice the story. I'm currently fascinated by the role I fulfill if you just lift my office out into its own narrative. In this scenario let's assume we're working with an ensemble cast and I'm not the main character, so that automatically bumps us down to the villain question. With a few exceptions mostly having to do with my hatred of our process servers, I don't really fit the villain category, and I'm not a love interest. Since we're looking at my office, it is a team-oriented story, and that gives me approximately eight choices for who I am. If we're telling the story from any other department's point of view, I'm almost invariably the shy-nerdy voice of reason. If we're looking from an attorney's point of view, I am anywhere from Rogue to Punching Bag, depending on the day and whether I've tried to contact a certain stupid large national bank that is not our main client lately (since there doesn't seem to be a 'She does whatever we throw at her/Jack of all trades' category, I suppose I'll say I'm mostly a Rogue in regards to the attorneys). And if we take it from my department's standpoint, I get to hop over to the circle of 'Leader' characters. Ignoring my propensity to categorize my job as a horror story, I'm not violent and I'm certainly not 'nearly-perfect,' so that leaves me in the 'Married to her job' category. Which isn't terribly inaccurate, I suppose, but apparently still makes me a not-strong female character. But let's go back to 'nearly-perfect' because I love this one. It gets leveraged against female characters all the time, because something deep in our insecurity makes us point to other girls and go "Too perfect!" I have, in fact, had this finger pointed at me at work several, if not many, times. Because I'm a goody two-shoes, because I put in extra hours without complaining, because et cetera. And so here, because some of the other women in my office resent the fact that, by not complaining about extra work, I am actually obligating them to do more work without complaining as well or risk irking the bosses, I slip into the annoying overachiever category (or, assuming an audience that isn't my co-workers, I am an 'Ideal Woman', presumably because my male bosses like me. But if I was a bit older I would be a wise crone, and maybe miraculously I wouldn't be resented anymore? Or, if the genders in my office were switched and the female attorneys liked me more than my male co-workers, I would be a Mary Sue?)
At this point I feel like my point would be made better by walking an actual, fictional, female character through this chart, so the nonsense you encounter by trying to implement this really comes to light. Because what it's coming to, outside of the meta issues at stake here, is that the role of all of these female characters boils down to point-of-view. (So, what does it say about our point of view here that I (we?) disapprove so intensely of this chart? What does it say about the chart-creator's point of view?)
I was going to take Temperance Brennan through the chart, but I realized pretty quickly that, since she is a titular character of a show she pretty much gets a free pass through the top line. Congrats, Bones, you can hang with Lara Croft. So I suppose it follows that this chart is effective as an argument against the lack of female protagonists. But that makes the whole bottom of the list terribly unnecessary, and as much as I'd like to look at the chart in this light, even my powerful inclination to retcon things doesn't extend that far.
And actually, I think that might be where all of our problems arise. The first question is whether the character can carry her own story, but that question then seems to be treated as whether the character does carry her own story. Just because some of these women are not written as main characters doesn't mean that they couldn't carry their own story, it just means that a different point-of-view was chosen for telling the story they were involved in. (I'm confident that the original authors of several of these characters, at least, would do a fine job of making them into main characters in their own stories.) And it's an even bigger problem that, since all of the first three turn-offs lead to the same place, it's basically implied that all the women in the branches off of the main line can't carry their own story, and are either too perfect or too soapboxy. I think it's this implication that has people up in arms, and I'm left thinking maybe without the examples, this would be a much better chart. (So I erased everyone. Which I guess makes me a villain.) Without the pictures we could stop focusing on figuring out how certain of our favorite characters were deemed unable to carry their own story, or without flaws, or too representative of an idea, and focus instead on how, if you're a female leader of a team, it's still possible for your main purpose in the story to be "the Gossip". (What?) Which is the sort of error that's the real failing of this chart. The examples lead to the dead-end logic that characters don't fit more than one trope, but more importantly the lines themselves lead to overly reductive and dismissive conclusions about female characters in general.
Which feels like a conclusion in a crappy college gender studies essay, but whatever. It's Sunday night and I have nothing better to be doing.
I guess, what I'm generally getting at when I pick up these arguments is that it's absurd to have some predetermined "Ideal Female Character" archetype, because there is no way it can be fulfilled realistically. And yes, I think that is what this chart is implying, because it relegates every trope to substandard status. So, in order to be a strong female character, you need to carry your own story, be just flawed enough, and not representative of anything readily recognizable (which I can only assume is how a lot of those characters got onto the bottom of the list). I remember having this argument countless times in college, with people who would tear other people's writing apart for "clichés" that were really just tropes. People have a habit of thinking that, just because they recognize something as an idea they've seen used before, that it must be a cliché and taken out back and burned. I feel like I tend too much toward ultra-realism in my demands for fiction, but at the same time, an unattainable standard for a certain group of characters, especially an entire gender's worth of characters, is arguing too hard for ultra-fiction.
metafandom a bit too much lately. But the Female Character Flowchart has been making such extensive rounds that I've started to see it elsewhere as well. It's popping up on facebook, twitter... and I'm fascinated by how, outside of LJ, all of the reactions I've seen have been "Yeah... the state of female characters is pretty sad," whereas most of us in this corner of fandom are up in arms about how some of our favorite female characters got thrown onto the chart or, from a wider standpoint, how the chart implies that any female character that serves a supporting role is not a "Strong Female Character". Some of you might remember my last diatribe on "Strong Female Characters" (which is locked due to real-life things touched upon in that entry, sorry), which mostly boiled down to my conclusion that 80% of the time I don't hold up to most "strong" character standards, so what are we even looking for if real, actual people don't pass muster? (And this happens on the list, too. I mean, Yoko Ono is on it and, as much as she's reduced to a trope in pop culture, she is still a real person.) And this is where I would wave my hands around and shout "Stop conflating 'strong' with 'well-written' in terms of characters." Nevermind how 'strong' tends to be a masculine ideal and putting the first on the list of traits for a female is counter-intuitive at best... well-written is what matters. (And I can't even get into the whole problem this raises with flawed vs. too flawed. And goodness, once we've determined, in that straight little line that supposedly leads to narrative perfection, whether someone is flawed enough or not they get dumped into the same reductionist morass as everyone else that can't carry their own story or exists as a soapbox for someone's ideas.) So let's say that our gold-star "Congratulations!" category is for Well-Written Female Characters. But I'll be honest here, I suspect that Lara Croft makes it across that fine line at the top, and in a chart where that happens but Faye Valentine and Zoe Wasburne are relegated to substandard status is more than a bit flawed (not that both of those characters don't suffer from writer-inflicted oversight problems). And that's my main argument against the chart. It's more concerned with a war against tropes than it is with what actually makes a good character, regardless of gender, and it doesn't seem to distinguish at all between the different roles protagonists play versus supporting characters.
But I'm determined not to go off on another rant on this stuff. Instead, I want to have a bit of fun with this chart. I've been skimming through it for the better part of a half-hour now, trying to figure out where I fit on it. I mean, I'm constantly going on about how my life has a secret author, after all, so it's only appropriate for me to figure out where I stand.
I'm going to come straight out with my hypothesis (because otherwise I will never manage to organize this entry at all). Because if you take your own life as a story, where you fall on the chart depends entirely on how you cut it. Every story is just a piece of a whole world (that's why fanfic has a place to flourish), and all of the characters in it technically have their own individual story going on. And I think this is something it's fair to assume for every character, whether the writer actually manages to portray that or not. I mean, let's face it, one-dimensional and stereotypical characters do serve a purpose (though I'm certainly not going to argue that they're always going to be put to good use). And, honestly, look at the people in your life that you only sort of know. The check-out guy in the grocery store with the weird haircut, the bank teller you always see, the boss you have that shares random out-of-context personal details. Are these three-dimensional characters? No, not from your point-of-view. But are they not real people? (Without straying into philosophy here, guys.) I like to think that there are three dimensions to any character, even if we don't get to see them, and that's the way I view most fictional characters. If it's not there, I tend to make up the rest, and that's probably why I forgive so much I shouldn't when it comes to writers messing things up.
So. Back on track here, a character's role and dimension depends on how you slice the story. I'm currently fascinated by the role I fulfill if you just lift my office out into its own narrative. In this scenario let's assume we're working with an ensemble cast and I'm not the main character, so that automatically bumps us down to the villain question. With a few exceptions mostly having to do with my hatred of our process servers, I don't really fit the villain category, and I'm not a love interest. Since we're looking at my office, it is a team-oriented story, and that gives me approximately eight choices for who I am. If we're telling the story from any other department's point of view, I'm almost invariably the shy-nerdy voice of reason. If we're looking from an attorney's point of view, I am anywhere from Rogue to Punching Bag, depending on the day and whether I've tried to contact a certain stupid large national bank that is not our main client lately (since there doesn't seem to be a 'She does whatever we throw at her/Jack of all trades' category, I suppose I'll say I'm mostly a Rogue in regards to the attorneys). And if we take it from my department's standpoint, I get to hop over to the circle of 'Leader' characters. Ignoring my propensity to categorize my job as a horror story, I'm not violent and I'm certainly not 'nearly-perfect,' so that leaves me in the 'Married to her job' category. Which isn't terribly inaccurate, I suppose, but apparently still makes me a not-strong female character. But let's go back to 'nearly-perfect' because I love this one. It gets leveraged against female characters all the time, because something deep in our insecurity makes us point to other girls and go "Too perfect!" I have, in fact, had this finger pointed at me at work several, if not many, times. Because I'm a goody two-shoes, because I put in extra hours without complaining, because et cetera. And so here, because some of the other women in my office resent the fact that, by not complaining about extra work, I am actually obligating them to do more work without complaining as well or risk irking the bosses, I slip into the annoying overachiever category (or, assuming an audience that isn't my co-workers, I am an 'Ideal Woman', presumably because my male bosses like me. But if I was a bit older I would be a wise crone, and maybe miraculously I wouldn't be resented anymore? Or, if the genders in my office were switched and the female attorneys liked me more than my male co-workers, I would be a Mary Sue?)
At this point I feel like my point would be made better by walking an actual, fictional, female character through this chart, so the nonsense you encounter by trying to implement this really comes to light. Because what it's coming to, outside of the meta issues at stake here, is that the role of all of these female characters boils down to point-of-view. (So, what does it say about our point of view here that I (we?) disapprove so intensely of this chart? What does it say about the chart-creator's point of view?)
I was going to take Temperance Brennan through the chart, but I realized pretty quickly that, since she is a titular character of a show she pretty much gets a free pass through the top line. Congrats, Bones, you can hang with Lara Croft. So I suppose it follows that this chart is effective as an argument against the lack of female protagonists. But that makes the whole bottom of the list terribly unnecessary, and as much as I'd like to look at the chart in this light, even my powerful inclination to retcon things doesn't extend that far.
And actually, I think that might be where all of our problems arise. The first question is whether the character can carry her own story, but that question then seems to be treated as whether the character does carry her own story. Just because some of these women are not written as main characters doesn't mean that they couldn't carry their own story, it just means that a different point-of-view was chosen for telling the story they were involved in. (I'm confident that the original authors of several of these characters, at least, would do a fine job of making them into main characters in their own stories.) And it's an even bigger problem that, since all of the first three turn-offs lead to the same place, it's basically implied that all the women in the branches off of the main line can't carry their own story, and are either too perfect or too soapboxy. I think it's this implication that has people up in arms, and I'm left thinking maybe without the examples, this would be a much better chart. (So I erased everyone. Which I guess makes me a villain.) Without the pictures we could stop focusing on figuring out how certain of our favorite characters were deemed unable to carry their own story, or without flaws, or too representative of an idea, and focus instead on how, if you're a female leader of a team, it's still possible for your main purpose in the story to be "the Gossip". (What?) Which is the sort of error that's the real failing of this chart. The examples lead to the dead-end logic that characters don't fit more than one trope, but more importantly the lines themselves lead to overly reductive and dismissive conclusions about female characters in general.
Which feels like a conclusion in a crappy college gender studies essay, but whatever. It's Sunday night and I have nothing better to be doing.
I guess, what I'm generally getting at when I pick up these arguments is that it's absurd to have some predetermined "Ideal Female Character" archetype, because there is no way it can be fulfilled realistically. And yes, I think that is what this chart is implying, because it relegates every trope to substandard status. So, in order to be a strong female character, you need to carry your own story, be just flawed enough, and not representative of anything readily recognizable (which I can only assume is how a lot of those characters got onto the bottom of the list). I remember having this argument countless times in college, with people who would tear other people's writing apart for "clichés" that were really just tropes. People have a habit of thinking that, just because they recognize something as an idea they've seen used before, that it must be a cliché and taken out back and burned. I feel like I tend too much toward ultra-realism in my demands for fiction, but at the same time, an unattainable standard for a certain group of characters, especially an entire gender's worth of characters, is arguing too hard for ultra-fiction.
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Well, "allowed" is probably a poor word choice. I just know I don't have much to contribute to the discussion, because I tend to be in the "be and let be" camp, and when it comes to fighting against/figuring out racism (small as this particular offense seems to me), that's not really a respectable camp to be in. I tend to overlook instances of what seems like minor racism to me, but being someone who's never encountered "real" racism against my particular group, that standpoint is pretty much unearned and so I generally can't argue my opinion without looking like I'm just lounging around in my particular privilege. Which, in all honesty, I probably am.
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I was in the women's studies dept. at UM and involved with several student groups there, before transferring to EMU to major in Social Work and becoming involved in activism groups there. It has been DRILLED INTO MY HEAD that I must speak out about isms wherever I encounter them, or I am JUST AS BAD as the ism-ists themselves. I have Unpacked the Invisible Knapsack about a dozen times. I am, in general, an outspoken and mouthy person. It's not in my nature to stand on the sidelines of a debate.
But there are some subjects I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole.
It's funny, because I read
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I'm hoping someday a good racism debate will come up where everyone has stepped back enough that other people can get involved without treading on toes. I think the key to this will be it starting as a discussion and not a rant that doesn't leave any room for disagreement. I kind of wish fandom wouldn't hop into the fray on issues like this and try to engage in debate when everything had already started off with something that amounts to "This ruins everything!" Tempting as it is to argue when things are phrased like that, it usually isn't an argument that's going to get anyone anywhere. Then again, I feel ridiculous suggesting that because I can't say "Hey everyone, calm down and speak rationally when you're offended so we can dissect the issue and ponder society at large through the lens of your discomfort!"
I feel like I have a really weird relationship to race issues in general. I grew up on the "good" side of a bad town, and a lot of my classmates and friends were black, which I knew was Something because my mom remarked on it every once in a while, mostly in regards to the birthday party I threw for myself in second grade without telling my mom first. She had to turn my friends away at the door because she wasn't going to be home the rest of the night or something, and she was really worried about some of the families thinking she was sending them away for racist reasons. But at the same time, until I moved in 5th grade I was pretty much always in "gifted" classes so I was completely removed from the rougher aspects of the area, so I have what I suppose is a whitewashed view of the whole experience. Then I moved to a podunk school district in the middle of cornfields where I didn't see a single other person of color in my classes until well into high school, when a couple of hispanic kids and one black kid were adopted by local families (who apparently registered these kids in the school district as white, because our school district demographics still read as if we have no people of color whatsoever). Many of the parents blamed the district's long-standing drug problem on the appearance of these kids (despite the fact most of them had grown up in the town, and knew about the drug problem when they were in school. Sigh). I was one of the only people there who wasn't afraid to go into the town where I grew up, and I wore it as a "Heck yes, I'm not a racist!" badge of honor. But then I moved to Chicago, and my first experience of Hyde Park, touted endlessly as a "diverse" neighborhood, was that all the black people were driving buses or selling me groceries and all the white kids were going to school and looking down on all the neighborhood people. It was like a perfect storm for reinforcing stereotypes. I was always kind of uncomfortable in the neighborhood, and it took me a long time to realize this wasn't because it was a particularly bad neighborhood, but because there are deep and complex tensions here between the university population and the neighborhood itself, for everything between discriminatory bus routes and the closing of neighborhood gardens for parking lots to stupid students doing stupid individually offensive things. I was downright baffled when someone in the freshman dorm threw a really terrible (as in, attended by about five people) theme party called the "Straight-Thuggin' Ghetto Party", later dubbed the "Racial Stereotypes Party" by the student body, that got people so up in arms that the kerfuffle actually made it onto MTV News (as well as other, more reputable news sources) and we all had to attend seminars on racial sensitivity, which seemed absurd to me, because I just couldn't get my head around that sort of thing not being obvious, and so obviously the party-throwers must've done it ironically and it was a stupid idea and clearly a terrible party anyway, so why did we care?
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Plus this entire story is one that I can't bring up in these arguments because it looks like I'm saying "But I have Asian friends and live in a predominantly black neighborhood, so that means I get a pass on being aware of my own latent -isms" when what I want to say is "This is really complicated, so here's where I'm coming from on this, help me figure this out." (Also, it's incredibly long, and I'm sorry for throwing this Wall of Text at you... I think I just wanted to write this down so it wouldn't turn up as a response to someone's journal entry about racism. (-;)
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And don't worry about laughing at the knapsack: God knows I have! I have had so damn much education about privilege, and sensitivity and issues of racism that it's coming out my ears. I've been exposed to it so much, I'm always tempted to roll my eyes and shout: "can we move on please?" whenever it comes up. I forget that it really is important, and it does need to be talked about, and just because I've heard the same damn thing a thousand times doesn't mean I can't learn something new.
For instance, before I read about the Inception kerfuffle, I'd never heard the term "hipster racism". (I've witnessed it, of course, but never knew it had a name.) While I don't make a habit of it, I realized that it is something I've done in the past. While I'm sure there are some instances that are worse than others, there are implications I'd never considered before and will be more aware of in the future. So, there you go: fandom has educated at least one ignorant white girl!
I had a similar situation to the one you describe when I lived in Ypsilanti. Ypsi is home to my university, EMU. It's a small campus, and most students are concentrated around it. The wider community is quite atypical of a college town: 40% non-white, with a quarter of the population living below the poverty line in 2000. I lived in a building notorious for housing drug dealers. It was raided three times during the time I lived there, once by the SWAT team.
A very odd setting for a middle class white girl. I had many very interesting experiences living there. And yes, I felt a lot of the racial tension you described.
Because of my experiences there, I'm always tempted to think I possess a certain special knowledge that, in reality, I don't: I was a white, middle class college girl slumming it for a few years!
I guess my point is that we should hold on to our experiences and be thankful for them, but not delude ourselves into elevating them above their worth. I, too, would love to see a sensible discussion on race take place in fandom, but I don't know how likely I would be to jump in: as you said, it's so difficult to convey the right tone that conveys your precious.
And I count myself fortunate that I'm able to have a lot of those discussions in my real life.
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You are going to get back on Sunday and have like, half a million replies from me, sorry!
Debates about racism always make me feel like I need to separate and distance myself from my past and my culture in order to justify something about what I'm saying, because it doesn't feel right to have to keep myself out of an argument because of my background. But at the same time, when we talk about sexism or sexuality I don't try to pretend that I'm not a girl or something. I think it's just easier to talk about these things when you are part of the party directly experiencing the issue, and so when it comes to race I try to find ways in which I'm a minority among the majority when really there's more to be gained by just listening. There's a part of me that feels like it's wrong that I should stay out of these arguments because I'm white, but at the same time I get annoyed at guys that hop into conversations about feminism and point out that they're different from most men because sometimes they sit down and have a good cry and so here's what they think... and I'm like "That's not the point!" I think I'm doing the same thing here by trying to justify my position with experience, and it's something I need to keep more closely in mind. I mean, I know better than it in normal conversation. I don't even say I'm from the South Side here, because 'South Side' implies something completely separate from Hyde Park, and yet I sometimes act like it makes me part of that very something I otherwise readily deny it's a part of.
So, to move on a bit, the Ypsilanti article linked to the article on hipsters (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_%28contemporary_subculture%29), and the quotes are all so amazingly vitriolic. It's like modern hipsters invented themselves as a catch-all for everything that white middle class 20-somethings do wrong. And I love when big academic words are leveraged with such anger. It's also surprisingly relevant to the discussion of the relation between the white middle class and racism. (I'm now off to do more research into the 1940s origins of the term, because I was only vaguely familiar with it before now.)
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Re: You are going to get back on Sunday and have like, half a million replies from me, sorry!
From:
Re: You are going to get back on Sunday and have like, half a million replies from me, sorry!
No clarification necessary! I know what you meant. I have a lot of friends who live in Chicago, and I know the reputation the south side has, and a little bit about the different neighborhoods.
Usually, when you're talking about where you live with people who don't know the area well, you would indentify where you're from as the closest major city. (Like my friend Kelly saying she's from Chicago, when she's really from one of the suburbs.) However, if you're speaking to someone who does know the area well, you can get yourself in trouble, because being from the city carries with it a degree of credibility that you're falsely claiming for yourself.
This is especially true of Detroit. I usually say "I'm from metro Detroit", but then when you're interacting online with people from other countries, they don't know what the fuck "metro Detroit" is! In those instances I say Detroit, but I'm always waiting to get caught out and chastised by people from actual Detroit. (So yes, I know what you mean when you say you won't claim to live on the South Side!)
LOL @ my colossal link fail! I was researching the idea of "hipster racism" when I was writing that comment, and I have no idea how I linked you to that article rather than the one on Ypsilanti. Anyway, yeah, there's a lot of backlash against hipsters, which I have to say is at least minutely well-deserved. I just find it weird, because I've never been part of any identifiable social group. You couldn't look at me and say "hipster" or "goth" or "hippie" or anything like that. (I do have characteristics of all three, though.)
I hope I didn't come across as lecturing with my talk about the value of experience; I meant to be commisserating in the sense of being another well-meaning white girl who wants so badly to say that she understands! But as you observed, sometimes that's not good enough! (I am almost always annoyed by boys who want to jump into discussions about feminism, but occasionally I'll come across one that says something that's so close to getting it I just want to have his babies right there. Yeah, I am feminist to the bone!)
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Re: You are going to get back on Sunday and have like, half a million replies from me, sorry!
I love the shading of "where are you from?" in and around big cities. And even small ones. When I refer to where I'm from in Ohio I say I'm from Youngstown, not because I was born there and lived there for a few years when I was little, but because where I actually consider myself to be from doesn't even make a speck on the map. And there are two other towns in Ohio with the same name. So I try to cut the suburbanites some slack when they say they're from Chicago... except the ones that come into the city itself and say it. "'Oh, where in Chicago are you from?' 'Naperville!' 'Er...'"
It always felt weird when I was in Europe and people would ask where I was from and I'd say "Chicago," though. None of the other travellers I met identified themselves by their cities--even Canadians, which ruins my theory that the US is so big (and featureless in the middle) that we have to identify by our cities. Then again, I could've easily gone along with everyone else and just given my country--I just feel weird saying "I'm from the US" because declaring oneself to be an American is the sort of thing rural conservatives do to prove a point, plus everyone knows foreigners hate us. (-;
And you did get the link right, sorry! (-: I was just noting that the article itself goes on about Ypsilanti being Ann Arbor's Brooklyn, which of course meant hipsters had to be mentioned, and I follow links like Neo follows white rabbits (which is why I wake up every morning hoping no one has linked me to TVTropes).
I am... probably a hipster. I'm into a lot of things hipsters are into, I bike around everywhere, I like to rant about hipsters, and even in my work clothes apparently I look like a hipster (I think this has to do with the beat-up Converses I wear, which I only started wearing because of Ten. Having a private reference to Doctor Who on my feet made going in to work every day just that tiny bit more okay. Then every third goshdarn businessman in the financial district started wearing them, too, and I wasn't different anymore.
Also, I go off on rants like that.^_^) But, like you, I've never really subscribed to a specific social group, and so suddenly looking like a hipster to everyone is weird. And I'm always kind of sad and frustrated when I meet real hipsters. Especially at concerts. Because you're not even supposed to look like you're enjoying yourself, and you certainly can't talk to people you don't know about any mutual interests you might have and I just don't see the point of liking interesting things if you're not going to share with other people--especially other people who are already interested. /outcasthipstergriping (-;You didn't come across as lecturing, don't worry. If anything I feel like I'm taking advantage of the fact that you're interested in these things. I get to talk about it so rarely that I'm just inundating you with random thoughts and information. So if you do feel the need to lecture or to tell me to cool it, you have my word I won't be bothered much.
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Re: You are going to get back on Sunday and have like, half a million replies from me, sorry!
I also found this in the article: "An episode of the TV series "Supernatural" called "A Very Supernatural Christmas" partially takes place in Ypsilanti."
Do you watch this show? It seems kinda random to even partially set a show in Ypsi...there's really not much to the place! (Despite Wikipedia's insistence that it's full of hipsters.)
I've been lost in TvTropes before. I discovered things there I never wanted to know.
I'm all curious now about what my clothing choices say about me. (My taste in music is certainly hipster-ish--aside from my love/hate fascination with Ke$ha.) What always gets me about hipsters is the "hip to be square" mentality where proclaiming yourself a nerd or a geek is a badge of honor. Well, as an actual nerd/geek I AM (slightly) OFFENDED! I am nerdy/geeky in ways that would make me socially awkward if I weren't psychologically incapable of recognizing my own social awkwardness.
(Well, I do realize it after the fact. A couple weekends ago, a friend had a small dinner party, and I got there early to help her get ready. I was peeling and cutting up apples when our other friend and her boyfriend got there. He asked me what I was doing, and I said I was, "Disarticulating the apples". Now, I meant this as a joke: "disarticulate" is a word you use to mean separating cuts of meat at the joint. I used it to mean I was "butchering" the apples, i.e. not doing it very well. Later, when I thought about the levels of thought necessary to get this "joke", I understood the look he gave me as well as the lack of laughter and the fact that he just kinda walked away.)
I would feel weird saying "I'm from the US" for fear that the person I were talking to would say "Well, DUH!" There's always the stereotype that you can spot an American anywhere.
Oh good. I worried about lecturing because apparently, in person, I can come off as "intense" in a discussion. I'd get into why that is, but the eleven hours of driving I did this weekend combined with the 7 hours of sleep is getting to me. I'll just cut myself off mid-ramble then. ;)
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Re: You are going to get back on Sunday and have like, half a million replies from me, sorry!
I am slowly being driven crazy by mainstream and hipster culture co-opting geekiness. It's...
but I was a geek before it was cool!... the theme of this thread is now "People who don't get it and pretend to be something they aren't appear in all facets of life and are always kind of annoying." (-; I guess it was one of the last remaining unexploited-but-generally-acceptable subcultures. I doubt hipsters will co-opt furries or something. Then again, you never know. (In fact, there was a guy I knew in college... plaid shirts, skinny jeans, ironic sense of humor... who also infamously showed up to calc class on a random day dressed as Blue from Blue's Clues).♥ disarticulating apples! (I would've laughed. Though I wouldn't have made it all the way down your tree of reasoning there. (-;) I've done things like that. I had quite a reputation as an aloof snob at work because it took me a long time to learn to watch what I say. I once told one of my co-workers to send a message to one of our clients that said there was a "fundamental disconnect in our communications." I was being deliberately obtuse, since people had just complained that we couldn't use multi-syllable words with them, but it was also a reference to some ridiculous political campaign buzzword or something that was going on at the time as well, that I really should've known better than to reference. They didn't even have the grace to stare blankly and walk away, they just came straight out with "Who talks like that, geez!"
... You know, on the "looks like an American" front, I'm always hyper-aware of looking like a city girl when I'm back home, but either completely forgot or completely missed whether I looked distinctly American in Paris and London. I probably looked like a tourist, since I was walking around with a camera and a notebook, and there's no missing the accent, but from a purely visual standpoint I really have no idea if that's true. I certainly can't pick out French or German or British tourists on the streets here until they say something, and I couldn't pick out other Americans on the streets over there (then again, I ran into maybe three Americans total. Everyone else was either from Europe or Australia/New Zealand. I guess Americans aren't travelling much right now).