Marie Brennan's Blog, page 113

The Littlest Black Belt Gets Dressed Up

After my test back in March, Shihan gave me a plain black belt to wear.

My real black belt had to be ordered from Okinawa, you see. Which takes a while — and then I vanished for three months, on account of house-buying and travel and house-moving and the dojo’s annual summer break. But tonight I went back, for the first time since early May, and this was waiting for me:

Mind you, the really real symbol of my achievement won’t come until the dojo party this Christmas. As Shihan has pointed out, anybody can go online and buy a black belt — even one with their name embroidered on it in Japanese. But you can’t buy an enormous diploma signed by a ninth-degree black belt in your style, which is what I’ll get in a few months.

Still and all . . . it’s good to have the belt.

My first (actual) GenCon

When I lived in Indiana, I would habitually go up to GenCon on a day pass just to go shopping in the dealers’ room. This year was my first time actually attending in any meaningful sense — mostly as a part of the Writers’ Symposium, but it counts, right?

Naturally, I took my camera with me. Wound up not taking nearly as many costume photos as I thought I might, but I quite liked this Lady Thor, posing in a sunbeam:

(I deliberately experimented with cranking certain settings to make the picture look less than entirely realistic.)

GenCon was a lot of fun. I went on a True Dungeon run at Patrick Rothfuss’ invitation, because of my participation in last year’s Worldbuilders fundraiser; most of us were complete newbies, but one of the players had such an enormous stack of equipment tokens for every class that we geared up and went through on Nightmare mode. We, uh, survived? I did a variety of panels, a one-hour workshop on Writing Fight Scenes (which hopefully taught participants many things, and taught me I should ask for a two-hour timeslot next time), and hung out with several friends from my Indiana days. All in all, I call that a good con.

Good enough, in fact, that I’m tempted to go back in a future year — and possibly to run a LARP when I do . . .

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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Dice Tales roundup

Man, I’m behind on linking to these things. Have a bunch of Dice Tales posts!

“PvP(ish)” — on how setting up PCs to be in conflict (or at least contrast) with each other can be a good thing

“Older and Wiser — Or at Least More Powerful” — on character advancement in a campaign

“In Medias Res” — on the narrative challenges of introducing a new PC mid-campaign

“Every Title I Can Think of For This Post Sounds Like Spam” — on the mechanical challenges of same. (All my title ideas had to do with making things bigger, helping them grow, etc.)

Comment over there!

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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How to bore me in thirty seconds flat

I needed to be doing some random stuff on the computer this morning, so on a whim, I put on the first episode of Rizzoli & Isles, which is Yet Another Police Procedural, though with two female leads.

First thing I see: a bound and terrified woman, in the clutches of an unknown villain.

Which led me to ask on Twitter, What percentage of police procedurals open their pilot ep with a woman chased, crying, screaming, or dead?

Because seriously — at this point, that is the single most boring way I can think of to open your show. Also problematic and disturbing, but even if you don’t care about those things, maybe you care about it being utterly predictable. There is nothing fresh or new about having the first minute of your police procedural episode show us somebody (usually a woman) being victimized. I said on Twitter, and I meant it, that I would rather see your protagonist file papers. I might decide in hindsight that the paper-filing was also boring . . . but in the moment, I’d be sitting up and wondering, why am I seeing this? Are the papers important? Or something about how the protag is approaching them? Because it isn’t a thing I’ve seen a million times before.

The only thing that brief clip of the victim gives us is (usually) a voyeuristic experience of their victimization. They don’t make the victim a person, an individual we get to know and care about. They rarely even give us meaningful information about the crime, except “this person died from a gunshot/strangulation/burning alive/whatever” — which is info we could easily get later in the episode, through the investigation.

There are exceptions, on a show or individual ep level. But the overwhelming pattern is: here’s some violence for violence’s sake, before we get to the actual characters and the actual story.

I decided last year that I was done with the genre of “blood, tits, and scowling.” I think I’m done with police procedurals, too. I won’t swear I’ll never watch another one, but they’ve just lost all their flavor for me, because I’ve seen so many. And because I am so very, very tired with those predictable openings.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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Stepping up

Last night, I went to the website of the California Democratic Party and filled out a volunteer form.

Because I believe that this election matters — and I don’t just mean the presidential election, though keeping that proud bigot, Donald Trump, out of office is a high priority for me. As I’ve said before, I think we as a society need to pay more attention to the down-ticket races, to the local elections and measures. And I think one of the most corrosive factors in the United States right now is the combination of apathy and organized efforts to restrict voting rights: the sense that your vote doesn’t really matter, and the passage of laws supposedly designed to combat the next-to-nonexistent problem of voter fraud, which just so happen to make it harder for the Wrong Kind of People to vote. I don’t know yet what my local party will ask me to help out with, but I’m hoping I can work on the “get out the vote” end of things.

But I won’t be choosy. Whatever they need, I will do my best to provide. Because I’m not sure I’ve cared about any election year as much as this one.

If you’re involved in politics, organizing or volunteering or holding some political office, speak up in the comments! I’d like to know who out there has already waded into this particular pond.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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a three-word review of JASON BOURNE

It came to me while I was sitting through the interminable final action sequence:

Macho masturbatory bullshit.

Because the action scenes were generally half again as long as they needed to be (and full of obnoxious, over-used shaky cam), I had plenty of time to contemplate how done I am with The Adventures of Scowly McScowlface and His Total Awesomeness*. Matt Damon is a good actor, but this film gave him bugger-all to work with; I imagine the direction he received consisted of “look intense!” and pretty much nothing else. And although there was supposed to be an interesting character conflict at the heart of it all, the script basically just nodded in that direction and then went back to the tired old formula of evil cover-ups and revenge. Round about the point at which a SWAT truck started slamming through other cars at an improbable rate, I mentally checked out for good, with the three words given above.

It is perhaps unfair to dismiss the entire film as macho masturbatory bullshit. The most engaging parts had nothing to do with Bourne at all; they were about Nicki Parsons and Heather Lee, who are the actual drivers of the plot. (For a movie titled Jason Bourne, he was a remarkably reactive character, basically just punching bad guys and engaging in vehicle chases when somebody else gives him a reason to.) Even they couldn’t really save the story from its essential blandness; Lee, who’s got a better claim to the title of “protagonist” than anybody else there, spends quite a lot of her time staring at screens and talking into a microphone, telling other people what to do. And contrary to what the director seemed to think, rapid intercuts of people walking places very intently doesn’t really build tension. But quite frankly, watching a straight white dude go around inflicting mayhem has gotten boring enough that even the simple expedient of swapping him out for a straight white woman looks interesting by comparison. My days of needing nothing more than fistfights and explosions to engage my attention are long gone.

I prefer the new Ghostbusters. And Wonder Woman. And that remake they’re planning of The Rocketeer, with a black woman as the lead. Or, y’know, anything with actual characterization and depth. Anything other than The Adventures of Scowly McScowlface and His Total Awesomeness.

*So why did I see the movie? Free ticket, via my husband’s company, which had bought out the entire auditorium for a preview. In hindsight, there were better uses for my evening.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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Oblique specificity of description

That phrase probably makes no sense, but it’s the best I can do.

There’s a thing certain writers are capable of: Dorothy Dunnett and Dorothy Sayers are the ones who come immediately to mind, and Sonya Taaffe (she has a Patreon for her movie reviews — I’m just sayin’), but I’m sure there are others I’m not thinking of at the moment. These people are brilliant at describing characters. And what makes them brilliant is what, for lack of a better term, I keep thinking of as “oblique specificity.”

By this I mean something like the “telling detail” writing-advice books are always going on about, but leveled up. It’s the ability to find that one thing about a character, be it physical or psychological, that isn’t in the list of the top ten features that would probably come to mind if somebody said “describe a character,” but winds up encapsulating them in just a few words. And it’s the ability to make those words not the ones you expected: the line that sparked this post is from the Peter Wimsey novel Murder Must Advertise, where Lord Peter is playing a cricket match and accidentally goes to town when up ’til then he’s pretended to be just an ordinary guy. There are lots of phrases I would think of to describe how he starts showing a higher degree of power than he’s exhibited before, but “opening up wrathful shoulders” is not one of them — and yet, it works.

I want to read more authors like this. (Because I want to dissect what they’re doing until I’ve figured out how it ticks.) So: recommend authors to me?

I’d especially love to see this done in different contexts, because one thing Dunnett, Sayers, and Taaffe share is that they’re all writing from a more omniscient perspective than you’d ordinarily see in a modern novel. I think the added distance helps, because description doesn’t have to be delivered through the perspective of a character; not all characters are really suited to that kind of descriptive artistry. Though no examples are leaping to mind at the moment, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a variant of this done with first-person narrators, using the narrative voice to give descriptions more punch than they would otherwise have, but I’m not sure that’s always quite the same thing that I’m thinking of. (Since I’m kind of vague on what exactly I’m thinking of, this distinction is subject to debate.) I think I’ve seen it much less, though, with third-person limited narration, which lacks both the unfiltered individuality of good first-person narration and the analytical distance of omniscient. Then again, maybe that’s just a function of who I’ve been reading. I welcome any and all recommendations, especially if you can quote lines to show me how that author approaches it.

But do keep it limited to description of characters, rather than other things. Scene-setting and action and so forth are worthy topics in their own right, but right now it’s the evocation of character that I’m particularly interested in dissecting.

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great review for COLD-FORGED FLAME in Publishers Weekly

Quoting just the key bits:

Brennan explores the power of memory, self-realization, and destiny in this mix of survival story and self-discovery tale. […] Brennan delights readers with this exciting, fast-paced start to a fantasy novella series.

Cold-Forged Flame will be out on September 13th. (As will the UK edition of A Star Shall Fall, as it happens.) I can’t wait!

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My decreasing sympathy for Captain Rogers

There are many things I liked about Captain America: Civil War, but probably the best aspect of the whole movie is the fact that I keep thinking about it, and about the arguments it presents. Just the other night I got into a discussion about it again, which prompted me to dust off this half-finished entry and post it.

Let’s get one thing out of the way, first: from what little we know about the Sokovia Accords, it sounds like they’re a steaming pile of badly-thought-out crap. (Not to mention wildly unrealistic in so, so many ways; as one of my friends pointed out, the most implausible thing in this film isn’t super soldier serum or Iron Man’s suit or anything like that, but the idea that the Accords could spring into being so quickly, with so many countries on board, without three years of very public argument first.) So when I say I’m increasingly sympathetic to Tony’s side of the argument, I don’t mean its specific manifestation — nor his INCREDIBLY naive brush-off that “laws can be amended” after the fact — but rather the underlying principle that some kind of oversight and accountability is needed.

Because the more I think about the underlying principles on Steve’s side, the more they bother me.

I understand his starting point. He accepted oversight and followed orders; the organization giving those orders turned out to be a Hydra sock-puppet. Now he’s exceedingly leery of the potential for corruption — or even just so much bureaucratic red tape that nothing winds up getting done. And he’s presumably reluctant to sign a legal document saying he’ll follow orders when he already knows he’ll break his word the moment he feels his own moral compass requires him to do so. That part, I understand and sympathize with.

But here’s the thing. It sounds like he wants all the freedom of a private citizen to do what he wants . . . without any of the consequences of acting as a private citizen. Soldiers don’t get personally sued when they destroy people’s cars and houses or civic infrastructure; private individuals do. Is Steve prepared to pay restitution for all the damage he causes? (Or are the insurance companies supposed to classify him as an act of God, no different from a tornado or a hailstorm?) Would Steve accept it as just and fair if the Nigerian government arrested him for entering the country illegally? It sure didn’t sound like the Avengers came in through the Lagos airport and declared the purpose of their trip to officials there. Based on what we’ve seen, it looks like Steve wants all the upside, none of the downside, to acting wholly on his own.

And this gets especially troubling when you drill down into him acting that way in other countries. I’m sure he thinks that petitioning the Nigerian government for permission to chase Rumlow there would eat up too much precious time — and what if they refused permission? Does he trust them to deal with the problem themselves? No, of course not — Steve gives the strong impression of not trusting anybody else to deal with the problem, be they Nigerian or German or American. To him, it’s a moral question: will he stand by while there’s danger, just because a government told him not to get involved? Of course he won’t. And this is the part in my mental argument with him where I started saying, “right, I forgot that you slept through the end of the colonial era. Let me assemble a postcolonial reading list for you about the host of problems inherent in that kind of paternalistic ‘I know better than you do and will ride roughshod over your self-determination for your own good’ attitude.”

Captain America is, for better or for worse, the embodiment of the United States’ ideals circa 1942. Which means that along with the Boy Scout nobility, there’s also a streak of paternalism a mile wide.

Mind you, Tony’s side of the argument is also massively flawed. Taken to its extreme, it would recreate the dynamics of the Winter Soldier: that guy went where he was told and killed who his bosses wanted him to, without question, without exercising his own ethical judgment. And anything done by multinational committee will inherently fail to have the kind of flexibility and quick reaction time that’s needed for the kind of work the Avengers are expected to do. The politics of it would be a nightmare, you know that some countries will get the upper hand and this will exacerbate tensions between them and the rest of the world, and the potential for a re-creation of Steve’s Hydra problem is huge. Plus, how are they going to handle people who opt out of the program? What’s going to govern the use of their powers — or do the authors of the Accords intend to forbid that use, without government approval? That’s a civil rights nightmare right there.

But in the end, I come around to the side that says, there needs to be supervision and accountability. It’s all well and good that Steve feels bad when he fails to save people, but he wreaks a lot of havoc in the course of trying, and feeling bad about it doesn’t make the people he damages whole. (If memory serves, almost all of the destruction at the airport is caused by Steve’s allies, until Vision slices the top of that tower off: I doubt that was a narrative accident.) Is setting up that supervision and accountability going to be difficult? Hell yes. But there has to be some, because otherwise . . .

. . . well, otherwise we wind up with a larger-scale version of the problems we have right now with police violence. Which is a separate post, but I’ll see if I can’t get that one done soon.

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The New Ghostbusters

Last year I talked about “girlcotting” Star Wars — supporting with my money and my attention a movie that gives me a female hero. So along comes Ghostbusters, a whole pack of women kicking spectral ass: of course I went to see it, on opening weekend.

I loved it.

Not in the same way that I love the original film. They’re different decades, different flavors. It took me a little while to let go of the 1984 version, to see this one for itself; there are parallels between them (on a variety of levels), but the 2016 film is coming at those things from a different angle. You can certainly line up this crew against that one (Erin = Peter, Abi = Ray, Holtz = Egon, Patty = Winston), but they aren’t the same people in drag. They go through a different arc and arrive at a different place.

And can we just stop for a moment to talk about Holtz? Jillian Holtzmann, the Ghostbuster played by Kate Mckinnon. This movie is basically the Holtzmann Show Featuring Holtz and Her Toys — and not because everybody else is boring; it’s just that Mckinnon walks away with nearly every scene she’s in. It is also apparently canon that she’s a lesbian: Sony seems to have instructed the director not to say so, but he’s not saying so in a way that makes the message pretty clear. If this isn’t the breakaway favorite for Yuletide 2016, I suspect that will be because it’s already too big for the exchange.

If you watched the original trailer and cringed, rest assured: that trailer was a terrible representation of the movie. The best lines aren’t in there. The characters’ nuances don’t come through. Patty, the character played by Leslie Jones, is not the one-note stereotype the trailer would have you believe: when she says “I know New York,” she isn’t talking about “urban street smarts” or anything like that. She’s talking about the stack of books she’s read that make her a walking encyclopedia of New York history.

(And dear god Chris Hemsworth’s character makes fence posts look like beacons of intelligence. It’s kind of amazing.)

It isn’t flawless. Neither is the original. But I enjoyed it a hell of a lot, and if I don’t go see it again in the theatres, it will only be because I’m still busy moving house.

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