teagrl

Off the cuff -- I saw Venom yesterday and thought it was fun. I appreciate the sensibility a lot, but thought it'd be *fascinating* if it were genderbent. I say this because in my head I thought of the female analogues of this kind of plot being obviously the Alien franchise (particularly Aliens 3), and Species which iirc ended up some softcore vangina dentata-esque bullshit.

But we can go further in genre and think of it as a sci fi take on your usual possession narrative. So it'd be kind of novel to have a deconstruction of the classic woman possessed narrative where both woman and whatever is possessing her reach some sort of balance/understanding by themselves, and the story just kind of...goes on. No external salvation needed or necessary!

And it would be even better if the woman wasn't in some position where whatever possesses her empowers her (a la Catwoman in Batman 2), which is trite at this point. As far as Venom goes, Brock's status as a "hero" even at the end has to do with circumstance more than any large scale idea of justice/vengeance. As a dude and his dude-coded symbiote, their agency and personhood comes through over anything else. It'd be nice for a woman to be accorded that kind of subjectivity not defined by grievance (I love love love Ripley, but the alien franchise is pretty conservative in using her as an order-establishing figure though I concede that there are readings possible that contradict that).

In the effort to make content. I will follow up on a post I made in tumblr detailing the empty-nest-in-my-head feeling I have now that Stone is done. It's still dragging me down.

That said today navel gazing with strangeallure, I think I came upon my formula for longfic. That is if I have some interesting content (to me), if I have a specific aesthetic, and if I have some talking back I mean to do at canon. That's what gets me to write more than 30K. Let's take a look.

The following are my titles, my content, my aesthetic, and the yelling I do at canon (my "meta"):

Velvet Gloves 55K court machinations, a glamorous court, balancing public and private is hard

Care and Training of an Apprentice 66K Force training under a different sect, rustic community, training of the self is training in how to feel

Ricochet 141K a hit job, gritty underworld/space ship/vents, you can't be free if you keep living the way you have

Thresholds 72k a babymoon, lush fantasy world complete with sentient dragons rancors, dealing with parenting doubts

River of Stone 92k captivity, jungle gothic, saving someone who doesn't want to be saved

My mid-form has these to some degree but I think the equation is less even and less clear. I'm not sure what the aesthetic of Flying Cage is per se, for example. I can't nail it down the way I did with the above stories because I spent so much time making sure that all my descriptions lined up in a specific way. In Ricochet everything described gets described as noir, gritty -- dirty, dark, and cramped. In Care it's sunny, cheerful, and loud. In Velvet, things are glittery and bright all the way. In Thresholds, things are colorful and sensual. In River I'm back to dark, but it's dark and wet.

So I'm going to try to fill up this journal with some content. It's surprisingly tough after tumblr made me used to the reblog + tag as commentary formula. And I'll start by x-posting from my tumblr with an eye on how that goes.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about remixing since I find it fascinating as a fannish approach. I remember a lot of discussion about it way back in the day. On a high level, I like how remixing sheds like on the techniques we use to “transform” canon (this is the name of the game in essence, no? to create “transformative work?”).

All that munching on remixing made me also think about beat sampling these days (another way of thinking about transformative is a “cover” which I might talk about at some point), and the kind of relationship that presupposes to an “original” track. I mean, I think of how Mobb Deep samples She Blinded Me With Science in Get it Twisted than and how Pete Rodriguez’s I Like It Like That gets sampled in Cardi B’s I like It. You can’t argue that the samples aren’t the basis, but the songs move into clearly different directions than their samples, and both have a different relationship to them.

I feel like my shit these days is closer to the former example than the later as I grow less interested in canon-for-itself and more interested as using it as a jumping point for narratives that just wouldn’t fit there for any number of reasons.