Still Angry at the Magic Lady Show for Torturing the Child
Guess I’d better not read the books
How ‘bout that Wheel of Time show? Gone girl does magic. I love when Gone Girl shows up and does things like magic. Like many cool new shows, I only know about it because one of my beloved youtubers went and made a cosplay. If someone loves something enough to hand-sew an outfit, there must be something about it, huh?
Also, beloved Bernadette discovered the show because one needs a lot of something to watch and listen to when one is hand sewing and being a delightfully quirky person. So says Bernadette. Us strange people must stick together and support each other in our strangeness.
I presumed, when I realized that lots of people don’t like Wheel o’ Time, that it’s half that many will not forgive Gone Girl for Gone Girl, and half will not forgive a woman for looking her age.
We’re going to stick with the Gay of Thrones school of naming conventions for several reasons. For one, amusing to me. For another, I am too scared to invoke the wrath of the most devoted fans by failing to know the names of characters they care about. Also, ever since Game of Thrones made the whole basic TV-watching world feel deeply and personally betrayed by its failure to be good enough, so many of us can’t bring our selves to love a new fantasy again. And by love fantasy enough I mean care enough to learn the fantasy names. We learned so many Brandons just to get the lamest conversation crowning Bran the Broken. We know Wun Wun was short for Wun Weg Wun Dar Wun, when I could have devoted that memory space to information about a human person friend. So, I will try my best to have cute, not-at-all-problematic names for the characters whose names I can’t remember.
I bought the book. Now I’m afraid to read it. I only have the first book, and I love reading fantasy books. I love dragons and magic, but I don’t want to read about a woman being tortured.
As a writer who writes fantasy, It’s easy for me to have a list of things I just wouldn’t ever include in writing, and that I don’t want to consume in media. I won’t do the Bagger Vance type magical character. There can be magic, but not marginalized people who are only written to provide convenient service to less marginalized people.
I also won’t graphically describe torture. I’m so mad there was a whole episode of one of the people of color in the show being abused, and it being shown in detail. It’s in the same category as having to watch Daenerys endure the R-word. The justifications is supposed to be, “This is the character at their lowest!” and yet more articulate cultural critics agree, “You don’t have to show it!”
Watching li’l Egwene get that little magic collar and the impressive special effects of, “This is the magic being sucked over to this other person,” brought the exact same nauseating feeling as that extremely long shot of the Stormship Troopers brainbug vacuuming out the cranium of final-disposable-corner-of-the-love-quadrangle-man. Or like trying to get NightCafe to generate a strawberry and creating a tropophobia trigger. Please don’t ask an image generator for a strawberry. It’s worse than toothy hands.
Well, I thought about three awful things and I didn’t make myself throw up. What and unprecedented victory for the day.
Maybe I’m easily upset. Well, yes, I’m easily upset. I didn’t like the bird-eating guy who cut peoples’ hands off in the first season. I forgot what happened to him but I guess he’s still alive and dangerous. What was nice was that the main characters he captured were only in danger for half an episode. It was enough to make me scared that someone I liked was going to be harmed, and the way they got out was reasonable.
I don’t want to see people being tortured. I don’t think it has the narrative value it’s supposed to. We know the long-nail mohawk people are bad. They’re trying to take over or something, they’re allied with the big bad guy and they killed that one guy that horrible way. They showed up like the bad guys in 300, so you know they conspicuously abuse huge swaths of people as a status symbol. They’re super theatrical so you know they’re some kind of fascist. there was a big scary sharp thing, so you knew someone was going to die horribly.
Everyone who likes Egwene and was sensitive was going to be upset watching her suffer. What may be worse, there are still people who find it titillating to watch people get tortured. I’ve seen it. I don’t mean to argue that they would watch the show and be suddenly thrilled to have their kink indulged. What I mean is that it’s still a trope in visual media to frame violence against a marginalized body as erotic. Remember that long, unnecessary death in Jurassic World? We didn’t just watch a person brutally killed by a ridiculous number of dinosaurs and technically-flying-and-swimming-things-aren’t-dinosaurs, we looked down her cleavage and up her skirt while she was being passed around between various creatures and it was distracting. It’s not just that some people sexualize violence against certain bodies, it’s that the way we’re used to making and consuming films has conditioned us to accept that as normal.
The metaphor strikes a little too close to home. I didn’t like how in that other interesting fantasy show Shadow and Bone, the big bad also used magical means to steal the female main character’s magical ability. I get that it might be the point that for those of us living in countries that are trying to take away reproductive freedom. Like, yeah, maybe it was therapeutic for someone to write “Someone’s trying to suck my magic!” as a metaphor for “Someone’s trying to micromanage my uterus!” Let’s not leave out the trans-men and non-binary folk who also have the magic organs everyone cares about.
I think the problem for me is that the people in the show are still in danger. If I had come into the show when it was finished and ready to binge, I might not be so bothered. I’m probably sensitive to the fact that both the fantasy people and we the IRL people are in unresolved danger. Based on the one spoiler I know, I can bet the fantasy people are going to get out of scary torture prison and get home somehow. But we don’t know how we’re going to get back on track with the laws of our own lands. It’s going to take so much effort from so many of us, and it’s going to take so long. I wish they’d just given us hope by rescuing the characters within one episode of being captured.
Or maybe it’s that my half-finished uterus-having child’s name is kind of similar to Egwene and seeing the TV young person being abused feels especially like seeing my child abused. Maybe.
Maybe it’s the way-too-many-times that the magic-partner-soldier person came in and told the chained up person that she had to accept her identity as sub-human. That was upsetting for me and my immigrant frustrations. See, to be an immigrant (in most of the world that I’ve been to) is in some ways to be in an abusive relationship with a country. I suppose other marginalized groups would say it’s like that for them, but I’ll leave it to them to speak for themselves. I’ve never regretted listening to people at other intersections.
Everyone of us who has be indoctrinated with some kind of self-aggrandizing patriotism has been told to accept that certain people deserve fewer rights, or to be less comfortable. What a terrible thing to believe, but it’s been pushed on most people I know. Somehow a lot of our governments tricked us into to believing immigrants or others have done something wrong and it’s fine that they’re treated badly.
I understand a little better now that I’ve gone through immigration in a few different countries. I’ve seen what it’s like to try to be friends with people who genuinely see you as inferior, so much so that they think they’re doing you a favor by informing you of your rightful place. That sucks. I knew it sucked before I experienced it, but I didn’t do enough about it. I can see what I would do differently if I were back in my own place of origin and I wanted to be friends with some people from some other place. Mostly listen and treat everyone as equals, since everyone is equals. Don’t presume to know what’s best for anyone. Don’t presume to belong in charge of someone just because they’re at some disadvantage.
