Maleficent: Hell Yes.

So, I'm in love.

My husband and I went to see Maleficent yesterday and if bigamy was legal and you could marry a movie, I'd marry Maleficent.

Okay, I'm kidding a little. But only a little. The movie isn't perfect. I could have completely done without the narrator, for one. Add a scene or two to provide the exposition, and get rid of the narrator. The only narrator I ever like to listen to is Galadriel, and this was no Galadriel. Also, the three Stooges-esque "comedy" of the three fairies was really weak--but then I've never been a fan of that kind of slapstick comedy. And I get the criticism some reviewers have made regarding the idea that anyone would entrust a baby to those goofs. Plus, this is not the movie where Disney makes any strides towards LGBTTQ inclusiveness. I'm willing to just set all that aside, because what I loved about the movie just so far outweighs all the flaws.

Some reviewers were unhappy with how focused on Angelina Jolie the movie was. This was no problem for me, because I really admire Angelina Jolie. Before she became unnaturally thin, I used to think she was very attractive, as well--I don't think of her that way as much, but I really enjoyed her in this role. She was perfectly cast. She has the unusually extreme features necessary for a non-human character, and all they needed to do was enhance her cheekbones and her eyes a little to make her look fey. Even her thinness worked for the character. And I loved how demon-like she looked, with her horns and the hooks on her wings. And yet she was not a demon. That was awesome.

Beyond her looks, though, I admire Jolie for her adoptions and her choice to go public with her decision to get a double mastectomy. I'm sure she's got plenty of flaws, but when it comes to what I know of her, I think of her as a really strong woman.

Which brings me to what I loved about this movie. This was a movie about a very strong woman. It showed her suffering and rising from that, taking vengeance, and then returning to herself. It's hard to capture in words how watching this movie made me feel. Just watching her fly--I had tears in my eyes. Why? Well, partly because I'm not in my right mind these days. But also because I haven't seen anything like that in so long. It's been so long since a I saw a female character who was strong without being irrationally emotional. Who was beautiful without being oversexed. Who was furious without being obsessed with a man. And the whole movie was like a feminist fantasy* of a woman beating these awful men--and only when they were trying to destroy the forest, too. I mean, for a greenie like me, that was awesome.

Most of the characters in this movie were female. Like I mentioned above, the fairies were too silly, but even so, at least they were female. I get very frustrated with all the stories where maybe the main character is female, which is nice, but then it's like the people writing the story have to balance that with three extra male characters. And then, of course, there's the bazillion stories out there with the one or two female supporting characters, who never talk to each other unless it's about one of the male characters. Even my beloved Lord of the Rings trilogy is terrible in this way. I've come to a point where I watch shows and movies and just try to roll with it. Watching Maleficent shook me up because it reminded me of what I've been missing.

[MAJOR SPOILERS]

Maleficent does fall in love in the film, but it's never central to who she is or what she's doing. Her love, Stefan, eventually becomes too wrapped up in his ambition to become king to visit her anymore, and all that happens is that Maleficent spends some time alone sometimes. It's implied she misses him, but not really spelled out, and certainly not dwelt on. That was refreshing. Then, the king tells his would-be heirs that he will give the succession to the one who kills Maleficent, and Stefan uses their former relationship to approach her. He drugs her and tries to kill her. He can't go through with it. One reviewer I read claims this is because he's "weak." I disagree. Stefan can't kill Maleficent because some part of him still loves her. Instead, he cuts off her wings.

Here's one of the things I loved about the movie. I knew something bad would have to happen to her to make her go evil and curse a baby, and I was dreading the obvious choice for her motivation there: the woman-scorned storyline we see so often (recently they decided to explain the Wicked Witch of the West's motivation in this tired way, for instance). But Maleficent doesn't go evil because Stefan scorned her. She goes evil because he stole her wings. It is her wings she mourns--not her love. She describes them, latter, "I had wings once, and they were strong. They could carry me above the clouds and into the headwinds, and they never faltered. Not even once."

Thoughout the scene where she first mourns her wings I cried for her because I thought of how in real life, Jolie has had to give up part of her body. I don't know what it's like to lose your breasts. I know she made a choice to do so--but it must still have been devastating. So, another reason the casting of her in this role resonated powerfully.

Then, there's the resolution of the curse. If you're familiar with the original Disney movie of Sleeping Beauty, you know that Maleficent curses Aurora as a baby--she will grow in grace and beauty, everyone who knows her will love her,** but then at the age of 16, she will prick her finger on a spinning wheel's needle and fall into a death-like sleep (although in the original story, unless I'm mistaken, the evil fairy curses her to die and one of the good fairies softens the curse to a death-like sleep--in the movie they skipped that). Only true love's kiss will wake her, but then, Maleficent doesn't believe in true love.

Maleficent watches the baby grow and finds she has to intervene because of the three fairies' incompetence. Soon, she is charmed by the little girl, and eventually, comes to love her so much she wants to revoke the curse, but can't. Aurora pricks her finger and falls asleep, but not before meeting a nice-looking, charming prince. Everyone scrambles to get this prince to Aurora's bedside, Maleficent included.

Now, I watch Once Upon a Time, and one of the things I love about that show is that mother's love counts as true love. And if anyone acted as Aurora's mother as she grew up, it was Maleficent, though she was cold and withdrawn about it. So I was really hoping Maleficent's kiss would do the trick, and pretty annoyed that they were going with the love at first sight silliness with the prince. And then... his kiss didn't work. Maleficent's did.

That was exactly what I wanted to see happen.

My husband, who in some ways is more radical that I am when it comes to gender and political stuff, was annoyed when the prince turned up at the end as some kind of reward for Aurora. He thought it would have been better without that. I can see his point, but it didn't bother me. The movie was never about Aurora, though she was important. And I don't begrudge characters having romantic relationships, as long as they aren't the only thing they are living for. I'm married, after all, and very happy to have a companion that I love. I wouldn't want to deny that to all the fictional characters out there, in some effort to make them all strong and independent islands. And Maleficent remains strong and independent, though not an island, because she has her companion and servant, Diaval***.

Anyway, overall, halleluliah for a film that presents a strong woman who never falters in her strength. A woman not ruled by her emotions. A complex woman. I have waited a long time to see that. Not to be over-dramatic about it, but in this current culture of open misogyny and narrow roles for women, it was like a balm to my soul.

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*It was very much the kind of fantasy I would have had as a young feminist. But I don't want to give the impression that I buy into the "feminists hate men" stereotype. It happens that many women, myself included, come to feminism after having very negative experiences with men, and as a result they do go through a period of fury towards men. It's not a balanced approach, and if this film wanted to be balanced, it failed at doing that. But I honestly don't need balanced fantasies right now. I am fine with a fantasy that privileges women, for once. If this movie plays out a feminist anti-man fantasy, in contrast with the thousands of male-fantasy misogynistic movies that objectify and dehumanize women, I am okay with that.
**This is actually something that bothers me. The implication is that Maleficent comes to love Aurora because of her own curse, not because she is a complex person with sensitivity and the ability to love independently of magical influence. I think it's great that she's so cold about it--she doesn't morph into this maternal, nurturing stereotype of perfect womanly motherhood at any point. Having experienced some of what she sees in Aurora with my own baby, I felt like I knew why she loved Aurora despite herself, and that's all I needed.
***One reviewer complained that Diaval becomes the dragon in the end instead of Maleficent, but I really feel that that reviewer totally missed the point. Maleficent is the one who turns him into a dragon, and he serves her. In the end, Maleficent regains her full power when she becomes fully herself once more. Changing into a dragon would have detracted from that.

Grimdark and Violence in Fantasy

Recently I was checking my stats on this blog and saw that someone came here after they did a search for "sophia grimdark martin." Which isn't quite as weird as it sounds, since about a month ago, I think, I went on a minor Twitter monologue about grimdark, and so it would seem that someone out there noticed.

What, you ask, is grimdark?

It's term, apparently originating from the description of a tabletop RPG, Warhammer 40K, set in a future which is "grim" and "dark," and in which everything is war.* I read a very interesting article discussing grimdark in fantasy here, but I wanted to go into a bit myself, because of my ambivalence about it.

As I understand it, grimdark has become a term for dark fantasy that takes violence to a really gruesome level. One of the articles I read about it (might be the one above, I'm not sure) talked about how the genre of horror basically died in the 90s, and was reborn as "dark fantasy." So what has become common, apparently, is for fantasy novels to show ever-more graphic depictions of violence, especially sexual assault and torture. This starts, more or less, with George R. R. Martin's series that I've only experienced as the TV show Game of Thrones (love it, am hooked, often can't take the violence). But from what I read, GRRM is a beginner compared to some of the grimdark stuff that's come out since. And it has also, apparently, become the expectation that fantasy authors write this sort of violence in their novels, and each one seeks to top the one before.

I actually don't know about this first hand, I'm just summarizing the articles I read.

I initially started reading about the grimdark trend because I was worried The City Darkens might be grimdark, and I'd just read about it briefly in an article on TVtropes.org which made it sound like it was generally viewed as a bad thing. However, despite the fact that these articles were critical of it, the authors of these articles were reacting to the trend and its popularity. Apparently, a lot of people like grimdark fiction.

As an aside, The City Darkens isn't grimdark. Not by a longshot, from what I can tell. Yes, there's violence in it. Just not nearly that level of violence. To quote the same article I linked above, "Ringil [in Richard Morgan's The Steel Remains] remembers being gang-raped at a boys’ private school, where all the kids take turns gang-raping each other as part of being hazed." This sort of thing is never going to happen in my books. There's a couple of reasons for that, which I'll get into.

1) I don't read novels with this level of violence, and if a novel contains a sexual assault, it had better be essential to the plot. Even Mélusine, which I reviewed here, and gave five stars to on Goodreads, has a sexual assault scene early on that I could have happily done without. When I don't like reading something, the likelihood of my writing it is very, very low. I have a similar thing with harming animals in fiction. I don't like it as a plot device. I think it's manipulative, because as they've pointed out (here and even better, here) on TVtropes, people get way more upset about an animal or child getting hurt or killed than adult humans. I also cannot stand it if the harming of an animal is in any way supposed to be funny or entertaining. Animals are not here to amuse us with their suffering, folks. The world is hard enough on them already without that.

2) I have a really hard time writing violence of any kind, because ever since I became a mom, all my emotional armor has become swiss cheese. I kid you not. I was never a fan of violence, you understand. I totally freaked my students out the first year I taught American history when I had to ask one of them to take over reading a letter by Michele de Cuneo because I burst into tears (it, too, involves sexual assault). But having my son just destroyed any level of desensitization I formerly built up. I cannot watch suffering dispassionately, and when I write it... yeesh. It's like I'm pulling out my own nails. Which doesn't mean I won't do it. As I mentioned, The City Darkens has violence, and I believe it's important to convey the consequences of things like war, so the violence is, in my opinion at least, fairly realistic. The big difference is, I don't slather on the details.

In fact, I can't imagine writing a story without violence. This is where my ambivalence comes in. I've tried, folks. Remember the plot-bunnies I mentioned about an Edwardian romance? I thought writing romance might be a good idea for me, so I could avoid violence. Well, it doesn't work for me. I love reading Edwardian romance, but when it comes to writing, it seems I cannot escape violence. In Broken Ones, there's domestic violence. In my Veronica series, there are murders and arson and plane crashes and other violent situations. And in The City Darkens there's still more violence.

I like to say I write to preserve my sanity, and that is true. I do go through seasons where I don't write, and that's okay, but when I'm in a writing phase, not writing very quickly makes me antsy, irritable... it makes PMS and pregnancy hormones look like a joke, people. While I often enjoy writing most when it's acting as an escape for me, it's also a form of therapy, in reality. There's a part of Myadar's Snare that is incredibly painful for me to write and to reread. Whenever I revise it, I just hate that part. It's because I gave myself this challenge, to write one of my greatest fears. So rereading it means going through that fear again. Ultimately, I hope it makes the story more authentic, but man. So unfun.

It brings to mind two (very different) authors. Nalo Hopkinson used to participate on a feminist sci fi and fantasy listserv I belonged to for a while. We read Brown Girl in the Ring for a book of the month. There's a scene where a character gets flayed alive, and someone on the listserv talked about how awful it was to read. Nalo Hopskinson responded that it also had been incredibly hard to write, which surprised the woman who had posted originally. She said she had never thought about whether a scene had been hard for an author to write. That really stuck with me, because I was already writing back then, but I hadn't really ever written anything that was that hard for me. In fact, I'd say that the first time I truly did that was in Myadar's Snare. It happens again later in The City Darkens, too. But up until then, I did write scenes that were hard scenes, but they were almost always fueled by anger, not tapping into fear or pain so much. Certainly not recent, raw pain or the way I imagine I would feel if something I am currently very afraid of would come to pass. I'd be more likely to draw on old fears or old pain, if that makes sense.

The other author is Stephen King. I'm not sure where I read this; probably Danse Macabre because I'm pretty sure it predated On Writing. He said he didn't really have a choice about what he wrote. He used a metaphor, which I'll paraphrase, but just be aware I'm probably getting it wrong... He said writing is like a strainer in your mind. All this muck passes through it, and some stuff says in it, and that's what you write about. He said that if he had a choice, he'd write like Amy Tan.

So violence is part of the muck in my strainer, I guess. And as such, I can't out-and-out condemn grimdark, because it's just taking that same muck to a much more extreme level, after all. I think, and this was pointed out in some of the articles that I read, that the real problem with grimdark is that it's violence for violence's sake a lot of the time, and that just seems like someone needs a better editor. Violence in novels and any other fiction medium really needs to have a purpose. It's like my issues with animal harm in fiction. That can really be applied more broadly to all violence. Violence can be used in a really cheaply manipulative way, and if that's why it's there, it's no bueno. Violence should exist in stories only when its absence would make a story impossible to tell.

How about you, do you have "muck" in your "strainer" that you have ambivalent feelings about? Have you pushed yourself to write something that is unpleasant for you to reread?
How do you feel about violence in fiction?

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*The hashtag #grimdark apparently has some sort of My Little Pony connection I find... disturbing.

feminists, atheists, and being child-free

Recently on Twitter I browsed through the list of people one of the people I follow follows. (Say that five times fast.) Because of her interests, quite a lot of these people were child-free feminist atheists. Or possibly some different order of those.

It made me think, as I clicked "follow" on a few of them, about whether I'd define myself that way. And I came back to a decision I made years ago after reading bell hooks--I couldn't tell you which one of her titles, as I have read most and can no longer pinpoint which one says what. I will not call myself a feminist. I am pro-feminism. This is for a number of reasons. hooks argued that labeling yourself with an -ist limits you, so that's reason #1. But I also have become frustrated with feminism because of the infighting and the exclusive nature I find most feminist groups have. And I wish they didn't, because I love women. I wish I had biological sisters and would love to hang out in a place with spiritual sisters. It's just so rare to find a place really like that, that doesn't get ruined sooner or later. At least, how I define "ruined." I'm thinking of the infighting again. But on reflection, since I don't have sisters, I probably idealize sisterhood. After all, siblings fight. I guess I just don't have the energy for that anymore. I used to totally be into feminist stuff--women's studies classes, I founded an online discussion group, etc. Just sorta done with that now. Read bell hooks. She nails a lot of the other reasons why, and you'll get way more out of reading one of her books than reading this blog. Incidentally, she's also the reason I quit graduate school. Well, maybe not THE reason, but I agree with her when she says (totally paraphrasing here) that high graduate theory is elitist, excludes the average person from being able to participate in dialogue, and doesn't help anyone who really needs help.

Anyway, back to the list of labels.

Atheist: I'm not an atheist. I can't live that way, I fear death too much, for one thing. For another, there's too much synchronicity in my life. I'm a daoist, and I also think there is a spirit world out there that I can sometimes interact with. Not like my psychic character, Veronica, does. But like some speck on her shoe might. I'm serious. So I'm sort of a daoist-spiritualist. I guess.

Child-free: I have no children, so I could claim this label, but since it's not a choice I've made, I wouldn't. I'm not against being child-free. In fact, in hooksian fashion, I might say I'm pro-child-free. But if I got pregnant tomorrow one of the emotions I'd be feeling is excitement. Another would be terror, no joke. But the point is I'd go through with it. I also have often thought about adopting/fostering. So I have no political stance anti-having kids. I am appalled by people who choose to biologically have more than say, seven. I think they are making a choice that is ecologically reprehensible. If a person wants and can afford to have 7+ kids, for the love of the earth, ADOPT. And really, that number could be lower, but I wanted to choose one that actually causes me to feel appalled. And probably I could meet someone tomorrow who is the 8th child in a family and think, "Gee, what a nice person, I'm glad they were born." So it's all relative, in the end. But IN THEORY I object to people having more than seven kids. So there.

Since I intend to epub a book fairly soon, I will have to rewrite my Twitter bio, so when that day comes, I'll probably put something about being pro-feminism in there, as I still do support it as a cause. I could put that I'm a daoist... animist? I'm still trying to work out the exact right label there. And maybe about being pro-LGBT/gay marriage (except get me started on marriage as a legal institution sometime--I dare you), and supportive of those who choose to live child-free. Except I'll only get 140 characters, so probably I'll stick to just one or two of those.