#dissertation topic

[dailyadventureprompts]

Do the ethnostates inherent in major fantasy ever feel real weird to you? You’ve got elftopia (full of elves, where everyone speaks elf and worships the elf gods), orc-hold (full of orcs and maybe their slaves, where everyone speaks orc and worships the orc gods), and dwarfton (made by the dwarves! for the dwarves!).

You might have some cosmopolitan areas, usually human-dominant, but those are usually rare enough in-setting that they need to be pointed out separately. Is this just based on a misunderstanding of the medieval era, and the assumption that countries were all racially homogenous?

This has been bouncing around my brain the last little while. Do you have any thoughts on that? Is it just in my head?

I think what you've noticed is a quirk of derivative fantasy writing, which like a lot of hangups with the genre originates in people trying to crib Tolkien's work without really understanding what he was going for:

Though it contains a lot of detail, Tolkien's world is not grounded. It functions according a narrative logic that changes depending on what work in particular you're focusing on at the time (The Hobbit is a fairytale full of tricks and riddles, Lord of the Rings is a heroic epic, The Silmirilion is a legendary history).

One of the reasons the races are separate is to instill the feeling of wonder in the hobbits as POV characters for the reader, other folk live in far off places and are supposed to feel more legendary than our comparatively mundane friends from the shire. The Movies captured this well where going east in middle earth was like going back in time to a more and more mythologized past.

In real life, people don't stay static for thousands of years, no matter how long their people live. They meet, mingle, war and trade. Empires rise and fall creating shrapnel as they go, cultures adapt to a changing environment. This means that any geographic cross section you make is going to be a collage of different influences where uniformity is a glaring aberration.

What the bad Tolkien knockoffs did was take his image of a mythical world and tried to make it run in a realistic setting. Tolkien can say the subterranean dwarven kingdom of Erebor lasted for a thousand years without having to worry about birthrates or demographic shifts or the logistics of farming in a cave because he's writing the sort of story where those things don't matter. D&D and other properties like it however INSIST that their worlds are grounded and realistic but have to bend over backwards to keep things static and hegemonic.

Likewise contributing to the "ethnostate" feeling is early d&d (backbone of the fantasy genre that it is) being created by a bunch of White Midwestern Americans who were not only coming from a background of fantasy wargaming but were working during the depths of the coldwar. Hard borders and incompatible ideologies, cultural hegemony and intellectual isolation, a conception of the world that focused around antagonism between US and THEM. These were people born in the era of segregation for whom the idea of cultural and racial osmosis was alien, to the point where mingling between different fantasy races produced the "mongrelman" monster, natural pickpockets who combined the worst aspects of all their component parts, unwelcome in good society who were most often found as slaves.

This inability to appreciate cultural exchange is likewise why the central d&d pantheon has a ton of human gods with specific carveouts for other races (eventually supplemented with a bunch of race specific minor gods who are various riffs on the same thing). Rather than being universal ideals, the gods were seen as entities just as tribalistic as their followers.

[blacktobackmesa]

do you think Kleiner's time as an MIT professor worked its way into Alyx's early childhood education. Do she and Gordon get to swap stories of classroom experiences, one from the halls of a big expensive university and the other from uncle kleiner's homeschool preschool

[lovesodeepandwideandwell]

You know what's weird? How quick high-level academics are to say they don't know about something, versus how taboo it is to say you don't understand something

[lurking-latinist]

I wish words were fungible. I mean, not really, obviously, that would negate the whole point of them being words; but when I'm working desperately to cut one article to under 9000 words, I do wish that I could take the trimmings and somehow turn them into my dissertation chapter which is currently dangerously short. You know, like when you cut out cookies and then roll out the leftover dough and cut some more.

[yarrowleef-babbles]

been hearing rumors that the "i'm always straight" lines may have been cut from the GN and IF that is true, I expect everyone will be super mad about that--and ngl i'd mourn the loss of it too because it has become iconic to me

But. i can't believe i'm playing devils advocate for this, BUT it is not entirely unreasonable for an adaptation of this work to decide it does not want to reference Ronan's sexuality yet......coming to terms with his sexuality is (one) part of his arc in the 2nd book. Adam Parrish being ~the 2nd secret he doesn't want to admit to himself~ , Ronan's catholic guilt homoerotic nightmares and the like, all characterize his sexuality as something he might vaguely be aware of but seriously struggles to openly admit. I don't think he even uses the word gay or any other word to describe himself in the whole series? (unless I'm forgetting something?)

So, idk, it's not unreasonable to want the (hypothetical) audience to also not be aware of it until Ronan is forced to directly grapple with his identity next book.

i think this is one of those things that has become very dear to the fandom over time, but if i look at it objectively without my feelings, i just.....i do understand why someone could conceivably decide that this off-handed bitchy "he's gay btw" joke is not of dire importance for the sanctity of the story 😭 in the 'pros don't outweigh the cons' sort of way....

[avantguardisme]

guess who successfully defended their dissertation proposal today!!!! this guy!!!!!!!!

[kaiserin-erzsebet]

Tip for researching certain educated nineteenth-century people: They will leave large chunks of text untranslated just to flex that they can. For example, if they had a conversation in French, you will get large stretches of French when they quote it. So, you do actually have to speak all of the languages that person speaks, because they're going to be pretentious about it.

They really desperately need you to be impressed that they are so cosmopolitan.

[trenchgardens-ooc-ooc-ooc-ooc]

your mommas lyin'... what's she tryin' to do...

[lifeof-pink]

in this essay i will explain how orv uses the often overused and memed upon theory that everything in a whimsical fictional universe is actually just a dream in order to portray a fascinating narrative of childhood trauma, mental illness, and the need for escapism in a late-capitalist, post-internet world

[parlortricks]

The thing about Soul Punk frankly is that if you had the experience of spending fucking years singing songs that were so blatantly about you. Well wouldn’t you want to pay him back in kind. Wouldn’t you want to make him have to feel what it was like to listen.

[louferrignojrofficial]

only 8 hours left till i can stop thinking about crime and theories and how i’m supposed to possibly write 2 essays of 1k words in 2 hours time when i barely remember any citations 😔

[gayness-and-mayhem]

I'm supposed to be doing a talk to some of my students in a couple of months about Star Trek and the origins of fanfiction, and I quite honestly don't know where tf to even start. If anyone has any idea suggestions/good places for me to do some more in depth research, I'd be really grateful, bc ngl, I'm slightly overwhelmed by the whole thing!

[bogkeep]

in the most recent patreon exclusive bonus episode of the very good podcast "if books could kill" michael hobbes has a very long tangent about a separate book he read for research (manhood in the making by david d gilmore) which is like, an anthropological study in what manhood means in various cultures across the world, and I Need This Book So Bad. i crave anthropological analysis of socially constructed gender roles in non-western cultures. but i must be patient. i found this book on a swedish bookstore but at the cost of too much money for a single book, and for a much more agreeable price on a norwegian bookstore - but they only ship to norway. in two months i will return. surely i can wait to months. i shall be so good and so patient

[communistkenobi]

does anyone have listening recommendations for like contemporary coverage of the far-right in north america. kind of like Knowledge Fight/Qanon Anonymous but less online-irony-jokey style and more informative. Or at least more theoretically grounded

[recurring-polynya]

In the content you have come to expect from this blog, I wish to talk about the hamburger in the Royal Realm. I will not beat around the bush. Here it is:

I spend a lot of time agonizing about whether or not they have various foods in Soul Society, usually based on age of introduction to Japan, and my own feeble attempts extrapolate which cultural forces do or do not exist, but this one feels very straightforward: there is no way they have hamburgers in Soul Society.

Wait, no, I am going to roll that back slightly, because I think it is the nature of Joe Shinigami to smuggle any kind of anything small enough to be stuffed into a shihakushou back through a senkaimon, so it's not like there has never been a hamburger in Soul Society. Kensei looks very much like a burg man, and he's probably published instructions for how to make one in his cooking column, but I can't bring myself to believe they are more than a rare and very expensive novelty. Also, as is the way of Soul Society, no matter how carefully you source your ingredients which time-tested recipe you follow, it will come out subtly and indescribably wrong.

And yet! Kirio seems to have mastered the art! Or has she? As becomes evident in this subsequent shot, there is something deeply wrong with this burger: it appears to be roughly the same height as Rukia and probably twice the weight.

The Royal Guard is known for innovating, and I'm so interested in this-- is Kirio trying out new foods for their reishi-holding capacities? Did she make this for Ichigo in particular, because it would otherwise be rare for her to encounter someone who has actually eaten a burger before? (Presumably Renji, who knows everything about the World of the Living, might also have some feedback). Where did she find out about burgers? The Royal Realm is basically the Los Alamos of Soul Society. It's not unthinkable that they figured out how to get Food Network up there.

I am so mad that we didn't get to see the full footage of everyone's trip through every stage of the Royal Realm. Did Kirio make Byakuya the Giant Hamburger? You know that Byakuya doesn't approve of anything invented or introduced to Japan after the Tokugawa Shogunate, but I feel like he would have great respect for anything he encountered in the Royal Realm. What I am saying is that I think it would be great if post-TYBW Byakuya gets into hamburgers with the signature intensity with which he pursues all of his interests.

PS: For full disclosure, the giant burg is anime-only. Presumably it got the Kubo seal of approval. But guess what he drew originally! (answer below the cut)

[lurkingshan]

Since you've watched a lot of kdrama, what are common things you've seen in kdrama that have been consistently ported into K-BL, and what is your assessment of that approach?

Ooh, interesting question. So first, let's acknowledge a few things:

Korean bl is short format, with even the longest shows (Light on Me, The Eighth Sense) not even half the length of a standard kdrama (16-20 hours), and most clocking in around 2-4 hours

Kbl operates under much smaller budgets and significant constraints around casting as compared to mainstream kdrama

Kbl often draws from webtoons and manwha and mostly does not have the kind of auteur writers and directors behind it that you get in kdrama (Hwang Da-Seul is the most consistent creator in genre with Where Your Eyes Linger, Blueming, To My Star)

All that said, there are a few features of mainstream kdrama that have definitely ported over into kbl despite these constraints:

Slick production values and strong use of setting and color: even the cheapest kbls still look decent, and there is always intentionally behind the setting and use of color palettes to set the tone and feel. Korea has a very well-developed film industry and it shows. Color Rush, Semantic Error and Blueming were fantastic examples of this: even within more familiar school romances, the settings felt specific and the use of color to communicate character and themes was striking. I also think often of Our Dating Sim and Choco Milk Shake and the very effective characterization work achieved through design of the apartments.

Sound production and music on point: the home of kpop is not going to be caught sleeping on the OSTs. Nearly every production has original songs and given the leads of these shows are usually idols, they're often the ones on the tracks. And when they use music that is not original, like in The Eighth Sense, it's a very intentional choice to set mood and tone. Korea is not going to let a boy who can't actually sing take the mic (*side eyes Thailand*). To My Star is a great example of memorable OSTs even in a fairly low budget production, and Wish You and Sing My Crush showed us what kbl can do when it decides to bring the full kpop treatment to bear.

A keen understanding of the international audience: kdrama production is a big part of South Korea's explicit goals to take the global media landscape by storm, and kbl is included in that. It's not a coincidence that Korea decided to step up its game in this arena shortly after Thai bl exploded (shoutout to 2gether and pandemic lockdowns). Kbl follows trends and explicitly caters to international audiences in a way jbl does not. The Eighth Sense was basically a case study in marrying kdrama sensibilities and western aesthetics for maximum international attention.

Second leads and valorization of unrequited love: you and I have discussed this one a lot because this is a feature of kdramas that will never die and that kbls also clearly love. Korea loves a one-sided love story and culturally, there is a certain dignity afforded to owning your feelings and being honest with the object of your affection, even when there is no hope of reciprocation. Often second leads don't get the guy/girl because they hesitate or hide their feelings until it's too late: the trope is used to underline the important of honesty and effort as well as providing a catalyst for the main lead to make their move. In Korean culture, the trying is what matters much more than the succeeding. We are meant to like most second leads and see them as honorable and dignified for their sincere feelings toward the protagonist. Second lead syndrome is a thing for a reason. It's also just a cheap and easy way to create drama so you'll often see it in the lower budget kbls. Second leads showed up recently in kbls like The Tasty Florida, Jun & Jun, Oh! Boarding House, Bon Appetit, etc. We also sometimes see kbls playing with the idea of unrequited love in the main pairing that is actually requited, like in Our Dating Sim.

Love triangles: relatedly, Korea loves them a love triangle, and they are uniquely good at doing it well when they want to. Light on Me is a fantastic example of a narrative where you can legitimately see the protagonist liking and ending up with both the main and second lead. And that is rooted in the way the narrative treats Daon with dignity even as it punishes him for his hesitation in reciprocating Taekyung's feelings (see above). When you have a strong second lead who engenders real sympathy with the audience, love triangle excellence is achieved.

Workplace romances: kdrama loves workplace romances, and we have seen kbl start to move into that space recently with shows like Roommates of Poongdock 304, Love Mate, Our Dating Sim, Jun & Jun, and The New Employee. Kdrama workplace romances run the gamut, but they often feature chaebol characters paired with a "normal" aka not wealthy person, and we are starting to see that more in the bl genre as well, as we discussed a bit yesterday. I believe @nieves-de-sugui commented on your post about how the rich/poor romance fantasy trend in recent bl may be coming in from kdrama. I think there's some truth to that, but really it's a foundational romance trope that predates kdrama by literal centuries, and is absolutely rooted in heteronormative patriarchal dynamics that assume men are breadwinners and caretakers for women (translated to seme/uke dynamics in bl). Often in kdrama the chaebol character is unable to live an authentic life due to the demands of filial piety and the expectations tied to their wealth, and I do think that dynamic is ripe for enrichment when you layer on gay identity in a homophobic society. But that requires shows leaving the no homophobia bubble, which few kbls have done.

Physical intimacy squarely in the middle space: comparing to heat levels we see across the spectrum of dramas, I think kdrama and kbl are pretty consistent in that they tend to land right in the middle of the spectrum. It's rare to see straight up dead fish kisses from romantic leads anymore (though it still happens, wincing at Unintentional Love Story), but they are also not going to be serving authentic sex scenes. What you get instead is very pretty open-mouthed kissing that feels more realistic than, for instance, the pure jbl lane, but still polished and aesthetically pleasing. Think Semantic Error, Blueming, Roomates of Poongdock 304, Love Mate, To My Star 2, Jun & Jun. This seems to be where the genre is landing and I don't expect heat levels to get any higher for kbl, as this is right in line with mainstream kdrama. The Eighth Sense offered a less polished version of intimacy that felt right in line with its grittier sensibilities.

So, after that long list, on to your second question: my assessment of this approach is that kbls are doing fairly well for themselves when you consider the constraints they are operating under. Look at a show like Love Tractor stacked up against something like Hometown Cha Cha Cha. These are both based in the classic romance trope of a city slicker coming to the country and falling in love with a humble working person. But where HCCC has 16 hours to build a quasi-enemies to lovers narrative with a rich community of side characters, LT has 3.5 hours to achieve the same thing. So it makes sense that it would fall back on well-worn tropes and story beats it knows the audience will recognize to help save time. These shortcuts help the audience ground themselves and get invested in the stories quickly.

One thing I'll say is that kbl mostly stays in the romcom lane with very occasional ventures into melo, and despite what casual observers think, kdrama actually has a lot more to offer than that. It's a giant world with stories based in every possible genre, tone, and style, and Korean media is particularly adept at embedding romance plots that actually work in all kinds of stories including action thrillers, horror, crime narratives, mysteries, supernatural and fantasy epics. I'd love to see kbl try this, though of course it would require the resources and runtime to do it successfully. Here's hoping they get the chance.