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wolfshadoe · 4 years ago

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This. So much this.

Where's the spirit essay jojo

oh you mean the essay about how spirit untamed is legitimately the most evil thing i have ever seen and knowledge of its existence caused me to question whether humanity can truly be redeemed? you mean that essay? i need you to understand that i think dishing on children’s media is stupid. children, and young girls especially, are constantly derided for what they like. i’m not here to do that. likewise, i’m not here to dish on sequels and reboots. i love sequels and reboots. i even liked the hobbit movies. i have no taste and won’t attempt to force my taste on others. no. i’m here to say that spirit untamed is an unmitigated crime against both god and man in every way a piece of media can be because it attempts to build on the unparalleled masterpiece that came before it.

and i know i’m right. i’ve never been more right. what the fuck is spirit untamed, you ask? here’s a trailer. you’ll note they turned off comments. every official iteration of this has comments turned off. what i’m about to say in this essay is very much fellow-feeling for people of a certain age and they’ve made their thoughts explicitly clear basically everywhere this sequel film has been talked about. if you don’t want to watch the above trailer or can’t, it’s a cgi animated horse girl movie with all the horse girl accoutrements. she moves to a small town, she’s a little weird, she loves animals, she makes friends. presumably something bad is happening and she will fix it with horses and friendship. once again, i’m not here to dish on that. i love cgi and i’m a horse girl. i learned how to ride on a mustang. this is a movie about me. that’s fine. if this were the only spirit that had ever existed, it would be fine.

unfortunately, this is a sequel to a much better movie, 2002’s traditionally animated spirit: stallion of the cimmaron. when i say it’s a “better movie” i mean that i’m not totally sure two movies so different can exist in the same universe. because the 2002 movie was told from the perspective of the HORSE as voiced by MATT DAMON and it was literally about him SABOTAGING WESTWARD EXPANSION and FUCKING THE EVIL UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT and DESTROYING INDUSTRY.

there are exactly two relevant humans in the film: the colonel (he’s a colonel) and little creek (he’s a lakota boy who gets captured by the united states government along with spirit, the titular horse). i’ll let you guess who the bad guy is! no i won’t. it’s the united states government which is accurately depicted as an accessory of capitalist expansion west as represented by the railroad specifically, to the detriment of all things good. the first time we see anyone in uniform, they’re killing natives in an unproved massacre on a native village. shortly after, the colonel captures spirit, and then little creek after that. when the colonel sees little creek, he comments on his race in a way that is malicious and real, and then has him put not in the stockade but tied up where they tie unbroken horses, where they have tied spirit. the movie never attempts to sidestep what it’s depicting or saying. it says it plainly, in a way any child or adult can understand. it’s uncompromising.

honestly, i’m kind of shocked this movie hasn’t entered into the modern sphere of discourse a little more. maybe it’s because it’s unimpeachable. no one can disagree that it’s visually one of the most beautiful animated movies out there. no one can disagree with the message, because it’s so simple and true: yes, the government destroyed native populations. yes, it existed largely as an arm of capitalism to aid westward expansion at the expense of native populations and the land itself. the dichotomy of good and evil is so clear in this one and the evil is american.

this is the climactic scene:

youtube

spirit–who has just destroyed the railroad with little creek’s help–tries to escape the actual literal united states government who are trying to actually kill this horse and this lakota boy with actual guns. i think little creek actually gets shot, but not fatally. they escape together by jumping across a canyon, solidifying the eagle symbolism that the movie used repeatedly as a metaphor for freedom and the spirit of the west, but the west-west. like the actual land in the west. not whatever texas thinks it is. it ends with little creek letting spirit go (this scene apparently still makes me cry 20 years later so JOT that down) along with his own horse so they can go live in horseful peace in the (titular) cimarron, which in this movie is an effective stand-in for the unmolested west–though the area depicted is largely a fantasy mishmash of various areas.

full stop i’m a emotionally compromised about any discussion of the american west and history. it’s been most of my life and the depth and nuance is endless. we could examine the rights and the wrongs of the national park system, of preservation over conservation, over the drastic and continued and literal physical marginalization of native people and cultures. we can also get deep into wild horses in this area specifically today, how they’re rounded up, why, and where they ultimately end up. all the efficacy of that. i’ve been to more bureau of land management auctions than i can count, and even trained a few wild horses. i’m not going to get into any of that here. i just want you to know that this animated horse movie, with music by bryan adams and hans zimmer, is the closest thing we have had to a mainstream kid’s movie addressing any of it. any of the reality and any of the history.

it depicts the government sanctioned destruction of native populations, it shows how the “untouched” west was actually very much touched by native populations prior to industrial expansion west but not in a way that destroyed those areas, it critiques the very concept of taming the west, and it shows that manifest destiny and westward expansion as represented in the movie by the railroad had a very real toll on nature in and of itself and required vast fucking resources to accomplish. it even shows that they were really shitty to horses in the old west. and again, not to harp on it, but it absolutely 100% is the only mainstream animated film that shows an unprovoked massacre of a native village by the government. and it did all this no exposition, almost no dialogue at all. it just puts it on screen in stunning animation. i dare any studio to even attempt a movie like this today. no one would even try.

NATURALLY, THIS GIVEN, I WOULD FEEL SOME RESERVATIONS ABOUT A CUTESY SEQUEL WHERE SPIRIT IS LITERALLY TAMED BY THE DAUGHTER OF THE RAILROAD OWNER.

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wolfshadoe · 4 years ago

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For a long, large part of my life, being queer in a media landscape–finding queerness in a media landscape–has meant theft.

I’m a Fandom Old, somehow, these days, older than most and younger than some, in that way that’s grown associated with grumpy crotchetyness and shotguns on porches and back in my day, we had to wade through our Yahoo Groups mailing lists uphill both ways, boring and irrelevant anecdotes from Back In Those Days when homophobia clearly worked differently than it does now, probably because we weren’t trying hard enough. I’ve seen a lot of stories through the years. I’ve read a lot of fanfic. (More days than not, for the past twenty years. I’ve read a lot of fanfic.)

When people my age start groaning and sighing at conversations about representation and queerbaiting, when we roll our eyes and drag all the old war stories out again in the face of AO3 is terrible and Not Good Enough, so often what we say is: you Young Folks Today have no idea how hard, how scary, how limiting it was to be queer anywhere Back In Those Days. Including online, maybe especially online, including in a media landscape that hated us so much more than any one you’ve ever known. And that is true. Always and everywhere, again and again, it’s true, we remember, it’s true.

We don’t talk so much about the joy of it.

Online fan spaces were my very first queer communities, ever. I was thirteen, I was fourteen, I was fifteen–I was a lonely, over-precocious “gifted kid” two years too young for my grade level in an all-girls’ Catholic school in the suburbs–I lived in a world where gay people were a rumor and an insult and a news story about murder. I was straight, of course, obviously, because real people were straight and anyway I was weird enough already–I couldn’t be two things strange, couldn’t be gay too, but–well, I could read the stories. I could feel things about that. I would have those stories to help me, a few years later, when I knew I couldn’t call myself straight any more.

And those stories were theft. There was never any doubt about that. We wrote disclaimers at the top of every fic, with the specter of Anne Rice’s lawyers around every corner. We hid in back-corners of the internet, places you could only find through a link from a link from a link on somebody else’s recs page, being grateful for the tiny single-fandom archives when you found them, grateful for the webrings where they existed. It was theft, all of it, the stories about characters we did not own, the videotaped episodes on your best friend’s VHS player, one single episode pulled off of Limewire over the course of three days.

It was theft, we knew, to even try and find ourselves in these stories to begin with. How many fics did I read in those days about two men who’d always been straight, except for each other, in this one case, when love was stronger than sexual orientation? We stole our characters away from the heterosexual lives they were destined to have. We stole them away from writers and producers and TV networks who work overtime to shower them in Babes of the Week, to pretend that queerness was never even an option. This wasn’t given to us. This wasn’t meant for us. This wasn’t ours to have, ever, ever in the first place. But we took it anyway.

And oh, my friends, it was glorious.

We took it. We stole. And again and again, for years and years and years, we turned that theft into an art. We looked for every opening, every crack in every sidewalk where a little sprout of queerness might grow, and we claimed it for our own and we grew whole gardens. We grew so sly and so skilled with it, learning to spot the hints of oh, this could be slashy in every new show and movie to come our way. Do you see how they left these character dynamics here, unattended on the table? How ripe they are for the pocketing. Here, I’ll help you carry them. We’ll make off with these so-called straight boys, and we only have to look back if somebody sets out another scene we want for our own.

We were thieves, all of us, and that was fine and that was fair, because to exist as queer in the world was theft to begin with. Stolen time, stolen moments–grand larceny of the institution of marriage, breaking and entering to rob my mother’s hopes for grandchildren. Every shoplifted glance at the wrong person in the locker room (and it didn’t matter if we never peeked, never dared, they called us out on it anyway). Every character in every fic whose queerness became a crime against this ex-wife, that new love interest. Every time we dared steal ourselves away from the good straight partners we didn’t want to date.

And: we built ourselves a den, we thieves, wallpapered in stolen images and filled to the brim with all the words we’d written ourselves. We built ourselves a home, and we filled it with joy. Every vid and art and fic, every ship, every squee. Over and over, every straight boy protagonist who abandoned all womankind for just this one exception with his straight boy protagonist partner found gay orgasms and true love at the end.

Over and over, we said: this isn’t ours, this isn’t meant to be ours, you did not give this to us–but we are taking it anyway. We will burglarize you for building blocks and build ourselves a palace. These stories and this place in the world is not for us, but we exist, and you can’t stop us. It’s ours now, full of color and noise, a thousand peoples’ ideas mosaic'ed together in celebration. We made this, and it will never be just yours again. You won’t ever truly get it back, no matter how many lawyers you send, not completely. We keep what we steal.

Things shifted over time, of course. That’s good. That’s to be celebrated. Nobody should have to steal to survive. It should not be a crime, should not feel like a crime, to find yourself and your space in the world.

There were always content creators who could slip a little wink in when they laid out their wares, oh what’s this over here, silly me leaving this unattended where anybody could grab it, of course there might be more over by the side door if you come around the alleyway (but if anybody asks, you didn’t get this from ME). We all watched Xena marry Gabrielle, in body language and between the lines. We sat around and traded theories and rumors about whether the people writing Due South knew what they were doing when they sent their buddy cops off into the frozen north alone together at the end of the show, if they’d done it on purpose, if they knew. But over the years, slowly, thankfully, the winks became less sly.

A teenage boy put his hand on another teenage boy’s hand and said, you move me, and they kissed on network TV, in a prime-time show, on FOX, and the world didn’t burn down. Here and there, where they wanted to, where they could without getting caught by their bosses and managers, content creators stopped subtly nudging people around the back door and started saying, “Here. This is on offer here too, on purpose. You get to have this, too.”

And of course, of course that came with a whole host of problems too. Slide around to the back door but you didn’t get this from me turned into it’s an item on our special menu, totally legit, you’ve just got to ask because the boss throws a fit if we put it out front. Shopkeepers and content creators started advertising on the sly, come buy your fix here!, hiding the fine print that says you still have to take what you’ve purchased home and rebuild it with your semi-legal IKEA hacks. Maybe they’ll consider listing that Destiel or Sterek as a full-service menu item next year. Is that Crowley/Aziraphale the real thing or is it lite?

And those problems are real and the conversations are worth having, and it’s absolutely fair to be frustrated that you can’t find the ship you want on sale in anything like your color and size in a vast media landscape packed full of discount hetships and fast-fashion m/f. It’s fair to be angry. It’s fair to be frustrated. Queerbait is a word that exists for a reason.

There’s a part of me that hurts, though, every time the topic comes up. It’s a confusing, bad-mannered part of me, but it’s still very real. And it’s not because I’m fawning for crumbs, trying to be the Good, Non-Threatening Gay. It’s not that I’m scared and traumatized by the thought of what might happen if we dare raise our voices and ask for attention. (Well. Not mostly. I’ll always remember being quiet and scared and fifteen, but it’s been a long two decades since then. I know how to ask for a hell of a lot more now.)

It’s because I remember that cozy, plush-wallpapered den of joyful thieves. I remember you keep what you steal.

Every single time–every time–when a story I love sets a couple of characters out on a low, unguarded table, perfectly placed to be pilfered on the sly and taken home and smushed together like a couple of dolls, my very first thought is always, always joy. Always, that instinct says, yay! Says, this is ours now. As soon as I go home and crawl into that pillow-fort den, my instincts say, I will surely find people already at work combing through spoils and finding new ways to combine them, new ways to make them our own. I know there’s fic for that. I’ve already seen fic for that, and I wasn’t really interested last time, but the new store display’s got my brain churning, and I can’t wait to see what the crew back at the hideout does with this.

Every time, that’s where my brain goes. And oh, when I realize the display’s put out on purpose, that somebody snuck in a legitimate special menu item, when the proprietor gives me the nod and wink and says, you don’t have to come around the side, I know it’s not much but here–there is so much joy and relief and hope in me from that! Oh, what we can make with these beautiful building blocks. Oh what a story we can craft from the pieces. Oh, the things we can cobble together. Look at that, this one’s a little skimpy on parts but we can supplement it, this one’s got a whole outline we can fill in however we want. This one technically comes semi-preassembled, and that’s boring as shit and a pain to take back apart, but that’s fine, we’ll manage. We’re artists and thieves. I bet someone’s pulling out the AU saw to cut it to pieces already.

And then I get back to our den, which has moved addresses a dozen times over the years and mostly hangs out on Tumblr now (and the roof leaks and the landlord’s sketchy as fuck but at least they don’t charge rent, and we’ve made worse places our own). And I show up, ready for joy–ready for a dozen other people who saw that low-hanging fruit on that unguarded table, who got the nod and wink about the special menu item, who’re ready to get so excited about this newest haul. Did you see what we picked up? The theft was so easy, practically begging to be stolen. The last owner was an idiot with no idea what to do with it. The last owner knew exactly what it could become, bless their heart, under a craftsman with more time on their hands, so they looked away on purpose at just the right time to let me take it home. I show up every time ready for our space, the place that fed me on joy and self-confidence when I was fifteen and starving. The place that taught me, yes, we are thieves, because it is RIGHT to take what we need, and the beautiful things we create are their own justification. We are thieves, and that’s wonderful, because nothing is handed to us and that means we get to build our own palaces. We get to keep everything we steal.

I go home, and even knowing the world is different, my instincts and heart are waiting for that. And I walk in the door, and I look at my dash, and I glance over at twitter, and–

And people are angry, again. Angry at the slim pickings from the hidden special menu. So, so tired and angry, at once again having to steal.

And they’re right to be! Sometimes (often, maybe) I think they’re angry at the wrong people–more angry with the shopkeeper who offers the bite-sized sampler platter of side characters or sneaks their queer content in on the special menu than the ones who don’t include it at all. But it’s not wrong to be mad that Disney’s once again advertising their First Gay Character only to find out it’s a tiny sprinkle of a one-line extra on an otherwise straight sundae. It’s not wrong to be furious at the world because you’ve spent your whole life needing to be a thief to survive. It’s far from wrong. I’m angry about it too.

But this was my den of thieves, my chop shop, my makerspace. Growing up in fandom, I learned to pick the locks on stories and crack the safes of subtext at the very same time I learned to create. They were the same thing, the same art. We are thieves, my heart says, we are thieves, and that’s what makes us better than the people we steal from. We deconstruct every time we create. We build better things out of the pieces.

And people are angry that the pre-fab materials are too hard to find, the pickings too slim, the items on sale too limited? Yes, of course they are, of course they should be–but my heart. Oh, my heart. Every single time, just a little bit, it breaks.

Of course the stories are terrible (they have always been terrible). Of course they are, but we are thieves. We steal the best parts and cobble them back together and what we make is better than it was before. The craftsman’s eye that cases a story for weak points, for blank spaces, for anywhere we can fit a crowbar and pry apart this casing–that’s skill and art and joy. Of course we shouldn’t have to, of course we shouldn’t have to, but I still love it. I still want it, crave it. I still thrill every time I see it, a story with hairline cracks that we can work open with clever hands to let the queer in.

That used to be cause for celebration, around here. I ask him to go back to the ruins of Aeor with me, two men together alone on an expedition in the frozen north, it feels like a gift. And I understand why some people take it as an insult. I understand not good enough. I understand how something can feel like a few drops of water to someone dying of thirst, like a slap in the face. If it was so easy to sneak it hidden onto the special menu, to place it on the unguarded side table for someone else to run off to, why not let it sit out front and center in the first place? I know it’s frustrating. It should be. We should fight. We should always fight. I know why.

But my heart, oh, my heart. My heart only knows what it’s been taught. My heart sees, this thing right here, the proprietor left it there for you with a nod and a wink because they Get It. It’s not put together yet, but it’s better that way anyway. It’s so full of pieces to pull apart and reassemble. I bet they’ve got a whole mosaic wall going up at home already. We can bring it home and make it OURS, more than it was ever theirs, forget half of what it came from and grow a new garden in what remains.

And I go home to find anger, and my heart breaks instead.

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