i’m in position to be knocked off the sidebar, and while this is good for ftb – it means a lot of people are posting, and what inspired my now defunct streak of daily posting was a ghost town vibe on the network – i cannot abide that ignominy. i post now just to stay in the sidebar. watch me burn!
i had a thought recently i wanted to hold onto. it has a few attached thoughts. this is a memo to myself; make of it what you will, or disregard. i’m cool with that.
-i remembered while listening to Princes of the Universe that once upon a time highlander made me feel some kind of feelings. it’s a kind of magic yo, and you have heard too often how i feel about magic in fiction. i’m into it. the thing i don’t want to forget – i’d like to remember what i felt about the show, so long ago, and without necessarily injecting immortality as a theme, put that quality into something i write.
-i relate the feeling of these powerful transcendant characters like paul atreides and connor mcleod to the powerful emotion created by surreal fiction like the works of david lynch and leonora carrington. my husband would get the latter but very much not the former, because the highlanders and space messiahs are power fantasies, like the superheroes he couldn’t relate to as a boy.
-srsly he related to wesley willis singing about how batman would kick his ass, because he saw a big buff representative of the dominant social order beating on weird outsiders and saw himself in the villains. therefore, he will never see the potential of a profound impact from fiction with messianic peeps.
-is that connected to his bad self-esteem? if so, could i give him .005 self-esteem points by helping him feel such a narrative? how could i play up that aspect of what i feel in those narratives, what sets them apart from superhero stories? i think of li mubai in crouching tiger hidden dragon and how he died, forever denied love by his heroic lifestyle. i dunno. i think about the ending of woo’s a better tomorrow II, where the guys have a heroic gunbattle and sustain a surely lethal number of gunshot wounds, living just long enough to have a cool pose for the closing shot.
-that’s the main shit. i think there was more, and if i remember, i may edit it in or drop it in comments. i should take notes more often so i don’t forget these things.
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edit one:
-the messiah thing. i wonder that this sense of profundity from heroic narratives relates to the way christians and their ilk feel so cool about jeezy peets and their respective special boys. if i gets a tear watching a the crow meet his ghost wife at the end of the movie brandon lee died to make, is that what they feel when they see yahweh’s meat puppet twitching on the cross?
-i have immortal characters and a notion of including demigods in my big gay RPG project. wonder if these notions could find a place in there…
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