The Babadook
I have never before seen a horror movie where the monster was so tightly wound with the metaphor. But that’s The Babadook for you, a film that’s been getting a lot of hype, and which we finally saw on Netflix last night.
The Bababook actually established a rule for me in horror writing, which is this: we must care more for the characters than we fear the monster. Because let’s be honest, anyone can create a scary monster. Finding some unrelenting, physics-distorting, shadowy people-eater is what horror films do.
Yet The Babadook is, for its first third, not even about monsters. It’s about a mother raising a wretched six-year-old boy who has problems acting out. The kid is violent, building monster-hunting dart-throwers in the basement which he then brings to school and almost puts out a student’s eye. He screams and throws tantrums. He does not, cannot, listen to reason when he gets overstimulated. He is getting expelled from his school.
And yet the kid is not a monster. He’s a kid, reacting to stresses in his life, and his mother is oversensitive ever since the father died in a car crash. Mother and son love each other, even when son has shoved mother relentlessly up against the limits of her coping.
Enter the monster.
The Babadook is both unrelentingly grim and yet strangely hopeful. The Babadook who stalks them is, quite clearly, formed from the family’s internal stresses, and power dynamics keep changing as a result of the book being opened. The horror wells out of a mother who, in fact, really doesn’t want to be a mother, who wants to say “fuck it all” and throw the kid into an asylum, and the monster preys upon those urges. The horror is not the monster itself, but rather what the monster honestly reveals about taking care of a kid with issues, and the things that happen when a woman is expected to be a perfect parent.
And yet… the ending is not what I expected. Horror movies are easy to write, by and large: everyone dies and all is horrible. And yet though there is horror aplenty come the end, and is not an ending I can quite categorize as happy, there’s a catharsis in The Babadook that grabbed all my deepest fears and told me that somehow, we could cope if the Babadook came to town.
I wouldn’t want it. But the Babadook wouldn’t show up if things were good. The monster isn’t the monster here, you see; it’s the amplification of all our other stresses, given form. And in that, The Babadook is almost a perfect horror film.
"How Do You Characterize A City Properly?" Me On Podcasts, and Video!
So if you have yet to somehow notice by now, I have this fiction novel called Flex out. It’s on shelves now. But people keep asking me questions about it! So I answer them in cool ways.
I was on one of my favorite podcasts, the Functional Nerds, where I spent entirely too much time rhapsodizing about old-school videogames. But if you’ve wondered at how delicately I had to get the inspiration for Aliyah – a question some folks have been too kind to ask – I touch on that here as well.
And then I was on Angry Robot Live!, discussing urban fantasy in a Google Hangout with Alyc Helms and Tim Waggoner and Michael Underwood, all of whom had many interesting things to say. You can watch the video here for an hour of me in my literal green-room, answering some really interesting questions on “How do you characterize a city properly?”:
And before you ask: Yes. I always put the hat on before every podcast, even if I shan’t be seen. For me, the hat is part of my Convention Ferrett outfit, the way I know I’m in “go mode,” so it helps with my inevitable anxiety of ZOMG I’LL SAY SOMETHING STUPID AND THE ENTIRE INTERNET WILL HATE ME.
As of yet, the entire Internet has yet to hate me. Only certain parts. Which means I’m doing my job, man.
Anyway, there’s two places you can hear me, if you’d like. I trust after this barrage of me-ness on podcasts, none of you will ever be surprised by the reediness of my real-life voice ever again. OR SO I HOPE.
Oh, and Katy Lees is in Week Four of her Flex read-through, where she is up to chapter twenty and, in her words, “Shit gets real.” Katy has been live-Tweeting her reactions to the book, which has been fascinating for me to watch someone responding to words I wrote in real time, and I am more than a little sad that she finished the book yesterday. I’ll be curious to see her sum-up of the book, but it’s been really fun seeing this social experiment, and I hope y’all are reading it.
The Tiger Expert
“So you’re a tiger expert.”
“Darn straight I am. I’ve been watching tigers on the Internet since I was a kid.”
“…on the Internet? Have you ever actually caught a tiger?”
“No, no. Not really. I’ve watched ’em. From a distance. They don’t actually come close to me, the tigers don’t seem to like me. But I know all about how they live!”
“How do you know that?”
“Well, you know, I’ve talked with all my other tiger expert friends. You know, the ones who also can’t catch tigers. We sit around staring at woods, bitching about how you can’t ever find a good tiger, not really, and we talk about what we think tigers are like.”
“But you’ve never raised a tiger.”
“Not as such, no. But we do have a lot of expertise in what tigers don’t like. We think. As I’ve said, we don’t actually get close to tigers, we just sort of stare at them on the Internet.”
“And yet… you consider yourself an expert in tigers.”
“Awful creatures, really. I keep wanting a tiger so goddamned badly, and yet they won’t come to me no matter how many M&Ms I leave out to entice them to eat from my hand, and so they must be very mean creatures, because they won’t accept a thing I give them. Which is ridiculous, because I have spent my self broke buying M&Ms and loud clattering pans and all the other things that tigers love.”
“Have you ever considered that maybe you really have no idea how to catch a tiger?”
“Of course not. I’m a tiger expert.”
That is, sadly, the problem I have with so many male misogynists. “Man, I hate bitches. They’re terrible, because I can’t get a date and that’s their fault. I’m doin’ everything I know the bitches like!”
And all this hatred wells up from the fact that they’re not getting laid using these derogative, shitty techniques taught to them by other idiots who also don’t get dates.
Dude. You’re hating someone because you’re too lazy to change up your goddamned game. Stop looking at porn on the internet and actually start trying to talk to actual women in different ways. Switch techniques. I’m not saying I’m much fonder of Pick-Up Artists, but jeez, at least they study the field.
Meanwhile, I hear guys ranting, sometimes directly to my damn face, at how awful women are because they don’t respect men by fucking them for all the reasons they’ve deemed should attract a woman. And I suggest that maybe, just maybe, the problem isn’t the women, but the idea that you’ve inhaled all these toxic ideas about how women work without actually ever having talked to a woman, and you’d do better on the dating scene if you dropped this arrogant idea that someone owes you sex, and took up the idea that you need to bring something to the table that actually makes you desirable.
They don’t listen. They’re tiger experts.
The Most Unfuckable Character On Game Of Thrones Is…
So because I have These Sorts of conversations with people, I wound up asking “So who’s the hardest person to masturbate to on Game of Thrones?”
And whenever I have These Sorts of conversations with people, people start needing rules. “Are we counting the underaged kids?” people asked. “We’re not counting Rickon or Arya, are we? That’d be creepy.” Which, you know, it gets tricky. Because the show upped the kids’ ages in dramatic ways – Jon Snow in the books is fourteen, Arya is nine, Sansa is eleven, and none of those kids are anywhere close to that age on the show. (Which is understandable – the actors would not only be incompetent at nine, but they’d age out quick.)
So we have a weird issue – the actor who plays Jon Snow is literally double the age of the character he’s playing, so when we ask “Who’s the hardest to whack it to?”, how do we count Sansa, who is either eleven, or the actress who is nineteen now, but was certainly underage when we started, and what is the age of consent in Westeros anyway and wow holy fuck does this get crazy.
Anyway, so I’m going to ask the question based on Season Five of the television show now, according to the actors’ current ages, restricting it to actors currently over the legal age of consent, eliminating anyone who is currently dead. (Sorry, Sean Bean fans. You should be used to this by now.)
With all those restrictions in place:
Who is the most unfuckable character on Game of Thrones?
Now, for me, this is a weird question, because it’s so clearly Sansa. I hate Sansa. I hate her more than Joffrey. My hot button is “People who prioritize their fantasies over reality in a way that harms other people,” and holy crap Sansa, I have yet to forgive you for taking Joffrey’s side way back in Season One and killing a poor innocent dog as a result. I loathe her so much that I can barely stand to look at her, and honestly, Sophie Turner is an attractive young woman, so that shows you how sapiosexual I am.
Yet the most popular answer is “Theon Greyjoy,” who a friend told me could see taking his anger (and current physical handicap) to to a dark, sexy place. Except that Theon has proven thoroughly, seethingly incompetent at literally everything else he’s ever done, so I’m pretty sure he’d screw up your sexual fantasies, too. Theon’s not a bad choice to never masturbate to, though frankly I might suggest looking towards Ramsay Bolton if you want some real dark fantasies happening. Like, “Fantasies you probably wouldn’t survive.”
For me, however, if you take personality out of it, the Least Fuckable Character in Game of Thrones has to go to Lord Walder Frey. Especially if you’re a woman. You know why he wants you, you know you’re walking away with an heir in your belly, and you can just imagine the stink as he crawls atop you.
(The funniest answer came on Twitter, however, in the form of Ser Pounce.)
And yet this is a democracy, so I ask you: Who is your choice for the most unfuckable character on Game of Thrones, and why? Explain why your nethers shrink at the thought of this person. And please, don’t break out in a slurry of fanfic to prove your choice, I really need to eat today.
My Glorious Ice-Cream Pants, or: The Danger of Small Fame
I have small fame. Small fame is pretty easy to get on the Internet.
“Small fame,” for the record, is that nebulous area where you have a couple of thousand fans – not enough to earn a living off of, but enough where every post you make gets a flurry of comments, and you occasionally get fan mail (which is quite nice), and if you squint nicely and don’t walk outside the Internet you can fool yourself into thinking that you are a Very Important Person.
(The way you can tell whether you have small fame or actual fame is to walk around the mall to get yourself an ice cream. Does anyone recognize you when you’re in a generically public place? They don’t? Then you’re not actually famous.)
But there’s plenty of places for people to get small fame. There’s lots of small famous people on Twitter, and small famous people on Tumblr, and Instagram and even FetLife, and tons of other places. It’s nice, like I said.
Until some of these these people self-destruct.
And what nobody tells you about small fame is that it comes with a problematic cadre of core fans, who – if you’re not careful – will mislead you.
Because what you see happening with this small fame, repeatedly, is that someone who’s now got a larger platform says something quite stupid. This is not because they themselves are necessarily stupid – “stupid” is a state that most of us fall into periodically, where we accidentally wash our hair with Vagisil or run through a stoplight or say something ill-thought-out on the Internets.
And the good news is that most of us have friends who’ll serve the same function as bumpers on a pinball table – they’ll go, “Wow, that was pretty silly of you,” and send you rebounding back into the Not-Stupid Zone.
We take our cues from our fellow humans, because we are social creatures. If you were to one day wake up and go, “I would like to wear pants made entirely of ice cream,” you would discover people staring and complaining about the ice cream drips and noticing that shortly afterwards you were displaying Rocky Road-smeared naughty bits about.
And so you would learn that this is maaaaaybe not your wisest idea, and rethink this ice cream-pants travesty.
But if you have small fame, you will have acquired a group of core fans who will love whatever you do. They are so like you that they are almost echoes of you, and will applaud and cheer and justify almost any action you would consider taking. They are not bad people, but they adore you simply because they are so close in tone and temperament to you that realistically, it’s like having a cheering section composed entirely of clones.
They will tell you these ice-cream pants are spectacular.
They will tell you that the folks complaining about the trails of dribbling Rocky Road you leave everywhere are irrationally afraid of ants.
They will tell you that anyone who doesn’t want to watch your peanut-coated nethers is just too damned prissy for their own good.
And if you are not careful, you will listen to these core fans, and not to the rest of the world frantically waving their arms and trying to warn you about the swarms of impending yellowjackets drawn to your sugar-clad genitalia.
Once you get past a certain point, you can get drunk on your own fame, and start listening to these core fans only, and start marking anyone who disagrees with you as The Enemy. When they’re not, in fact, The Enemy, but a friend who is trying to point out that hey, your ass is showing.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s a lot more comfortable to live in the core group. They don’t question you. They defend you. They cheer you. No matter what idiotic thing you do, they will assure you that ZOMG, you were correct, and look at all those idiots out there denigrating you. And you’ll come to believe that anyone who criticize you is a jealous fool, because hey, I have this cheering squad over here, how can I be wrong with all these metronome-nodding heads assuring me I’m right?
And if you’re dim, you never do the math and realize you’ve got about a hundred people relentlessly nodding their heads, and ten thousand people disparaging these fantastic ice-cream pants.
It’s sad, when someone vanishes up their own ass like that. Some of the best things I’ve learned have been from people who have, sometimes quite rudely, put me in my place. And it was painful at the time, and embarrassing, and not something I wanted to do at all, but in the end I learned how to be a better and wiser human being, and to compose pants made out of much more durable waffles.
But if you’re on the Internets, one day you too may be lucky enough to experience the danger of small fame. And when that happens, go to the mall, look around, notice how nobody is paying attention to you at all, notice how when you step outside this carefully-constructed framework you are not, in fact, such a much.
And breathe thanks that you still have people who will call you out when you’re foolish. It’s actually a blessing, I assure you.