Eccentric Flower:201001/Profundity

Jette:

One of the very few things I liked about the recent "Prince Caspian" adaptation was an acknowledgment at the beginning of the movie that these four kids had actually been grown-ups for awhile, and now were stuck being children again, and were having a helluva time adjusting. I always thought that would be extremely difficult to deal with ... if you think about it, possibly psychologically damaging.

-- 19:53, 25 January 2010 (GMT)

Iain:

This is why my hero(ines) always end up staying in the worlds they discover.

For myself, I never objected to your heroines staying in the worlds they discover. I only object to the fact that the transition is damn near seamless. I don't care how much you finally decide you want to be in the new place, and I don't care how sparkly nice and fun it is, if you want to have an interesting story and a realistic main character, you need some speedbumps getting there. Far more than you tend to allow, anyway.

-- 21:27, 25 January 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

Sure, I agree ... sorta.

I mean, yeah, in the example where there are unsettling physical changes to get used to, there should be more bumpiness. But - to use the Quarter Moon example - if I woke up tomorrow female, I would be "Hooray!" and there would be no psychological adjustment - on MY part. I completely believe this. All my difficulties (and they would be many) would be in my interactions with OTHER people who wouldn't be nearly as copacetic about the change in my universe as I was.

And frankly, I still say Dorothy should have been, "Oh, wow, cool place, can I stay? Screw Kansas!" from the getgo - except for the only two people back in the real world who gave a damn about her.

-- 22:05, 25 January 2010 (GMT)

Mrissa:

I call this the Death of the Magic ending, and I treasure the books that dodge it. I was so relieved when Pamela Dean did something different with her portal fantasy trilogy, because I'd already met Pamela and started to be friends with her before I could find the third book.

-- 23:00, 25 January 2010 (GMT)

Ursula:

It really depends on how an ending is played. If a story is about somebody from our world who goes off to live happily ever after in a fantasyland where they are royalty/magical/whatever, and they just never come back, I tend to see that as sort of immature wish-fulfillment. Whether it's the author's intention or not, we're sort of being encouraged to reject reality and spend our whole lives just dreaming... And that's a good way to never achieve anything in this life.

But then there are stories like "Love and Monsters," a Doctor Who episode from a couple of years ago. (I know you don't watch the show, but I suspect you'd like this one.) This normal guy spends his life aware that there's something more to life than our humdrum reality, something epic and weird that most of us never grasp. He ends the story having had a big, scary sci-fi adventure and with his girlfriend transformed into a weird creature, but they're very much in love and he likes his weird life. He keeps a video diary, and he has this entry where he talks about how there's so much more to life than just school and work and marriage and babies and dying. He's still in our world, but he has made a happy, sci-fi life for himself here. It's kind of a celebration of misfits, and an acknowledgment that their lives can sometimes be much richer than those who fit in better.

I think these things work best when our hero's fantasy adventure has either somehow changed the real world for the better (the Back to the Future ending) or he brings the magic back with him somehow. When it's about the person disappearing into wonderland forever, it rings a little hollow for me. Although it can sometimes work well as an ambiguous, borderline tragic thing... (spoiler warning!) Like in Pan's Labyrinth, where we're not quite sure if the kid just died or if she really did go live with the pixies.

-- 00:02, 26 January 2010 (GMT)

Ursula:

I've never read Quarter Moon, but if it involved a protagonist who changed gender and had no issues with it at all, I could see why that would bother readers. One of the things about Orlando that drove me nuts was the way that Woolf has the character be so apathetic about the gender change. That saps the whole experience of any drama or comedy, and makes it about as interesting as somebody dyeing their hair a new color on a whim. (Or imagine a story where somebody wakes up on another planet and they just shrug and go get a job at the Woozlebeeer factory and they fit in fine. That is not a story!) A story with a contented gender changer could work if everybody AROUND the character freaked out and the hero had to fight their resistance to the change. That's drama. But if a gender change is just shrugged off as no big deal, you're kinda cheating the audience out of all the fun stuff.

-- 00:09, 26 January 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

And of course I LOVE the way the gender change in Orlando is handled. (I might add, for those who haven't read the book, that it's not given significantly more drama in the original.)

Yes, it would be a problem if there was no other story going on, but the point was that the gender change was, in the vast scheme of Orlando's timeline and events, not a very significant event. There were a lot of much more important things happening!

-- 00:30, 26 January 2010 (GMT)

Ursula:

Well, at best that strikes me as a very problematic narrative choice. To reject all (or any) of the drama of it seems like a deliberate effort to make it totally uninteresting... Even as a tranny myself, that tack is just baffling. Yes, maybe that's how Woolf saw it, and maybe that's you see it, but it's really alienating to 99.something percent of the planet. Expecting us to just roll with it is like expecting us to sympathize with a rock or something. You can MAKE us feel something for the rock, but you're gonna have to work for it. (And as I read Woolf's book, I kept thinking, essentially, "Huh... Still just a plain ol' rock, huh?")

I wasn't asking Woolf to lavish pages on the transformation (although I would've vastly preferred that) but to just rush through it and then not have the character give a damn made for one of the least satisfying books I've read in my life, despite the fancy prose style. It wasn't even handled in an interestingly surreal, WTF way, like the change of protagonists midway through "Lost Highway". It was more like those huge narrative leaps you see in bad amateur fiction: "And then the bad guy got ran over by a car and then things were good again the end."

Obviously, I've spent way too long arguing with Woolf in my head. That book ticked me the heck off.

-- 03:37, 26 January 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

Well, remember, Woolf was making a point. This is an oversimplification, but the basic idea there was, "Well, I had sex and life situations as a male, now I'll have the same sex and life situations as a female, and they'll be the same - gender makes absolutely no difference, it's just the same stuff from the opposite camera angle."

Except - and this is Woolf's genius - it DOES make a difference, and Orlando is forced to admit that it does, and Woolf is smart enough to be smarter than her protagonist, and smart enough to have her protagonist catch on.

But, again: The central eyeball-popping moment is that Orlando does not die. In a book where your character finishes up 330 years old with no signs of stopping (and if we take the film version, which continues the idea into the 1990s, even older), then who has time to blink at a gender change mid-novel?

-- 04:46, 26 January 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

Unrelated note: The copy of Orlando I have is a printing of the first American edition. I got it in a used book store. When I was reading it for the first time, I found that someone had clipped the news article about Woolf's death and put it in the book for safekeeping. The article was oblique - I didn't know much about Woolf and hadn't realized she killed herself. I had to look it up. She was subject to vast bouts of severe depression her entire life, and one day she put on her overcoat, filled her pockets with stones, walked into a river, and drowned herself. An extraordinarily difficult death.

Her body was not found for three weeks.

-- 04:53, 26 January 2010 (GMT)

Ursula:

I knew about the stones in Woolf's pockets... It's almost like she planned her suicide to be as chilling and unforgettable as possible. I admire a lot of what she did, but that book (and the film) so did not speak to me. I suppose it's not so surprising, as Woolf would be coming at a M2F gender change from an entirely different perspective than I would... But then the immortality stuff bothered me, too. I sort of get what she was going for, but the overwhelming passivity of it all just made me insane.

SNL did a sketch a couple of years ago where some guy won the lottery and then drove a reporter insane by having no reaction at all. Just, "Oh. Huh. Cool." Reading Orlando, I felt like that reporter. Great things were just raining down on this character, and he/she just barely registered any of it. I couldn't see anything enjoyable in it at all.

-- 06:33, 26 January 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

Oh, see, if I won the lottery, I would totally go "Oh. Huh. Cool." and leave it at that. Because, first off, I am just not a jump-up-and-down-with-glee person, and second, I'd do it entirely to piss the reporters off. No, I am not giving a statement. No, I'm not going to speculate on what I'm going to do with the money. It's none of your business or the public's. - slam door -

Some of us prefer to not wear our emotions on the surface. If something good happens to me and I indulge in a quick "Yes!" and a fist-pump, that's demonstrative for me. There is only one person in the world I'm demonstrative around, and only when there are no other witnesses present. It doesn't mean that I don't get great happiness from good things; it's just in how I choose to celebrate it.

Unfortunately I concede that just because some people are actually like that in real life doesn't mean you can have your fictional character do it without the audience feeling cheated. I wish it were otherwise, because I hate writing demonstrative characters almost as much as I hate being demonstrative.

-- 15:25, 26 January 2010 (GMT)

Ursula:

But, see, you would at least be reacting on the inside. I'm not asking for characters to be outwardly reacting to everything, they can be repressed as all get-out and a story can still work. But for a lead character in a story to have no real external or internal reaction to large, life-altering events... That's going to be a boring and frustratingly opaque character.

A decent story could be made out of a lottery winner refusing to gush for a reporter out of spite... THAT's a response!

Had Orlando been inwardly freaked out but trying not to show it, that could've been interesting. But no, we got that "same person, just a different sex" malarkey. Again, Woolf seemed to be deliberately trying to sap the situation of any drama or comedy or horror or joy. They say great storytellers can make anything interesting... Well, I guess it's also possible to make any bizarre situation tedious, if you really work at it.

-- 23:09, 26 January 2010 (GMT)

Bunny42:

Didn't you allow that most people fall into the "jump-up-and-down-with-glee" category? I wouldn't know how to cope with "Oh. Huh. Cool." It's totally foreign to me, given the outrageous odds of anyone actually winning. How could one not be gleeful? Not for the media, perhaps, but gimme a break. How could you not be thrilled that your future was pretty much covered, (if you invest properly, that is), or that you could go get anything you want (except, maybe, whirled peas), or, or... you could give it all away to people needier than you. There was such a woman in FL, years ago, who won, I dunno, $65 Million, or so, and proceeded to establish a trust fund to help worthy causes, while remaining in her trailer park with her peeps. Oh, I believe she did buy a new car. She's dead,now, and the trust fund remains. Tell me you wouldn't be tickled to be able to do such a thing. I don't believe "Oh. Huh. Cool." for a minute. Nope. Refusing to gush for the media out of spite, as Ursula mentioned, I could appreciate. But not being elated? Not at all? No way. Talk about your sci-fi!

-- 04:57, 27 January 2010 (GMT)