laceblade

Panel Title: A Princess With a Sword Is Still a Princess: Modern Adaptations of Fairy Tales
Description: From Countess D'Aulnoy to Teri Windling, many writers are fascinated with the fairy tale. These tales have been used in a variety of works, including television shows, short stories, and novels. What speaks to us in the fairy tale princess? Do girls really want to be princesses? Can we redeem the concept of princess by making her more active? What do fairy tales tell girls? What do fairy tales tell boys? What do they tell adults? And why do we care? Come discuss the issues of gender in fairy tales both traditional and modern, the limitations and problems of fairy tales, and why they are so popular today.
Friday, 10:30-11:45pm
Twitter Hash-Tag: #ModernPrincess
Panelists: Kerey Luis (moderator), Lisa Baluersouth, Emily Jiang, Genevieve A. Lopez, Na'amen Gobert Tilahun

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This post is intended to be transcript-y!

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KL: We'll be discussing gender in modern adaptations of modern fairy/folktales. Favorites?

EJ: Long-lived love of fairy tales since going to the library.

Grimms, Hans Christian Andersen, loves YA. Excited about recent retellings. Donna Jo Napoli. Anything Disney.

LB: Favorite adaptation is Deathless by Cat Valente. Likes Mercedes Lackey retellings. Will read anything.

GL: Grew up reading fairy tales at same as watching Disney Renaissance films. Have been vocal critic of Disney adaptations, prefers to tend toward darker retellings herself. Disney has a puritanical swing in their re-adaptations. Generally, they’re beautiful but there is lots at play in reinforcing gender/racial tropes that needs to be looked at if
consuming them and passing them to children.

NGT: Instead of reading fairy tales, read all mythology books ever. Greek/Roman, Egyptian, etc. etc. Also in love with Disney. Can sing all of the songs. Sings Part of Your World at work. Also a vocal critic of Disney movies. Likes to watch them, likes to tear them apart. (The Disney film) Princess and the Frog fills him with rage. Favorite adaptation is a YA novel by Sarah Beth Durst – Out of the Wild. POV of girl whose mother is Rapunzel. All fairy tale characters live in New England. Fairy tales take over a small city. Friends/enemies co-opted into the fairy tales.

KL: Unsure what favorite modern adaptation is. Maybe Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue. Teaching a class on fairy tales soon, fascinated with what people will have to say. Class is intensive, only 6 weeks long. Each week, also a film. Ending with Princess and the Frog,
hoping her students will tear it apart. Will put ?s to the panelists and then maybe halfway through, open up to questions from audience. What kind of changes do you see in gender roles in adaptations? Do yo use changes at all?

( >Rest of the panel is under this cut. )

[At this point, this audience member said he had "a few things to talk about," my laptop died, and realized how exhausted I was, so I got up and left.



I found myself wishing that this panel would talk about anime/manga, but on Sunday, there will be an entire panel called Fairy Tales in Shoujo Anime and Manga. I'm on it!
It is my ultimate dream that in the future, anime/manga get talked about whenever applicable, without having their own separate/special panels!
ALSO-ALSO, I feel like there's a lot of YA lit that could have been discussed? Shannon Hale's Princess Academy comes to mind. Mostly, though, I was incoherent by the time I sat down at this panel, and thus my thoughts are minimal.

I'm tired, so I don't have a lot to say about these.

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I got a little eye-rolly after hearing there was going to be yet another movie adaptaion of Jane Eyre, but then my bookstore had free tickets to a screening, so I went with a co-worker.

SO AWESOME.

It captured the creepy Gothic Bronte tone perfectly.

Rooms were actually dark at night, save for candle light. I was a little weirded out by use of flashbacks at first, but ended up digging it.

RATING: Win.

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Summer Wars: It was pretty great. There are lots of things to chew on, I think. I'm not sure if this is a movie I'd like to own, or not. A couple of parts brought me to the edge of an eyeroll, but then it didn't happen.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT THAT WAS AWESOME!

I have lots of unrelated ideas about this movie, so I will list them:

1) I read an article somewhere, where Christopher Nolan acknowledged that he got the idea of dream-diving from Satoshi Kon's movie "Paprika." If you liked the concepts in Inception but have never seen "Paprika," I highly recommend it! That and everything else Satoshi Kon ever touched.

2) What would have gotten me to go see this movie immediately:
INCEPTION: Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as SPIDER-MAN!

3) This movie was highly inspiring to me from a writing standpoint. Lots of times I'll read something and be so floored that I become morose and think, "Oh, I'll never be able to write anything like that, so why bother." But when I watched this, I vainly thought to myself, "I could totally have written that!" I mean, the concepts were intricate. But the dialogue and whatever itself were not that hard - for this movie, I think once you had the central concept down, everything else would follow pretty easily.

( 4 is a spoiler. )

5) WHERE IS THE FIC? ELLEN PAGE/ARTHUR AND ARTHUR/COBB WOULD BE PREFERRED. I would also accept Arthur/British Guy.

6) I will now go reread everyone's Inception posts.

7) I left the theater loudly asking my boyfriend, "HOW CAN IT BE SO GOOD? WHAT IF I COULD WRITE LIKE THAT? OH MY GOD, HOW WAS THAT SO AWESOME?!"

8) I'd really like to wear scarves around my neck like Ellen Page did, but I feel like that look would only work with a small bust size. Her makeup artist was fabulous.

I think I can explain what I didn't like about Avatar enough without spoiling anything.

I liked the protagonist (mostly) and I liked the graphics.

But I feel like this is James Cameron's "I just watched an anime and now I'm going to make a movie!"

I cringed with apprehension in the first 5 minutes, and the loosened up over the next 30. By the end I was shuddering repeatedly with James Cameron's self-righteousness.

This movie could also be titled, OMG GEORGE BUSH IS SO EVIL! I WILL SPEND $300,000,000 TO EXPLAIN WHY!!

There could be a lot of interesting discussion on bodies in this movie, and obviously race. I look forward to the response of fandom.

I recommend the write-up by nihilistic_kid, although it spoils everything if you're concerned about things like that.



Overall: It was not as squicky as I thought it would be, but I was underwhelmed/annoyed by the heavy-handedness and refusal to go a lot deeper.

Nightschool, vol. 1 and 2 by Svetlana Chmavoka
Volume 1 was a reread for me. It held up well, and I look forward to reading more of this series.

Her Majesty's Dog, vol. 2 and 3 by Mick Takeuchi
Not as good as volume 1, but still good.

20th Century Boys, vol. 3 and 4 by Naoki Urasawa
I continue to have so much love for this series.

Greenwitch by Susan Cooper (3 of 5 in The Dark is Rising)
I like this book the least out of the three I've read so far, but I'm still looking forward to reading the rest of it.

Why Buffy Matters by Rhonda Wilcox
Great academic analysis of Buffy, I ate this up. I didn't care for the introduction much, but I'm glad I kept reading.
Massive spoilers through the end of the series, so I would not read this book unless you've seen it all, or don't care about spoilers.

Critiques: For a book that had the goal of explaining why Buffy as a whole is important to society, the author focused mainly on analyzing it in order to prove that the show is "art." A lot of the things she chose to focus on were references in events to episodes that are repeated throughout different essays, to the point that the repetition became annoying.
Also, the author focused on the most artistic episodes in the entire series, aside from "Surprise"/"Innocence" (which are good episodes, but not stylistically different from the rest of the series), she wrote about "The Zeppo," "Restless," "The Body," and "Once More, With Feeling." I guess if my goal was to argue that an entire TV show is artistic (and I'm not sure why the argument needs to be made in the first place), I would use "mundane" episodes to prove my point.

Despite my critiques, I liked the things that Wilcox analyzed and expanded on. Visual cues/framing devices have to be extremely blatant for me to pick up on them (ie, Revolutionary Girl Utena), so now there will be things for me to look for. I am really eager to continue my re-watch of Buffy (I left off after finishing Season 3 a couple of months ago).

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Baccano! ep. 1-3 (of 16)
This is a re-watch for me, first-time viewing for the Boyfriend. Boyfriend finds the show a little pretentious [We're telling the plot in a non-linear fashion, Audience! We're so clever!], and I'd say I'm inclined to agree with him. It's a fun show, and I still love Isaac/Miria, but I think I've decided it's one that I don't want to own.

CLAMP School Detectives, ep. 1-5 (of 26)
A ridiculous opening sequence! CLAMP School Detectives is like Burn Notice, except that instead of an ex-spy, they're three fourth graders who try to help women in trouble. I don't think I'll finish this show, as there's not a lot of emotional growth/etc. Still, I liked the manga (my write-up is here), and it was nice to see the anime version.

Burn Notice, 3.1-3.2
It seems like these seasons start out a little slow for me? I like this season's antagonist more than I liked season two's, I think.

Robotech, ep. 1-4
I'm not really sure how to describe this show. It's so cheesy, and I hate all of the characters thus far. BUT post-apocalyptic futures IN SPACE will carry me far. I'm in it for the long haul, as the DVDs I have are from the middle part of the series. As I said, I dislike all of the characters for far, but the one I dislike the most is Minmei.

"High Society"
Didn't like this movie much, aside from Louis Armstrong. Lots of awful dialogue, especially the misogyny of Grace Kelly's love interests.

"The Girl Who Leapt Through Time"
The subtitles didn't work on the DVD we rented from the library, so thank God this movie had a good English dub. I kind of loved this movie, aside from a couple of needlessly long crying / running/panting scenes. It's about what a high school girl would do if she had the ability to leap through time. I thought that the protagonist was maturing emotionally, but that turned out to not be the case.
I was kind of hoping for a Donnie Darko ending, but I loved this anyway.

"Freedom Writers"
My mom wanted me to watch this movie. I know that it's all "nice white lady blows the minds of kids of color with uplifting and simple phrases," but I did like the fact that the kids told their stories in their own voices throughout the movie, and that it showed the outright racism of teachers/administrators in schools. Better than I expected, but not great.

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Google Wave
I unexpectedly received an invite from my friend nylorac15. I'm a little wary about Google Wave - I think that for simple chatting, I'd much prefer Google Chat. I don't want people to watch me type as a type! In most cases, that would be very bad. I self-censor, but I need a little bit of time before I hit "Enter." Wave seems to remove this safety net.

What kinds of things might Google Wave be used for? I can only think of fannish-related activities: epic writing of fanfic between multiple parties, collaborative real-time WisCon panel write-ups, etc. Outside of fandom, I really can't come up with any uses for the technology. Let me know, Internet. Wikipedia is vague, and I'm not watching Google's hour-long video. I've got shit to do.

I need to figure out a way to have the contacts list not contain everyone I've ever Gmailed in my entire life. :[ It seems like the only way to delete people from the list is to delete them from my Gmail contacts list FOREVER, and that sucks. How come there isn't more control, as there is with Google Chat?

OH MY GOD STEVEN MOYER IS GOING TO BE IN THE LIVE-ACTION MOVIE OF MIN-WOO HYUNG'S PRIEST MANHWA

One day I will write an epic post of love for the Priest manhwa! For now, know that is an epic tale of ZOMBIES and THE WILD WEST and AMAZING ART and EPIC ANGST and FALLEN ANGELS and DEMONS flashbacks to the MIDDLE AGES WITH KNIGHTS AND SHIT, and is basically bad-ass.

AT ONE POINT, A SET OF RIB CAGES BURSTS OUTWARD THROUGH SOMEONE'S FLESH. It doesn't get any more bad-ass than that.


It sounds like they're going to butcher the storyline, but....OMF PRIEST.

One thing I forgot to mention, and I've been thinking about all day....

( Spoiler! )

All you lucky bastards who have this movie playing in your city had better blog about it!!

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Watched "The Prestige" last night. It was bad-ass. I preferred Hugh Jackman's character to Christian Bale's, but then Bale's mostly just yelled a lot during the movie. Still, I was unspoiled for all of the turns and surprises, which made things fun. Also, the presence of David Bowie increases the greatness of any movie by 10 points.

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You can get the first episodes of the animes Honey & Clover and NANA on iTunes for free now through August 31. Both of these series are examples of realistic (they're still dramatic, but there are no transformations to magical school girls) shojo, and they are two of my favorite series of all time. An article with more information on Honey & Clover is here, while there is also one on NANA here. I have been waiting for these to be released in the U.S. for a long time!

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Today's Kate Beaton comic is about the Bronte sisters, and it is glorious.
I bought a used copy of a book claiming to be a metabiography of the Brontes today at a bookstore. OM NOM NOM.

How come nobody told me they're making a live-action version of Blood: The Last Vampire?!

Watch the totally bad-ass trailer here!