As with almost everything genre-related in my life, the reason I became interested this year in reading as many Hugo Award-eligible works as I can before March 28 this year is all thanks to my former college professor Dr. Atara Stein (may you rest in peace).
As a young undergrad at Cal State Fullerton, I had taken her Science Fiction literature class because I’d become interested in learning how other people have written science fiction in the hopes that I would be able to write my own. One of the first things she told us on the first day was that because even the science fiction genre encompassed a wide breadth of topics and themes, we would be focusing on what to her embodied what science fiction was as its very heart: What does it mean to be an intelligent “human”?
Through the clarifying lens of the “artificial intelligence” theme, a partial list of everything I read that school year is as follows: Neuromancer, Frankenstein, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and He, She and It. We also watched the director’s cut versions of Blade Runner and Terminator 2 as well as the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Measure of a Man” (because she was also a secret Trek fanfic writer on the side).
It’s because of her college course that my philosophy about what makes “good” science fiction has to flow from satisfying at least two of these three criteria:
Does the work examine what it means to be “human” in some extensive way?
Is a very important part of how the plot and/or setting works tied to the use of technology created by sentient beings?
It is very improbable that the events in the setting of the book will happen during my lifetime?
This is a rubric which I’ve been following both consciously and sub-consciously my entire life, and it’s the rubric by which I plan to read and critique as many science fiction comics, short stories, novellas, and novels as are eligible for the 2016 Hugo Awards as I can before the nomination deadline of March 31.
When he threw open the comments on a blog entry about the show to people who had questions about his first guest appearance, the following exchange took place:
Q: I think TBBT has really made geek chic in some respects, which I’m all for! Do you think the show’s had an impact making geeks more mainstream and funny?
Wheaton: I think it’s part of the general uncloseting of geeks, if that makes sense.
It’s no secret that I originally thought BBT was making fun of us, and I couldn’t get into it. It wasn’t until late in the first season that I gave it a real chance and ended up seeing that it was laughing *with* us and not *at* us. I love that the show embraces its geekiness, refuses to dumb down its humor, and manages to find a balance between mainstream and nerd humor. That’s a lot harder than it seems, and is sort of like playing Comedy Operation. If you touch the sides, the audience’s red nose lights up and instead of laughing, there’s a loud buzzing noise. It isn’t pretty.
Based on those words alone, I put “The Big Bang Theory” on my list of shows that were kind to geeks and science; however, some opinion pieces I saw earlier this year had me questioning his words.
The first one I saw was from Kris Naudus, a writer with whom I worked when I was at Wizard Entertainment. She’s currently a content manager for gdgt, but in her free time, she maintains a blog at LiveJournal where she posts her musings on pop and geek culture. She’s not a fan of TBBT, but because so many of her friends and family enjoy it and keep recommending it to her, she thought she’d give it another chance.
I usually insist that I don’t like this show because it’s not really nerdy; it’s just making fun of nerds, and that offends me. But this episode didn’t offend me as a geek or nerd. It offended me as a woman, and as a decent human being. Sheldon’s behavior was disgusting and the fact that the episode plays it for laughs and lets him get off scot-free, means that in a way, they condone it. We’re supposed to accept it because “that’s just the way Sheldon is.” It’s absolutely awful that part of the show’s premise is “these guys can’t talk to women,” but then they’re all given girlfriends before they’ve actually learned that lesson. Or really, Sheldon hasn’t learned that lesson, because he doesn’t need to, because he has Amy and Amy doesn’t care because of the way she is. Which is a shame, because I like Miyam [sic] Bialik and how Amy isn’t a stereotypical girl character. Unfortunately, it also makes her an enabler.
Shortly after I watched the episode, I also came across a TEDx talk by Jorge Cham, the cartoonist behind Piled Higher and Deeper, aka PHD Comics, aka The Webcomic that Grad Students Get and Most Everyone Else Might Not Get.
His talk was about something he’s calling “The Science Gap,” that leap in perception between what academics, nerds, and geeks see regarding the world of science and what the rest of the “normal” or mainstream world sees. The relevant part of the talk starts at 4 minutes and 46 seconds into the talk; you can watch the whole thing below:
Let’s take a closer look at one of Cham’s comments again:
TBBT is a major TV network show that’s [also] supposed to be about scientists and researchers, and the show has a lot of fans—and I don’t want to offend them, especially on the Internet—but this show does… all the smart people in this show have [these] glasses, they dress really weird, they’re socially inept, and all the pretty [and] cool people, they’re blonde, they’re dumb, they’re outgoing, etcetera. And so, I don’t have anything personal against the show, but I do sort of worry about what these stereotypes, what impact they have on society in general.
Long-time readers know that I’m definitely the kind of person who will put her money where her mouth is, and rather than just take someone’s word for granted regarding claims that a piece of entertainment is misogynistic or unrepresentative of a particular sub-culture, I’m going to check it out for myself. So, I hopped on over to the CBS website where “Egg Salad” had been streaming and I watched the entire episode.
Because Naudus was so thorough in her review, a lot of the twists and turns of the story were spoiled for me and so I don’t feel as if I can be as completely objective as a person watching the episode during its first run or without the benefit of the fan-wiki and a review by a trusted source would be. During my viewing of the show, I paid close attention to the scenes where Sheldon was interacting with his assistant Alex, because for the last four years I’ve been an assistant to various people in many different industries and know first-hand what it’s like to work for someone who has a very strong sense of self like the Sheldon character does.
The scenes where Alex felt uncomfortable and insulted as her boss started describing her as being full of hormones and/or having her emotions controlled by them like a lesser human being was equally as uncomfortable to me because I could see how I would react in exactly that sort of situation, having seen it in the workplace. I’ve also done human resources work during my career and I know how unnerving it is to have someone show so much disrespect towards you and your position without realizing that they’re doing so, as in the scene where Sheldon told the African-American woman from human resources that she was “a slave” to her body chemistry. And knowing that the other three scientist characters were equally as guilty of inappropriate remarks and behavior in the workplace regarding their female co-workers didn’t make things better because it showed that even Leonard as the most “normal” of the four was a terrible co-worker and colleague.
With those three things in mind and having seen how similar Naudus’ conclusion about the episode (“Sheldon hasn’t learned [his] lesson, because he doesn’t need to, because he has Amy and Amy doesn’t care…”) was to my conclusion about Observe and Report (“Even at the end of the film, [Ronnie] is still posturing, still arrogant, still a dick, but this time he’s got everyone else around him affirming and agreeing that he should continue to be this way….”), I came to my first realization about “The Big Bang Theory”: Because of the nature of episodic sitcoms on the major non-cable networks in the U.S., it is in the best interests for the writers of TBBT to keep Sheldon and the other main characters as being portrayed as stereotypes of geeks rather than showing positive growth and change for as long as possible; ergo, this show is not very kind to geeks at all.
On the other side of the coin is Cham’s claim that this show isn’t kind to science through its portrayal of young, intellectual researchers in academia. One could be cynical and say that the only reason Cham is saying this is because he is the executive producer of a feature film based on his comics as well as an ongoing web documentary series which portrays realresearchers talking about realscience and he just wants the additional views on YouTube, but I don’t think that’s it.
I think that through Cham’s experience having done a series of lectures all across the U.S. and abroad starting in 2005 and the work he’s done since then on his feature film and web series, he’s personally seen and spoken to thousands of young intellectuals in academia who are more socially adjusted, more stylish, and have more interesting lives and compelling stories about those lives both inside and outside of their field of research than the four main characters on TBBT. From physics grad Ameliz who wants to be a professional actress to architecture grad Matt who built and lives in his thesis, from the research teams at CERN who are working with the Large Hadron Collider to the unnamed woman who went from being a cancer researcher to a cancer patient, Cham more than anyone understands who exactly the average young scientist is and why he or she are nothing like the characters on TBBT.
“But TBBT is fictional!” I hear you say. “It’s not meant to be realistic! You should just chill!” Believe me, I hear and understand that viewpoint, but I think that the continued portrayal of scientists as being socially inadequate and only unattractive compared to the average person has a chance to harm real scientists. For example, on the PhD Comics YouTube channel, Cham aired a multi-part look at how fandom interacts with the real world, and what neurobiologist grad student and host Crystal Dilworth has to say about her reaction to the stereotypes in TBBT is interesting:
Dilworth: It’s interesting, your take on TBBT because for me I look at that show as propagating some, in my mind, negative stereotypes about scientists.
Lincoln Geraghty, professor of popular media studies at the University of Portsmouth, England: Well, indeed.
Dilworth: Especially for me as a woman, believing that in order to be a woman in science, you have to be both ugly, socially unequipped, and narrowly focused. Which, I’m a woman in science pursuing a PhD and I don’t find…
Prof. Geraghty: What’s your field?
Dilworth: Molecular neuroscience.
Prof. Geraghty: Oh, blimey.
Dilworth: So, Amy Farah Fowler is supposed to be me, and I don’t feel like I’m being accurately represented.
My immediate response, which I posted in the YouTube comments to the video, are that I understand what Dilworth is saying because as a scientist who happens to be a woman, it could be hard for her to be taken as seriously as an Amy Farah Fowler-type would be because Dilworth—in my opinion—is more conventionally attractive than the character is. By perpetuating the stereotype that Fowler is what all or most female neurobiologists look like, it harms her personally.
But even more damaging is the notion that “scientists” are a completely and totally different type of person than the average person can hope to become. We all know that through hard work, exercise, the right diet, and maybe the right fitness applications on your cell phone, a person can go from very unfit to reasonably fit in as few as nine weeks. But what about increasing one’s knowledge? Shouldn’t we encourage more interest in the sciences by encouraging people of all kinds to be interested in it?
In this same episode of TBBT, Penny, the audience viewpoint character and Leonard’s girlfriend, got jealous when she learned that Alex had attempted to ask Leonard out on a date. Alex, who is reasonably attractive, also happens to be a doctoral candidate in physics (which is why she’s Sheldon’s assistant). After pondering whether or not she should take community college classes in science, Penny decided that it all seemed too “boring” for her, and chose to start wearing “geeky” glasses instead as a way to keep Leonard’s interest in her fresh. Thus, creating a “fake geek girl” for Leonard to have sex with that evening.
But wouldn’t it be cool and provide a more interesting character arc to have Penny learn what the sciences are like, for her to find a science or a skill that she does like and for which she has a real aptitude? Wouldn’t in encourage interest in the STEM fields to watch how someone’s interest in the sciences can be piqued? And couldn’t it be equally as engaging and as funny as trotting out old stereotypes about geeks?
Until someone give me a production budget, a writing staff, and some actors, unfortunately, we’re never going to know that answer for sure. However, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t wish and ask for more from our entertainment.
When it comes to reading webcomics, I have a set list of nine “dailies” I read and a few that I read which update less frequently. And while I’ve definitely settled on these few, that doesn’t mean that I haven’t read other webcomics or aren’t familiar with their work. Also, my love of comics and comics strips isn’t exactly a casual one; hell, my high school Extended Essay was about the role of women in comic books from the 1940s to the 1990s.
So when I saw a friend’s Facebook update decrying how Sinfest has become a den of “ludicrous feminist mediocrity,” I had to check out today’s strip:
Click to embiggen! (c) Tatusya Ishida
I flipped through the previous two or three weeks of strips to see if there was any context for the strip, any lead-up, and I noticed that there were a few new characters I’d not seen before as well as a few large colored wordless strips which seemed to be part of a larger story. No “feminist mediocrity,” but perhaps some exaggerated examples of extreme feminist thought and behavior. And then I learned that Ishida has been drawing strips like those for over a year and a half, with very little explanation as to why, leading my friend to make that comment.
Another recent strip which got me thinking about feminism and webcomics was this April 24, 2013 strip for Penny Arcade:
Click to embiggen, though do you really need to do that? (c) 2013 Mike Krahulik & Jerry Holkins
Without context, it seemed to me that the comic was pointing out that emphasizing sexual characteristics is ludicrous for characters in video games and that there’s a double-standard when it comes to what is an acceptable amount of sexualization. Through the dialogue, it’s emphasizing that the female sorceress is more attractive to the Gabriel character to play because her secondary sexual characteristics are emphasized in proportion to her body whereas the male barbarian’s secondary sexual characteristics—and quite possibly his primary as well; I have no idea if that sling is containing nothing but an enormous scrotum or if it’s an enormous scrotum and penis—are not. Finally on the first read-through, the comic pointed out to me that there’s an inequality in what video game character designers find attractive versus who their audience will be, because I know that both women and men read Penny Arcade.
I gave my approval to the strip when I saw it first-thing that morning, and noted that I would have to return to the site later on in the day to get the context and a bit of commentary. As I wrote on Twitter, what I had hoped to read from writer Jerry Holkins was that they were starting to understand why some female gamers have a tough time being a part of the fandom and that they “gained some levels” in Feminist Theory.
Oh boy, I cannot wait to see the blog entry that will go along with this comic penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/04/… // Feminism, level up!
Clearly, that was too much to hope for from the crew who mishandled the “dickwolves” saga, as seen by the news post that went out later that day. After first stating that the art being used to illustrate even the title image for Dragon’s Crown is so ornate as to render it incomprehensible, and that it just seems to be part of what developer Vanillaware does on a regular basis, Holkins goes on to write:
The only characters here who aren’t fucking mutants are the Elf and the Wizard, who are there to calibrate the player; everybody else is some fun-house exponent of strength or beauty stretched into some haunted sigil. Iconic isn’t even the word—they don’t evoke icons, they are icons. They’re humans as primal symbols.
It’s very weird to pull up a story about a game with frankly visionary art and hear why it shouldn’t exist, or to hear what I supposedly fantasize about, or what kind of power I supposedly revere, and any attempt to defend oneself from these psychotic projections or to assert that creators may create is evidence of a dark seed sprouting in the heart. It’s an incredible state of affairs. They’re not censors, though—oh, no no. You’ll understand it eventually; what you need to do is censor yourself. [emphasis mine]
I understand that the more extreme reactions (“Oh, you must be a sexist chauvinistic pig in order to like this sort of thing!”) and the initial assertion by Kotaku writer Jason Schreier were more than a little bit knee-jerk; thus, Holkins’ implying that those kinds of people are “psychotic” is perfectly valid.
However, Schreier’s follow-up posted just the day before—and probably before Holkins started writing his post—was dead-on and I was disappointed that a chunk of Mike Krahulik’s responses on Twitter were centered around whether or not it was right to “censor” artist George Kamitani’s work instead. That in itself is a fascinating discussion, but not the main crux of this issue.
Passing off half of the six available player character designs as “fun-house” or “primal” symbols and calling it “frankly visionary” doesn’t address the fact that it’s done in a way which could turn off some of its potential audience. In fact, I’d argue that even while Kamitani is trying to change how the modern person envisions fantasy characters, he falls into the trap of contorting his “non-mutant” Elf character into the same spine-breaking action shot for which so many others have been lambasted.
Instead of being a part of promoting equality to their audiences, Ishida has chosen to confuse his and Krahulik and Holkins have chosen to ignore or to troll the vocal members of theirs. And while I don’t claim to even know what Ishida’s thinking, I know from previous news posts and an interview in their own reality series that Krahulik and Holkins have been grateful for the chance to educate and illuminate their audience about things that are important to them.
When it comes to being a writer or actor, we currently live in interesting times—and by “interesting” I’m using the “Chinese curse” definition of the word.
Computers and the Internet have not only opened up a new distribution method for people to see their work and give them money for it, but also a way for people to view their work and keep from giving them money for it. The main point of contention during the Writers Guild Strike of 2007-2008 and the threatened Screen Actors Guild Strike of 2008 was over residuals from “new media,” and how much a production studio would pay them for re-broadcasts of the material over time beyond its initial broadcast.
To briefly summarize, rather than use the old mathematical formula created in the 1980s when home video became a concern or wait a few years to see exactly how profitable distribution on “new media” is and create a new formula, the WGA wanted the producers’ guild (the AMPTP) to create a new formula right now which would potentially address any and all concerns about how writers would get paid for work that has the potential to be seen and consumed in innumerable ways that aren’t easily tabulated thanks to things like click rates and online piracy.
Because that formula hasn’t been perfected yet and online piracy is still a problem, anyone who wants to start releasing their content on the ‘net is trying to figure out who their loyal paying audience (aka their True Fans) is and how to best get a hold of that person’s entertainment dollar.
About a month ago, Indie Wire.com blogger Cameron Carlson went to the “Producing Web Entertainment” seminar at the American Cinematheque in California, and came away with eight things he learned about how to best reach an Internet-based audience. However, the people on that panel and the series they were talking about were people I’d never heard of personally, which made me wonder: Exactly who are these guys and why would I want to believe their words on this topic?
After doing lots of clicking and a bit of research, I present to you my own list of five things I think these particular content creators are doing correctly and incorrectly when it comes to reaching out to a ‘net-savvy audience:
1. The folks at Babelgum.com allow for embedding, viewing fullscreen, and sharing via social networks on their video content hosting site and that’s great. However, they don’t have multiple options for embedding a la YouTube, and that’s bad. If I want to share your video with my friends on my blog, then I want to show you off in the best manner possible and a small inset ain’t gonna cut it. This kids’ re-enactment of the Bravo reality show “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” is pretty funny, but if the sample I’m showing you presents poorly, you’re not going to want to go to the source to see more, are you?
That’s a shame, as there’s some pretty good content over at Babelgum, including a BBC channel that has clips of shows like “The Young Ones” and “Red Dwarf” and many of the Improv Everywhere skits.
Overall grade: C+
2. I was fully prepared to give the gang at FearNet.com an awesome grade because they have an interesting selection of free R-rated movies that only require an age-checker to view, the female eye-candy host of their “Jobs of the Damned” original series seems pretty genre-savvy, and they already know their audience is going to be a bunch of horror buffs, so they don’t condescend when they conduct interviews, as seen above.
However, when I pasted the embed code for the video above into the text side of my WordPress Dashboard, a whole lot of clunky code came along with it, including a link to their ad network. Ugh.
Overall grade: B-
3. Sometimes, size really does matter and in this case, the lack of an adjustable embed code means that showing you this episode of “Easy to Assemble” is going to break some blogger templates and even some LiveJournal pages, so good luck sharing it with your friends. By far, this is the slickest of the productions we’ve seen in this review, but there’s just one major problem I have: Why does the About page only contain a press release for the second season?
Part of what turns a casual viewer into a True Fan these days is the level of access to the creators of that content and the amount of information those creators are willing to provide. If you’re not even willing to have a FAQ section available on your site to explain exactly why actual Hollywood stars like Illeana Douglas, Justine Bateman and Ed Begely, Jr. are schilling for IKEA in a quirky web series, then I’m not going to want to watch it, no matter how many Streamys it has won.
Overall grade: C
4. See what I mean about breaking templates? I really, really like “Imaginary Bitches,” even if I’m not their target demographic of women who do “lunch with the girls” and make plans to go shopping. The conceit of main character Eden (played by Eden Riegel, best-known as Bianca from “All My Children”) creating bitchy imaginary friends because her real-life friends are all in relationships and have abandoned her is so freaking interesting to me because it’s an unusual take on a very common situation.
The embed issue aside, the other problem I have with IB is the lack of consistency on the Cast page. Props go to male cast members Michael Traynor and Billy Aaron Brown for following Eden’s example and deciding to relish in the playful spirit of Internet TV and having such playful bios for their cast pages.
With the exception of Brooke Nevin, the rest of the female cast didn’t follow suit at all, which makes them all look like, well, bitches.
Overall grade: B-
5. And as long as I’m at it, I’m also gonna give some props to Strike TV, because just in the same way that Joss Whedon was bored, wanted something to do during the Writers’ Strike, and came up with “Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog,” every single series in this long list was created because some writer had an idea, was able to go out and realize it, and someone gave it a home.
I am now about to take those props away because not only is the management team nothing but guys, but it doesn’t seem like any of the blogs or any of the other series have been updated since 2009. If a bunch of Canadians living on an island off the coast of Washington state can produce at least one video a week for over six years while trying to maintain a day job or school, you’d think a bunch of Hollywood screenwriters could do the same, yes?
Overall grade: F
Ultimately, as Carlson concluded, just as the plate engravers looked askance at Johannes Gutenberg or silent film stars cursed Al Jolson’s name under their breaths, the successes or failures of the Hollywood players in this article are probably being well-scrutinized by the bean counters at the AMPTP. I don’t agree, however, that it’s these particular creators who will be the “shovel sellers.”
In fact, I’m going to make a bold prediction right now and say that it’s going to be some unknown creator who’s going to come up with a product, video format, level of popularity and transparency, and price security that will propel Internet-original entertainment beyond the comparatively niche circle it currently enjoys.
As with almost everything genre-related in my life, the reason I became interested this year in reading as many Hugo Award-eligible works as I can before March 28 this year is all thanks to my former college professor Dr. Atara Stein (may you rest in peace).
