My analysis is so half-assed it pisses me off
Sunday, 17 November 2019 23:16![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yvannairieIs there a writer's equivalent of having eyes bigger than your stomach because that's me constantly with my TF ideas, lmao.
For example, I'm currently thinking about how a lot of the more interesting, alien and inhuman aspects of the pre-war culture of Cybertron come out in the culture of lower castes -- not just stuff like pit-fighting, the only designations some people having being just serial numbers and the lack of a higher education causing their behaviour to lack a lot of the social performance of the higher castes, or having social behaviour that is way more "down to the metal" due to the high physical demands based on them and it pisses me off that... I don't really have a project where to play fake anthropologists because everything I'm interested in writing happens during the war, which changes the social landscape of the planet pretty dramatically.
There's plenty of compelling intracommunity politics to be found in a situation where almost everyone sleeps in a garage, carries all their personal possessions on them and maybe only ever moves within a few square kilometers, or else is entirely unrooted and doesn't have anywhere to ground themselves to. And for my purposes -- the purposes of mixed-caste, militaristic settings and wartime social requirements -- knowing all of that would help to explain why the social conflicts we see form, even while I recognise that the way those conflicts are written comes from the writers being humans, just writing human conflicts.
See, my relationship to the anthropomorphism of Cybertronians is always gonna be a contested one. It's definitely convenient that the aliens have fairly human concerns, it definitely makes it easier to theory-craft and construct narratives, but at the same time TF loses a lot of its appeal if I simply accept the forces driving those conflicts are identical to the human forces driving them. That's boring. Even if in the end the solution is outwardly the same, even if communication, compassion and flexibility will fix everything, to presuppose a frame is going to end up with half-ass solutions and, even worse for me, boring stories.
And also there's the fact that when one of the main points of contention the big bad of the series has towards his own society is that philosophising about it is done in a way that blatantly ignores the material reality those conditions arise from... if I then ignore (or lbr just. Don't bother exploring) that material reality, it feels too much like I'm giving the big gray bastard himself a philosophical victory.
So what I'm saying is I choose to blame Megatron for my writer's block.
For example, I'm currently thinking about how a lot of the more interesting, alien and inhuman aspects of the pre-war culture of Cybertron come out in the culture of lower castes -- not just stuff like pit-fighting, the only designations some people having being just serial numbers and the lack of a higher education causing their behaviour to lack a lot of the social performance of the higher castes, or having social behaviour that is way more "down to the metal" due to the high physical demands based on them and it pisses me off that... I don't really have a project where to play fake anthropologists because everything I'm interested in writing happens during the war, which changes the social landscape of the planet pretty dramatically.
There's plenty of compelling intracommunity politics to be found in a situation where almost everyone sleeps in a garage, carries all their personal possessions on them and maybe only ever moves within a few square kilometers, or else is entirely unrooted and doesn't have anywhere to ground themselves to. And for my purposes -- the purposes of mixed-caste, militaristic settings and wartime social requirements -- knowing all of that would help to explain why the social conflicts we see form, even while I recognise that the way those conflicts are written comes from the writers being humans, just writing human conflicts.
See, my relationship to the anthropomorphism of Cybertronians is always gonna be a contested one. It's definitely convenient that the aliens have fairly human concerns, it definitely makes it easier to theory-craft and construct narratives, but at the same time TF loses a lot of its appeal if I simply accept the forces driving those conflicts are identical to the human forces driving them. That's boring. Even if in the end the solution is outwardly the same, even if communication, compassion and flexibility will fix everything, to presuppose a frame is going to end up with half-ass solutions and, even worse for me, boring stories.
And also there's the fact that when one of the main points of contention the big bad of the series has towards his own society is that philosophising about it is done in a way that blatantly ignores the material reality those conditions arise from... if I then ignore (or lbr just. Don't bother exploring) that material reality, it feels too much like I'm giving the big gray bastard himself a philosophical victory.
So what I'm saying is I choose to blame Megatron for my writer's block.
