i keep saying i'll have more cogent things to say about this, but till then...

[fictional]

Check out deepad's post, I Didn't Dream of Dragons, a thoughtful, lucid, poignant essay on race and reading fantasy.

Excerpt from my comment:

But here is my problem, and that problem is love. Brought up on a steady diet of white fantasy and British boarding school novels, now, even when I can identify the alienation imposed by them -- these are stories by people who think of me as sub-human -- I still love them. They are still the fabric of my childhood, the patterns of my inner landscape. It's like Stockholm Syndrome.

And I still don't know what to do with that? How does one cope with the politics of desire?

Comments

Beautifully said

[tricksterquinn.livejournal.com]

So I meandered into this rather randomly, but I wanted to say first of all, WOW. That was so incredibly well thought out and wise and well-written, and much more polite than I'd've managed.

And secondly,
Let's take Doctor Who, which, if I'm not mistaken, you watch too. I don't know what you see in that if you do, but I imagine for lots of people it's "woah, adventures -- wouldn't that be COOL?" For me it's about "how do you love when you're sure you're too heartbroken to love anymore?" "how do you find the grit to be extraordinary when you're really perfectly ordinary and scared out of your goddamn mind?" "how do you engage with beauty when you know it will always end in loss?"
That is a gorgeous way of putting why I, as well, watch the show. I always find it fascinating to think about the different shows four people can be watching while all watching the same thing (or books or movies or any sort of media).