Thursday Thoughts - Midnight Thoughts

I don't have a clever image for this yet, but as I'm currently out of Tuesday Tales ideas, I might as well ramble to keep my schedule up to date.

I drank a Dr. Pepper late, so I'm still awake and watching The 100. I'm only in Season 1, but seeing commercials for the current season, I need to know how they get there. It's like Teen Angst Mad Max right now.

I have a kinesthetic (sp?) tape on my right wrist. I think I pulled a tendon lifting my bed frame up to my room. Luckily I'm left handed, but wrist pain is some of the most agonizing pain I've experienced. I guess because my wrists don't usually hurt. I'm going to Occupational Therapy twice a week for a few weeks. Hopefully that works on calming it down. I think I threw out my old wrist braces. =\

I'm also on 5 new medications for my allergies & asthma. It's annoying, but one is for acid reflux, and I'm glad I haven't had any for a few weeks now. I had a stick test and learned I'm allergic to dust mites, mold, dogs, seasonal stuff, and eggs. I love dogs and cooking eggs, so my feelings were hurt.

I have off Friday, so I want to take some time to catch up on reading. I have some writing I also need to do. I've been writing more scenes for later in my story than scenes in the beginning, and I'm trying to be okay with that.

Now that I've climbed in bed, I'm getting sleepy, so sleep well everyone!

Thursday Thoughts: A Wrinkle in Time (review)

Happy Thursday!


I know I've set Tuesdays aside for character development and what-not, but the Editor-in-Chief at b-word.org shared an article that inspired me to finally write a review for Ava Duvernay's film adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time. (I just learned there was a 2003 TV adaptation. I'd love to see how they interpreted the book.)

Here is the article in question from Indiewire.


And the pivotal quote from Brie Larson:

“I do not need a 70-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work for him about ‘[A] Wrinkle in Time.’ It wasn’t made for him. I want to know what it meant to women of color, to biracial women, to teen women of color, to teens that are biracial.”

The quote struck a cord  with me because as this movie came out, I heard there had been negative buzz about it. I also saw that a lot of people who had read the book were disappointed in the adaptation. Some of the things I've read in regards to the movie: too much cgi, a heavy-handed message, over-the-top/melodrama/cheesy.

But the majority of the reviews were also from white people.

Ava loved the book as a child, and she adapted a movie in memory of her late father. If you've read the book, that's understandable. You'll also notice, as most published works, the book features an all-white cast. As a black woman, Ava adapted the characters to be more diverse: a biracial Meg (or perhaps multiracial, depending on Gugu Mbatha-raw's racial makeup, so at the least), a biracial mother, and POC spirits by way of Oprah and Mindy Kaling.

With this infusion of color, there is immediately a new dynamic added onto the original story. So when Brie Larson stated the above, I definitely see where she is coming from and agree wholeheartedly, because typically, the first people who get their hands on these works for critique (or criticism) are older white men, and there's a 95% chance that they will be out of touch with the nuances of films like this. As for public critique, aside from the age difference, the same can still be said, and with the public critique comes a scrutiny typically reserved for films like this created by people of color. They will swear that's not true, but did anyone complain about the cgi, heavy-handedness, or melodrama of The Matrix? Or The Hobbit? Or Lord of the Rings? Or Guardians of the Galaxy? Or the last (awful) Jurassic Park? I heard nearly no one complain about the last Jurassic Park movie, and I still need to know why and why there is yet another movie, but that's a rant for another day.

With these complaints about A Wrinkle in Time, my main question above all others is: Did these people read the same book I did?

I read the book so I can go see the movie, and I was so worried. No offense, but this book was trash. As a writer, everything agents will tear a book apart for today is in this "beloved children's classic." Here's the main list of glaring issues:

1. I've never read a more passive main character in my life. Meg is useless for the entire book. Charles Wallace and Calvin quite literally drag her everywhere, and most of the time she's whining about not wanting to do anything or not knowing what to do while the boys handle everything.
2. Flowery prose. I'm sure it was big back in the day, but the amount of times I rolled my eyes reading this book, I can see why people say not to write like this today.
3. I say this as a devout Christian: we were beat over the head with the Bible in this book, and it DID NOT FIT. I also say this as someone who loves The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. The scriptures were so randomly thrown in, it felt like L'Engle was trying to convert each reader. Insistence does not a good story make, and Bible beating doesn't make a convert either.
4. Deus ex machina: The secret is LOVE! The whole time, there is no indication of how Meg can defeat the It (also, did Stephen King read this book, too?) until the 11th hour when there are about 5 pages left in the book, and it was cheesy.
5. Stranger Danger: Calvin is the most touchy-feely person in the history of touchy-feely people. The amount of times he grabbed Meg's hand or touched her or took charge of the situation was blech. Even in the movie, Calvin's pretty thirsty, but it's more humorous than gross, and he never touches Meg without her permission.

When I watched the movie, first off, Chris Pine and Gugu Mbatha-raw? Yes, please. Make real babies. Secondly, Ava & company managed to fix all of the issues above while leaving the essence of the story in tact. Who could ask for more? Too much cgi, you say? Literally 98% of the story is set in other dimensions. Did you want them to learn how to tesser and film on set? Heavy-handed message you say? Um, did you read the book? Melodramatic you say? Um, DID YOU READ THE BOOK?

But anyway, let's look at those last two more closely, beginning with the melodrama. This story is told through the lenses (ha) of a teenaged girl. If you didn't want it to be dramatic, you've never met a teenaged girl, for one, and for two, perhaps this wasn't a movie you should've gone to see.

For the "heavy-handed" message, which was to love yourself no matter your flaws. Fight the darkness with light; fight hate with love: Meg is an awkward, frizzy-haired tween whose father has literally vanished off the face of the earth. Teachers have stopped believing in her; she is bullied daily for her father being crazy and because she shut down when he disappeared, and everyone talks about her behind her back. Thus, Meg has no self-confidence and trusts nothing and no one. That manifests itself whenever she tries to tesser, shown as a suffocating, solid wall of tribulation from which she always comes out of the other side in pain. Her brother Charles Wallace continues to show her love and believes in her no matter what everyone else says. I absolutely love that scene where he's yelling at her across the playground about how he loves her and how wonderful she is. It's embarrassing, but it's cute, and ultimately his love for Meg is what saves them both in the end (I also absolutely love that shot of her holding him where she says, "I'm coming for you." The love they have for each other!), and when Meg finally does open up to that love, she most gloriously tessers, as Charles Wallace says.

As Meg battles with the It in Camazotz (was there a reason for such a weird name?), she is pushed down by what the It calls a better version of herself: a fashionably dressed, straightened hair, "popular" girl. Google-Image Cosmo girl covers right now. Notice the trend? Despite Calvin's One Direction-level thirst (what did he say? "You don't know how wonderful you are, do you?" Something like that. BOY, go somewhere), I love that he keeps telling Meg, "I love your hair," even though when he first says it, she might as well have started fighting him, she got so upset. But girls who have such a low self-esteem or are made to have such a low self-esteem they can't believe anything but the worst about themselves. While some magazines and other media have done a lot better to lift up women of color, we still have white women playing Asian characters and lighter-skinned or biracial women playing characters written as darker-skinned or black. Society more readily accepts a certain image, and while that's changing, it's slow-going.

Other moments that struck a deep recognizance with me:

The sibling dynamic of kids without a father worked so well for me. I don't think that is just a POC dynamic, but it might be for the most part, or at least felt more deeply or (though I hope not) experienced more frequently. When there is just one parent present, the siblings end up of having to look after each other, help raise each other, fill in the gaps, because despite the remaining parent's pain, they still have to make ends meet. It was very important to see that. It's what my family had to do, on multiple levels. My mom worked overnight for most of my childhood. So who do you think was making dinner and (though we often forgot to dry them) helping wash her work clothes while she slept? My sisters and me. So when Charles Wallace is awake making hot milk for everyone, even though he's 8 or 9, I was cooking eggs at 5. It wasn't as weird as it was supposed to seem, especially today (or back in the day, when parents weren't afraid to not supervise their children. I'm still alive. No house fires, either).

Finding Mr. Murry. Now, I cry at the drop of a hat. If you sat with me the first time I watched The Hunger Games, I cried for about 5 minutes when Rue died, and when Katniss was crying about it, I started crying again. But at the same time, I can't imagine how hard of a scene that was for people whose fathers have died. Mine is just not in the picture, but seeing this young girl of color get to hold her father after not knowing what had happened to him for 4 whole years was heart-wrenching. No matter how bitter we might feel about our non-existent fathers, at least for me, I felt that moment. The whole reason Meg was the way she was was because he was gone, and now she had found him. I loved that scene so much.

But also, Mr. Murry LEFT Charles Wallace! Now, trust me, if my kid were possessed, I might give up and save the other child too, but I still loved this moment because it showed that parents, no matter what pedestal we have them on, aren't perfect. He tessered without thinking about the consequences, and in 4 years, he didn't learn anything. It happens. We forgive them.

So to sum this up, I give this movie 4 out of 5 stars. I loved it, and I will be buying it and watching it frequently.

To You, Who Thought America Was Different

(I posted this on Facebook, so I wanted to share it here as well.)

I’ve actually held back on saying something in a conversation I jumped into a couple of days ago. A friend of a friend, upon seeing the posts of white racists/supremacists, said the following:




“This just isn't what America is.. the violence from both sides needs to stop.. the beating of the people needs to stop.. this has just got out of hand.. yes I voted Trump but because I voted him. Doesn't mean I agree with what the other Trump people are doing.. this all has went to far. And if it keeps going on there will be no coming back from it.. we all really need to start praying because this is just the beginning.”

Two or three thoughts on that, but I just turned off notifications for the post so I could move on. But again: two or three thoughts. 1) She doesn’t have black or brown friends. She can’t possibly. 1b or 2) If she does, she unfollowed them the moment they started yelling “Black lives matter” because to her all lives do, and she doesn’t get why they’re singling out just black lives. 3) She had no need to listen to any minority’s accounts of racism or discrimination and feels any talk about it is divisive.

So to her, America has been sunshine and moonbeams, and seeing all these racist whites now attacking minorities after her candidate won the Electoral Vote, she doesn’t get it. It’s not America to her.

Okay, so just in case, here’s what America is:

America was landed upon by white settlers escaping religious persecution (the US portion, but lets not forget the white Spaniards landing further south and spreading murder and disease to the “Indians”). Upon landing here, they immediately pushed out and/or killed the people already inhabiting the land and claimed it as their own. They brought/bought/or kidnapped Africans to settle the land and take care of their children, marking them as 2/3 of a person and property. They also pushed the Mexican people from their land to the west and drew a line that said, “This is now America.” Then, when people finally decided, maybe it’s time to not have slaves anymore, half of the country tried to pull a Brexit so they could keep enslaving black people. And then propaganda articles demeaning black people popped up, and Jim Crow laws, and the Ku Klux Klan were born, and black men being hanged for a white woman saying they whistled at her, the death of Black Wall Street, and whites only clubs, restaurants, bathrooms, water fountains, pools, white people attacking black men and women who dared sit at the counter at their diners, firemen hosing black people with full power fire hoses, police dogs attacking, black children in integrated schools being yelled at by white adults, church bombings, churches being set on fire, and police brutality, and more police brutality, and a white boy walking into a Bible Study of a historically black church and shooting the churchgoers, and there’s so much more.

And you voted for Trump because--with all his plans to build a wall, and saying illegal immigrants are rapists, and Muslims need to be registered or thrown out, that black people have horrible schools, neighborhoods, and don’t have jobs, so what do they have to lose in voting for him--somehow you thought America wasn’t going to show itself for what it really was no matter the outcome? You somehow think people are going to be able to come together after your candidate just threatened to tear us apart? And did you feel these same people, who are now attacking minorities not ONE day after Trump became president-elect, weren’t the same people calling President Obama the n-word and a Muslim, and making dolls and pictures about hanging him, and that they should have come together with the rest of the country? Were you saying “Come together” 8 years ago? Because I don’t see anyone who would vote for Trump would have if they had believed in President Obama.

But good luck to you in thinking your candidate can bring us together.

Monday Musings: That Oxymoron, the Self-Hating POC

I normally don't do posts on Mondays, but this article I read yesterday is still on my mind. Take a moment to read That Oxymoron, The Asian Comic Superhero by Umapagan Ampikaipakan from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

I wanted to dissect everything wrong with this article via Twitter, but it's Twitter, and I needed my thoughts to be connected by more than me replying to myself in 140-character bursts.

A summary of the article for those who don't want to read it (that's fine; I sometimes don't read the article someone is about to rant on lol): making a typically white American superhero anything OTHER negates everything any fan of color can dream of attaining.

Are you confused? Because I'm confused. Let's start the dissection.

The final page of the first issue of the new Ms. Marvel comic is pitch perfect. A strange mutagenic mist pervades the streets of Jersey City, activating a secret alien gene that triggers a transformation within our teenage protagonist. She punches her way out of a chrysalis to find that she has mutated into another body: The Pakistani-American Muslim Kamala Khan, with her newly minted superpowers, has been transmogrified into a tall, leggy blonde.

It is a fantastic visual gag.

Is it? (Does this transformation remind anyone else of something? The overweight Jewish girl who gains powers and becomes a hot, thin redhead?) As a young black American girl growing up in a predominantly white community, I wanted SO badly to look like my blonde, blue-eyed friends. I thought my darker skin and short, nigh-unmanageable hair was awful. There's nothing funny about that. 

But it doesn’t take long ... for Kamala to realize that her brown Muslim self is as potent as can be. All she needed to become super, besides a costume and a mask, was a strong sense of individualism, righteousness, a can-do spirit and a purpose. The superhero comic is an inherently egalitarian genre, even though its lead characters are exceptional: After a bout with a radioactive spider or some Terrigen Mist, it could be you or it could be me.

Which is why the recent push by Marvel and DC for greater diversity in comics doesn’t make much sense.

Wait, what? Isn't the push for diversity a push for egalitarianism? According to Ampikaipakan, only in the United States. To non-Americans, in his words:

The superhero comic is the American dream illustrated, and by definition the American dream must be accessible to all. However monochromatic its characters...

Okay, I'm going to stop you right there. By definition, the American dream must be accessible to ALL. So, by definition, the blonde-haired, blue-eyed male should appeal to people all over the world. He can be you, young black girl in Kenya, and you, old Japanese man in Kyoto.

I'm being very sardonic about this, but only because it doesn't make sense. The American Dream, unfortunately, has always been portrayed as the perfect white family to a world dominated by people of color. But that doesn't make it a necessity, because obviously, if you aren't white, you never can be. Speaking of which:

I’m Hindu and grew up on the adventures of gods with formidable features: the elephant-like Ganesh; the monkey-faced Hanuman; the blue-skinned, butter-eating Krishna. But they always remained out of reach: I could never be Ganesh or Krishna; they were deities. Yet I could be Spider-Man, because I already was Peter Parker.

I want to stand on my desk and yell at my screen in a weird balancing act that this is a ridiculous comparison. I could never be a deity, but I could be a normal person. Well, duh. And yeah, he wasn't looking at Peter's race, just that he was the Everyman who was bitten by a radioactive spider, and you don't have to care that your favorite superheros are all white, but why would making Peter Parker suddenly Peter Ampikaipakan "[undercut] the genre's universal appeal," as he says a little later?

Because had I seen a black Batgirl (even though I absolutely loved the dark-haired, short-haired Barbara Gordon played by Yvonne Craig in the original TV show), I would have been so empowered to see someone who looked like me playing a superhero. I did love Eartha Kitt as Catwoman, but she was also a villain. I don't want universal appeal to also entail that the bad guys aren't white, because that's what negating the importance of POC superheroes also does. If the universal superhero must be white America, then what is the universal villain?

"It can’t be an accident that so many efforts to create an Asian superhero have failed."

No, it wasn't an accident, but the main example he uses, the Chinese superhero the Green Turtle during WORLD WAR II, is flawed beyond measure. Did he imagine that just because the character was fighting against the Japanese that Americans, great at their inability to tell the difference between anything, were going to sympathize with an Asian character in 1944? Green Turtle was created to fail, not just because he was an Asian superhero, but because he was an Asian superhero trying to be pushed during a time of anti-Asian sentiments.

As recently as 2004, “Spider-Man: India” transposed Peter Parker’s story to Pavitr Prabhakar, a poor Indian boy in Mumbai. Aunt May became Aunt Maya. Mary Jane, Meera Jain. It was a near-literal translation of American tropes into an Indian setting, and made no use of India’s rich mythological traditions or particular class and caste struggles.

The same goes for the heroes of major Japanese mangas, like Astro Boy and Devilman. Though their origin stories tend to be mystical or supernatural ... in most other respects these characters are just rip-offs of the American comic book canon.

That's not Pavitr's, Astro Boy's, or Devilman's fault; it's the fault of their writers, who thought only the American experience was what fans wanted to see, and while the many angry white boys will throw tantrums on Twitter about it as they tend to do when the matrix gets reloaded with a different filter, there are fans of color cheering and jumping for joy that someone with their face is in their comic book (well, unless they're Umapagan Ampikaipakan).

The current Ms. Marvel is the most successful rendition of an Asian superhero. But Kamala is Asian-American, and her struggles to balance her duties as both a superhero and a good Muslim girl are merely another retelling of the classic American immigrant experience.

But...didn't you just say that...the others were just...I mean...

So apparently, a Peter Parker in India but still using American tropes is wrong, but so is a brown Ms. Marvel handling the struggles of an American immigrant? So, was she supposed to just be a Ms. Marvel from Pakistan still using the American tropes? Because I thought that was wrong, too. So, what's right?

Try to adapt the superhero comic’s conventions to an Asian context and the genre collapses under the weight of traditional Asian values: humility, self-effacement, respect for elders and communal harmony. American comic book heroes also act in the service of the collective good, but they do so, unabashedly, out of a heightened sense of self. How can an Asian superhero take down the bad guy without embarrassing both the bad guy’s family and his own? How do you save the world and save face at the same time? The Asian comic superhero is a contradiction in terms.

Humility: superheroes can be humble. Point blank. They're not all Dark Knight Batman. Self-effacement: superheroes typically wear masks, right? So as long as their identities remain hidden, the attention is basically on no one. Communal harmony: if a villain is disrupting the harmony of the community, wouldn't an Asian superhero stopping that villain restore the harmony, and because no one knows who the actual hero is, their family's honor is safe? No offense to the villain's family, but their honor is the villain's problem. Maybe they shouldn't have raised a sociopath.

The final point, to which I call bulls**t:

We geeks out here in the Asian hinterlands have always readily bought into American ideals because the American comic book makes us believe we can be special, too. The Asian superhero, steeped in our cultural baggage, would only undermine the fantasy.

Obviously, I can only speak from a black American perspective, but done properly, an Asian superhero steeped in the baggage of one of the various cultures (you can't lump all Asians into one culture and then speak for them, sir) should do nothing but strengthen the fantasy that a reader, with all of their issues and cultural baggage, can overcome them all to save the day.

So why did I call Ampikaipakan a self-hating POC? Because he is basically saying that anything other than a white American hero isn't good enough for people around the world to aspire to. Seeing an Asian-American superhero struggling with her identity only reflects back his issues as a non-American Asian striving for the American dream, and he can't handle that. He doesn't see that Kamala Khan could have been an awesome and accessible Ms. Marvel without becoming the tall, leggy blonde. He thinks her battling with her superhero duties and her cultural identity shuts out the world from understanding her.

But in a world that is mostly NOT American, wouldn't those trying to attain the American Dream understand Kamala's plight more because they are fighting the same internal struggle as she is? Wouldn't that show them that they aren't alone in this world that keeps throwing the ideal of white-American superiority at them?

Because Kamala can't be white, and she shouldn't have been forced to be. Umapagan, you can't be a white Peter Parker, so don't get upset when someone takes off your color-proof glasses and shows you so.