the continual discovery of fresh types of nonsense

body image/appearance stuff

one of the things i love about the wot adaptation is how it is doing something very intense with aes sedai sisterhood as both very appealing and very dangerous, something that works because 1. it is almost all conveyed through incidental detail and implication, and 2. at every step there is a dense layering of personal, interpersonal, institutional, and political concerns that overlap and cut across each other, producing ambiguity and ambivalence at every turn. 

for one thing, it manages to avoid the traps to either side—naïve sentimentalism of the women’s-college-brochure variety on one side, and naïve cynicism of the misogynistic snake-pit caricature à la jordan on the other—to create a realistic picture of what it feels like to belong to an institution: that is, to be intensely attuned to and conditioned by its idiosyncratic functions both consciously and not, and to be at all times both profoundly attached to and profoundly ambivalent about the institution, at once deeply enabled and empowered by it and deeply alienated and harmed by it.

the motif of the rings alone does this work, and it does it without a single word of dialogue about what an aes sedai’s ring is or what it means. the word ‘sister’ does this work, with its multiple valences (personal/intimate; institutional/political) in each of its several overlapping registers (monastic, familial, feminist) and its plasticity in grammar.

and in a truly fucking extraordinary way, the triangulation between nynaeve, moiraine, and liandrin in the fifth episode really, really does this work. three short scenes, a linked sequence of two-handers—moiraine and nynaeve, nynaeve and liandrin, liandrin and moiraine—develop a terrain of personal commitment and institutional relationship so layered i’m going to have to spend all morning trying to map it out. so. let’s go.

this constant shame-all-the-way-down situation, this everything-i-do-is-bad-and-wrong thing, is absolutely completely and entirely about lack of context. i feel okay about those things that are supported by a context; i feel desperately disgusting about those things in which i am more or less on my own. ‘no one gives a shit’ and ‘i am disgusting’ are superficially distinct but actually coterminous feelings. it’s about (drumroll please) relationship! ding ding ding

‘i would be horrified if you were dating someone who didn’t know her modernist flower shops,’ i said to @anachronome the other day, and listen i stand by it