Drowning Nor Waving

This is also how a lot of horror stories work. The monster got her because she stole a valuable artifact/slept with a man she wasn't married to/looked into a mirror she'd been told was cursed/was mean to a handicapped child/otherwise violated either a social taboo or a taboo established by the story.* When I was in my early teens and reading all the horror I could get my hands on (and scaring myself sick in the process), that's exactly how I dealt with the scariest ones. "If I don't steal valuable artifacts, the monsters won't get me."

Of course, then there are the horror stories that doesn't work on . . .

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*A lot of horror does the cultural work of policing social norms, and that's more or less the mechanism by which it does it. Us vs. them, where "them" are the people who violate a taboo, either knowingly or unknowingly, and "us" are the people who don't and are protected by our inherent virtue from every possibly doing so.

It's a little like the Puritan idea of the Elect, come to think of it. You know who the Elect are because they lead virtuous lives; obviously, if bad things happen to them, it's because they aren't among the Elect after all.

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I am full of *nodnod*. And they remain the policemen of social norms until the particular messages get out of date, and then they turn into fairy tales; because they're still scary enough to give that little thrill, but since the norms they're enforcing or the symbology they're using to enforce them don't really exist anymore -- Bluebeard's don't disobey your husband, even if partially subverted, is going under; Hansel and Gretel loses the don't talk to strangers and wander in the woods sting because, well, most kids don't grow up in places where there are woods anymore -- they're...just stories.

(Tangentially yet still, this is part of why it kind of makes me laugh when horror fans/authors/whatever emphasize how extreme! they are. In the great general morass, horror is one of the most socially conservative things out there.)

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Although there have to be approximately five bazillionity horror writers who've rewritten Hansel and Gretel for the suburbs, right?

I don't read a lot of horror so I haven't seen much of them, but it just seems like don't talk to strangers is something people are so militant about these days (often with good reason) that it'd keep respawning in a different form.

Actually, maybe this is just where all the no pedophile stories, for god's sake warnings come from in everybody's submission guidelines... the urge to write Hansel and Gretel gone horribly wrong.

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Is that still a militant thing? Maybe I'm reading in the wrong places (probably, actually) but I had a sense that there was almost a backlash against it, because of all the Stranger Danger stuff our generation got.

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My impression is that it pretty much is? Although I don't exactly have a direct source of information on my own, not having kids, so I could be way off.

I think the backlash is actually just starting, depending on where you put your limits for 'normal' childrearing and 'crazy protective' childrearing. Have you seen Free Range Kids? A good examplar post is here, although there's also another one further down when the police apprehended her son for riding the train alone.

She's apparently gotten tons of hate mail, and tons of mail from parents thanking someone for finally talking sense.

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Yep. That's one of the things I was thinking of re: backlash and all the wrong places I read to get any balanced sense of the matter. I come to suspect I have surrounded myself with Crazy Hippies (tm). *g*

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Oh, that makes sense then. I think I think of FRK as, like, this leading edge of backlash that's just starting to hit, with the vast majority of folks still very Not OK with the ideas therein.

Also, oh my god appropriate subject, we just reified as-you-know-Bobism again!

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We did!

(You Bob or me?)

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And much later, I return to the conversation with another quote. I'm rereading M. R. James, as I periodically do, and at the beginning of "The Mezzotint," he refers to an earlier story of his, "Canon Alberic's Scrapbook," the main character of which is a gentleman named Dennistoun:

He did not publish his experiences very widely upon his return to England; but they could not fail to become known to a good many of his friends, and among others to the gentleman who at that time presided over an art museum at another University. It was to be expected that the story should make a considerable impression on the mind of a man whose vocation lay in lines similar to Dennistoun's, and that he should be eager to catch at any explanation of the matter which tended to make it seem improbable that he should ever be called upon to deal with so agitating an emergency. It was, indeed, somewhat consoling to him to reflect that he was not expected to acquire ancient MSS. for his institution; that was the business of the Shelburnian Library. The authorities of that might, if they pleased, ransack obscure corners of the Continent for such matters. He was glad to be obliged at the moment to confine his attention to enlarging the already unsurpassed collection of English topographical drawings and engravings possessed by his museum. Yet, as it turned out, even a department so homely and familiar as this may have its dark corners, and to one of these Mr Williams was unexpectedly introduced.

Which is a perfect example of the reader's reaction to the horror story--and then the horror story's reaction to the reader's reaction. "You may think you're safe, but you're wrong." (This is even a convention of vampire movies, as the Fearless Vampire Hunters always think they know all the rules, but there always turns out to be an exception or a loophole they haven't thought of.)

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...ooh, neat.

(And okay, I really do need to see that movie one of these days. People I know keep quoting/referencing it.)

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which movie?

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The Fearless Vampire Hunters (Killers?) is movie, no?

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Is it? I have no idea. I've been using the term Fearless Vampire Hunters (or FVH) for years, half as a joke and half as shorthand. I suspect I got it from Stephen King.

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Oh, huh. I wonder if the movie's riffing King or if he's riffing the movie.

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The Fearless Vampire Killers is from 1967, so either King's riffing off it or it's convergent evolution. (As a trope, it's kind of hard to miss.)

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timwb.livejournal.com

I read once of "zombie syndrome".
When someone is diagnosed with a fatal illness and is near death, then friends and family become reconciled to the impending death.
But if there is a dramatic recovery, then the patient may become shunned, as the friends and family cannot reconcile having the person still in their lives.

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ex-benpayne119.livejournal.com

Wow. That's fascinating.

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moon-custafer.livejournal.com

There's a French film from a few years back (Les Revenants) which I haven't seen, which is supposedly an unusual take on a zombie flick: several hundred people return from the dead, and now society has to figure out how to reintegrate them given that their families have moved on, and their jobs have been filled.

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I love that movie! Except for the ending, which I don't love at all!

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Huh. Neat. Well, not neat, really, but you know.

I wonder if that's a sort of...external analogue to stuff like phantom limb syndrome. Mental and emotional habit proving stronger than physical reality.

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pwyrzykowski.livejournal.com

I did my undergrad thesis in part on this phenomenon - if you're interested, look up stuff on "locus of control". The idea is that people tend to have either an internal locus of control (they believe they are in charge of their lives) or external locus of control (they believe life is generally unpredictable and uncontrollable, have more tendency to believe in fate). People with an internal locus of control have a tentency to try to assign blame when bad things happen, because the thought that sometimes bad things happen randomly is insufferable - they tend to look for what "who is responsible?", and "what could they have done to avoid the situation?". At it's worst, this can manifest as "blaming the victim" in things like rape cases, etc. A related concept is "cognitive dissonance". This is the idea that holding two incompatible ideas in our heads at the same time is psychologically impossible, so if people do have a strong idea about how the world works, they will reject any evidence to the contrary.

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Oh neat -- thank you! *files that for later research*

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ex-benpayne119.livejournal.com

I lived for ten years in a smallish town, the sort of town that had one murder every few years... and almost without fail, the media followed that pattern... the victim would initially be portrayed sympathetically, and then gradually over time details would be revealed which made the incident more "their own fault"... the public reaction followed suit... "how awful" became "well why was she walking the street at that hour?" and "there must have been some relationship between them."

That's a great quote. Thank you.

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If you're interested, the rest of the article's actually really great. I picked it up off the sidebar on Making Light. :)

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clarentine

This morning, for the first time in three days, I woke without a sinus headache. Heaven, I tell you - and I wish you the same relief this morning.

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I caved last night and took half a Tylenol 3. The world has been decidedly weird until about an hour ago, but the head's improving. :)

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clarentine

I'll take weird over painful any day of the week.

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I dunno. Tylenol 3 weird is really, really weird; it's like dream-logic gets applied overtop real life, and that's very uncomfortable for me. I'd almost prefer the headache.

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STEPHEN J. B. SAID:
I don't disagree with the truth of this observation; I'm just profoundly wary of paying too much attention to it.

Humans may have a need to create a narrative where other people are responsible for the terrible things that happen to them, so that we can maintain our belief that we can avoid those things; but we also have a profound need to create narratives where we are *not* responsible for the terrible things that happen to *us* -- even when, in fact, we are, and we *could* have avoided those things with even a little bit of self-control or common sense.

Examples of the former all too often turn into excuses for the latter, in my observation. Because we cannot take responsibility for everything does not mean we should take responsibility for nothing.

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