Appendix M, Part 1

This is Part 1 because I didn't want to be late to my own party but I also don't like blogging for a topic in advance even if it's my idea. Feels like homework. And I like homework! Anyway, I wanted to think about what works have influenced the fiction I write (whether or not it's related to elf-game bullshit, which it both is and isn't since most of it isn't typical D&D shit but neither is most of the D&D I run). Bon appetit!

I'm very excited to see what others write for themselves. Although I encountered lots of confusion on the basis that most fictional works are topically specific, so there's not necessarily cases where the content of one work influences the content of someone's entire corpus, I think it's fruitful to think about what works have profound influenced us as individuals with respect to how we see and interact with the world. Or, you know, works which are just your favorite.

1. Euphoria

I’ve talked before at length about Euphoria as a show that feels like it had always been my favorite, put best by Carly Rae Jepsen: “Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad” (doesn’t that line sound like something out of Euphoria?). I’m utterly terrified of what Season 3 will be like. Like, I don’t know why Hans Zimmer all of a sudden is involved. Was Labrinth unavailable? What are we doing here? Also, after just watching Nana, I couldn’t believe they didn’t greenlight Zendaya’s proposed storyline where her character becomes a pregnant private investigator.

2. A Good Man Is Hard To Find

I’ve read this short story in high school and college and, of course, outside of class. It’s always stuck with me both because it’s a powerful story on its own terms and because the author’s own interpretation felt orthogonal to my reading. Essentially, it’s about this southern family in the twentieth century with a racist plantation-era grandma and some snotty kids who are on a road trip, meanwhile hearing rumors of an outlaw known as the Misfit. The grandma’s son, who is the children’s father, takes a wrong turn and the family ends up accosted by the Misfit and his gang who kills them one-by-one. The grandma begs and pleads with the Misfit not to kill her, saying she knows that he’s got good blood and he isn’t truly a bad person, as much as he insists otherwise. Then, she addresses him as her own child, at which point he feels so repulsed that he finally shoots her. The Misfit says at the end, “She would of [sic] been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

So, was the grandma being authentic? Obviously not, right? Her referring to the Misfit as “one of her babies” was obviously a last-ditch attempt at appealing to a fallen social order which no longer guaranteed collaboration amongst whites. Right? Flannery O’Connor, the author of the story, disagrees or at least thinks that point is orthogonal to the thesis of the short story: that regardless of the grandma’s own intentions—although we shouldn’t discount an authentic encounter with the sublime—the Misfit is affronted by grace which he violently refuses. That was a crossroads in his life of transgression, at which point he refused to turn away. Do you buy it? I don’t know if I do. I worry I’m too Protestant.

3. The Green Knight

Gorgeous film. Gorgeous Dev Patel. The way they replaced an adulterous kiss with an adulterous handie. The way one of her gifts is a portrait of him being caught in the act with her. The extended bit where he imagines his life after running away from the titular Green Knight and eventually perishing to the cum-stained symbol of his own nonchivalry. Oh that’s the good shit.

4. Les Misérables

My mom first introduced me to Les Misérables when I was in second grade. We used to listen to musical soundtracks when she dropped me off to school. It had a huge impact on me even at that age: not just introducing the concept that what is legal is not necessarily moral or vice versa, but I remember asking her around then why Cosette didn’t remember any of her childhood living with the Thénardiers, and she said children often forget their childhoods if they’re traumatic. That was a weird metatextual conversation in hindsight. Anyway, lifelong obsession. I used to ideate to “On My Own”, just like to…

5. Mamma Mia

… “Thank You For The Music”, the bonus track of the Mamma Mia! The Movie soundtrack. I’m not blonde. I don’t really know what that was about. It took me longer for my mom to show me Mamma Mia because my dad considered it an obscene story and didn’t want his children to listen to sexy, sexy, secular music, although we still grew up listening to Abba because my mom and her whole family were obsessed with them. Did this influence any fictional work of mine? Well, there’s this a transition at the end of Lay All Your Love On Me where after Sky’s friends kidnap him to do homoerotic scuba diving, Sophie’s friends take her out dancing on the island. It’s an interesting erotic tension between one’s specifically romantic partner and their lifelong friends, perhaps evocative of Sappho’s community of young women, which has influenced how I write relationships.

6. The Mummy

This is so self-evidently a D&D movie that it feels like there’s barely anything to say, and I’m on a strict timeline here. Shout-out bisexuality.

7. Neo Yokio

I will always and forever ride for Neo Yokio. If there’s one fan of Neo Yokio, that’s me baby! If there’s no fans of Neo Yokio, I’m dead. I don’t consider myself an anime freak, or at least I hadn’t seen much anime before I had seen this, so I see this much less as a “bad anime” (and its perception as such is something for which it playfully strives) than as a silly satire of inter-bourgeois culture war and consumption as micro-identity. And it’s so, so funny. My sense of humor was harmed irrevocably by this show, but I also feel like it prepared me for the burgeoning world of social influence. The Christmas special at the time felt like a funny commentary on the podcast trend, but in hindsight feels unfortunately prophetic.

8. Neon Genesis Evangelion

My friend at the time showed me the Evangelion remake movies and I watched all of them because I liked him and I tend to mold my interests around those of people I like. Anyway, I saw the original show by myself soon afterwards, and despite not having any context for the mecha genre or really giving a shit about the giant robot fights, I fell in love with how the story operated on a deeper level as a high-concept psychodrama. I’m aware that all of the Christian iconography was employed because it looked cool and foreign to the studio, but I don’t think it was used ignorantly; rather, I think it serves as an interesting subtext for the show’s exploration of relational anxiety and impossibility. Maybe I’m just reading the show through the Žižek I was reading at the time.

One thing while I have a soapbox: I don’t see any gender fuckery in the show except for what is typical of castration anxiety bullshit. I’m not going to deny that for someone else Shinji might represent some fuckery, if not for me, but I want to gesture towards a certain tendency I perceive in some to identify male-to-female dysphoria with a foreclosure from masculine subjectivity. I don’t know. I think that shit needs to be figured out. And I think it’s more generous to Shinji as a character, and to trans-females, to read him as just male. Maybe even a trans guy. Wouldn’t that even make more sense? Whatever.

9. Ocean’s 8

MOTHER CONVENTION. Never saw the original movies and tbh I don’t really want to? The selling point of Ocean’s 8 is that these women are serving weapon-grade cunt. There's nothing deep to this. Shoutout to Rihanna for helping Anne Hathaway realize she has titties.

10. The Phantom of the Opera

There’s a clip from Drake and Josh that I can’t find anywhere from a fake in-universe show that Megan is watching. Some girl is complaining to her dad that so-and-so is sooo sweet, but so-and-so is sooo hot. The film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera confused my sexuality real bad, like much worse than Mamma Mia ever could’ve (like sure, Sophie has three dads; but here from where I’m sitting, I’m Sophie, not Donna). It also ignited in me an interest in gothic themes—the sublime eroticism of transgression—and in the social determination of ugliness. Like, Erik’s hot, right? The point is that he only thinks he’s ugly because society has determined him to be ugly according to his race and disability? He’s like those incels who look totally fine but have just atrocious personalities. Isn’t this how Joker 2 should have been structured? Just a thought.