Appendix M, Part 2

Part twooooo from part oneeeee. I think this is maybe the more interesting half?

11. The Metamorphoses

Uhh I fucked up and somehow forgot to include this, so now this list is out of order. Oops. Anyway, Ovid’s Metamorphoses changed me. I wrote my undergraduate thesis about how popular reception takes for granted the corpus of Greco-Roman myth as a consistent and cohesive canon and, more importantly, that Ovid invented or remixed “myths” wholesale which we consider canonical but were actually written specifically to satirize and criticize patriarchal relations and imperial power (also, therefore, supposing a structural homology between erotics and politics: that these are the same forces operating on different levels of social existence). My favorite examples are of Phoebus pursuing Daphne to rape her and, upon realizing she has escaped sexual violence, transforms her into a power symbol to adorn his temples as well as the heads of emperors (although that one is more a remix than an invention from Ovid); how Minerva punishes Arachne not just because she’s better at weaving than her, but because her tapestry depicts the rapes of the gods earlier in the poem (and this is a story she tells her sisters the Muses, who were just recounting their own episode of sexual violence); and how Pyrrha is gaslit by her husband Deucalion that the Oracle telling them to "throw their mother's bones" to repopulate humanity after a worldwide flood is just a metaphor for rocks, even though Pyrrha's mother is literally Pandora (an earth goddess whose mythos was revised by Hesiod to align with his patriarchal society). An absolute triumph of an epic by the world’s first male feminist—who was also distinctly heterosexual because he liked women and didn’t care for sex as an expression of power, which I think is an interesting orientation that perhaps has implications for Paul the Apostle’s ethics of sexuality.

12. Pirates of the Caribbean

This is another self-evident one, I think. Obligatory “Fuck Johnny Depp”, but I don’t think Jack Sparrow is actually a particularly important character. I’m all about Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom. Absolute power couple. I know there’s a sentiment that the last two films of the trilogy (yes, the trilogy) jump the shark from fairy-tale-esque storytelling to something more narratively complex, but I love Elizabeth’s arc from starting off as just a damsel archetype to becoming the Pirate Lord, and Will’s arc replacing Davy Jones as the psychopomp of souls lost at sea. Just really good stuff.

13. The Princess Bride

One last obvious pick. It’s cute! It’s fun! It’s not shy about inserting itself into the real world while also having barely anything to do with the real world. I think that was an influence in me deciding to put my home campaign in the not-Caribbean. Like, you don’t need to explain the not-Caribbean to people. Speaks for itself! So does this movie’s inclusion in my list.

14. Sailor Moon

I just adore Sailor Moon. I see myself and all my friends in shards of each of the characters. Sailor Jupiter is my tall queen and she’s just like me for real, as they say. I love Tuxedo Mask’s useless bishie ass, plus how all the villains are gay boys. Someday I want to write a fic that’s like an American movie adaptation AU where Usagi gets her cool finger poses from not-TikTok, which is revealed to be another scheme of the alien queen (played by femme Ru) to steal the energy of girls because American movies love an evil CEO (played by butch Ru). Idk. Just love it.

15. The Sandman

This is gonna be a double whammie. The hold Neil Gaiman had on us Tumblr bitches was embarrassing in hindsight—especially for a story that turned out to be about the guy—but we can translate how much of a piece of shit Neil Gaiman is into how much of a piece of shit Dream is, and vice versa. The Sandman remains and perhaps has become even more of an interesting exploration of the male manipulator, who tries to flee the consequences of his own actions and how they have impacted his family, friends, and lovers. That being said, though, it’s the stories of all those secondary characters that I find more emotionally engaging and pertinent to myself, as well as the general approach to retelling myths as a vehicle for character and social study (very Ovidian). I think it’s telling that the story ends with Dream essentially killing himself, as if to force the reader to absolve and mourn him. Like, yeah, that sounds about right. What a tragedy. Hand-jerking motion.

16. Stardust

Boom! Another one. Told you it was a double whammie. Stardust (the movie) to me is just a very cutesy adventure movie whose silliness drives emotional realness. There is nothing deep or interesting to say about it, and I’m including it only because its atmosphere, story, and dramatis personae were foundational to what I want out of fun adventure stories.

17. Sword Art Online

Going to bat for fucking Sword Art Online a third time? Didn’t I say all that I needed to say with the first two? One more thing. Sometimes I get bored and browse the subreddit so I can passively consume scrollable content. There was a fun post a few months ago, asking female viewers why SAO appeals to them, considering the show’s content and reputation. I learned that I wasn’t alone: we don’t give a fuck about the stupid MMO fights and so on, but there’s a genuine, shoujo-like tenderness to the romance that’s kind of addicting, plus the main character is CUTE. It’s fundamentally about getting married in Club Penguin—or Roblox or Runescape, etc., take your pick—and how real those human connects are, even they are situated in a virtual context. And isn’t our very social existence virtual?

There’s no line that hits more like a fucking truck than Cherami Leigh’s delivery of Asuna declaring that, if Kirito died, “I’D KILL MYSELF!” Gagworthy every time. So real.

18. The White Lotus

It’s come to my attention that showrunner Mike White is a pick-me gay who also doesn’t understand how central Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s composition was to the show’s tone and expression. Maybe it was too gay. Anyway, I love The White Lotus as an exploration of the friction between bourgeois self-conceptualization from microcultural identity to personal psychological complexes, and the socio-material substructure of the resort constructed to facilitate its guests’ gnostic pursuits. I say “gnostic” because it’s been on my mind recently how there’s a certain ideological sleight-of-hand when the word “materialism” is identified with the pursuit of wealth, which not only reduces concerns of survival to a naïve animal-like subjectivity, but elevates intellectual or spiritual self-actualization into life’s purpose; whereas the pursuit of wealth has nothing to do with “material things” but with the social significance invested in them (the fetish), from the power relations which dictate our lives and our capability to exist. Doesn’t that sound like a trick of the devil? Anyway, that’s how I see The White Lotus: as an excellent work of torture nexus fiction.

19. Wicked

There’s three levels at which I love Wicked. Like other musicals, it was one which my mom had shown me as a child—although for a long while I shared her opinion that no one cares about the second act. Like, you can just walk out after Defying Gravity, because we all got the idea and there’s nothing else to say. Then the film adaptation came out last year and I went from having fond memories of the musical to becoming downright obsessed with it. It’s like Joker (haven’t seen) for weird women, defined broadly. The thirst for social justice, the homoerotic love triangle, the inherent gayness (you are either a fag or a hag or both): just an incredibly addictive story.

Then I read the original novel by Gregory Maguire. Oh my God. The musical is an inspiring story about rising up against oppressive social forces—very characteristic of the composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz’s work in general, such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Prince of Egypt (which I almost included in this list, until I realized I forgot to include the Metamorphoses). The novel, on the other hand, is a tragedy almost similar to Euphoria in tone and topic but grander in scope, about characters who are corralled into categories of oppression versus repression, about the insane grandiosity of wannabe saviors, about the power of religion to dictate discourse and people.

20. The Yellow Wallpaper

Just a really good story about the insanity of patriarchal relations and the political aims of pathology, in this case of hysteria. Yeah, why not lock up your wife because she has postpartum depression? The first person narration lets you inhabit both the character’s delusions and her subjectivity as their underlying force. You feel a little crazy reading the text, like you want to pull her out of the pages like she herself tries to pull the woman out of the wallpaper—and then you become her. I love modernist literature because not only are the topics pertinent as always, but they always have a metatextual dimension that illuminates those topics wonderfully.