thinking about how Humans Are Space Orcs stories always talk about how indestructible humans are, our endurance, our ability to withstand common poisons, etc. and thats all well and good, its really fun to read, but it gets repetitive after a while because we aren't all like that.
And that got me thinking about why this trope is so common in the first place, and the conclusion I came to is actually kind of obvious if you think about it. Not everyone is allowed to go into space. This is true now, with the number of physical restrictions placed on astronauts (including height limits), but I imagine it's just as strict in some imaginary future where humans are first coming into contact with alien species. Because in that case there will definitely be military personnel alongside any possible diplomatic parties.
And I imagine that all interactions aliens have ever had up until this point have been with trained personnel. Even basic military troops conform to this standard, to some degree. So aliens meet us and they're shocked and horrified to discover that we have no obvious weaknesses, we're all either crazy smart or crazy strong (still always a little crazy, academia and war will do that to you), and not only that but we like, literally all the same height so there's no way to tell any of us apart.
And Humans Are Death Worlders stories spread throughout the galaxy. Years or decades or centuries of interspecies suspicion and hostilities preventing any alien from setting foot/claw/limb/appendage/etc. on Earth until slowly more beings are allowed to come through. And not just diplomats who keep to government buildings, but tourists. Exchange students. Temporary visitors granted permission to go wherever they please, so they go out in search of 'real terran culture' and what do they find?
Humans with innate heart defects that prevent them from drinking caffeine. Humans with chronic pain and chronic fatigue who lack the boundless endurance humans are supposedly famous for. Humans too tall or too short or too fat to be allowed into space. Humans who are so scared of the world they need to take pills just to function. Humans with IBS who can't stand spicy foods, capsaicin really is poison to them. Lactose intolerance and celiac disease, my god all the autoimmune disorders out there, humans who struggle to function because their own bodies fight them. Humans who bruise easily and take too long to heal. Humans who sustained one too many concussions and now struggle to talk and read and write. Humans who've had strokes. Humans who were born unable to talk or hear or speak, and humans who through some accident lost that ability later.
Aliens visit Earth, and do you know what they find? Humanity, in all its wholeness.
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I guess I have Ger/Ame in the brain but my ideal for this ship DOES involve Germany either having been in one-sided love with Italy, or the two actually being in a relationship. When that ends and America enters the picture, Germany doesn't think to adjust his expectations from Italy to America. They have a lot of similarities.
But Prussia casually mentions he saw a few guys harassing America in an alley and Germany is like ??!??!?!?! WHY DIDN'T YOU HELP ??!?!?! and runs to "save" him, only to arrive and America has dispatched his harrassers with... efficiency.
Germany arriving at America's ready to help him with paperwork and things he doesn't understand only to find America has already finished his paperwork and is helping Mexico and Canada with theirs.
Germany falling in love with someone who can take care of themselves and realising he no longer has a role, nothing to offer America. Why would America want him when he has nothing America needs?
America teaching Germany that love isn't just about what he can do for someone! Teaching him that they will equally help each other! The first time Germany asks for help is asking for a pen when he forgets his kne day. So small, but America BEAMS at him as he hands him one - the exact type Germany uses.
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Still mulling over Anne with an E and I think I need to watch another adaptation or two of AOGG bc I want to criticize the... Misappropriation of narrative space, I suppose, but I suspect that's also just a side effect of the medium, you know? Because what I mean by this is that Anne of Green Gables as a book is very, very narrow in its scope, as it is purely and solely about Anne and, especially early on, she doesn't give other people's stories or perspectives much space in her narrative, and is somewhat ruthlessly self-interested at times in a way that actively constrains the scope of the narrative. To me that's an interesting and delightful aspect of the book as a childhood/coming of age novel, because especially at an age like nine or ten, children really are focused on their own internal world primarily and are still in the earlier-to-middling stages of being more conscious of those around them and their lives and perspectives. A side effect of this is that, for example, we have no clue what's going on with Gilbert other than a few comments from secondary characters and some of Anne's own accidental, quickly interrupted mentions. I find this deeply charming, especially the way that it hints at Anne having editorial sway over the narrative, because she clearly thinks about him far more than he comes up in the text, and I think it could be adapted in a cute and inventive way to the screen, but that's neither here nor there.
The way this relates to Anne With an E is that I think AWaE got too ambitious in widening the scope of the narrative. I'm not even necessarily against the idea of, say, exploring Anne's history and behavior with a modern understanding of trauma rather than an Edwardian children's novel that absolutely wasn't interested in or intending to tackle the emotional realities of traumatized children. And that's a place where it shined (the scene of her cheerfully telling her classmates about "the mouse in a man's pants" to their growing horror was painfully accurate to the experience of not understanding that your funny story is actually deeply worrying), even if it got awkward at times (unfortunately the Anne actress did not carry off the flashbacks well and they were just kind of corny). Unfortunately I do think that there's, I suppose, a maximum amount of gritty reimagining that any narrative can reasonably bear, and I think AWaE way overdid it.
(putting this under a cut bc it got long and wandered away from the point)
I think there's space in that narrative to explore something like, pick two: residential schools or early 20th century modes of queerness or some B plot about con-men that came out of nowhere and mainly served to undermine the notion of Green Gables and Avonlea as a fundamentally safe place - frankly I'm not even against the idea of undermining that notion, in a "challenging the narratives of settler-colonial pastoralism" way, but I think that the residential school plot should've been the thing to do that, as a way of emphasizing that the idyllic safety of Avonlea came not as a result of hardy white Protestant goodness but very much at the expense of displaced and oppressed First Nations people, but I think the way they chose to do the conman B plot was actually counterintuitive to that end, because it positioned the outsiders as the ones seeking to extract profit at the expense of the good hardworking white Protestants of Avonlea, who then became the victims of a thieving invader, when, like. Colonialism, y'know? I digress.
Returning to my original point about the scope and space of the narrative, I may have the most issue with Gilbert's entire plotline. On the most basic level, it requires a significant reframing and rewriting of his and Anne's relationship at this point in their story, which I just... disagree with. I think it's a misstep to try and reimagine a deliberate erasure of him from the narrative via Anne's (somewhat petty) refusal to include him, even though he's very much present and the reader is regularly reminded of his presence in her life outside the text, as an opportunity to actually remove him from Avonlea and do some weird shit with him. Gilbert Blythe doesn't really need to go on a personal journey justifying his passion for medicine and wrestling with the realities and impacts of the Atlantic slave trade. (If I read that sentence after reading the book but before watching this show, I would find it completely bewildering.) It's not even that I don't think "Canada, as an English/French colonial project, has always benefited from and enabled the violence of slavery even if actual chattel slavery wasn't present there in nearly the same amount as it was in other parts of the empire" isn't worth exploring as an element of the showmakers' clear desire to interrogate and challenge AOGG as, unavoidably, a work of colonial fiction. I just don't think putting Gilbert on a boat achieves that. I'm not sure exactly how I'd achieve it - frankly I'm not well-versed enough in Canadian Black history to have a take - but, to me, deciding to literally import a character to make the point about Canada needing to wrestle with anti-Black racism as much as anyone is, like... I mean it's kind of decentering Black Canadians, isn't it? And the whole thing puts Gilbert in this really weird position of clumsily lampshading the white savior in relation to Bash, but also kind of a white savior by proxy in terms of Bash's relationship to the Black community in Charlottetown. I don't know, I'm not qualified to have much of a take on this, it was just all so bizarre and unnecessary to me.
Returning again to my original point, I ultimately just think that, while the text of AoGG leaves a lot unsaid and implied about what's going on with other characters in the novel, there's only so far you can stretch that and still be telling the same story, you know? And while the core of the book is Anne exploring her place in the world, and that can be expanded to include more serious questions about things like childhood trauma and various societal bigotries, I still don't quite know how I feel about the necessity of committing to, essentially, a change in genre for the sake of tackling some of these issues, because at the end of the day, for all it doesn't shy away from things like Ruby's or Matthew's deaths and the attending grief, AoGG is a children's book, and those challenging episodes still come with a resolution and catharsis, and that's... not really something you can achieve, if you're going to include residential schools as a B plot. Like, for a show set in 1890 or whatever, there's absolutely no way to have any sort of resolution or catharsis about a residential school without egregiously whitewashing the reality, especially in, what, 2019 this was airing? After several years of mass graves getting uncovered? I don't know, I think they were just too ambitious. It's not that the legacies of slavery and ongoing Native genocide don't deserve to be explored, but I'm not sure that an adaptation of a book that is firmly rooted in an idealized image of a rural Canadian childhood is the place for it. It's kind of weird to have the horrific violence of the residential schools sharing space with Anne putting liniment instead of vanilla in the cake, you know?
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