30 Days of DC Meme: Day Twenty
Jul. 31st, 2010 12:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwenfrankenstienAaaand we're in the home stretch.
Favourite Fanwork
There are so many things I love in this fandom, there is a reason I've been able to sustain interest for four years even after most of the writers I loved left for greener pastures. But my absolute favourite favourite fanthing ever is![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sharpest_rose's story Jabberwock, which I thought was offline but then I remembered it is in one of the two zines in this post. (I forget which, sorry.)
I just. I fucking love this story so much. In first year I took a course called Sex, Gender, and Popular Culture and for our final paper we were allowed to choose any topic and I wrote about fanfiction* as feminist critique and this story was my example. Which turned out to be hard, because it meant summarising about 20 years of DC continuity, as well as the story in question, and still fitting in the clever Thoughts that were the point of the essay. It ended up clocking in at about 2500 words (I think the assignment said 2000 but man, there was a lot of summarising).
This is from the introduction to that essay:
The alternate universe posed in Mary Borsellino's “Jabberwock”, a Batman story in which Bruce Wayne has a younger sister, is an example of this. “Jabberwock” revolves around Alice Wayne, a.k.a The Bat, and her Robins, Barbara Gordon, Stephanie Brown, and Ariana Dzerchenko. This takes three supporting characters who were treated poorly in DC's published Batman stories, and makes them into the heroes. “Jabberwock” is not simply a happily-ever-after fix-it story, however. The same terrible things happen to the Girl Wonders as their male counterparts in the canonical stories. In “Jabberwock”, though, the women are allowed to own their tragedies.
And from the conclusion:
"Jabberwock”'s interpretations of the characters are no less valid than the versions present in the stories it reappropriates. “Jabberwock” provides a critique and deconstruction of gender as represented in the Batman mythos. It brings the reader to question the necessity of the sexist and misogynist elements in many Batman stories, and troubles the stories legitimised through publication. The reader is left wondering why DC Comics chooses to privilege certain patriarchal narratives over stories with a more feminist message.
...Actually, I am sort of tempted to post this essay in full. It is incredibly nerdy and kinda pretentious, but I genuinely think it is one of the best things I've ever written. Would anyone read this if I did post it? Not gonna lie, it is largely a love-letter to Mary's story, disguised as cultural critique.
* Obviously, not all fanfiction does this. I was writing about how it can function as feminist critique.
Favourite Fanwork
There are so many things I love in this fandom, there is a reason I've been able to sustain interest for four years even after most of the writers I loved left for greener pastures. But my absolute favourite favourite fanthing ever is
sharpest_rose's story Jabberwock, which I thought was offline but then I remembered it is in one of the two zines in this post. (I forget which, sorry.)I just. I fucking love this story so much. In first year I took a course called Sex, Gender, and Popular Culture and for our final paper we were allowed to choose any topic and I wrote about fanfiction* as feminist critique and this story was my example. Which turned out to be hard, because it meant summarising about 20 years of DC continuity, as well as the story in question, and still fitting in the clever Thoughts that were the point of the essay. It ended up clocking in at about 2500 words (I think the assignment said 2000 but man, there was a lot of summarising).
This is from the introduction to that essay:
The alternate universe posed in Mary Borsellino's “Jabberwock”, a Batman story in which Bruce Wayne has a younger sister, is an example of this. “Jabberwock” revolves around Alice Wayne, a.k.a The Bat, and her Robins, Barbara Gordon, Stephanie Brown, and Ariana Dzerchenko. This takes three supporting characters who were treated poorly in DC's published Batman stories, and makes them into the heroes. “Jabberwock” is not simply a happily-ever-after fix-it story, however. The same terrible things happen to the Girl Wonders as their male counterparts in the canonical stories. In “Jabberwock”, though, the women are allowed to own their tragedies.
And from the conclusion:
"Jabberwock”'s interpretations of the characters are no less valid than the versions present in the stories it reappropriates. “Jabberwock” provides a critique and deconstruction of gender as represented in the Batman mythos. It brings the reader to question the necessity of the sexist and misogynist elements in many Batman stories, and troubles the stories legitimised through publication. The reader is left wondering why DC Comics chooses to privilege certain patriarchal narratives over stories with a more feminist message.
...Actually, I am sort of tempted to post this essay in full. It is incredibly nerdy and kinda pretentious, but I genuinely think it is one of the best things I've ever written. Would anyone read this if I did post it? Not gonna lie, it is largely a love-letter to Mary's story, disguised as cultural critique.
* Obviously, not all fanfiction does this. I was writing about how it can function as feminist critique.