Three stages of mastery

It's a little dismaying to look back at the coursework I did in education classes and realize how little I actually know today about how people learn things. Some I've forgotten in the 5-ish years since Ed Psych, but most I don't think I ever learned in the first place, nor realized I hadn't until I got to actual teaching. But while I don't have much to show for my academic training in learning, I have found a model that I quite like to explain the stages - if not the process - of learning, and on a related tangent, when, whether and how rules ought to be broken.

This almost - almost - pushed me to figure out how to resubmit memebase posters so that I could
say something along the lines of  'Oddly enough, Marvel seems to agree with you ...'

Creating necessary characters

First, some required reading. Before I explain my thoughts on how to fix Strong Female Character problems in fiction (not the sociological or economic forces that sustain them, but the legitimate and thorny storytelling problems that drive well-meaning storytellers so often to use Strong Female Characters), as I am about to do, you should read the following (unless you already read them after I scattered them around in this post, in which case, good job).

https://medium.com/@directordanic/the-problem-with-false-feminism-7c0bbc7252ef

http://thedissolve.com/features/exposition/618-were-losing-all-our-strong-female-characters-to-tr/

http://www.overthinkingit.com/2008/08/18/why-strong-female-characters-are-bad-for-women/

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/08/i-hate-strong-female-characters

Ok, back? Good. Now, a little context: a few weeks ago, a friend posted the first two of those on Facebook, which led to a very interesting discussion in the comments. I kept thinking about the issues raised in these (and the other two, which were linked off the others), and they helped me define the issues I saw with Astrid in the How to Train Your Dragon movies, as described in the post linked above. 

Because here's the thing: the articles are right. Strong Female Characters as they currently appear all too often in media are a flawed and ultimately unhelpful way to depict gender relations. At the same time, though, Strong Female Characters arose as an attempt to solve these problems, and to replace the even more flawed roles assigned to women before this new archetype was created. And I suspect that the vast majority of content creators who include Strong Female Characters in their works are doing so out of a sincere desire to do right by women, whether for ideological or market-driven reasons, because they have been told again and again about the need to avoid the problematic tropes about women that have been floating around ever since people first started using vocal grunts to signify abstract concepts. While their efforts are not entirely successful and demonstrate a certain lack of awareness and sensitivity on their parts, it's not really fair to demonize the creators who do so, unless they work for Disney, in which case for crying out loud, they should know better by now.

I also think that the debate about gender equity in fiction is too often approached from a perspective of things NOT to do. And to be fair, there are an awful lot of things on that list. But I wonder sometimes if the problem is that we spend all our time telling creators they're doing it wrong and not enough giving suggestions on doing it right. The Bechdel test is one of the more helpful offerings; it offers a basic, easy-to-follow checklist for creators to run through to see if they're doing it right. However, even the Bechdel test doesn't give terribly specific guidance about how to go about fixing a problem once diagnosed, and lord knows it's possible to write a thoroughly sexist and unenlightened story that passes the test; Bechdel is a helpful benchmark, but I think its primary value is as a statistical evaluation of fiction as a whole rather than a litmus test for individual works. And so creators - the test was originally and remains most often applied to movies, the vast majority of which are created by men - know that they AREN'T supposed to make women wimpy and submissive and reliant on men, but actual guidance on what they SHOULD be doing is sparse. And so they make female characters unwimpy and unsubmissive and (at least at first) unreliant on men, and if they're really daring, they try to create TWO such women, but they're still approaching the female sex as a list of don'ts rather than a list of dos.

So let's see if we can fix that.

The birth of nations, or why Iraq is on it's own now

(Alternate blog post title: Good money after bad)

I've already worded out pretty hard this weekend re: How to Train Your Dragon, and I'll be the first to admit that I don't know enough about this topic to hold forth indefinitely. But I've been sitting on this for a couple weeks, and I do want to say a little bit about the current resurgence of violence in Iraq and what America ought to do about it. (And say it now, before things change again)

Supporters of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria wave al-Qaeda flags in front of the provincial government headquarters in Mosul, Iraq. (Associated Press)
(IDK if I'm actually allowed to repost that here, but sue me.)

I was never a fan of the war. I remember during the build-up, when GWB pushed and pushed for Iraq to allow UN weapons inspectors into the country, and they did, and then in one particular news article, I remember GWB describing the no-weapons-here reports coming in from the inspectors as "like the replay of a bad movie." And it was clear to me then that Bush and his crew had decided they wanted a war and that they would find a way to get one. And so it proved to be; Iraq was not an al-Qaeda ally, Iraq was not building or hiding WMDs, and our invasion made a god-awful mess of things that it took us years to painstakingly reassemble. I wasn't a huge fan of John Kerry as presidential candidate either, but I was still horrified that even after Bush started an entirely unneccessary war that already was showing signs of bogging down into insurgency, American voters not only reelected him, they gave him carte blanche in both houses of Congress. I was enthusiastic about Obama's candidacy in 2008 for a number of reasons, but chief among them was that he was not Bush and seemed committed to reversing some of the most harmful things Bush was doing. His record there has been mixed, which is partly his fault and partly that of the Congresses with which we have partnered him, but he did get us out of Iraq.

And that was a relief. Exiting with something approaching dignity did not erase the shame I felt on behalf of my country, but at least it was behind us. And then, apparently just like the entire rest of the country, I moved it into my mental outbox and lost all interest, succumbing to a not-unreasonable case of Iraq fatigue. Sure, I saw occasional news headlines about suicide bombings, but I rarely even bothered to click on them; suicide bombings are just a thing that happens in the middle east, I suppose is how the reasoning goes, and it no longer has anything to do with us.

And then, last month, Iraq was right back into a civil war. Oh joy.

Bonus post: Dragons pt. II

We interrupt your regularly scheduled weekly program to bring you another ginormous How to Train Your Dragon post. If that's not your groove, go ahead and move on to the next interesting thing on the interwebs.

After writing the first post, I saw the second movie again in theaters (with a family member who hadn't seen it before), and doing so and discussing it afterward helped me localize and identify several things I felt watching it the first time. You will have surmised from my previous post that I very much liked this movie, and you would be correct; in some ways, it is superior to the first. In others, however, it is not quite as strong; my overall preference at this point leans slightly toward number one. In no particular order, here are my five favorite things about HTTYD 2, and with them my five least favorite. Obviously, MAJOR SPOILERS ABOUND for both the first and second movies; proceed at your own risk.

(Edit 7/8/14: Further investigation has helped clarify some of the issues raised in complaint #3; I've amended that section accordingly)

It's the second blog post, so I use the poster for the second movie. See? I'm clever.

A consideration of Dragons

Yeah, I missed my Monday/Tuesday target update, partly because I had company over, but mostly because the post I've been working on keeps getting overtaken by events before I can publish it. I've got a 3-day weekend coming up, so hopefully I'll get it off then. In the meantime, I want to talk about dragons, and specifically, how to train them.

3D optional