v-s.net v0.6

Sunday, 1:55 pm in Life

School is over. Like, forever. Every time school is over (though not usually forever), I go through my cupboards and attempt to clean up stuff. I’m such a packrat, so this is often something that is easier said than done. Anyway, the current target of my wrath is the cupboard in my study, which is kind of used as the ‘junk cupboard’ and as such is just full of… well, crap including all of my school books from Year 8 (1997) onwards (don’t ask me where Year 7 went). I don’t really know why I’ve kept them this long; maybe I really, really did believe that one day I might desperatley need to look up something I ‘learnt’ in Year 8 Geology. Maybe I was keeping them as a kind of sociological record, and maybe it was for all the badart I drew in the margins.

Somehwere along the line I must’ve decided that the latter was the reason, so I went out and bought myself a fancy scrapbook thing from that chain of uber-wanky stationery shops that’s popped up in Woden and Civic. After ~Mat [h] went home this morning, I spent a long time crosslegged on the floor going through Year 8, cutting out anything worth saving and tossing the rest of the bullshit in the bin. There was a lot of bullshit. I guess you kind of get into the mindset that when you were a kid you were just a little version of whomever you happen to be at the moment. Flicking back through old schoolbooks really brings the hard realisation that, at age 13, I really was… well, age 13. A whole bunch of things that seemed really cool and mature or funny at the time now just make me cringe, but again I suppose that’s just the whole thing about growing up. You grow up. I’m also amazed by both how prolific I was back then (I have a stack of exercise books that are just filled with character and setting information for NewEarth, the ‘universe’ that would eventually – very, very eventually – become Corner), and how it was both paradoxically very compelling and totally un-original. It was The Maxx meets The Crow meets Beetlejuice meets Zork Nemesis. Stuff that should never, ever see the light of day ever again (of course), and yet…

… and yet, I really knew how to build a world back then. Age thirteen and alone (this is ‘97 remember, and the Internet is still a hazy shadow) and unconstrained by being ‘original’ or ‘popular’ or worrying about self-insertion or The Ghost of Mary-Sue. So those books didn’t get thrown out. The really, really scary part, though, is reading the little snippets of fiction I wrote at the time. Oh, the dialogue is often cheezy and you can’t really say much about the characters – fresh as they are from the minds of a thirteen year old – but a lot of the writing is good. Unformed and lacking a bit of depth, but the potential is clearly there, and I can see urbannordica under every penstroke.

I kinda wish I had dA back in those days.

Anyway, I got through Year 8 and ran out of glue, so Years 9 through 12 will have to wait a while. I think the other thing that is kinda shocking about going through all these books is how fast everything moved. For the last four years I’ve just kind of been plodding along, fairly stable in both myself and my relationships. High School was just such a rush. I can now see where the typical ‘(pre-)teen’ TV shows comes from, too; Lizzie McGuire or Sweety Valley High or pick your era and your tweenagers. It’s all adults looking back at their high school days and reliving them vicariously with the knowledge of adults. If I suddenly woke up tomorrow in a giant time loop and was forced to relive my days at High School, I like to think I’d know exactly who I’d be. It would be great fun. Maybe.

On a totally related but initially seemingly un-so note, who remembers these? Troll dolls, back from the mid-90s; I still have a bunch in a drawer somewhere, I think (see above about being a packrat), with their hair all cut into weird punk-esque mohawks. Weird, ugly naked little things.

So imagine my… bemusement to discover that apparently someone thought it was a good idea to cross said  weird, ugly naked things with (for the love of god) the Bratz, to produce the similarly-named and equally baffling Trollz. Trollz comes on in the mornings after Yu-Gi-Oh, which in turn is after Totally Spies and on Fridays is replaced by Winx Club.

Any ex-otaku will recognise the formula; a group of girls with distinct but similar magical powers who are called upon to save the world from the forces of Evil. It’s got shoujo written all over it, right?

Well, kinda.

The Trollz might be the inheritors of the Sailor Senshi’s formulae but certainly not the spirit. Like their current glut of compatriot programs, they seem to be primarily focused on one thing and one thing alone; consumerism. Forget the DVDs, forget the dolls, forget the playsets and bath towels or whatever; after all, My Little Pony and Rainbow Brite and Care Bears and all the other pre-millennial ‘girly’ cartoons were all vehicles to sell merchandise. The new shows go a step further by not simply pushing their own consumer items but the very idea that a cunsumer life is the be and and end all. Tsukino Usagi may have had a wide wardrobe and a fetish for comics, but at the end of the day she spent more screen-time resolving Personal Issues and Saving the Universe than actually shopping (or even talking about shopping). The constantly changing outfits are just a kind of shoujo window dressing. Kinomoto Sakura might have had a different outfit for each battle, but they were all ‘hand-made’ by Tomoyo (and they were very definatley ‘battle outfits’ not ‘fashion’ per se). Watching Trollz or Winx Club, on the other hand, feels like sitting through a half-hour commercial for… what? iPods? Cell phones? ‘Fashion’ (you know the type that only actually looks okay on two-dimensional stick girls)?

The second thing are the archetypes. Shoujo uses these two; look at Sailor Moon with the ‘ditzy one’, the ‘tough girl’, the ‘smart one’ and so on (see Teen Girl Squad for not just a parody of the archetypes themselves but the group dynamic that permeates the genre). Trollz made me laugh since it has a ‘goth’ character (who I swear is voiced by Wendy Hoopes or someone very hard to sound like Jane Lane), as well as the requisite ‘smart one’ and ‘tough one’. Winx Club goes a step further by turning their ‘smart one’ into a full on techogeek, as well as adding in a ‘raver’. Which seems like a nice cross-appropriation of subcultures… except Onyx is no Lydia Deetz. And Sapphire and Alex and Techna are no Mizuno Ami, for that matter. Sailor Moon’s archetypes got it ‘right’ by being, well, I guess more complex. Ami is a shy girl who is good at studying and that’s what she is. She doesn’t somehow manage to be that as well as really interested in boys and clothes (the other thing with the new Western-shoujo is that the lead sentai often has a convenient pre-fab group of boyfriends; kind of like the Shittenou gone berserk). Lydia’s (living) friends don’t just magically happen to be the most popular people in the school; come to think of it, neither are her dead ones.

When the shy nerd girl is trying to convince me dating comes naturally to her, or the token anti-social goth that she would shop at the same places as the ditzy preps I know I’m getting culturally hoodwinked somehow.

Does it matter? I mean, shit Dee, this is a lot of wangst for a kid’s TV show, right?

Maybe. That’s the problem with taking a critical look at what passes for modern consumerist ‘culture’ nowadays; once you know what metanarrative to look for you see it everywhere. Which of course doesn’t actually answer the question of does it matter.

Like pretty much everyone my age, I was weaned on a diet of Darkwing Duck and Scooby Doo re-runs. Beetlejuice might have wanted to make me wear black, but it never convinced me I needed to start dating at age thirteen (and considering the show’s somewhat creepy nercophillia-pedophillia undertones that’s probably a good thing). I might have idolised Transformers dolls, but the show never really made me want to go out and buy a new SUV/boombox/gun. Darkwing Duck never tried to sell me iPods (and I’m using ‘sell’ here in an indirect sense of creating an ‘ideal lifestyle’ around a product, which is how most modern advertising tries to work). And Scooby Doo’s only cultural crime was to contain a bunch of drug-references that went over my pre-teen head anyway.

Children’s buying power is possibly the single biggest consumer force ont he planet and everyone who is interested in these sorts of things knows it. Junk food and breakfast cereals and toys all mercilessly market to kids, of course, but so too now do things like cars (I’m not kidding here; the “I want that one mommy!” is very powerful). And both MacDonald’s and Big Tobacco know that the best way is to “get ‘em young”. And get ‘em young we are; we’re turning our offspring from children into teensy-tiny consumers. (The sheer number and type of Bratz merchandise my second cousins get around with is sort of a case-in-point, here; gone are the days of dressing up in your mum’s old scarf, nowadays it’s a Bratz scarf or none at all.) You could easily argue it has negative effects outside the obvious, as well. Brands are now pervasive in every part of a child’s life; including play and ‘imagination time’. This goes beyond children building imaginary worlds based on things they’ve seen or heard and into children using those things for their imaginary worlds. We’re training a generation of fanfic writers, not authors.

Maybe it just bothers me because I’m old enough to actually get what’s going on. Maybe…

… on the other hand, Onyx is kind of cute in a silly action-figure kind of way. I like action figures.

I almost bought one of these a couple of months ago, but eventually didn’t. After seeing neogeen’s one, however, I’m wishing I’d bought it. They’re so adorable.

Speaking of raptors, I bought a tiny plush one at the National Museum the other week. It’s all orange and black and furry, since furry dinosaurs are all the new scientific rage. All-in-all it’s makign me want to try and find a copy of this to go with After Man.

• Mood » dazed and bemused