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Jan. 22nd, 2008 10:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynWhen I was in late grade school and early high school, one of the themes in Terribly Earnest Books For Young Adults was that of the teenage runaway. Any urges I might ever have had to run away from home as a kid had been driven out of me by reading one of the Beezus and Ramona books long before; the girls had wanted to run away from home, only to realize that they had no idea where to sleep or where to go or how to pay for food or anything. I was maybe eight at the time I read this, and I thought to myself that if I ran away from home because something upset me, I'd be in the same boat. I could run away to Grandma and Grandpa's, but they'd just call Mom and Dad. Not, you understand, that my home life was anything that really deserved to be run away from- I'm just saying that when TV or movies or whatever left me thinking about running away from home as a means of either escaping a problem or making my parents sorry for whatever decision they'd made, I wound up saying no because it just wasn't practical.
Come late grade school/early high school, and the Terribly Earnest Novels began. These were the books written about teenagers who ran away and had miserable times of it and wound up crawling home, or attempting to. Anybody who stayed away wound up looking at a future full of ick, if they had a future at all. Mostly they didn't. You occasionally got cases like the story I remember in one of our literature textbooks, where the girl ran away at fourteen or fifteen and her parents mounted a search and broadcast messages to her on her birthday and when she finally decided she'd had enough of Being Miserable, she approached someone to help her get back in touch with them... and when they met her they decided she was yet another impostor claiming to be their daughter, and sent her away. That story ended on the girl listening to yet another 'come hooooooooome' message on her birthday and thinking she'd never been the daughter they thought they had in the first place, but basically, it was yet another Person Who Runs Away Has A Future Full Of Ick story.
That annoyed me. That annoyed me so much. The stories were all predicated on the fundamental assumption that Your Parents Are Right. Or if Your Parents somehow happened to be wrong, then Running Away Still Wasn't The Answer. You were supposed to find some kind of assistance in the form of an Understanding and Compassionate Adult, or a Social Service Agency Tailored For You, or something- but Running Away was one of those things that Could Never End Well. If the runaway was to have any kind of a future, they had to come crawling back and acknowledge that they were wrong, whether to their parents or someone else. Otherwise? Future Full of Ick.
I realize now that these Terribly Earnest Stories and Books were deliberately being aimed at adolescents in danger of embarking upon lives of homelessness, drugs, prostitution, etc. in the hopes of stopping them before they started, but even so, there is something unspeakably annoying about hitting the same damn basic story element AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN. Just once, just once, I wanted the runaway to run off and stay away and have it wind up being good. I wanted someone to flee an untenable home situation and have adventures. I wanted them to have the kind of life post-running-away where, when they finally saw their parents again, they could honestly say, "I'm not sorry." And then I wanted a damn ass dance of victory in their faces, even if I didn't know the phrase at the time. It was one of the things I liked about Elizabeth Moon's The Deed of Paksenarrion books- the books start with Paks running away from home to escape what she sees as an intolerable situation, and end with her kicking more ass than anyone else in the whole damn chronicle. She did feel a little sorry for her parents and admitted that the situation wasn't as bad as she had thought before the end of the trilogy, but ultimately, it was Teen Runaway Does The Right Thing And Makes Good On An Epic Scale.
That being said: I am tired, very tired, of stories/movies/whatever where human civilization falls and Plucky Bands of Shaggy-Haired Survivors (because scissors don't make it through the apocalypse) struggle valiantly to put things back together, but there are Bad People and/or Monsters who make it hard. There's always straggling bands of Bad People, and they're nearly always so much better prepared for life after civilization falls than the Shaggy-Haired Survivors that you kind of have to wonder how the Shaggy-Haired Survivors lasted long enough to make it to the movie. Reign of Fire had Van Zant and his gunmen; David Brin's novel The Postman had the white supremacists (I didn't see the movie); the Mad Max movies have... well, anybody bad, really. In zombie apocalypse movies there's the zombies, who don't need to look after any of the normal body functions and who can't be killed without rolling a 19 or higher on a called shot to the head (or whatever). Or there's the OMGNOOOOO Pandemic, whether it turns you into a zombie or just wipes out most of civilization at a single pass. Sometimes it's just a setup for the Bad People versus the Shaggy-Haired Survivors, but sometimes it has a reservoir and continues to be a danger.
The point is that when you get an apocalypse scenario like this, the writers never seem to think that the lack of civilization is enough of a challenge for their heroes. Possibly because there isn't a writer in Hollywood willing to admit that if everybody in industrial Pennsylvania was wiped out by the OMGNOOOO Pandemic, they wouldn't have a clue how to make their own metal or get their own oil out of the ground and refine it. So there's always the damned Extra Threat. And honestly, that's nearly as annoying as the fact that no runaway can ever be allowed to be right in their choice of actions. At least the Running Away Is Bad brigade has the excuse of actual dangers to actual people on their side. It always comes out the same with the post-apoc stuff. Either the Shaggy-Haired Survivors manage to outlast the Bad People/the OMGNOOOO Pandemic that turns the Bad People loose/the Devouring Monster (dragons, zombies, whatever) through Pluck and Wit, or they lose horribly and Everybody Gets Eaten- but they never really do civilization putting itself back together. The implication is sort of that if you're capable of surviving the Bad People, you're capable of reviving the glories of the Time Before.
That was one of the things I appreciated about The Postman- the patchy, complicated attempts to revive cultural elements of the Time Before. That was why I bought the book in the first place, for that whole 'hi, I'm a symbol of a structure we lost- how about we try and put it back together?'. Brin showed it trying to happen. Then, of course, the Bad People showed up and we had to deal with them, but eh, at least there was that gleam of the other to start with...
As for as the ending horribly goes, I blame that on Lord of the Flies. I know that Lord of the Flies was written in response to some horrendously annoying fiction (might be Victorian, might be later- I don't know) that plunked a bunch of shipwrecked young people down on an island and assumed that in the absence of authority they'd nevertheless pretty much replicate English society and have a Thoroughly Decent Setup going despite the fact that a lot of people really are jerks at that age, but still... Lord of the Flies kind of tainted us with the assumption that if civilization goes away and we have no reason to assume we'll ever get back to it, we're going to wind up being Very Bad People. It's a nasty view of human nature that I don't think ought to be assumed to apply across the board.
I think it's also responsible for one of the most aggravating trends in post-apoc entertainment, namely: We Did It, It's Our Fault. The end of the world is always humanity's fault. Either we created the OMGNOOOO Virus, or we dropped the Bomb, or we Ran Out Of Oil And Overheated The Planet, or we poisoned ourselves- whatever. It's assumed that if human civilization falls, it's because of something we did. (I'm told that there's a mention of a flu pandemic the year before the end of human childbearing in Children Of Men; that might be an exception. Wouldn't know. Haven't read. Haven't seen.) It's the same trope as the slasher flick: did you have sex? DIE. did you use bad words/chemicals? DIE. did you play with Mr. Atom? DIE DIE DIE. Even in Reign of Fire it was pretty clearly implied that human overenthusiasm was as responsible for the end of the world as the dragons were; Creedy starts yelling about rogue marines. "Yeah, they killed a lot of dragons, but they took half the world with them!" Not to mention that nuclear weapons get deployed against dragon nests- so it's humanity's own damn fault that everyone's dead. (Asteroids Fall Everyone Dies movies like Deep Impact don't count. Those are movies about responding to impending danger, not living in the aftermath.)
I suppose the problem is that post-apoc stuff tends to be written as a means of indicting humanity for its faults and failings, or as a Warning Before It's Too Late, when it's written for any reason other than 'let's put our leading man in ruggedly insufficient clothing and have women be promiscuous'. So when it comes right down to it, it's the same *!(&)!&*) problem as the Terribly Earnest Books For Young Adults: it's all about Aren't You Lucky The Writers Are Here To Warn You, GET THE MESSAGE YOU IGNORANT FOOL. I think that's why I liked Fido so much: it postulated a society where life as we know it ended and another world had to begin, one in which zombies were just as much a fact of life as anything else and it was considered perfectly normal for an eleven-year-old to have to shoot his father between the eyes because of attempted devouring. It was an examination of a society that was, by our standards, royally screwed up- but perfectly adapted to its circumstances. Yes, everyone lives in conditions that Ward and June Cleaver would envy, but it's still technically post-fall-of-civilization. Everything that we ever knew passed away, and then got up again in a very different guise, and society changed on a fundamental level because of it. (Not to mention that we see no hint whatsoever of anything existing outside of one community, when it comes right down to it.)
I can deal with that.
Come late grade school/early high school, and the Terribly Earnest Novels began. These were the books written about teenagers who ran away and had miserable times of it and wound up crawling home, or attempting to. Anybody who stayed away wound up looking at a future full of ick, if they had a future at all. Mostly they didn't. You occasionally got cases like the story I remember in one of our literature textbooks, where the girl ran away at fourteen or fifteen and her parents mounted a search and broadcast messages to her on her birthday and when she finally decided she'd had enough of Being Miserable, she approached someone to help her get back in touch with them... and when they met her they decided she was yet another impostor claiming to be their daughter, and sent her away. That story ended on the girl listening to yet another 'come hooooooooome' message on her birthday and thinking she'd never been the daughter they thought they had in the first place, but basically, it was yet another Person Who Runs Away Has A Future Full Of Ick story.
That annoyed me. That annoyed me so much. The stories were all predicated on the fundamental assumption that Your Parents Are Right. Or if Your Parents somehow happened to be wrong, then Running Away Still Wasn't The Answer. You were supposed to find some kind of assistance in the form of an Understanding and Compassionate Adult, or a Social Service Agency Tailored For You, or something- but Running Away was one of those things that Could Never End Well. If the runaway was to have any kind of a future, they had to come crawling back and acknowledge that they were wrong, whether to their parents or someone else. Otherwise? Future Full of Ick.
I realize now that these Terribly Earnest Stories and Books were deliberately being aimed at adolescents in danger of embarking upon lives of homelessness, drugs, prostitution, etc. in the hopes of stopping them before they started, but even so, there is something unspeakably annoying about hitting the same damn basic story element AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN. Just once, just once, I wanted the runaway to run off and stay away and have it wind up being good. I wanted someone to flee an untenable home situation and have adventures. I wanted them to have the kind of life post-running-away where, when they finally saw their parents again, they could honestly say, "I'm not sorry." And then I wanted a damn ass dance of victory in their faces, even if I didn't know the phrase at the time. It was one of the things I liked about Elizabeth Moon's The Deed of Paksenarrion books- the books start with Paks running away from home to escape what she sees as an intolerable situation, and end with her kicking more ass than anyone else in the whole damn chronicle. She did feel a little sorry for her parents and admitted that the situation wasn't as bad as she had thought before the end of the trilogy, but ultimately, it was Teen Runaway Does The Right Thing And Makes Good On An Epic Scale.
That being said: I am tired, very tired, of stories/movies/whatever where human civilization falls and Plucky Bands of Shaggy-Haired Survivors (because scissors don't make it through the apocalypse) struggle valiantly to put things back together, but there are Bad People and/or Monsters who make it hard. There's always straggling bands of Bad People, and they're nearly always so much better prepared for life after civilization falls than the Shaggy-Haired Survivors that you kind of have to wonder how the Shaggy-Haired Survivors lasted long enough to make it to the movie. Reign of Fire had Van Zant and his gunmen; David Brin's novel The Postman had the white supremacists (I didn't see the movie); the Mad Max movies have... well, anybody bad, really. In zombie apocalypse movies there's the zombies, who don't need to look after any of the normal body functions and who can't be killed without rolling a 19 or higher on a called shot to the head (or whatever). Or there's the OMGNOOOOO Pandemic, whether it turns you into a zombie or just wipes out most of civilization at a single pass. Sometimes it's just a setup for the Bad People versus the Shaggy-Haired Survivors, but sometimes it has a reservoir and continues to be a danger.
The point is that when you get an apocalypse scenario like this, the writers never seem to think that the lack of civilization is enough of a challenge for their heroes. Possibly because there isn't a writer in Hollywood willing to admit that if everybody in industrial Pennsylvania was wiped out by the OMGNOOOO Pandemic, they wouldn't have a clue how to make their own metal or get their own oil out of the ground and refine it. So there's always the damned Extra Threat. And honestly, that's nearly as annoying as the fact that no runaway can ever be allowed to be right in their choice of actions. At least the Running Away Is Bad brigade has the excuse of actual dangers to actual people on their side. It always comes out the same with the post-apoc stuff. Either the Shaggy-Haired Survivors manage to outlast the Bad People/the OMGNOOOO Pandemic that turns the Bad People loose/the Devouring Monster (dragons, zombies, whatever) through Pluck and Wit, or they lose horribly and Everybody Gets Eaten- but they never really do civilization putting itself back together. The implication is sort of that if you're capable of surviving the Bad People, you're capable of reviving the glories of the Time Before.
That was one of the things I appreciated about The Postman- the patchy, complicated attempts to revive cultural elements of the Time Before. That was why I bought the book in the first place, for that whole 'hi, I'm a symbol of a structure we lost- how about we try and put it back together?'. Brin showed it trying to happen. Then, of course, the Bad People showed up and we had to deal with them, but eh, at least there was that gleam of the other to start with...
As for as the ending horribly goes, I blame that on Lord of the Flies. I know that Lord of the Flies was written in response to some horrendously annoying fiction (might be Victorian, might be later- I don't know) that plunked a bunch of shipwrecked young people down on an island and assumed that in the absence of authority they'd nevertheless pretty much replicate English society and have a Thoroughly Decent Setup going despite the fact that a lot of people really are jerks at that age, but still... Lord of the Flies kind of tainted us with the assumption that if civilization goes away and we have no reason to assume we'll ever get back to it, we're going to wind up being Very Bad People. It's a nasty view of human nature that I don't think ought to be assumed to apply across the board.
I think it's also responsible for one of the most aggravating trends in post-apoc entertainment, namely: We Did It, It's Our Fault. The end of the world is always humanity's fault. Either we created the OMGNOOOO Virus, or we dropped the Bomb, or we Ran Out Of Oil And Overheated The Planet, or we poisoned ourselves- whatever. It's assumed that if human civilization falls, it's because of something we did. (I'm told that there's a mention of a flu pandemic the year before the end of human childbearing in Children Of Men; that might be an exception. Wouldn't know. Haven't read. Haven't seen.) It's the same trope as the slasher flick: did you have sex? DIE. did you use bad words/chemicals? DIE. did you play with Mr. Atom? DIE DIE DIE. Even in Reign of Fire it was pretty clearly implied that human overenthusiasm was as responsible for the end of the world as the dragons were; Creedy starts yelling about rogue marines. "Yeah, they killed a lot of dragons, but they took half the world with them!" Not to mention that nuclear weapons get deployed against dragon nests- so it's humanity's own damn fault that everyone's dead. (Asteroids Fall Everyone Dies movies like Deep Impact don't count. Those are movies about responding to impending danger, not living in the aftermath.)
I suppose the problem is that post-apoc stuff tends to be written as a means of indicting humanity for its faults and failings, or as a Warning Before It's Too Late, when it's written for any reason other than 'let's put our leading man in ruggedly insufficient clothing and have women be promiscuous'. So when it comes right down to it, it's the same *!(&)!&*) problem as the Terribly Earnest Books For Young Adults: it's all about Aren't You Lucky The Writers Are Here To Warn You, GET THE MESSAGE YOU IGNORANT FOOL. I think that's why I liked Fido so much: it postulated a society where life as we know it ended and another world had to begin, one in which zombies were just as much a fact of life as anything else and it was considered perfectly normal for an eleven-year-old to have to shoot his father between the eyes because of attempted devouring. It was an examination of a society that was, by our standards, royally screwed up- but perfectly adapted to its circumstances. Yes, everyone lives in conditions that Ward and June Cleaver would envy, but it's still technically post-fall-of-civilization. Everything that we ever knew passed away, and then got up again in a very different guise, and society changed on a fundamental level because of it. (Not to mention that we see no hint whatsoever of anything existing outside of one community, when it comes right down to it.)
I can deal with that.
