Alchemi Prompts: Pop Culture

[packbat]

What is something in pop culture (a commercial, a magazine, a trend, a common idea) that you particularly hate? Why?

Hate it? Not really - I actually kinda enjoy it. Nevertheless, it is pernicious.

It's the idea that Mom would sum up as "Neo, You're the One".

However, The Matrix is hardly the sole offender. It is probably an ancient storyline, to tell the truth. The protagonist (it's generally the protagonist), out of the blue, discovers that (I shall avoid the pronoun, though it is usually "he") is actually Special, and can, without or with minimal preparation, perform incredible, unheard of feats.

Just out of the blue. Bam. Wins the lottery. Bull.

Einstein didn't wake up one morning and build the atomic bomb, or prove the theory of relativity, or even demonstrate the photoelectric effect's dependence on the color of light. These are all things that took years to do, and were only accomplished at all through his familiarity with centuries of difficult work that preceded his, and the hard work of anything from dozens to thousands of other brilliant people. Jascha Heifetz is said to have practiced the violin at least three hours a day even when he was in his 80's. Mozart? Composed his first pieces when he was five - implying he didn't make the big time until he'd been working at it twenty years.

How many lottery winners can you name?

It's a stupid thing to be annoyed by. And, like I said, I like many of those stories, not all of which possessed even as much literary merit as The Matrix has. But wish fulfillment is no virtue.

Comments

[chanlemur.livejournal.com]

I think there is a healthy measure of wish-gratification here, yes; but on another level, it's the neatest way to work out a particularly thorny metafictional tangle, to wit:

1. A huge and overpowering antagonist force is often critical to drive the excitement of a plot.

2. A humble, average protagonist is often critical to the audience's ability to sympathize with him/her.

3. Yet, despite this obvious power disparity, #2 must somehow triumph over #1.

How do we do this? Magic plot twist! Give the seed of the enemy's destruction to #2. In short, Neo's being The One is little different from Frodo Baggins inheriting the One Ring from Uncle Bilbo. It's just that there's a lot more kung fu going on in the former case.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Well, I suppose there's that. I generally prefer fast-witted though undersupplied protagonists, personally. Like the one in the Sheri S. Tepper book who knocked an assassin over a staircase (or something, not sure) but ducked back into her room fast enough that she could pretend to have been awoken by the crash.

[thatbajoranguy.livejournal.com]

I dunno, I took your question in an entirely different direction, more about the real world rather than the literary world.

I'm absolutely sick of the news covering people that are so irrelevant to life, society, commerce, and logic that they have to invent cutesy terms for these people because they are, in many cases, jobless or performing a job that benefits no one. I think the only time AP should write a story on an "heiress", a "celebutante", a "pop princess", or the "glitterati" is when, PERHAPS, one of them is run over by a bus, which then blows up, which then has MIR fall on top of it, which then is peed on by a stray dog. That might be newsworthy.

Aside from their deaths (horrific or not) or their conviction of some major crimes, I don't think they're worth the time of day. I think you know which are some of the people I am talking about ...

(I guess as a connected but corollary point: I think the category of what constitutes a "celebrity", and therefore someone worth covering, has grown far, far too large.)

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Y'know, I think it's a manesfestation of a primal instinct in a civil society. In the hunter-gatherer environment in which humans evolved, the people you knew well enough to recognize were all people who are local, people you would have to deal with all the time, and therefore people whose status you needed to be aware of. It just happens that in modern society, it's easy to become aware of people to whom you have no connection whatsoever. And once some poor fool ex-model gets involved in a sex scandal days before she appears in a reality show with the adopted daughter of a pop singer, well, she's become someone people are aware of. And therefore an attraction to members of a certain demographic. And therefore an ad-seller. Wait, I mean, "newsworthy".