a sense of joy and then a panic

At io9 there's a fun little what-it-says-on-the-can article, "Good Character Development Includes The All-Important "F*@% Yeah" Moment."  I enjoyed reading this - I think everyone knows exactly what is meant by a "fuck yeah" moment, even if (like me) you don't know most of the examples cited.  The article says, "It's harder to root for characters who don't have [fuck yeah moments]. In fact, I'd say it's hard even to identify with characters who don't ever make you go "fuck yeah.""  But y'know, the more I thought about it, the more I came up with exceptions to the religion of Fuck Yeah. 

(I'm going to just go ahead and talk about things where I know what I'm talking about, and stay away from say, American comics, which dominate the io9 article)

1.  DBZ is like 70% Fuck Yeah moments, yes?  And when I was in middle school this was obviously A for Awesome, but when I re-read in late high school I started noticing how sad a lot of these moments are.  In particular, there's the moment the article calls "Outnumbered or totally pwned, but the hero still won't give up" - these moments ceased to be awesome for me.  You start getting into the territory of Martyrdom Culture (warning: tvtropes) and then it becomes straight-up depressing: intense, yes, obviously, but harrowing.  Kind of sick.  I had discovered Radiohead by then and I remember acutely just how much "I Will" shifted my paradigms, so to speak.  And now what I notice is all the stuff in between Fuck Yeah moments, and it's like, wow, I am actually reading social horror! 

2.  The best Fuck Yeah moment in the X-Files, for my money, does not belong to Mulder or Scully.  It belongs to Skinner.  After spending the entire series up to this point kowtowing to the Cigarette-Smoking Man, Skinner reveals in "Paper Clip" that he's not just a middle-manager drone, and he actually has the drop on CSM.  Though the smoking gun cassette has been stolen from him in a mugging, he reveals that he's had codetalker Albert Hosteen and his buddies memorize its contents.  CSM says, indignant, "What the hell is this?" and Skinner replies, "This is where you pucker up and kiss my ass."  Oh, fuck yeah!  This moment made Skinner one of my favorite characters right down to the end.  But this is a moment that only Skinner the Bureaucrat could have had, especially because it shows he cares for and believes in Mulder and Scully after all.  Mulder, by contrast, does the Middle Finger to the Lord pose all the time, but he became a character I rooted for in "One Breath."  Scully is comatose in the hospital after being abducted "by aliens," and Mulder is waiting for bad guys to show up at his apartment so he can kill them in revenge.  Her sister shows up and convinces him to go see Scully - when he returns, he finds his apartment trashed.  He sits down and cries, for many reasons.  Hardly Fuck Yeah.  Better than Fuck Yeah.  In other words, Fuck Yeah =/= Rooting for a Character.  And Fuck Yeah only works when it's characteristically appropriate.  Oh and, Fuck Yeah =/= Violence, in case that needed to be said.  Skinner's moment would have been a joke if his "big surprise" was punching CSM instead.

3.  I can think of no Fuck Yeah moments in my favorite books.  There may be some late in Catch-22, but they made no impression on me.  What cut to the quick in that book was: Snowden dying in the plane, saying, "I'm cold"; Yossarian realizing that the world is just mobs with sticks; the preceding conversation with Aarfy where Yossarian can neither get Aarfy to understand that raping and killing a hotel maid is wrong, nor get the army to arrest Aarfy.  Sad, enraging moments - the last one made me so angry I had to put the book down.  The Sound and the Fury enters the sublime during Jason Compton's chapter, because Jason is such a total piece of utter fucking shit.  Just thinking about it makes my blood run - with rage.  My mother and I call this reaction "puke sneeze," because my mother used to get this really hilarious nasal tone in her voice when she was talking about things she read in the paper that pissed her off.  In terms of adrenaline and passion, let's not forget the power of the Fuck You! moment.

All that said: as an adrenaline junkie raised on kung fu movies, I of course appreciate a good Fuck Yeah moment, sometimes in spite of myself.  I loved the second half of Hot Fuzz (though mostly because of the Midsomer Murders in Hell angle).  And one of my top-played songs on iTunes is "Iche Will" (which does not mean "I Will"!), which gives an adrenaline boost while still noting: what the fuck is really going on here?  Good old Rammstein.


p.s.  My icon was made for this post.

Words:
- Syzygy. A kind of unity, especially through coordination or alignment, most commonly used in the astronomical and/or astrological sense.
- Conduit. A means of conveying something from one location to another or between persons.
- Je Souhaite. French for "I Wish."
- Kitsunegari. Japanese for "Fox Hunt."

Arcadia. (Arcadia) As in Et in Arcadia Ego.

You can put swear words in dialogue. As in, "and you're in the wrong house, you son of a bitch!" (Paper Hearts)

Villains must be compelling. This is not an option. (Cigarette-Smoking Man, Krycek, Marita)

It's okay to kill the dog. (Quagmire) But only once in a while. (Ice)

"Make your own damn sandwich." (Arcadia)
"This is where you pucker up and kiss my ass." (Paper Clip)

"Hey Man, Nice Shot" by Filter. (D.P.O.)
"Beyond the Sea" by Bobby Darin. (Beyond the Sea)

Color-blindness. (Wetwired)

Kuru. (Theef)

The Hanta virus. (X-Cops)

Moby. (Closure, all things)

People that society thinks are dangerous are not always the real dangers. Vice versa, pillars of society can be predatory. (Sanguinarium, Fresh Bones, Signs & Wonders, Chimera, Die Hand Die Verletzt)

Unreliable narrators. (Field Trip, How The Ghosts Stole Christmas, Bad Blood)

The inner lives of hegemonic assholes and the people who put up with them. (Dreamland I and Dreamland II, Two Fathers, One Son)

Animals are part of the world too. (Fearful Symmetry, Alpha, Red Museum, Biogenesis, The Jersey Devil)

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. (X-Cops)

And technology, we also have to fear technology. (Ghost in the Machine, Blood, Wetwired, First Person Shooter)

Ghosts can be caught on video/camera. Fantastic! (Born Again, The Calusari)

Old people are scary. (Excelsis Dei, Dod Kalm)

Watch your fucking vents. (Squeeze, Tooms)

Don't even think about the port-o-potty. (The Host)

If stuck in the middle of nowhere, don't get on a midnight bus. (Roadrunners)

And obviously avoid the creepy mutant neighbors. (Home)

Also avoid Santa's Villages. (Sein und Zeit)

Frohike:  I don't get it.  Why would the government want to turn Scully into a bimbo?

A pictorial ode to the X-Files, because "All Souls" (the one before the cut) made a real impression on me.  Various episodes (All Souls, The Calusari, Sleepless, Home, Fresh Bones, Ghost in the Machine, The Blessing Way, DPO, How the Ghosts Stole Christmas, Biogenesis, Wetwired, Field Trip), seasons 1-6.  All caps from here.  I tried to keep a theme.

The episode tonight (at 2 am, CDT), "Sanguinarium", features a plastic surgery unit that is becoming plagued with horrid deaths of patients as entranced doctors bore holes in their brains, pour acid on them, etc., while they're under the knife.  They claim possession.  Everyone starts suspecting witchcraft, and the first, obvious suspect is the rather strange, dark-haired nurse who has a pentagram on her door and bathes in blood.  At one point she tries to kill a plastic surgeon, then goes into a vomiting spree of needles, and dies.

She's not the witch.  Or rather, she was a good witch, trying to protect the patients.

It's the cleanshaven, cleancut, clean everything middle-aged male, WASPy plastic surgeon, the one who blamed the nurse in the first place, who just replaces his face when he's discovered and disappears to do more blood sacrifices. 

While this is a weak episode in some senses - or at least, not one of the stronger ones - it gets points from me for creative use of gore and for pointing out that sometimes, the good clean kids are not safe, and the strange questionable kids are the good guys.