We made it through another February! The only redeeming factor about this month is that it’s short. Despite the weather… and the short hours of daylight… and the news cycle… and, and, and… I was able to engage in some really lovely forms of escapism. I’m teaching my second experimental college (Exco) course focused on the animated series Arcane — the show was originally designed to function as a large scale advertisement for a game company but spun off on some really interesting depictions of humanity in the midst of class conflict. In the first few weeks, we’ve covered Marx (class!), Foucault (gender!), and Lacan (language!) alongside animation / musical styles in a wonderful mishmash of analytical discussion. We’ve tackled the child figure’s use in media, misogynoir implicit in systems of character creation which try to deliberately ignore societal ramifications, and laughed about the canon appearances of Imagine Dragons (of all things) in a Victorian steampunk universe. I was worried (much like I was for my last exco, Ludomusicology), that nobody would show up or participate in discussion, but once again I have been proven wrong by the absolutely wonderful people who bring their amazingly complex selves to class every week. I’m so excited to keep discussing more topics (tragedy! Prison breaks!) as the semester goes on… even if I do have a bias towards season one and am a lot less fond of season two…
Another piece of media (well, sort of) that has been occupying me the past month is actually a class — specifically, my Queering Media course. Alternatively heartwarming and gutwrenching, we’re tracking not only the history of queer representation in modern media forms but also the ways in which traditional media consumption / production can be disrupted. This is something I’ve also come up against in game studies — going into the field, I (perhaps naively) thought that ‘queering’ a field meant including more diverse representations of sexuality. Instead, I’ve found that queering something equates to taking a step back and examining the entire field in which that thing is located. For instance, not only did we watch The Celluloid Closet, a history of queer Hollywood, but we also discussed encoding specific messages within media. Not only did we discuss camp, but we also highlighted the manner in which communities disassociate specific aspects of media in order to flip them on their heads and create something entirely new. Though I do love me my classical music / literature, I’m thrilled to be studying something slightly more contemporary.
When I need to unwind, though, I’ve recently found myself enthralled by the Netflix series Hilda, based on a series of graphic novels by the same name. Ostensibly a kids show, the series features gorgeous animation, engaging characters, and stakes which feel like they matter yet at the same time are low enough to avoid any stress. On the decidedly higher stakes (yet still meditative!) side is my playthrough of Disco Elysium, a trippy murder mystery where you are called on to perform such tasks as singing karaoke or helping a programmer map the scientific embodiment of nihilism in an abandoned church. Fun for the whole family!
Of course, this isn’t everything I’m engaging with now — my roommates and I are working our way through The Good Place and Gilmore Girls, I’m playing perhaps too much Balatro, and am just about to cart my tote bag of books back to the public library in order to check out more — but I think the disparate nature of these examples proves how quintessentially Oberlin finding one’s niche is.
