Nos, you are a rockstar! This is exactly the kind of post I was dreaming of! I'm sorry to have given you something to stress about in the midst of everything else you're working on, but this is awesome and SO VERY appreciated!
The really big thing for me is that as a viewer, I get so much MORE out of DS knowing the darker context it's working against. I mean, yay fluff and all, but every time Fraser invokes Inuvik, he's also evoking this great wealth of history -- dark and light -- and insisting that Canadian viewers acknowledge it.
It reminds me quite a lot of American television and popular culture in the late 1980s, when hiphop and Bill Cosby brought African American culture into the mainstream. MTV really did change everything -- but location was everything. It was nothing for Aerosmith to film a video with RUN-DMC in a New York studio, a cab ride's distance from where the rappers lived. There aren't major television studios in Inuvik or Tuk. (Wow, can you imagine if there were? If they had funding and support for a northern-based entertainment industry?)
Speaking of industries (see my clever segue), the sex industry bits shocked me. I get necessity==>invention, but wow. I am a Southern girl in ways I don't even *realize*. Sex shops here are...well, okay, Texas only legalized vibrators and dildos about a month ago, so obviously it's different here. In Austin, sex shops here tend to be really large, brightly lit with fluorescent lights, have mostly vids, have crazy security, and have staff dressed in shirts and ties (unless it's a head shop, in which case it's a dingy shop full of all kinds of crap with sex toys on the far wall while the rest of the place is full of bongs and pipes and kitch). The more sex-positive and woman-owned shops have more fetish clothing and more boutique layouts, but god. I can't imagine actual bulletin boards. Like, the new age bookstores have bulletin boards. D&D gaming stores have bulletin boards. And I don't know why, but I always have a sort of kneejerk, this is skeezy reaction. (Hi, I have issues, but srsly, how could people trust each other with their bodies on the strength of a sheet of paper tacked to a cork board?)
Anyway, this is a FABULOUS post and I'm bookmarking it now. (I'm going to wait til Monday to pimp it on the noticeboard in hopes that more people will see it and come look.)
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Nos, you are a rockstar! This is exactly the kind of post I was dreaming of! I'm sorry to have given you something to stress about in the midst of everything else you're working on, but this is awesome and SO VERY appreciated!
The really big thing for me is that as a viewer, I get so much MORE out of DS knowing the darker context it's working against. I mean, yay fluff and all, but every time Fraser invokes Inuvik, he's also evoking this great wealth of history -- dark and light -- and insisting that Canadian viewers acknowledge it.
It reminds me quite a lot of American television and popular culture in the late 1980s, when hiphop and Bill Cosby brought African American culture into the mainstream. MTV really did change everything -- but location was everything. It was nothing for Aerosmith to film a video with RUN-DMC in a New York studio, a cab ride's distance from where the rappers lived. There aren't major television studios in Inuvik or Tuk. (Wow, can you imagine if there were? If they had funding and support for a northern-based entertainment industry?)
Speaking of industries (see my clever segue), the sex industry bits shocked me. I get necessity==>invention, but wow. I am a Southern girl in ways I don't even *realize*. Sex shops here are...well, okay, Texas only legalized vibrators and dildos about a month ago, so obviously it's different here. In Austin, sex shops here tend to be really large, brightly lit with fluorescent lights, have mostly vids, have crazy security, and have staff dressed in shirts and ties (unless it's a head shop, in which case it's a dingy shop full of all kinds of crap with sex toys on the far wall while the rest of the place is full of bongs and pipes and kitch). The more sex-positive and woman-owned shops have more fetish clothing and more boutique layouts, but god. I can't imagine actual bulletin boards. Like, the new age bookstores have bulletin boards. D&D gaming stores have bulletin boards. And I don't know why, but I always have a sort of kneejerk, this is skeezy reaction. (Hi, I have issues, but srsly, how could people trust each other with their bodies on the strength of a sheet of paper tacked to a cork board?)
Anyway, this is a FABULOUS post and I'm bookmarking it now. (I'm going to wait til Monday to pimp it on the noticeboard in hopes that more people will see it and come look.)
Yay Nos! \o/