To read Part 1, all you have to do is click to the previous post!
The unused epigraph for this post is:
“We are never more creative than when we are at odds with the world and there is nothing so artistically destructive as comfort.” – Excerpt from Nerd Do Well, Simon Pegg’s autobiography
I wanted to find something from Simon Pegg because Hot Fuzz is one of my favorite movies of all time. More importantly, Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s “Cornetto Trilogy” influenced me quite a bit when it came to writing Falling for the Protagonist. They come at satire from a place of love. Hot Fuzz especially is so clearly an homage to buddy cop films, not just a satire of them. Satire can come from a place of disdain, too. It can be made for cheap laughs. The Scary Movie franchise is a good example here. Is it satire? Yes. Does it come from a place of love? Not in my opinion. These movies seem to be more intent on disparaging and poking fun at horror tropes. Same goes for Not Another Teen Movie and others of its ilk.
I love romance novels. I also find many romance cliches and tropes to be hilarious or overdone. I wanted to express my love and poke (gentle, well-meaning) fun at the same time. Just like my heroes Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright.
As for the quote above, I simply agree with it. Wholeheartedly. For many creatives, the medium (or media) we choose to work through becomes our therapy, our chance to express our strongest and deepest emotions. When I am at odds with the world, I write. Sometimes I create amateur art, too. The utter destruction of America as a country, for example, led me to write blog posts and create art based on a quote from Frankenstein.
I had a teacher once who said that a book was a conversation between the author and a reader. Naturally, being all of fourteen or however old I was, I thought I knew better than this teacher. What an idiot! How can I have a conversation with the author? The book is their words. I never get to give my words back to them. Plus, Jane Austen is dead! I can’t give her my thoughts on feminism or whatever.
Anyway, cut forward a decade or so, and I finally came to understand what this teacher meant. Any time you read a work, whether it’s a memoir or a fictional story, the author is presenting their thoughts and experiences to you, and you, in turn, bring your own thoughts and experieinces back to the text. In this way, you can converse with the author. Just because they can’t hear your side of things doesn’t mean your side is nonexistent. The same is true for looking at a sculpture or painting. Watching a movie. One or more artists is presenting a piece of themselves to you, and you, in turn, offer something of yourself back. This is how artistic interpretation works in a nutshell.
Incidentally, this is why AI “art” is such a travesty; you cannot converse with someone who created art for no reason, who doesn’t know the “Why” behind their own creation. To bring it back to the Simon Pegg quote, comfort is “artistically destructive.” If we don’t feel anything, the urge to create is absent, or worse, perfunctory. Because it cannot feel, AI art is, therefore, empty and meaningless. Real art is of and for emotion, which is why it is (and must be) inherently and exclusively human-made.
What was I feeling when I sat down to write Falling for the Protagonist? Helpless, maybe. Scared. COVID-19 had changed the world forever. Politics in the U.S. were as precarious as ever. I had no idea how I was going to become financially independent. I didn’t know how to protect my sons from anti-Autism rhetoric. And I was buried in romance novels, noticing all these tropes and laughing over some of the patterns I’d noticed. I poured my discomfort and uncertainty into Falling for the Protagonist. I used that book to examine gendered dynamics and the entitlement that some people feel to other’s time and attention. As noted in the previous post, I explored reality through fiction. (For more of this, please feel free to check out a feature I wrote for Culturefly.)
Have I made a point? Who can say? There will be one more post about my “unused epigraphs” and then we will move on! If you are reading this in the UK, it is likely that Falling for the Protagonist is already available in a bookstore near you! If you’re in the US, the release date is September 22nd! Preorder now!
One of the things I was just asked for (at time of writing) was an epigraph for my novel, Falling for the Protagonist. I was also asked for my dedication and acknowledgments. Writing and submitting the acknowledgments was probably the closest I’ve come to being able to internalize the truth of being published. For a very long time, I held up “writing an Acknowledgments page” as some beacon of publishing, the thing that—above all else—would say to me, “Hey, Bex. You did it. You’ve made it.”
Needless to say, that was a big moment for me.
But I didn’t ever plan on putting an epigraph into my book. For those who don’t know:
Epigraph (N) – [in the context of books/literature specifically] A motto or quotation, as at the beginning of a literary composition, setting forth a theme
Still, the very mention of one sent my brain down the path of What If. As I found it fun to think about, I decided to come up with some quotes (and ask my friends as well). Since I never plan to “publish” the quotes we came up with, I decided to post them here for anyone who is interested. First, just the quotes. If you want to stop there, read the book, and decide for yourself what relevance these quotes have—cool. In fact, I’m supposed to encourage you to do that, I guess. I mean… other people buying and/or reading the book is important to me.
In fact, I think I’m going to make this a preorder hype post. Yeah, that’s what I’ve decided. So… go to my Linktree to find links to places to preorder Falling for the Protagonist or feel free to search for the book title (or Bex Goos) on your preferred bookseller’s website. Then preorder it! Support my dream!
But if you don’t care to do that, also cool. Or if you want to read the whole post, including my explanation, before reading the book, also totally cool. In short: Everything is cool. I don’t control you. I don’t even know you. Your autonomy is safe, and I shall never attempt to trample over your right to make choices for yourself!
Here are the quotes I came up with:
“Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.” – Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried
“We are never more creative than when we are at odds with the world and there is nothing so artistically destructive as comfort.” – Excerpt from Nerd Do Well, Simon Pegg’s autobiography
Here are the quotes my friends came up with:
“Truth is a matter of the imagination.” – Ursula K Le Guin, author of The Left Hand of Darkness
“Men are more interesting in books than they are in real life.” – Mary Ann Shaffer, author of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
The rest of this post will be about Quote 1 because this post is so long that I already had to scroll up and add “Part 1” to the title. Part 2 will be about the rest of the quotes. Hopefully. May have to add a Part 3.
Tim O’Brien wrote fiction about the horrors of the Vietnam War. I wrote a satirical romance novel about a woman who falls into a book and sends the main character into an existential crisis. These two things are not the same. But I will always remember my students’ shock, back when I was an (inept) English teacher, and I told them that The Things They Carried was fiction. I believe I told them before we started reading the book, but I felt a reminder was in order after they’d gotten through a chunk of it. They simply could not believe that what they had read was made up. It was so real! It felt like nonfiction! It led to some great discussions about the power that fiction has to help us hold up a mirror to real life. Fiction helps us confront and interact with truth. It’s sort of like how standup comics help people face reality by getting them to laugh at themselves. There are lenses through which we can observe ourselves and others. I wanted to use my work of fiction to do just that.
Just look at the (simplified) definition of satire I used to help my students understand it: Satire is used to highlight a flaw in order to raise awareness and/or incite change.
One of my main goals in writing FFtP was to draw attention to a glaring issue with real life: We are not treated to other people’s internal monologues, but some people still act like their motivations should be crystal clear. Some of the things that men pull off in romance novels would get men a face full of pepper spray in real life. Why? Because, in a book, the narrator is constantly letting us know, “Hey. Don’t worry. Both parties are totally on board with this.”
I am going to write out a summary of a very real novel in my own words. TRIGGER WARNING: Kidnapping, forced imprisonment, threats of sexual violence
After discovering the man she just married is a murderer with a history of criminal dealings, Holly Bardwell flees the marriage and the man in the dead of night. Her car breaks down somewhere in the Colorado Rockies, so she finds herself wandering through the mountains on foot, only to pass out in the snow outside a hunting lodge. One of the owners of the lodge, Adam Colter, discovers Holly and brings her inside. He nurses her back to health and introduces her to the co-owners of the lodge, his younger brothers, Ethan and Ryan. While Holly was unconscious, the three brothers decided that Holly was the one for them. For all of them. When Holly attempts to leave their (otherwise unoccupied) remote mountain lodge, they stop her and carry her back inside while she begs to be let go. Then they tell her the truth—that they all intend to marry the same woman, and they have agreed that she is to be that woman. She will pleasure all of them. Carry their children. Be wife to all of them. It’s okay that they just met her twelve hours ago, because they know in their guts that she is meant to belong to them. She won’t ever have to worry about a thing because they’re gonna take real good care of her. She doesn’t have to leave. They don’t want her to leave. She’s going to belong to them forever.
How’s that going for you? I want you to know that you saw a Trigger Warning at the top of the paragraph that wasn’t there before I wrote the summary. I realized on rereading it that I should go back and add the TW. Because that summary was missing one very important line at the end:
Holly listens to the brothers explain how they want her to be their wife and live with them forever, and she is totally into it.
Yeah, this is the plot of Colters’ Woman by Maya Banks. It’s an erotic romance, not a thriller. Note the apostrophe placement in the title. Their last name is Colter, not Colters. She is all of their woman. And she loves it. She can’t wait to marry these three dudes and bang it out for the rest of their lives.
Changes the cadence a bit, doesn’t it?
Romance gives readers a chance to explore scenarios that would feel unsafe in real life because the narrator is there to say, “Yep. Totally into it.”
But what happens in real life when Person A thinks they’re in a romance and Person B doesn’t? Suddenly, the story is different. Now you’re looking at a person who feels entitled to another person’s attention, maybe even their affection. How the story progresses depends entirely on how Person A takes rejection, if they take it at all. Maybe Person A refuses to believe the rejection. Maybe they believe the rejection, but respond with anger or violence.
When only one person approaches an interaction as romantic, the entire interaction is anything but.
In my book, I wanted to highlight this entitlement, the way that an interaction can take on whole new layers of meaning when there is a disparity in the way the participants are experiencing it.
Yes, I wrote a fictional novel. But I wanted to use that fiction to showcase a piece of reality, namely that women (or anybody, really) can feel unsafe in a situation without ever being overtly threatened. They can feel unsafe even if the other person has absolutely no unsavory intentions at all. Because they are not privy to the inner monologue of this other person.
There are no narrators in real life.
By the way, I’m not the only one who noticed this strangely thin line between romance and horror! Check out this ingenious trailer for Red Eye (2005). Link included because the embedded video might not work.
I never saw the movie, because I’m not into the thriller/slasher/horror genre, but the trailer stuck with me, clearly. It perfectly encapsulates the disparity delineated above.
Nick DiRamio also showcased how easily an interaction in a romantic movie could be changed from romantic to creepy/horrific. All they did was change the background music. That’s all it took. I’m going to link to the video at the timestamp where this happens, but I do highly recommend watching the whole thing. Nick is hilarious.
This all led me to Tim O’Brien. He was my first thought when the idea of epigraphs entered my mind. His quotes about fiction are all top-notch. Yes, the book is made up. But there is reality reflected in the fiction.
As always, Bex is late to the party. (Actually, in real life, I’m never late to parties because I’m not invited to them.) I finally watched KPop Demon Hunters and I have some thoughts about the central message of the film. Which is… it was generic and (seemingly deliberately) obtuse when it came to acknowledging very real issues that surround pop stardom.
They ALMOST made a movie about the dark underbelly of, not just KPop, but being a star or idol in general. As someone who is not particularly aware of the KPop scene, I can’t speak to it specifically, but there are articles if you want to read up on it. I do know that we have had plenty of exposés about the darkness lurking beneath the sappy sweet peppy exterior of popular entertainment in America. Just read Jennette McCurdy’s book! Or watch, if you can stomach it, Quiet on Set, the docuseries about Nickelodeon. Listen to former child stars discussing their lives. Read books and AMAs from people who were on certain reality shows like America’sNext Top Model.
If you have not seen KPop Demon Hunters… oh yeah…
SPOILER ALERT FOR KPOP DEMON HUNTERS
Okay, if you have not seen the movie, it follows a pop trio in Korea called HUNTR/X (Huntrix). The three women in the trio—Rumi, Mira, and Zoey—are charged with entertaining the masses and protecting the masses from the demons who push their way out of the underworld to eat human souls. The songs are pretty great if you like pop music (which I unabashedly do), the art style is… unique. Often pretty. With one exception.
It’s this. This is the exception. Good LORD this was a step too far for me.
It has decent characters, great acting, and is overall an enjoyable story. That being said… I take issue with the message of the film, otherwise knows as the theme.
I honestly thought for a good chunk of the movie that they were going to go for an incisive and poignant message about the hidden horrors of being a celebrity or idol. The clues were all there!
The constant repetition of “For the fans” and “We need the fans.”
The fact that their mentor lady told them, “Your faults and fears must never be seen” (which I’m trying to generously read as NOT a straight ripoff of Elsa’s emotionally abusive father in Frozen. Conceal it don’t feel it, am I right).
The constant pressure to perform, to the point where Rumi—without her partners’ permission—interrupts the week of vacation they’ve been anticipating in order to put them right back in the spotlight. It particularly bothered me that the other two responded with a bit of upset… for a minute.
Then their manager, Bobby, busts in to inform them that “Golden,” the single that Rumi dropped WITHOUT THEIR PERMISSION OR KNOWLEDGE, is going viral, and just like that, Mira and Zoey are happy happy happy!
There was an in-film reason for Rumi’s betrayal of her costars, namely that she believes her own demonic traits will be erased once they sing “Golden,” but Zoey and Mira don’t know that! They have every reason to be angry at her. While they do try to confront her later, that arises from other behaviors and warning signs, not from this clear and remorseless betrayal. In this moment, when they discover their vacation has been cut short, all is forgiven and forgotten almost immediately.
Like I said, I feel like they were getting there, except they waaaay boffed it at the end with this generic message of “Oh EVERYONE has their hidden demons and you just need to BE YOURSELF,” and not “These PERFORMERS have their demons and are afraid to be anything other than perfect because of the backlash they’ll face.” Again, this is highlighted by the fact that they’re angry to see a rival band. Why would this make them angry? Because they need the fans! They need to be IT and PERFECT! But again… that didn’t go anywhere. They still just LOVE being pop stars, and the message of the movie ends up being generic: DON’T BE AFRAID TO BE YOURSELF.
Again, to give it a generous reading, “coming after the fans” could mean she fears the demon band is a danger to the fans, except… they establish in an earlier scene that the Saja Boys are not “coming after the fans” in a dangerous way. It really just reads to me here like she’s afraid to lose fans because of her music career, not because the rival band is made up of demons.
I don’t have anywhere else to put this, so I’ll just say I looked it up and “Saja” 사자 means “Lion.” Hence the band’s logo being a lion and their call to action being, “Join the pride.”
Credit where credit is due, I like the lyrics in “What It Sounds Like,” the final number the trio sings as they defeat the demon lord. Specifically, when they sing “[N]ow we’re seeing all the beauty in the broken glass.” That’s a good line! I like that one. Oh, but speaking of that song, there are other lyrics I want to focus on…
My voice without the lies
Why did I cover up the colors stuck inside my head?
We’re shattering the silence.
It’s all about a “song [they] couldn’t write.” The lyrics are all about uncovering the truth, finally being honest, not being scared to be their real selves, to show that they have flaws. I’m willing to bet there’s another layer of meaning to it, too, considering it’s likely that pop stars aren’t always allowed to perform the songs they want to sing. I’m sure there are some out there who would prefer to go against their established “image,” and either feel they can’t or are explicitly told they can’t. Jesus… I think I just described the plot to Stuck in the Suburbs. Am I really sitting here thinking the Disney Channel Original Movie Stuck in the Suburbs achieved the message I’m looking for where KPop Demon Hunters didn’t??
“What It Sounds Like” could have been the perfect anthem for tired, burnt-out celebrities and pop stars everywhere. “We’re shattering the silence”? Come on! When I think of entertainers shattering the silence, I think of the abuse they endure behind closed doors. The pressure. The paparazzi and fans hounding them. Photoshopped pictures in magazines. Speculation in headlines. Their lives under fucking microscopes. They never have peace! This song could have been about them coming to the realization that it’s better to let the world see them as imperfect than to keep living up to impossible standards at the expense of their own mental health. But, no, in the context of the movie, it’s all rolled into the “Don’t be afraid to be yourself” narrative.
I swear, the bones of this theme are in there. Look at Saja Boys’ final song. The religious imagery in their lyrics, the fact that they are dressed like the Korean version of the Grim Reaper. Describing fans as “down on [their] knees” to worship the band. The sinister nature of the song is ostensibly about how the band of demons is planning to take people’s souls (“You gave me your heart, now I’m here for your soul”), but I see it as yet another cry for help. The obsession of the fans exposed as something dark and unbearably heavy, not a connection, not a tie that binds, but a rope that constrains and imprisons:
I can be the star you rely on
I’m all you need
Your obsession feeds our connection
They’re there for the fans. The fans “rely on” them. But who can these pop stars rely on?
Why wasn’t this theme explored more fully? The concept of idols and stars being beholden to their fans, even if it’s to the celebrities’ own detriment. Is it because it’s a kids’ movie? (I think it is? I’ve heard people talking about their kids loving it, at any rate.) Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad for kids to learn that the celebrities they idolize are human, too. And it wouldn’t have prevented kids from picking up on the more general message of “It’s okay to be yourself”! That message could have still been there! We need to give kids more credit, man.
Or was it because the filmmakers didn’t want to piss off the Powers That Be in the entertainment world? In the KPop world? Maybe. I’m not sure I can blame them for that. It is quite possible that the oppressive nature of the entertainment industry is exactly what… prevented this movie from pointing out the oppressive nature of the entertainment industry. Gotta appease the masses. Gotta appease the bosses. The people who write the checks don’t want to look bad. No no. Stay in line. Funnily enough, in a meta sort of way, this movie does kind of send the message I wanted it to. My awareness that the moviemakers would have had to pull their punches to appease the higher-ups is the message, but only if they had punches to throw and chose to pull them. I can’t speak to the motivations of the people who wrote and produced this movie. Maybe it never occurred to them to send a more poignant message. I’m operating under the assumption that they would have wanted to, but felt they couldn’t. Maybe they didn’t want to at all, which is a problem in and of itself.
Anyway, what I would have done would be to make it so the general public DOES know about the demons and THEY are the ones who turn on Rumi when they discover she is part demon.
(BTW THEY NEVER EXPLAINED THAT. Did her mom have sex with a demon?? What are demons anyway? I love their design, but they appear to be a bunch of otherworldly monsters and then… there is this one dude who was human and sold his soul. So were all demons human once? Some of them? I know Rumi tried to figure that out herself in one scene, but was unable to draw a conclusion, as I am unable to do. Was Jinu a demon at all? Why does he get a pet bird and tiger? Where did they come from? Are they demons? Demon animals?? Maybe I missed something…)
Ahem, so basically it could have been a message about how nice it is to sing and how Rumi can’t get enjoyment out of it when there’s pressure to be an IDOL, and the end of the movie is her realizing she doesn’t need to be this perfect object for her FANS, but rather can sing on her own terms for herself. The woman who does Rumi’s singing voice, EJAE, apparently had her own negative experience with this industry as she was told she was too old and would “never make it,” so I’m simultaneously very happy for her and also upset that they didn’t go more into the “Pop stars don’t shouldn’t exist to be consumed by the masses” message.
I really thought for a small portion of the movie that they were going to go for it, they were going to make a point about what celebrity does to people (both the person who is a celebrity and the people who worship them). The trio really could NOT stop repeating the fans thing. The fans! For the fans! We need the fans! AHHH THE FANS. It’s like… are we supposed to believe this is a healthy mentality?? Because it’s not. Yet, that was never addressed. A charitable reading of this is that they like pleasing the fans and interacting with them, and that is why they are so desperate not to disappoint. But… it still leaves us with these three women making all their decisions for groups of strangers rather than for themselves.
Imagine if a group of the obsessed, screaming fans featured at the beginning of the movie went up to Huntrix at the end of the movie and calmly, politely asked if it was okay to chat, rather than screaming manically and assuming it was okay to mob their idols? What if the fans thanked them for their hard work? This would contrast nicely with the fan behavior throughout the film and show there was a lesson for everyone to learn.
In conclusion, it was a pretty movie and I liked it (though I am concerned all the bright colors and jerky animations were there to continuously grab and regrab viewers’ attention, not unlike someone constantly snapping their fingers in front of your face), but the ending had it falling flat for me. Rumi, Zoey, and Mira want to be golden, but—to paraphrase a famous poem—“Nothing gold[en] can stay.” They strive for perfection that cannot and should not exist.
So yeah, the film was good, but it had no teeth. I like my movies and books to have some teeth. Like Sinners. That was a good movie. It had teeth.
Also I YouTubed again. Check it out below (if I embed it correctly) or follow this link.
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