fridgepunk (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fridgepunk) wrote2011-08-07 10:42 pm
fridgepunk) wrote2011-08-07 10:42 pm
So there I was...
...I'd accidentally started on this random urban fantasy novel ("accidentally" and "random" in the sense that I've been kinda busy and trying to squeeze in some pony fics just to keep myself writing regularly BUT THEN I went and wrote a few thousand words of first chapter: wtf brain?!?) which has this weird as fuck metaphysics underpinning it (I think my brain just flat out went "okay, all that Unknown Armies stuff from years back? And all those deconstructive thoughts you've had while reading the Dresden file books? Fucking move that all out of here so I can make room for new stuff NAOW" I await those killer swarms of featuses working themselves into this somehow).
Which was when two great ideas slammed together, which were:
1) Thriller is awesome, and obviously the modern uniform of a necromancer would be the red and black leather thriller jacket/trouser combo (and the thriller dance would make a good calibrative test of the necromancer's control of his undead minions.
2) Hey why don't I have the final battle be between the white supremacist guy at the head of an army of racist zombies (skin heads and black shirts and teddy boys oh my!) dredged from the depths of London's history of interracial conflict, and the "wicked" "witch of the north" donning the thriller jacket and dancing up a spectral army of every normal person who got killed by the sort of bastards on the other side?
Which meant that I had a very simple to write sequence in which an an ethnic female british and NOT FUCKING STUPID version of harry dresden defeats racism by doing the thriller dance – with the key to this sequence being that the dancing and descriptions of the physical and spiritual manifestations of the vast magical powers being wielded is interspersed with what amounts to an African-American History essay regarding the social-racial-political context surrounding Micheal Jackson's early rise to stardom as a pop rather R&B or Soul musician (though We'll see if I don't truncate it the fuck down into something far less deep than I'm making it sound when I get round to editing it into the bulk of the novel itself).
So I went to youtube to start rewatching the Thriller video to get the steps of the actual dance right and the pacing and structure of it all...
...did it always have a bit at the beginning where two black people are totally drssed in the universally recognizable uniform of the preppy white teenagers from a cheezy all white 50's B-Movie?
Damn, I thought I was totally stretching the extent to which racial politics was present in the video quite a bit to make it into this weird magico-racial fulcrum/focus for this scene. But nope, apparently there was more than enough there in the source material all along, quite explicitly so in fact.
Which was when two great ideas slammed together, which were:
1) Thriller is awesome, and obviously the modern uniform of a necromancer would be the red and black leather thriller jacket/trouser combo (and the thriller dance would make a good calibrative test of the necromancer's control of his undead minions.
2) Hey why don't I have the final battle be between the white supremacist guy at the head of an army of racist zombies (skin heads and black shirts and teddy boys oh my!) dredged from the depths of London's history of interracial conflict, and the "wicked" "witch of the north" donning the thriller jacket and dancing up a spectral army of every normal person who got killed by the sort of bastards on the other side?
Which meant that I had a very simple to write sequence in which an an ethnic female british and NOT FUCKING STUPID version of harry dresden defeats racism by doing the thriller dance – with the key to this sequence being that the dancing and descriptions of the physical and spiritual manifestations of the vast magical powers being wielded is interspersed with what amounts to an African-American History essay regarding the social-racial-political context surrounding Micheal Jackson's early rise to stardom as a pop rather R&B or Soul musician (though We'll see if I don't truncate it the fuck down into something far less deep than I'm making it sound when I get round to editing it into the bulk of the novel itself).
So I went to youtube to start rewatching the Thriller video to get the steps of the actual dance right and the pacing and structure of it all...
...did it always have a bit at the beginning where two black people are totally drssed in the universally recognizable uniform of the preppy white teenagers from a cheezy all white 50's B-Movie?
Damn, I thought I was totally stretching the extent to which racial politics was present in the video quite a bit to make it into this weird magico-racial fulcrum/focus for this scene. But nope, apparently there was more than enough there in the source material all along, quite explicitly so in fact.
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