Sentinel

I guess it's a lesson that things change, and it can be sad when they do, but sometimes the change makes room for loveliness. I haven't walked down to where my forest used to be, near where I work, since I discovered that it was torn down. Instead, I went looking for the rumored path around the pond behind my office building, and I found a new kind of forest - different, but still beautiful.

There's a dirt service road near my parking lot, and halfway down that, a gate into the woods. This is no towering, shady, cathedral forest. It's open and light - full of vines and fluttering leaves instead of sheltering pine boughs and violets. I've seen a pretty brown butterfly several of the days I've walked there, and today it didn't avoid me, but flew close and settled on the ground for a while to let me watch it. Through these woods is a field, stretching from the barely-tree-masked highway to the brambly edge of the lake. The wheel-tracked, overgrown road climbs over the crest of a hill and winds down behind the lake, where it disappears into another airy wood. Today I went on an adventure down to the lakeside, away from the road, where there were patches of tiny purple flowers that smelled amazing, like basil or oregano.

Monday, when I went walking there, I passed by a tree in the woods that looked like none of the others. This is a young forest, with tall, slender trees, and in the midst of all of them is a thick and blasted trunk, broken off forty feet in the air, with dry white-gold wood showing through where the bark has been stripped away. It's imposing; it commands respect. Another smaller but similarly scarred and broken trunk stands by it, and several dried logs lay near its feet. Among the wispy young trees, it looks like an ancient warrior. I call it the Sentinel.

On the way into the woods Monday I picked up a rock from the road, a shimmery gray piece of stone that had the same sheen as charcoal. I thought I'd bring it back and put it on my desk, but when I left the woods and walked back toward the main road, I knew with blinding certainty that I needed to give it to the Sentinel. I turned around, went back through the gate, and picked my way through the woods until I stood beneath it. There was a rock there, in the sunlight, and I spotted it from a way off and decided to place my rock there. When I got up close, I saw that a perfect O of lichen was growing on its surface. I left the stone in the center.

It was still there, today. I wonder how long it'll stay there.

The good ship I don't know what

(OMG two posts in one night! What madness is this?)

I've been thinking about fandom - shipping, in particular - and probably this is a fairly rudimentary conclusion to come to, but it was something of a revelation for me. I often feel guilty that, when it comes to Western-culture movies and television, I pretty much only ship guys (and the rare opposite-gender couple - I'm looking at you, Amy and Rory OTP forever). In fact, I've always favored male characters disproportionately over female characters. And I thought, god, that's awful! I'm a girl, for heaven's sake, and a lesbian at that, and my favorite characters are still all men? The sexism I show in my own entertainment preferences is disturbing.

And while it's true that this is sexist of me - I'm not trying to excuse it away - it's also a societally cultivated sexism. In mainstream TV and movies, there are far greater numbers of interesting, well-developed, central male characters than there are female. It's not fair, and we're trying to change it, but it's reality. And because of that, there are far greater numbers of meaningful relationships between two male characters than there are between two female characters.

In the end, that's what I ship for: meaningful relationships. I don't dare hope that same-sex characters will be shown in canonically romantic partnerships (lately I get frustrated and down-hearted and resentful of pairings that purposely flirt too close to that edge with no hope of actualization) but the meaningful relationships are undeniably there. Women on TV and in movies are so rarely given enough of themselves, separate and apart from the men in their lives, to develop meaningful relationships with other women. It's the Bechdel Test principle - in order to past the test, there have to be two women in the show or movie who have at least one conversion about something other than a man. This happens so rarely that female characters don't get to develop on their own, and so they don't get to develop the kind of heart-pounding, squee-inducing, shiptastic relationships with each other that men do.

I admit that I have a pretty small range of experience with Western TV and movies. The only exceptions I can think of are:

- Xena and Gabriele
- Inara and Kaylee

I've never even SEEN Xena. (I'm thinking I should remedy this.) I guess Willow and Tara should fall under this category, but they're TRAGIC and so I don't think I'd get much joy out of shipping them. LiveJournal friends, I know you've seen more TV and movies than me! What ladies do you ship, or consider shippable? I'd love to have a few more pairings to add to the list, just to prove they exist.

As an interesting side note, I have no trouble shipping girls from anime or from Western TV shows meant for kids, like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. And you know why? It's because MLP:FIM and Sailor Moon and Utena and Yuru Yuri and Madoka and the like PASS THE BECHDEL TEST. The girls in these shows are developed on their own outside of the influence of a central male naturally-more-important-than-them character.

That's it, I've got to find out if Xena is on Netflix.