[Image: "Marshmallow Gun" (excerpt) -- click for full original at xkcd.]
I realized a couple days ago — during this criminally busy week — that I hadn’t posted any writing samples in a long time.
Many of the (non-blogging) pieces I’ve posted on RAMH are grouped together under the category called “Paying Attention.” But I don’t post a given bit of my work with a “I thought you’d be interested in reading this” preface, followed by the thing itself. (Yes, smart aleck: that would be too simple.) Instead, I’ve prefaced each piece with a full blog post about an component of writing to which I try to (yes) pay attention when I myself am writing: setting, character, action, and so on. At the foot of each such full post is a link to some writing of mine which illustrates (if I’m lucky!) whatever point the post was ostensibly making.
The topic of today’s post, obviously, is something no one really wants to think of — and maybe not a lot of people are willing even to read. But I’m not talking about a specific something, mind you, because everyone has different thresholds for different sorts of unpleasantness.
What things or experiences does the word “unpleasantness” call to your mind? Do you expect to encounter them in fiction? If you know you’ll encounter them in a given book, will you not read it?
Some of this I (and a bunch of others) gabbed about a few weeks ago, in the post titled “The Ick Factor” and the comments which followed it. Slime, guts, Things That Are Wet Which We Wish Weren’t, and so on. Exploding body parts. Open-heart surgery. Then there are the great Victorian taboos, sex and death (he said, whispering). Bodily functions…
Okay, enough of that — I’m kinda grossing myself out here a little.
But unpleasant physical experiences aren’t the only ones which make people squirm and want to run away. Psychological ones are tough to endure, too: cruelty; madness; chronic frustration. And then there’s the whole matter of unpleasant language.*
The problem of unpleasantness for a writer of adult fiction becomes particularly acute if he or she wants to depict life in all its noisome reality. Sometimes you’ll hear an author say, “Sex scenes are the most difficult ones for me to write.” That may be true, for those people. (One man’s meat…) But for my money, what’s really hard to write well are scenes involving loathsome characters, behaving loathsomely.
In the work-in-progress, Seems to Fit, I have one such character. I know the rules — that if you make a loathsome character 100% loathsome, no one will believe in that character (or care about his/her loathsomeness, I guess). You’ve got to add complex psychological layers, assign your villains some sympathetic traits, in order for their villainies to ring true.
And yet… and yet…
Chapter 2 of this draft of Seems to Fit introduces my, uh, my antagonist, let’s say. This early on in the book, I knew I’d have lots of later opportunities to layer his portrait with redeeming shadows. This early on, all I cared about is roiling the reader’s head: having earlier introduced a half-dozen “good” (if flawed) characters, I needed to make it plain that somebody “bad” enough will stand in opposition to them.
Note that by “bad” I don’t mean like cartoonishly evil — Hitler-evil, Ted Bundy-evil. I’m just after, well, thoroughgoing unpleasantness.
Please don’t read this if you’re offended by bad language, or if you’re currently dealing with godawful people in real life and think that reading about another will push you over the edge. Language aside, this really is not a nice guy in pretty much any way at all: he’s spiteful and vain, has a streak of cruelty, and a hint of sexual perversity. His grooming habits are questionable. It really was not fun to be inside his head, and — unless you can sort of keep what’s on the page at arm’s length — it probably will not be a “fun” read. Don’t expect to feel sorry for him after reading this.
But I did want to deal with his unpleasantness early on and directly, to make it beyond doubt.
And whether you read it or not, if you’re a writer (or reader!) of fiction, ask yourself some questions: How should a writer deal with “unpleasant” characters and behavior? Can readers — your hoped-for readers — be satisfied with a story which holds no unpleasantness at all?
It’s a short chapter. It just introduces him. The things he does here aren’t the worst things you’ll ever read about, or the worst things you can imagine. They’re just… unpleasant.
Anyhow, all caveats and warnings and so on aside — if you want to see it, the link below will take you to the current version of this chapter. At this point, all you need to know to “get” this chapter are these elements introduced in Chapter 1:
- The action takes place in the spring of 1988.
- Most of the action (not this chapter, though) occurs in a small suburb of Philadelphia, called Caerleon.
- A character named Al Castle, introduced in Chapter 1, is in his 70s. He’s the retired owner, chairman, and CEO of a very successful metalworking company in Caerleon.
On, then — if you want — to Seems to Fit, Chapter 2.
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* I’ve probably told this story before, but when I was teaching high-school English I did a little mini-course on semantics. A crucial part of this dealt with profanity, obscenity, and other forbidden language, and how people respond to it.
“Let’s say I come up to you from behind and yell, ‘I’m going to hit you over the head with this baseball bat! Duck!‘ The smart thing to do — the reflexive thing — is to duck, right? And you would duck, wouldn’t you?”
The kids nodded (probably wondering where I was going with this, but they nodded).
“Okay, now an alternative scenario. I’m going to approach you from behind and yell, ‘I’m going to hit you over the head with the phrase “baseball bat”! Duck!‘ What do you do then? How do you react?”
The question seemed utterly stupid to my students, because of course the premise was utterly stupid: why would you warn somebody about hitting them with a phrase, with mere words?
“Exactly,” I’d say. And then I’d move on to whatever came next. (I had very patient students.)
Ah, the difficulty of unpleasantness!
I’m not sure what to do with this. When I was busily writing a few months (close to a year) ago, or more, I wrote a story about a central character with a lot of issues. He’s no one’s idea of an ideal guy. But he was the center of the story, and I tried, in the span of time I had, to show him being unpleasant.
It wasn’t hard. But I don’t know how I’d go the other way. How does one layer in desirable, sympathetic characteristic into a thoroughly despicable character? I wondered if going about it the other way — that is, writing the character the way I did for the short story — would work better. Pretend he’s the central character and make him as disgusting as I can. Put him into a position of needing to hold readers. Shake well.
I don’t know. I have certain taboos in writing fiction, I’ve discovered, which I am loath to violate, despite wanting to twist the guts of readers and strew them about the page. But there’s a tic inside me, some little nervous flinch which is so strong a polarizing force, I just … don’t go there. And those taboos are easy ways to crunch the reader.
How to address?
I’m working on it now. I’ll let everyone know how I fare.
I’m not going to read that chapter right now because the timing is bad, but I want to come back later and give it a whirl.
As for unpleasantness… Sometimes I’m horrified by what my characters say and do, and then I freak out a little, and then I might even tell a reader that so-and-so doing such-and-such really unnerved me. And then I wonder if I’m a wimp and what that character did is no big deal in today’s world of CSI et al–and then I have to worry if the reader will think I’m a nut for freaking out over nothing at all.
Of maybe I’m supposed to freak out to prove that I’m not actually as evil as the character?
Because writing fiction, is just that, fiction, don’t we sort of let down our guards for a while so that we can take something to a level we, ourselves wouldn’t go to? The unpleasantness of a character can be cathartic in a way, for me anyway. It helps me look a person, usually from my past that I didn’t deal well with for whatever reasons, and allows me to look at them through a safe lens. They can’t hurt me again (or even just bother me), but I can feel what they did before and maybe recreate them, so others can see what I either saw or felt. I don’t have to like the person or even “forgive” them, but I can draw or show them in such a way as to show you how unlike me they are.
When I encounter a character in my writing whom I find makes me feel uncomfortable, I usually try writing them to make me feel better about them, but dislike it because it doesn’t ring true, so I have to re-write (again) to make them yucky again and throw in some extras to make sure I won’t make them likable again in the re-reading.
(Excellent — comments on the topic from three people who’ve definitely got their dark sides!)
Darc: I guess the conventional way to “layer in desirable, sympathetic characteristic into a thoroughly despicable character” is to explain, somehow — and preferably without being too heavy-handed — where the sociopathy comes from. Give him abusive parents, say, or no parents at all. In some ways, there’s too much of this already: putting the wicked on a shrink’s couch can really bring all the action to a standstill and/or water down much of the story’s tension. But hinting at it, with a little expository phrase here or there, or a photo on his nightstand — that oughta be doable, if done delicately.
Every now and then I read a story which includes a really nasty individual for which no background at all is provided — or needed. But the author obviously lost his/her nerve at some point, said something like I can’t do this…! So what s/he does is tack on a wholly artificial and likewise unexplained “humanizing” tic: makes the villain cry at old movies, say. Which drives me crazy. I want to shout at the writer, “Nonono! You almost had it!”
marta: The way things work in the culture anymore is that whenever fiction is offered up for public consideration, a certain percentage of the reading public wonders how much of the characters might be based on real people — and which ones. It’s a short step from that to wondering if the characters represent facets of the writer’s own personality.
It sounds like you’re aware of that second level of questioning, and that awareness makes you want to point out (particularly unpleasant) points of difference. The thing is, though, I think it tends to be only relatively unsophisticated readers who believe the “author = character” equation. Sure, there’s probably some small overlap between Thomas Harris’s mind and Hannibal Lecter’s. But I’d love to go out to eat with TH, while never ever even wanting to share a subway car with HL.
Somewhere, I read a thriller writer’s response to this sort of confusion. It went kinda like: Folks, that’s why they call it fiction.
cynth: With that second paragraph, you sound even more conflicted than marta, which I would scarcely have believed possible. :)
The Missus once told me about a Southern writer who’s widely considered to be a master of dialogue. She (this other writer) was discussing how best to deal with dialect in characters’ speech. She said her approach was to start them out talking with more dialect-type touches — dropping the “g” in “ing,” for instance, and/or drawing out their vowels (“Ah” substituted for “I,” for example). Over time, you taper off so that eventually the character is talking normally, if you just go by what’s on the page. The reason it works is because the reader has already established, in his/her head, the speaker’s unique voice — and keeps “hearing” that voice even when it’s no longer spelled out.
It suddenly occurs to me that the same approach might work when applied to extremely unpleasant characters: if you “catch them in the act” early on — show them being really awful once or twice at the outset — then you can gradually sort of back it off. The recollection of that early portrait will still be seared into the reader’s mind, so (for example) Mr. Nasty’s sweet talk in Chapter 25 will ring hollow.
While I acknowledge the point you’re making about establishing the nastiness early on and not having to reiterate it so much thereafter, JES, I wonder about that anecdote about the Southern writer. It sounds to me like that would be a technique in the writing process – that you start off concentrating on things like the accent and the dialect to bring the character into focus in your mind while you’re writing it. But I would find inconsistencies in the presentation of a character within the published novel extremely obtrusive and irritating.
On the whole, I like a bit of humanity even in the nastiest characters – so long, as you say, as it’s done subtly in the way of painting in a bit of background here and there. I found it rather frustrating with Thomas Harris (although I confess I am relying on reviews here, since I haven’t read Hannibal) that he originally set up the Lecter character to be beyond analysis, something that would confound the psych-profiler’s skills, a representation of pure evil – and then the longer the series went on the more he started the humanizing, “how did he get to be this way” stuff.
Interesting example that occurred to me straight away when you first started talking about ‘ick’ and horror a week or two ago…. I’ve read most of the Lecter novels and seen the films, and in the whole oeuvre for me the standout moment of chills-down-the-spine horror – which comes over much less well in the movie (either of the movies) than in the book of Red Dragon – is when the FBI realise Lecter has been communicating in code with a killer on the outside via personal ads, but decide to let him place one more ad to help them crack the code. When they deciper it, they find it gives the home address of Lecter’s nemesis, Agent Graham, and the message: Kill him. Kill his family. Pure evil. All the big gore effects are as nothing compared to this. We know this guy abducts people, tortures and mutilates them, makes perverse artworks out of them, feeds their body parts to their friends and family for his amusement – but that that is nothing compared to this: this moment of revelation is just so absolutely cold. It’s perfect horror. Nothing else in any of the Lecter books I’ve read comes close.
I have a lot in me to say about your character here, but it’s a bit late now in Beijing.
One thing I would like to say now is that I think there’s a need to be aware of the spectrum of unlikeability in characters. I mean, there are worthy dopes who just aren’t supposed to get the girl and then there’s brain-sauteeing Hannibal Lecter. There’s a lot of ground between those poles.
I think there’s a lot of ground between Lecter – or any significantly ‘evil’ character – and your man here, too. Frankly, from this introduction, he seems kind of pathetic and immature but not exactly ‘evil’ (and you’re giving him some of that humanizing thing straight away with the stepfather thing, and the quest to confront the real father). There’s a fairly big step up from boosting your mom’s bank card and failing to return library books to….. well, perjury…. blackmail…. rape…. murder. How far would this guy go? And how far are we supposed to dislike him?
Supplementary – and perhaps useful? – question here: does it really matter how much we like or dislike him? That doesn’t seem to me to be anything that’s going to drive plot, or even make him necessarily more memorable or compelling as a character. Shouldn’t we be thinking more in terms, perhaps, of how much we might fear him? (And there, fear of what he might do to characters we sympathise with blends into fears of how far he might derail the plot from where we might want it comfortably, ideally to go, and also into imaginative areas of how much we would not want to meet this person in our own lives.) Your man here seems to be your common-or-garden jerk, and not someone we’re going to particularly excited – or alarmed – by.
Final point (good album playing….):
On the issue of discomfort… have you come across Little Britain, JES? It’s been the big hit in comedy skit shows in Britain in the last few years since I left, and I’ve only just been catching up on it through DVDs a departing friend bequeathed to me.
Discomfort is mainly what they aim for. It’s very well conceived and well performed character comedy, with a small number of recurring stock personae and situations, but it’s got a heavy leaning towards the gross-out. Most of the characters are both physically and morally unattractive, not to say outright disgusting. It looks at the line, and then cavorts on to the other side of it jeering at you.
And if you’re looking for exploring the limits of taste for humorous purposes in literature – well, I think I’ve already commended Iain Banks to you (especially his early work The Wasp Factory, but most of it, I gather); but also Will Self, especially My Idea Of Fun. I’m not saying I like it, but I respect the fact that it goes right out there on – and perhaps a bit beyond – the boundaries.
Supplementary (morning after) point:
Do you remember that Vernon Scannell poem I was trying to find, about the experience of Saturday morning cinema-going as a child in the ’30s? A central theme of that is the fascination with the villain in old Westerns – the fixation on the trappings of stereotype, the dark clothes, black hat, stubbly jaw; the recognition that there was something about “the sooty man” that could “move our childish hearts with something oddly close to love”.
Froog: This cluster of comments could frame a book titled something like Good Story: How to Write (and Read) a Novel.
Somewhere around here, I’ve got a horror story which I wrote some years ago. The protagonist was a… a creature unlike others I could remember from classic and second-tier horror stories and films I knew. That was a goal I’d set for myself at the outset. (I never did anything with the story, although I like it, because a few years later a successful film (and less successful sequel) came out which featured a monster much like mine. The movie killed a central motivation for me to have written the story — I just knew any editor worth his salt would want to know why I’d so brazenly ripped off from the film — and I lost interest in it.)
Another goal for the story — for the central creature-character — was to make him matter-of-factly irredeemable, I guess you might say. There was nothing personal in his peculiar appetite, although he took great pleasure in both the hunt and the kill; what he ate was just, well, just what he ate.
When I workshopped the first draft of the story, one reader’s comments started something like, “I love that this guy is completely unrepentant.” Which was very close to “matter-of-factly irredeemable,” close enough to satisfy me. (He’d read a lot of horror.) But the other workshoppers weren’t so sure: the consensus was that (biology/anatomy aside) such a creature failed to convince them, because they didn’t understand his mind enough to believe in his unrepentant nature. He was sort of the opposite of a deus ex machina, an evil miracle whose evil wasn’t credible because his unrepentance seemed so conveniently miraculous. The final draft of the story thus included a certain amount of backstory, plus some additional foreground material — and was almost twice as long as the first.
In retrospect, I’ve always thought the story was stronger with the limited backstory than with none at all. But I couldn’t help regretting the loss of that “evil beyond analysis” feel of the original, something like your excellent take on Harris’s original Lecter.
(That story of mine also had one of my favorite titles: “In the Ruins on Borphyr Road.”)
More later…
Froog: When I started working on this post, I realized somewhere in the middle that the description of my character (in the post, I mean) made him sound evil, rather than merely unpleasant. So I backtracked a bit, with the not-Hitler/not-Bundy disclaimer, and that’s also why I hammered in the “unpleasantness” nail a little more firmly — or tried to.
And y’know, he’s not even a villain. He stands (or rather, will stand) in opposition to the other main characters. But he’s not the central conflict, the main obstacle they’ll encounter en route to “The End.” So I didn’t want to make him a diabolically twisted genius. He’s selfish, weak, vain. I wanted to make him someone who would threaten the placid world of multiple main characters in the late 1980s, most of whom are elderly (and thus generally value placidity). These characters, I guess you could say, fear tripping on a sidewalk or setting a kitchen fire more than they fear death. I want Martin to be that sort of threat to them. (By book’s end he will, though, nearly unravel every thread in the plan they’ve put together: not because he’s evil, just because he’s spiteful.)
And he’s also the hole in the dike through which two centuries of history leaks, tying together the story of my Welsh brewmaster with the main story. If he were genuinely, greatly evil, I think he’d resist being the agent of any outside force — or at least be aware of its influence. He’s not “possessed” a la The Exorcist, but he is easily nudged: his path of least resistance lies evil-ward, and he’ll never have second thoughts about it, but he needn’t be an evil genius. At the same time, as you say, he’s just a thoughtless jerk, and yet needs to be enough of a thoughtless jerk that awful things can happen in his wake.
Thanks for provoking all this thought. I hope to achieve the above, but we’ll have to see how it works out. In the meantime, having laid it out like this, I have a clearer idea of some of the pitfalls I have to deal with — to keep an eye open for.
(Ludicrous reCaptcha in this context: Levy-Samuel twinkles.)
Froog: on your follow-up and morning-after thoughts…
I didn’t know anything about Little Britain before your mention, so (predictably: ha) looked it up. It appears to be one of those shows which I could watch no more often than once a week. More often than that, it would start to seem sadistic or cruel rather than merely biting. (Or, putting a finer point on it, it would start to make me question my own… well, compassion, for lack of a better word.)
Now I say that, which makes me sound delicate and easily offended. But I’ll watch South Park episodes and re-runs five times a week and laugh out loud at every one. (I generally do this in the back room, while pressing off things to wear for work the next day, because The Missus does have a substantially lower gross-out/discomfort threshold than I.) Probably something to do with the ridiculous, crude animation style — put the same words in the mouths of stage or film actors and I’m pretty sure the laughter would die in my throat.
While reading your comments on The Wasp Factory and My Idea of Fun, I was reminded of a novel from the early 1990s by Patrick McCabe, called The Butcher Boy. Do you know that one? Hard to read in numerous spots — even though you’ve got plenty of reason to “understand” the violence, you still don’t exactly want to encounter more of it.
(Clockwork Orange has that effect on people, too. I’ve never met anyone else who acknowledged reading the book (worth the read for the language alone, if one can sufficiently compartmentalize his squeamishness to enjoy it). But the movie had many people feeling like Alex himself: forced to sit with his eyes open as all this dreadful stuff happened onscreen. Which was sort of the point, but nobody I ever talked to about it seemed to have gotten it.)
“…’the sooty man’ that could ‘move our childish hearts with something oddly close to love’”: that’s wonderful. And much more accessible than a dozen treatises on why Mephistopheles is a better character than Faust! (Although I do think there’s a connecting thread.)
I loved The Butcher Boy. It’s about the only novel I’ve read in – just about – one sitting. The violence didn’t particularly linger in my mind (although it is 15 years since I read it). I suppose it was shocking because committed by a child and within the context of a mostly funny book (albeit very black comedy); but it was integral and necessary to the plot. And McCabe wasn’t just playing with it for effect. The Wasp Factory and – even more so – My Idea Of Fun are pursuing the same sort of gross-out humour as Little Britain – except that it’s disease, deformity, and psychopathic violence that they’re employing, rather than obesity and everyday bodily functions.
I should probably give A Clockwork Orange another go – both the film and the book. I read it in high school, but it was the invented language that left an impression on me. I have just about no recollection of the story, or even the tone or purpose of the book. I did, however, have the feeling that Kubrick’s film had completely missed the mark. It seemed to be very much in the mould of a number of other late ’60s British satires, like Lindsay Anderson’s Oh Lucky Man! – cheesy, overblown, cartoonish. (Maybe it was just the presence of Malcolm McDowell, who seemed to be in all of them.) I agree it’s difficult to watch; but I think that comes not only from the often unpalatable content, but from the fact that the story just doesn’t engage – I never really cared about Alex’s plight, nor had any sense of where the film was going.
I love South Park. To an indecent extent. There is a genius to it. I agree that the cartoon format gives you a saving distance (although I have winced at many of Kenny’s horrible deaths); any attempt to recreate what they do in live action would just be vile.
I couldn’t help thinking that in your ‘Fairy Tale’ summary of the WIP – which was too plot-light and character-background-heavy to be a satisfying fairy tale, I’m afraid; you weren’t really following ‘the rules’! – this character didn’t seem to have any convincing purpose at all. (You said hardly anything about how he would affect the central plot, and nothing, as far as I recall, about the device of him introducing the Welsh brewer back-story.) It seemed rather as though your Arthurian fetish had compelled you to introduce a Mordred character, but you hadn’t yet entirely decided what you were going to do with him. I supposed that the non-stripped-down, non-’fairytale’ version would have more flesh on the bones – but does he have an essential purpose?
I think it’s always worth asking yourself that question about a character (if for no other reason, just so that you’re prepared to fight your corner if your editor asks it): What would the novel be like without them?
After watching too much of Little Britain in a short space of time, I’ve decided that what brings it up short of greatness for me is not so much the one-note nastiness of most of its humour, but the fact that there’s no real development in any of the characters.
Sorry to inundate you with references and recommendations, JES, but the great standout in skit shows in the last couple of decades was The Fast Show. Its genius lay in the subtle variations they worked in the very limited and repetitive scenarios, so that many of the characters started to seem real and human and surprisingly, movingly detailed (despite being basically confined in the same one-minute sketch over and over again). Of course, it helped that the acting was so good. I have no words for Paul Whitehouse: he’s unbelievable. (Impressive enough that Johnny Depp begged for a guest spot on the show!)
Last time I looked, there wasn’t much of it on YouTube – but the particular highlights to look for are the Ted & Ralph segment (portraying the strained affection between a young aristo and his elderly groundskeeper) and the fireside chats of Rowley Birkin (Whitehouse’s greatest character – a permanently sozzled, barely coherent septuagenarian raconteur).
Did I say ‘barely coherent’? I meant ‘rarely coherent’! Great stuff, though.
Froog: Oh yes — Clockwork Orange, O Lucky Man!, and (also from Lindsay Anderson) If…: McDowell’s unholy trilogy. I saw all three at just about the time I was learning what movies could really do, beyond the limits of the films which I’d always seen represented on network TV (the weekday-afternoon The Early Show, NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies, etc.) and on small-town movie screens. Maybe I was just too impressionable, but on those three films’ basis I had extraordinarily high hopes for McD’s future. By the time I saw, some years later, that he’d been cast in a short-lived sitcom opposite Rhea Perlman (even if it also featured Lucy Liu, Carol Kane, and Billy Connolly) — well, I knew then that he probably wasn’t going to be another Olivier.
But he could have been, damn it.
Yes, I cut a lot of corners in that fairy-tale version. I was nervous about posting it in its original form, which pretty much gave away the show on every important plot (and character) point. I do think Martin’s a necessary ingredient — if for no other reason than that he pisses off one character so much that he (the latter) digs in his heels and insists on going forward with a plan which he’d otherwise have had a lot of questions about. (Weak Martin’s interference becomes strong Larry’s weakness.)
We’re about to head out for a group lunch; when we get back, I’ll have some Fast Show goodness (which I found yesterday) to share with you here.
Froog: The group lunch didn’t really last until now; just didn’t get to come back for this until now.
Needless to say, I’d never heard of The Fast Show until you mentioned it. And three guesses how I spent the next hour or so…
First, I know you have problems with YouTube; do they extend to other videos on the Web as well? (I don’t know if the YouTube thing is a technological issue or a Great Firewall issue.) If you can view other videos, instead of going directly to YouTube try Google Video. There’ll you find links to YouTube, of course — especially since Google acquired it — but also to Google’s own video library, Dailymotion.com, Myspace, Photobucket… various sites based in Italy and Brazil, for example… perhaps even some downloadable WMV files. (I haven’t found any of these. But if they exist, you could sidestep the problems with stuttering a/k/a streaming video played through a slow Internet connection.)
At the moment, 830(ish) hits are returned on the phrase “the fast show.”
Among them, I see, are several copies of an episode in which Johnny Depp actually did make an appearance — one of the “Suits you, sir!” bits. (However, this was in the so-called “Last Fast Show” in 2000, not the original series.) I also see that Amy Winehouse showed up in a 1997 episode.
But the thing I thought might really interest you — because it doesn’t require any fancy hardware, software, or Internet connection, and I can’t believe it would be worth blocking — is this: via the Internet Archive, a complete collection of Fast Show transcripts. Not just the “real” three series, but also the three-part last show and two specials.
Of course, I guess the really definitive thing — if you’ve got a Region 2 DVD player — would be the 7-disk set, The Ultimate Fast Show Collection from 2007…
I’ve done one post on South Park so far, specifically about Cartman. (But mysteriously, I don’t see anything about it on Froogville, other than a few stray asides. Hmm…) It took me quite a while to latch onto it, because it was carried only on a premium cable channel at first — or one, at any rate, which I didn’t have access to for some reason. My niece and nephews (and brother, and one sister) kept telling me, like, “Uncle John! You have got to see this show!!!”
So about a year and a half ago, while pressing some things off for work the next day, I scrolled through the channels for something to watch. Only South Park was not showing a commercial at the time so I figured, well, I might as well give this a try… Before the episode was over I’d fallen over backwards onto the bed, laughing.
Good thing about this is that so many of the shows are still new to me. Bad thing about is that my niece and nephews have all pretty much seen everything by now, and talked themselves out of it. So it’s been a solitary (not exactly guilty, let alone shameful) pleasure. Heh.
Thanks for those links, JES. I’m glad to have made another convert! You, me, and Johnny Depp – a fine company.
YouTube (and certain other video sites) is blocked in China, but my main problem is that my connection speed – via Tor – is so slow that streaming is unviable from just about any source. I should – soon be getting myself a VPN. And then I’ll probably spend a week or two catching up on all the stuff I’ve missed. (I have, for example, been wanting to do a Barstool ‘Unsuitable Role Models’ tribute to the recently deceased Keith Floyd.)