wari-os asked:
What are your thoughts on the blorbis problem?
Good question, which I really should have addressed in my “about me” post.
There are two ways to approach the problem, at least:
1. Invent “blorbo” out of whole cloth, and be done with it.
2. Re-imagine all of pop culture in terms of blorbo.
Option 1 looks very appealing, because there are a lot of interesting, exciting “blorbos” – characters who are very special and interesting and unlike anything we’ve seen before, and for which we have lots of strong and passionate feelings.
“All of pop culture now is like that. There are new ‘blorbo’ candidates at every turn. There are new ones we haven’t seen, but we hope to get to them. And some characters may be more popular than others. But it’s all so interesting and so new – every day is new blorbo day!”
There are good reasons to try to “re-imagine” all of pop culture in terms of “blorbo” – we’d like to not write off entire categories of stories and tropes, but instead understand them in light of the new and exciting characters and plotlines we’ve just seen (or read about). If “all of pop culture” can be interpreted as being like “all of Star Wars,” well, maybe we should read it as being like Star Wars.
The problem here is that the “blorbo” interpretation tends to be a lot more flattering to our blorbos than “Star Wars” is to its blorbos.
We like “Star Wars,” and we like all of “Star Wars.” The characters are fun, but they’re not necessarily all fun. (E.g. Chewbacca is the best – but that doesn’t mean Star Wars has everything to say about what it means to be a Wookiee!)
There are a lot of boring and unmemorable Star Wars characters and stories that nonetheless deserve to be taken seriously and studied, not in light of their “blorbo” significance, but just as in-themselves – as though we could know them just from “Star Wars” alone.
So the “blorbo” thing kind of leaves me in this weird place where I end up feeling like, sure, I can love characters and stories and genres I like, but it’s also very flattering and fun to re-imagine them all as blorbos, and it’s especially flattering if I get to feel that I am doing this in a good and interesting way, rather than in a way that feels silly or pointless.