This is sort of a companion piece to We Love Trees.

So my friend Kathy linked to my Avatar comic on the Livejournal community deadbrowalking, and lots of people came to have a look, and I followed the referring links back to the community and had a read.

Now I’d been thinking that I’d kind of handwaved away the cultural appropriation problems with the film in my post about it – just went ‘hey, look at this article on io9′ instead of addressing it. And linked from that community was lots of useful and interesting discussion of that, and of cultural appropriation in general. And this strip is sort of me thinking out loud about it.

The Japanese song is the theme from Hayao Miyazaki’s brilliant film My Neighbour Totoro. The lyrics mean, roughly, “Let’s go for a walk! I’m feeling lively!”

Don’t get me wrong. I am in that audience.

Dan and I only went to see Avatar because we wanted to be able to join in the conversation about it properly. We’d read all the critiques and watched the parodies and we were expecting it to be terrible. The thing about going to see something with rock-bottom expectations is that it’s almost a certainty they’ll be exceeded. “Cue the generic ‘tribal’ music,” I said to Dan as it started, discernment goggles still firmly in place over the 3D ones, and then it all went a bit wrong.

See, there are things – in the absence of a better term I’m going to call them ’squee triggers’ – which, if they appear in a work of fiction, torpedo your objectivity from a height and convert you to a helpless, fascinated five-year-old. I reckon everybody has at least a few. Among my friends they range from the fairly nerd-culture-standard (giant robots) to the downright odd (fantasy worlds with well-thought-out economic systems). This was like Squee Trigger Bingo for me. A few of mine are: Rites-of-passage rituals. Mysterious dayglo plant life. Collective-consciousness type things. Networks. Flying. Rainforests. Flying over rainforests. So yeah. I would say neuroscience, but there wasn’t any proper neuroscience in it. Neuroscience flavouring, maybe.

But oh, the ambivalence about this gigantic corporate movie whose villains are working for a corporation. People being kicked off their land by business interests and dictatorial regimes is something that needs to be talked about. On the other hand, having the topic co-opted and sold back to me in this shiny, slick, breathtakingly expensive package with what feels like no actual convictions behind it – and what’s more, told so Anviliciously that you can’t even take that aspect of it seriously – it’s like… It’s like a rail of mass-produced Topshop T-shirts with identical rips and patches, factory-positioned safety pins, and spray-painting saying “Punk Rebel”.

And that’s without even going near the racefail.

And yet I spent most of the damn thing prostrate and saucer-eyed, and came out feeling simultaneously thrilled and icky, as if I’d just had the best sex of my life with a smooth guy in a shiny tie who’d lied about doing charity work in order to talk me into bed.

What are your squee triggers?

—

OK, my week’s shifted a bit and from now on I’ll be updating on Thursdays, rather than Wednesdays. And this is the first of a few strips which are responses to specific things I’ve seen or read recently. I know it’s scrappy and sketchy, but it’s been a month of crisis and random misfortune and my brain is leaking out my ears.

[Edited to add: A rather less disingenuous eco-fable from my childhood. Dr Seuss's The Lorax: Part 1 of I think six]

This is dedicated to Margaret McCabe. I hope your ship came for you, too.

I don’t even remember why I’m doing this strip. It just wanted out.

I’m back home for a few days. Permit me to let my teenage self out for a minute.

‘Cultural observers’ was what they called them in Star Trek.

Edited to add: I had a request for an A3 print of this strip (hi Tanya!) so I made a few while I was at it. Available at the Shop.

Newsflash: school sucks when you're a geek

A thing rather like this strip except that it’s a song: the excellent ‘Mutants Here I Am’ by Plundersonics. Woman relates bizarre story of turning into giant monster in the most bored, drawling, disaffected voice imaginable, featuring lines like ‘The usual. Spectacular. Adventures’ and ‘Until I lost body parts it was fun.’