Ideas, Conceptual Metaphors, and my Fanfic by GoramMan

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Ideas, Conceptual Metaphors, and my Fanfic

POSTED BY: GORAMMAN
UPDATED: Sunday, March 2, 2008 19:29
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Thursday, February 28, 2008 1:33 PM

Hello BSR,

I promised a post about my latest chapter in the fanfic I'm writing called Spinning Out. Chapter 3 took a lot of time and thought to write. It was 13+ pages of exposition for an entire arch of stories that I am in the process of loosely planning. This chapter sees Mal and Zoe going to Badger for a job after the events portrayed in Serenity. The crew of Serenity has been out in the black for three months and has little to no idea of what happened after the Miranda broadwave. Badger not only has work for Mal but he (of course) just so happens to be on top of all the latest news in the verse despite major restrictions on interplanetary communication. He is persuaded to give Mal and Zoe the lay of the land.

THE IDEA

The original idea I had for the background of this story was not going to be a fanfic at all. For the past year I would occasionally think about an original sci-fi story with original characters and the whole shebang. The background of which would be this powerful entity (not necessarily a government or even human) would use the conflict between two populations to control them. They would shift their support and alliance from one population to the other depending on several factors such as politics within the population, cost of labor, availability of resources, level of education, and level of independence. This would be referred to as a cycle (some kind of cycle, didn't ever come up with a cool name). Both populations would beware of the cycle and knew what to expect every time it happened. But they would remain oblivious to the entity behind the scheme up until a certain point which would be where the story began for the reader.

Although I really liked this idea and meditated upon it often it was entirely too tidy. Whatever scenario I would come up with to show the man behind the curtain I would eventually reject. It was too obvious, it was too subtle, or I thought nobody would really give a damn. Further more, how do I make readers empathized and sympathize with anybody in these two populations if all of them are dupes from the beginning? How do they relate? They aren't going to believe they are dupes too.

So the idea sat on the shelf for a very long time until I decided to start writing fan fic for BSR. Then it clicked. The Alliance has basically two distinct populations. The central planets and the rim planets. I refer to these as the Core and the Rim. Miranda makes for a great inciting incident. So why not do a story where the Alliance starts using the population of the Rim against the population of the Core? It is certainly powerful enough to do so and because it will be an event unprecedented in the history of the 'Verse the premise is less dubious than my original idea of it occurring over and over again. The seed was planted and with chapter 3 it germinated. I say that because it wasn't until the completion of chapter 2 that I committed to the old idea. I say it for another reason...

CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS

There became a point in my life when I realized that the human brain is really not all that great. The truth of is that it should be able to do all kinds of things but repeatedly fails. How often do you forget, miscomprehend, and wrongly apply information. All of the time!

If you don't think so, you are lying to yourself.

I became very interested in how the brain works at a very convenient time. It was after I separated from the Navy in the Summer of 04 and the presidential election was in full swing that I discovered the conceptual metaphor.

A regular metaphor is defined as follows:

Quote:
1. a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance, as in “A mighty fortress is our God.”

It's basically talking about something as if it were something else. We use metaphors in fiction all of the time to involve the reader and cause images to appear in their mind. But why do we do that? Because it evokes emotion and thought. Trippy, huh? That ain't nothing.

A conceptual metaphor is the understanding of one idea in the terms of another. This is more than rhetoric or a part of speech. This is in reference to ideas and to make this easy let's just say ideas = conceptual domains. Now in a conceptual metaphor there are two specific domains. The source and the target. An example:

Understanding is seeing.
The target domain = understanding
The source domain = seeing

This is a very prominent conceptual metaphor that we use. Hardly anybody that will read this post will have highly technical and detailed knowledge of how learning and understanding occur in the human brain. Therefore, it is to us an abstract idea. But we know when we understand something as soon as it happens. Let's assume that somebody has just explained something to you. To let them know you understand you don't refer to the cognitive processes your brain goes through. You say things like:

I see what you are saying.
I got the picture.
It is clear to me now.

You can't "see" the words or the idea. They didn't give or show you a picture. There was nothing obstructing your vision. But the other person doesn't get confused because this is a conceptual metaphor the two of you share.

That was too easy...let's try another one:

Ideas are food

Seems a little silly, doesn't it? Well have you ever said anything like:

What he said left a bad taste in my mouth.
All this paper has in it is raw facts, half baked ideas, and warmed-over theories.
There are too many facts here for me to digest them all.
Let's let that idea simmer on the back burner for a while.
That's food for thought.

Not so silly. The truth is that most of our understanding about the world around us is metaphorical. We don't think of things as they are. We think of them as what they are similar to because we don't understand most of the world around us. The problem with this is that, although it is still a functional way of thinking, it is not rational. We will treat highly complex ideas as if they were something as simple as a fry if the connection between the two of them is made in the brain. Because we will act on these metaphors this is very powerful knowledge.

What you will find is that the less technical information you have with a certain conceptual domain, the more abstract it is to your mind, and therefore you will rely on conceptual metaphors to a larger degree to understand and act on them.

I learned of conceptual metaphors from the works of George Lakoff. He is a professor of cognitive science at Berkley. The above examples of conceptual metaphors were taken from his book, Metaphors We Live By which he wrote with Mark Johnson in the 80's. Along with continuing his research and writing more books on the subject he heads an organization called the Rockridge Institute which teaches libs like me to talk about politics using this information. If you think that evil, cons do it too. They just arrive at their message through a different process that was developed by Frank Luntz and supported by the works of Grover Norquist, Scaife, the Coors family...but that is a discussion for the shit hole we call the Real World Event Discussions board. A place I do my damnedest to stay out of.

SO WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH SPINNING OUT?

In the fic Badger tells a story from his youth about a disc grinder that explodes in his hands and scars him:

Quote:
“Happened when I was eleven. I’ll assume you know what a disc grinder is. At that time I was going with me uncle to his job at the shipyard. He was a welder. He was still flexible enough to get into all those weird nooks on the ships so he spent his days spot welding and doing simple joints where needed. He brought me along to smooth out the welds with a disk grinder. Well one day I come into the shop and can’t find any disks to use. I look in the trash and find one. Apparently there was a crack or chip that I didn’t see. I started that puppy up after my uncle tacked a bracket onto a bulkhead and it blew up right in me face. I staggered backwards and almost fell off the catwalk. I was screaming and crying like a stuck pig. Then me uncle is standing over me. I reach out to him. He swipes me arm away and punches me right in the face. Knocks one of me teeth out.” Badger pointed to the back of his jaw. “But I stop crying. I realized that me chest wasn’t hurt at all. It was just the speed of it. The shock of it. The sight of all those metal bits sticking though me bloody shirt. That’s what was so horrible. After I got me head nearly knocked off by me uncle I was embarrassed I even made a peep in the first place cause that really hurt.

Mal and Zoe exchanged glances. “You’re right, Badger,” said Mal. “This really explains a lot to us.”

Badger sighed and buttoned his shirt, “The point is: that’s how the central planets are behaving right now. The power source is the ideology of Parliament. The motor is the Alliance government. The disc is all the people, money, and loose resources in the Core. Miranda is the crack. All Parliament had to do to stop it all was to stop spinning for a while and check the bloody disc. All we have to do to get a hold of that money is position ourselves to where it will fly off the axis and be prepared for the shock. Keep our wits about us.”

“Don’t you think that’s a little too simple?” asked Mal with a raised eyebrow.

In the story Badger is able to acquire greater amounts of wealth and power because he is successfully applying this metaphor to the new situation the Verse is in. This is what Lakoff refers to as a surface frame but I would contend that this is a considerably deeper frame given the trauma of the experience with the grinder.

The continuation of the arc of stories will be set against this background where the Alliance has reached a critical mass, Miranda happened, and now it is flying apart as if centrifugal force is being applied to it. My tentative title for the series is, "Serenity: The Centrifugal Chronicles." Campy yes...but they live on a space ship.

The grinder, by the by, was based on a true story. A worker had a bad disc that flew apart and fragments of it went into his eye. The surgery failed to remove all of the pieces. One evening during recovery his eye was throbbing with pain. Instead of calling his doctor he doped himself up on a few extra pain killers and went to sleep. Upon waking he found that his eye had shriveled up and died. It was hanging out of the socket when he sat up...

Well this post is already too long. I would be interested in any questions or comments you might have so post away!

Spinning Out, Chapter 3:
http://www.fireflyfans.net/sunroomitem.asp?i=19755
Rockridge Institute:
http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/
A fresh article from RI:
http://www.alternet.org/election08/78048/

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Friday, February 29, 2008 5:19 AM

WYTCHCROFT

i will be replying to this GM:)

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Sunday, March 2, 2008 5:35 PM

TANKOBITE

Well, you put a lot of work into this; keep with it, sounds like an interesting concept. Personally though, I'm not sure what you mean by the Alliance using the population of the Rim against the Core worlds. Would you mind elaborating on that?

Anyway, good luck; though I think it would be interesting to see Serenity running guns to rebels somewhere...for cash of course.

-----------------------------------------------------------
There's a widow in sleepy Chester
Who weeps for her only son;
There's a grave on the Pabeng River,
A grave that the Burmans shun;
And there's Subadar Prag Tewarri
Who tells how the work was done.

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Sunday, March 2, 2008 7:28 PM

GORAMMAN

http://www.fireflyfans.net/sunroomitem.asp?i=19755

Read the chapter if you are interested. Badger explains it all.

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Sunday, March 2, 2008 7:29 PM

TANKOBITE

Ah; I'd only gotten around to reading the first one. I'll check it out later.

-----------------------------------------------------------
There's a widow in sleepy Chester
Who weeps for her only son;
There's a grave on the Pabeng River,
A grave that the Burmans shun;
And there's Subadar Prag Tewarri
Who tells how the work was done.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

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