On Monday, 16 May 2016, the ABC crime comedy-drama Castle aired its series finale in the U.S.
Truth be told, story-wise, its last season didn’t always (no pun intended) have the quality of the previous ones, and it felt rushed and rough at times. Still, watching that closing scene, those last few moments mystery writer Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion) and his wife, NYPD Captain Kate Beckett (Stana Katic) shared onscreen was bittersweet for me.
I followed the series since 2009, when it came out, and it became a big part of my life in the years since. I remember going through articles and posts talking about it; I was already familiar with fanfiction at the time, but the series’ fan community helped me realize why fan works existed; I made a friend and grew closer to another one because of it. And at one point, I used scene from an episode (“The Blue Butterfly,” S4 E14) to describe an experience of love.
I was already a fan of the mystery genre when Castle came out. I became interested in it because I loved the genre; I stayed because I came to love the series, too. Continue reading “Always–A “Castle” Tribute”
This piece was inspired by one of Anita Sarkeesian’s older videos, entitled “Why we need you Veronica Mars.” In this pre-“Tropes vs. Women in Video Games” video, Ms. Sarkeesian comments on the three-season TV series featuring Kristen Bell as the eponymous “tiny blond detective.” Drawing primarily from her particular school of feminism, she sets forth and discusses reasons why we need more characters and shows like Veronica Mars.
I’ve mentioned my fondness for mystery and detective fiction elsewhere, and I’m very familiar with Veronica Mars; I spent a whole summer binge-watching the show, and I was very excited when the movie came out in 2014. Neo-noir in style, almost Dashiell Hammett-like at times, and written with a deft, light touch that brought the characters and setting to vivid, gritty, California sun-soaked life, I think Veronica Mars is one of the best examples of contemporary detective fiction.
Just not for all the same reasons as Ms. Sarkeesian.
Now, I have nothing against Anita Sarkeesian– everything written online about her seems to portray her as either a much-needed voice in today’s conversation on culture or a charlatan and a con artist; I don’t know her personally, so I’d rather reserve judgment. And I have nothing against feminism, either. I believe in women’s rights for much the same reason that I believe in men’s rights: I believe in human rights, and in the radical notion that men and women are equal, though not equivalent. This won’t be a critique of her discussion, but I found Ms. Sarkeesian’s discussion somewhat limited; no doubt mine will be, too, but either way, I hope to show why we still need you, Veronica Mars.
Veronica as victim
“I need your help, Veronica.” It’s one of the most common lines throughout the series, spoken by someone calling her or cornering her after class or in the ladies’ room; it’s even said in the 2014 movie. With those five words, she once again steps into a world she never really leaves. A world of characters and events every bit as dubious and dangerous as the ones Holmes and Watson meet in Victorian England, and she manages to solve the case and get her homework done, too.
Veronica is like a court of last resort for the students of Neptune High and, later on, Hearst College. She deals with all these victims, finding solutions for their problems. What we have to remember is that she herself is a victim. Before the events of the TV series take place, her best friend Lilly Kane was murdered and her father, former sheriff Keith Mars, was kicked out of the Sheriff’s Office in an emergency recall election. She was drugged and raped at a party, and the sheriff to whom she reported it refused to believe her.
She is a victim, but she does not stay a victim: she gets up, dusts herself off and presses on. In her words,
Tragedy blows through your life like a tornado, uprooting everything, creating chaos. You wait for the dust to settle, and then you choose. You can live in the wreckage and pretend it’s still the mansion you remember. Or you can crawl from the rubble and slowly rebuild.
(S1E3, “Meet John Smith”)
Justice not for sale
Social inequality is a recurring theme, beginning in Season 1, where we’re introduced to the “09ers,” the rich inhabitants of Neptune, California (postal code 90909), characterized as a “town with no middle class,” ground zero when the class war comes.
In many of her cases, Veronica comes up against 09ers, and she outsmarts them, solving the case in the creative ways that Ms. Sarkeesian refers to in her video. The lesson is that justice isn’t a product that goes to the highest bidder; it isn’t something that the 09ers can buy. Something we have to remember every time we hear about the most shocking miscarriages of justice brought about by deep pockets. “Justice on the side of the highest bidder” is not justice at all.
Friends, family, partners in crime
In her video, Ms. Sarkeesian mentions two important characters: Veronica’s father and mentor, Keith Mars, and her friend, the tech-savvy Mac Mackenzie, who ends up working at Mars Investigations in the novels set after the events of the series and movie (and which, unfortunately, I haven’t read yet, but I’ll get around to reading The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line soon. No spoilers! 🙂 ).
She only appears as a minor character, but Veronica also has Lianne, her alcoholic mother, who left them after Keith was voted out of office. Veronica uses up her college funds to send her to rehab– an arrangement that doesn’t turn out well, and puts her future in jeopardy.
I found the omission of Wallace Fennel a glaring omission on Ms. Sarkeesian’s part. Wallace is roped into Veronica’s cases a few times, and he is portrayed as a loyal, foul-weather friend.
Keith, Mac, and Wallace show us the importance of our friends and family. On the other hand, Lianne shows us that sometimes, the people closest to us end up hurting us. That doesn’t make them evil; it just means they’re not perfect.
Veronica Mars is a hero
That’s right, she isn’t just a marshmallow. Veronica Mars is a hero.
We tend to form cults around our heroes. In places such as China or North Korea, cults around heroes tend to take a rather scary turn, with iconography and, sometimes, “hagiography” almost comparable to Catholic saints.
We sometimes forget that our heroes aren’t perfect, aren’t infallible or impeccable. Veronica is cynical– not without cause– at times indecisive, makes the wrong decisions, and sometimes it appears as though she doesn’t appreciate Wallace’s help. She isn’t perfect, but then again, who is?
She might not be perfect, but in spite of that, she always sets things right.
In the end, who is Veronica Mars?
She is a friend, a daughter, a detective, an avenging angel, a flawed and human character. She is a hero, and we could always use more heroes.
Aletheia Observer, signing out. Be careful out there! 🙂
Mystery is by far one of the most interesting genres of fiction for me– I actually once considered getting an AB in Literature at this university that offered courses on mystery and detective fiction! 😀 I didn’t push through with that plan, but I’ve never lost my love for mystery stories. Which is why, when I heard of this anime entitled “Hyouka” last year, I was intrigued.
Hyouka (lit. “ice cream”) was originally aired in 2012, and having watched it in 2013, it’s very clear that I actually came late to the party 🙂 . Adapted from Honobu Yonezawa’s Classic Literature Club series, it’s primarily the story of Oreki Houtarou, a very observant freshman high school student at Kamiyama High School, who joins the Classic Literature Club at the request of his world-travelling elder sister Tomoe to prevent it from getting abolished by the school. He lives what he calls an “energy-saving lifestyle” and lives by the motto “I don’t do anything I don’t have to. What I have to do, I do quickly,” and generally seems to have succeeded at that when we first meet him and lives a rather dull and decidedly not rose-colored life– until Chitanda Eru, the poster-child of curiosity, bounces into his life with the ability to spur him into action with the simple words,
“Watashi, kininarimasu!” Also sometimes rendered as “I can’t stop thinking about it!”
Those words usually become the starting point of their adventures as they try to solve mysteries– or satisfy Chitanda’s curiosity– along with their friends Satoshi Fukube, the database of assorted facts, and Mayaka Ibara, the student-librarian.
In general, most mystery and detective fiction centers around two elements: a crime that has been committed (in modern mysteries, it’s usually murder) and a detective investigating it (Sherlock Holmes is arguably the most popular). The premise is simple, really. The universe has been thrown off-balance by this crime, and it’s up to the master detective to restore order and harmony to the universe by using his powers of deduction and bringing the story to an elegant denouement.
Not entirely the case with Hyouka.
Where the mysteries that detectives like, say, Gosho Aoyama’s Shinichi Kudo/Conan Edogawa or G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown solve are usually violent crimes, the mysteries that the Classic Literature Club usually gets involved in are more mundane: a book that regularly gets borrowed from the library and returned within the day, a cryptic announcement on the school’s P.A. system, and other “everyday mysteries,” so to speak. In fact, the closest they come to violent crime is a movie class project! 🙂 Nope, no spoilers. One of the worst sins in the world is to spoil a detective story.
It’s been argued elsewhere that Hyouka can be interpreted as an exploration of detective fiction; another interpretation of the series delves more into its slice-of-life elements. Personally, I think both the mystery and slice-of-life elements of it contribute to the overall identity and “this-ness” of the series, but I think that’s another discussion for another time.
In his “Defence of Detective Stories,” G.K. Chesterton talks about detective stories or “police romances” and how they show us the importance of morality, “the most dark and daring of conspiracies,” and this very much applies to conventional mystery stories. He also talks about how detective stories show us the poetry of modern life, and it’s this part of his argument that most applies to Hyouka. I’m sitting here, typing away on a computer, and you’re over there, reading it on a computer screen or some other device– haven’t you realized how utterly strange that is, and that it’s never been done before? That people have never been quite this connected before?
If you haven’t, it isn’t your fault, not completely. Experience tells us that the more “connected” we are with each other, ironically enough, the less inter-connected we become. As an example, from philosophy, we have Plato talking about “the good,” in the context of a society in The Republic, which makes sense, because he lived in a city-state with a few hundred-plus people; fast forward a bit, and as society becomes more urbanized, we have the rise of the Stoic philosophers, who are decidedly more inward and individual in their thinking. Right now, it seems we have more technology, but less Wonder. The world is full of everyday mysteries and miracles that we can’t see, because we don’t wonder.
Remember that slogan from the National Geographic Channel? “Live curious”? Curiosity isn’t the thing, it’s Wonder, the ability to see the new in the everyday. And perhaps when we can say “I can’t stop thinking about it!” like wide-eyed Chitanda, we might also be able to go looking for answers like Houtarou and the Classic Literature Club.
Aletheia Observer, signing off. I wonder . . . 😉
-A.O.
P.S.
In keeping with our “wonderful” theme, here’s “Nolita Fairytale” by Vanessa Carlton. Speaking of fairy tales, I wonder if I should write about “Once Upon A Time” one of these days?
Aletheia Observatory 