Well, like I said, you know...I'm not in favor of obnoxiousness, and I think it's always advisible to watch your tone, and I think matociquala had exactly the right response to that first one: good discussion, please watch your mouth.
It's one of those frustrating things where you want to say, "Can you get off my side? You're not helping." Because I do think she brought up interesting points, particularly by saying, if the work is derivative of a certain kind of bodice-ripper (and I think that's a strong argument, particularly given how it leans on the whole thing where getting dick makes Nicky happy to be a woman), what's the gender message there? Maybe even, what's the relationship between fanfic and romance novels, how much do we use those conventions to subvert them, and how much do we resort to them out of convenience, or even because we actually like them?
My frustration with the debate comes out of me kind of realizing that when fandom says we want to look at fanficition critically, we mean *always* in broad-stroke views (talking about qualities of stories and tendencies in some writers, etc. etc.), and *never* by being able to cite examples in order to back up our meta appropriately (by saying "X story by Y writer does these things, and here's what I think about that") -- at least not when it's a story we don't like. Then we get on lj and say "I wish SOME PEOPLE wouldn't write out-of-character" and make everybody worried that we mean them *g* I don't know, maybe I'm at a place in my meta-life where I'm like, look, we've covered all these theoretical ideas, and we can't advance anywhere from here until we do criticism like criticism is actually done, story by story, writer by writer. (Dammit, I knew this English degree thing would ruin my life one way or another! *g*) But I can't guarantee to you that nobody will ever do it sarcastically or snippily or pissily (particularly when lj culture tends to lionize that type of writing, because the newspaper-movie-critic style is frankly more entertaining than the literary-critic style of analysis). I don't know, though, I wonder if being more able to express negativity about stories would keep people from only doing it when they're so ticked off that they can't modulate their tempers anymore?
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Date: 2006-05-21 01:14 pm (UTC)From:It's one of those frustrating things where you want to say, "Can you get off my side? You're not helping." Because I do think she brought up interesting points, particularly by saying, if the work is derivative of a certain kind of bodice-ripper (and I think that's a strong argument, particularly given how it leans on the whole thing where getting dick makes Nicky happy to be a woman), what's the gender message there? Maybe even, what's the relationship between fanfic and romance novels, how much do we use those conventions to subvert them, and how much do we resort to them out of convenience, or even because we actually like them?
My frustration with the debate comes out of me kind of realizing that when fandom says we want to look at fanficition critically, we mean *always* in broad-stroke views (talking about qualities of stories and tendencies in some writers, etc. etc.), and *never* by being able to cite examples in order to back up our meta appropriately (by saying "X story by Y writer does these things, and here's what I think about that") -- at least not when it's a story we don't like. Then we get on lj and say "I wish SOME PEOPLE wouldn't write out-of-character" and make everybody worried that we mean them *g* I don't know, maybe I'm at a place in my meta-life where I'm like, look, we've covered all these theoretical ideas, and we can't advance anywhere from here until we do criticism like criticism is actually done, story by story, writer by writer. (Dammit, I knew this English degree thing would ruin my life one way or another! *g*) But I can't guarantee to you that nobody will ever do it sarcastically or snippily or pissily (particularly when lj culture tends to lionize that type of writing, because the newspaper-movie-critic style is frankly more entertaining than the literary-critic style of analysis). I don't know, though, I wonder if being more able to express negativity about stories would keep people from only doing it when they're so ticked off that they can't modulate their tempers anymore?