: Sunday, January 17, 2010
- naraht: History without oppression? - But zvi's critique does also leave me with serious philosophical questions about the extent to which it's even possible to write a happy, oppression-free historical AU. To start with I don't believe you can justify it by means of alternate history. If you attempted to alter history that much you'd end up with something that looked completely unlike Regency England, and I don't think that's the goal. -
- zvi: You don't have to go looking for this stuff, it just traipses across your reading page, you guys - A different way to write historical fanfic is to write it up like a live action costuming event, where people wear the right clothes and stand in the right cities, and make some vague noises about being a lord or a slave or whatever, but speak in a turn of the millenium dialect and evince turn of the millenium attitudes, and are really completely inaccurate, except for historical allusions one uses to serve as window dressing or needs to drive the plot. And the problem with writing such a story up the second way is that one's twenty first century attitudes gloss right over historical realities without necessarily examining the set up for internal consistency and plot-unrelated offensiveness. -
- rivkat: Climbing the walls - Let me unpack that a little. As to Kripke (here, "Kripke" will stand for "the forces that get SPN to TV in the form it has"): No, I don't think he has an obligation not to speak about/back to fandom. It's not Fight Club and it's not his Fight Club anyway. Yes, I do think he executed his portrayal of fangirls very badly, in line with SPN's general problems with women, sexuality, and women's sexuality. And we can totally call him on it! I've seen lots of fans debate issues of power, appropriation, othering, and so on in our own works; just because SPN's creative forces are unlikely to listen to criticism in this vein is no reason to exempt SPN. -
- handyhunter: i just like this icon. hundred is scruffy and pouty! - No story is perfect, but I wonder if they can be imperfect in ways that does not result from not having chromatic main characters (and cultures). If movies are going to fudge around with comics canon (which is confusing and sometimes non-sensical anyway), why not change the race of the main character (instead of the villain or victim)? -
- telesilla: Write ONLY what you know and an unpopular fannish opinion. - This latest round of gay men having fits about women daring to write about gay sex? Feels a lot more like "hey! Keep out of our fort! Didn't you see the big NO GIRLS ALLOWED!!!! " than anything else. -
- melannen: Science, y'all.So, over 9 polls, in a variety of slash subfandoms from the late-teens yaoi set to the mid-thirties meta fans set, dates ranging over 7 years. Only one poll had less than 50% queer participants, and that was the earliest one, and even it was at 37%. The median percent of queer participants was 59.7%, and the mean was 61.5%.
SO when people say things like "slash fans are appropriating queer experience", what THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS, WHO IDENTIFY AS QUEER hear is either "you aren't queer enough, your queer identity isn't real" or "male voices are the only ones qualified to speak for the queer community."