When I said '... that are current in that fandom' I really just meant certain individual examples - e.g. Prostitute!Sam and SerialKiller!Sam - not a general trend. That was sloppy phrasing, sorry.
(I do think the 'more crack than in other fandoms' thing *is* a valid generalisation, though. It's not supposed to mean 'everybody here writes crack'. It just means what it says - it's more frequent here than elsewhere, from my experience. Same goes for a lot of other things I 'generalise' about - it's never supposed to mean 'everybody does this', it just means I notice certain trends that seem to be significant to me. I believe that those trends do exist; that doesn't mean that I fail to see variety and divergence.)
>Your generalisations about 'this fandom' amuse me. I don't mean that all that snarkily, it's just that you're often treating LoM fandom as some homogenous group,
Am I? In what way?
>and --- didn't the ending discussion on lifein1973 show you that some of your assumptions in that way are, at least partly, wrong?
How? (Possibly I'm being horribly dense here...)
>Hell, some of the more prominent LoMfans are contradictory in themselves, so what do you think the rest of the fandom's like?!
People are contradictory. That's human. Did I ever claim anything else?
Doesn't mean one can't observe certain things they have in common, occasionally. As I said - *trends*. There's a crucial difference between trends and the kind of mental boxes I talked about in my sexuality post - mental boxes are sharply delineated. Trends allow for difference, vagueness, a certain amount of contradictoriness.
>Well, obviously - but that's because they're extremes!
Which is all I was saying, really.
>You can, very plausibly, have an irate, "I know everything, you know nothing" violent Sam. You can also, very plausibly, have a, "my world is crumbling, I wanna crawl into the hole in the wall" crying Sam. Two extremes, same character.
Actually - two sides of the same character. I'd find it difficult to get behind a Sam who was portrayed as *all* this or *all* that, though. Though if it's just a single fic I could still imagine that his other sides simply aren't visible in the slice of his life that the fic presents us with, so that would still be okay with me. But there are fics where Sam ceases to feel like Sam to me, where what I see is not one of his sides but some other character with the same name yet different character traits. From what I've read of them so far, both SerialKiller!Sam and Prostitute!Sam at least verge on that for me (as does loads of crack). This is what I meant when I said that the more extreme versions of Sam that exist in this fandom (see? better phrasing! *g*) are not - to me, anyway; obviously this depends on everyone's personal interpretation of Sam - particularly compatible with what - again, to me - is canon Sam (either version of canon Sam, selfish prick or not).
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I wasn't actually generalising.
Date: 2008-02-20 01:39 pm (UTC)(I do think the 'more crack than in other fandoms' thing *is* a valid generalisation, though. It's not supposed to mean 'everybody here writes crack'. It just means what it says - it's more frequent here than elsewhere, from my experience. Same goes for a lot of other things I 'generalise' about - it's never supposed to mean 'everybody does this', it just means I notice certain trends that seem to be significant to me. I believe that those trends do exist; that doesn't mean that I fail to see variety and divergence.)
>Your generalisations about 'this fandom' amuse me. I don't mean that all that snarkily, it's just that you're often treating LoM fandom as some homogenous group,
Am I? In what way?
>and --- didn't the ending discussion on lifein1973 show you that some of your assumptions in that way are, at least partly, wrong?
How? (Possibly I'm being horribly dense here...)
>Hell, some of the more prominent LoMfans are contradictory in themselves, so what do you think the rest of the fandom's like?!
People are contradictory. That's human. Did I ever claim anything else?
Doesn't mean one can't observe certain things they have in common, occasionally. As I said - *trends*. There's a crucial difference between trends and the kind of mental boxes I talked about in my sexuality post - mental boxes are sharply delineated. Trends allow for difference, vagueness, a certain amount of contradictoriness.
>Well, obviously - but that's because they're extremes!
Which is all I was saying, really.
>You can, very plausibly, have an irate, "I know everything, you know nothing" violent Sam. You can also, very plausibly, have a, "my world is crumbling, I wanna crawl into the hole in the wall" crying Sam. Two extremes, same character.
Actually - two sides of the same character. I'd find it difficult to get behind a Sam who was portrayed as *all* this or *all* that, though. Though if it's just a single fic I could still imagine that his other sides simply aren't visible in the slice of his life that the fic presents us with, so that would still be okay with me. But there are fics where Sam ceases to feel like Sam to me, where what I see is not one of his sides but some other character with the same name yet different character traits. From what I've read of them so far, both SerialKiller!Sam and Prostitute!Sam at least verge on that for me (as does loads of crack). This is what I meant when I said that the more extreme versions of Sam that exist in this fandom (see? better phrasing! *g*) are not - to me, anyway; obviously this depends on everyone's personal interpretation of Sam - particularly compatible with what - again, to me - is canon Sam (either version of canon Sam, selfish prick or not).