hmpf

SF&F lately has been strangely obsessed with themes of mass murder for the "Greater Good", as well as other forms of extreme moral compromise for various lofty(ish) goals. My latest fannish love, the show I kind of refuse to call 12 Monkeys (it's called Splinter, I tell you, Splinter!) is part of that strange glut of texts dealing with extreme - and sometimes really rather artificial - ethical dilemmas of that sort. It's not the first such text that I've been obsessed with in recent years, though. Two of the previous ones caused me to produce long, unfinished essays, which I recently decided to post to tumblr (though there is no discernible fan presence for either of the two book series in question there).

I'm somewhat troubled by my own fascination. Unfortunately I ran into messy clumps of thought tangle before I could really get to the bottom of that, or get to any sort of definitive point, with either of these two unfinished beasts. (My brain is really only half-smart, and in situations like this, it shows.)

Still, I poured a lot of work into these, and maybe someone will find them a little bit interesting even in this fragmentary shape. Or maybe not, that's also fine. I'm just putting them here because, well, they already exist, so why not.

Links to the relevant tumblr posts:

On Morally Evaluating the Mass Murderers of Terra Ignota (This is probably the more useless of the two; though it does, at least, have some bullet points of the things I still meant to cover, i.e. "where it actually would have gotten interesting, probably".)

Dirty Laundry, part 1; part 2 (This works fairly well as is, but is lacking a crucial third chapter on the problems of trying to have your Lovecraftian apocalypse and subvert it, too.)

Also kind of relevant:

My review of The Delirium Brief

All this is very much the background for most of my ongoing, disorganised and meandering "Splinter" discussion on tumblr, as well as all of my fic writing of the last two or three years.

ETA:

1.) This is actually a slightly weird & arguably off framing for "Splinter", although my discussion of the show *does* grow from all this because that's where my mind has been.

2.) I should just go and read some actual philosophy already, instead of fumbling around in the dark for years...

There's still something I utterly don't get about slash in LoM fandom - and it's not the sex, although that still doesn't do anything for me. But I 'get' why the sex might be interesting for people.

( Read more... )

I'm at work; I meant to read Mikey's furry!porn now, but my boss is around, so maybe not. ;-) Instead, I clicked on my 'meta' tag, because occasionally I get curious about my own past thoughts - and rediscovered that I actually give fairly good meta, albeit not on a very regular basis. I mean, it's not worldclass meta - it's often vague and disorganised and so on - but I still enjoy rereading some of those discussions, and I don't feel terribly stupid in retrospect. In most cases, anyway. *g*

I'm a bit ashamed, though, because in about half of those discussions I dropped out halfway through, due to my tendency to get overwhelmed.

I wish there was a way to not only download the contents of one's LJ including comments, but also to re-upload them to some other journaling service including comments, because I'd hate for fandom to lose all of this public history in the inevitable move sometime in the medium-term future. (We all know that fandom can't stay on LJ forever, don't we? We may try to ignore that fact, like San Francisco may try to ignore that it's due for a monstrously big earthquake, but it's still there, looming ominously somewhere in the future.)

What we really need is not for society to accept new labels, new groups (homosexuality, bisexuality, asexuality... various fetishes... polyamory) but to do away with the need for labels and groups completely. It's too complex, contradictory and fluid a thing, on every scale (and there are at least two different, intersecting scales here - strength of drive and type of attraction - and possibly more) to be categorised. And, while it's true that we always have to generalise because otherwise communication is impossible (reality is always more complex than the words that try to capture it, but we do need to talk about it nevertheless), I'm not sure that having more opportunity to differentiate really helps much, in this particular area of human experience. Having a whole *bunch* of minorities I could identify as does not help me.

Perhaps this is one area of life where we should just try to learn to live with the fact that... life just doesn't always *fit* all those neat little boxes we make up in our minds? That sometimes it really is amorphous, ever-changing, and possibly even weird beyond description... (and also, that this is a feature and not a bug. Repeat after me, society: DEVIANCE DOES NOT EQUAL ILLNESS.)

Cultural identity would be another such area.

We need fewer boundaries, fewer mental demarcation lines.

Oh, and I'd also like world peace, please.

I'm turning ten in fandom this year.

Being the obsessive-compulsive type that I am, I've kept records of my beginnings in fandom. A bit odd, that, because back then I was still fairly convinced it would only be a short, transitory type of madness, and not a lasting and defining feature of my life. Why did I feel a need to keep records of it, then? Guess some part of me knew better already. ( Read more... )

It's 1880 words in note/brainstorming form already. Arrgh.

(Sorry. I don't even watch Torchwood. But I sort of liked that ep title.)

But. Seriously. WTF is it with fic writers and killing Sam recently? Seems like it's the new big fad. Which is kind of odd - as well as kind of fitting - seeing as how the lad's *already* dead! I mean, is it even still possible for him to die in 1973? *g*

( Bit of meta about deathfic, angst, h/c etc. )

*

Speaking of dead protagonists. To complement my writing that frelling useless essay/paper/thing about An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge recently (not really - it's just a coincidence, really) I just bought Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman.

Any other texts with dead protagonists I should know? *g* (I know there are a few movies - Jacob's Ladder, Abre Los Ojos... anything else?)

I found this:

http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/1087998.html

I just love it. Here "wächst zusammen, was zusammengehört" :D - "old" fandom and "new" fandom, united in wank. I'm awed that the wank isn't dead yet, despite being sixty years old. Not surprised, mind you - I've been to enough "traditional" cons, and read enough fan history, to have been disabused of any notions that that kind of fandom was inherently more peaceful or what have you! *g*

What I love particularly about this, though, is that it got posted to fandom_wank in the first place. It sort of confirms the impression I've been getting over the last few years that the barriers (which have never been entirely impermeable, of course) between these two "kinds" of fandom are becoming more and more permeable. I think I first began to notice this in DW fandom, with its split between "classic Who" and "new Who" fen. At some of the "interfaces" between the two groups, people inevitably began to mingle and communicate.

Of course, even "old school" DW fandom isn't exactly identical with traditional SF fandom; there's another old, old split here between the "literary" fen and those who got into fandom via "media" fandoms... and that's still in effect, I think. But the awareness seems to be growing that we have things in common; that, in fact, we may have sprung from the same tradition.

There also seems to be a greater convergence between these two kinds of fandom and comics fandom lately, and there seems to be a great increase of media fen, and female media fen especially, branching out into comics. Multifannishness is becoming ever more inclusive (or so it seems to me, here on the sidelines.)

I think Livejournal is an important factor in this development - perhaps *the* most important factor. I remember that a few years ago most of the fannish users of LJ seemed to be fanfic-oriented media fen. But this really seems to have changed - nowadays, a lot of people who are affiliated more with "traditional" SF fandom are on LJ, too, and - even more recently, it seems to me - comics fandom has arrived here, too. And suddenly everybody gets to see everybody else's multifannish associations, and things just... open up...

fandom seems to have moved to livejournal almost completely, even for those things that aren't necessarily best served by LJ. In fact, very little except the pure socialising part of fandom - which is, of course, an important part, no contest about that! - is *really* best served by LJ. Forums are better suited for discussion, since they allow discussions to stay in the public eye, and thus stay *active* longer, whereas on LJ a discussion will drop off people's friends page pretty quickly, turning discussions into quick, transitory, blink-and-you'll-miss-them things. (Sure, those people who noticed and joined the discussion when it popped up on their friends page often keep at it for days - but on a forum, a new contributor might discover it months after it started, and bring it back to the top by posting to it, and *everyone who contributed until then would notice*, and the discussion would be revitalised. A good LJ discussion goes on for days; a good forum discussion can go on for months.) And archives are much more suited for presenting fan-made content, esp. fanfic, because they don't require the potential reader to first learn about the individual LJs of three or four dozen writers and then search those LJs for fic; also, archives usually allow searching for different categories of fic, *and* they keep stuff accessible. Etc.

But, my general reservations about fandom's near-complete move to LJ (and f-locked LJs, for that matter) aside, my issue here is mainly with fanfic. I find the posting of fic to LJ and *only* to LJ, as seems increasinbly the practice in fandom, a bit antisocial, to be honest. (After turning into one of the official naysayers of Life On Mars fandom, I am now working on discrediting myself in fandom at large... ;-)) And I don't *understand* the attitude behind it, either. I mean, *why* would people not want their fic to find the widest possible readership? And how can they not care if it will still be easily accessible to new readers in a year or two?

The cynical part of me can't help wondering if there's a tendency to move away from fandom as a community and treat it as merely a tool for instant, personal gratification. I.e. as soon as you've posted a fic to your LJ and received an amount of feedback for that fic, you move on to the next fic for which you will get feedback in turn, and old fics become uninteresting simply because they don't generate large amounts of feedback anymore - so why bother keeping them easily accessible? That readers who come into the fandom later might still want read those older fics just doesn't matter, because the gratification to the writer is negligible, and the reader's gratification simply doesn't figure into the equation.

As I said, it's the cynical part of me that came up with that explanation.

Well, no matter what the reasons, it seems to me that the decentralised, dispersed nature of fandom on LJ is a good way to make sure that, instead of amassing a wonderful, huge collective treasure of fanworks for 'later generations' of fen to discover and enjoy, most of our work will simply disappear into obscurity and relative 'un-findability' fairly soon after it's posted.

Am I the only one who finds that perspective a bit sad?

(Also, I dislike the tendency for fandom to happen in a - however slightly extended - big 'NOW' for the personal reason of often being stressed out of my mind. The fact that fandom - discussions, fics, everything - seems to happen so quickly now, and requires you to constantly stay on top of things because you'll never be able to *find* the good stuff again if you don't notice it immediately when it's posted is a considerable additional stress factor. Which is sad, because I'd much rather 'do' fandom at my leisure, and I'm a naturally slow person. So, instead of 'doing' fandom at my own pace, I tend to go into hyperactive fannish phases when I manage to keep up with things for a few months, and then drop out of everything completely for months in turn. Needless to say, that way I hardly know what's happening anymore, and miss most of the good fic, debate etc.)

I've been out of the meta game for ages, so I don't know if this has been discussed on metafandom, recently or at all. If anyone remembers related discussions and can point me there, that would be much appreciated. I'm mostly interested in the question of why people aren't interested in keeping stuff accessible, because that is something I really, truly do not 'get'. So, if anyone can explain that mindset to me... I'm really curious about it.

When cleaning up my old notes and paperwork recently, I found several abandoned drafts for - sadly unfinished - meta posts. I don't really have the time to clean them up and make them presentable (or add substance to the 'thinner' ones), but I also don't quite feel like simply throwing them away. So, maybe, I'll be posting a few of them here. Or at least I'll be posting one today. It's a - fairly unspectacular, really - bit of Methos meta, but I think it may actually be of some interest for Life on Mars fandom, too, as it deals with canon inconsistencies/insufficiencies and fannish reactions to those. Essentially, it's a bit like the 'canon vs. fanon' situation we have in LoM now, only that in LoM we're still struggling with declaring our mental independence from canon. HL fandom has a lot more practice in that department, as large parts of HL canon have sucked, or at least been severely disappointing, throughout the history of the franchise, and the fandom has been feverishly 'fixing' things for more than fifteen years now... (There's a difference, though, in the fact that the *majority* of HL fandom sees a need to fix things, whereas in LoM fandom only a very small minority feels that way.)

Anyway, this particular bit of meta is not really about the fixing of HL canon in general, but about one character who, arguably, is so very fascinating to fans because he was probably not planned but rather improvised by the writers, which shows in his characterisation... i.e., our fascination, and the fanon versions of his character that we love, are *based* heavily on the fact that *the source text is flawed*.

( Here goes the old, abandoned Methos meta. )

ETA: This really hardly even deserves the title 'draft'. It needs fleshing out, it needs structure, it needs lots of things... but I don't have the time.

ETA2: I think the point I was trying to make was that, no matter *how* we interpret him, a certain degree of 'fixing things' is always involved in developing a fannish relationship with Methos.

Gah. My brain is completely fried today. I need to think more about the parallels and differences here - because there *are* differences between the LoM and the HL situation, though I can't quite put my finger on them yet.