Avon was the source of one of the first great "stars found out they've been slashed" kerfluffle in fandom as I recall.

Really? I wondered if 'twere he. That's hilarious - he's unquestionably one of the most wonderfully omnisexual characters I've ever seen. Like Q, you get the distint impression that he would be snide and ruthless and nostril-flaringly Alpha male towards pretty much anyone with a pulse. Or indeed a big block of concrete. Which isn't to say that he'd have to be a top, mind you - that's a large part of his charm. He's all...ah, I could get carried away here. Ahem.

Still, I'm sorry he found it distressing. That's a real shame. I can understand someone being weirded out by it, but he's got his slashability setting permanently cranked up to the max, poor lamb. Ah well. (Incidentally, Hec, you may recall a long, long time ago that we had a rps discussion in which I was very self righteous? lest I forget to apologise, let me take this opportunity to point to my shiny hat of hypocricy. You were right.)

Got to love Blake's 7. In one of the tiny handful of episodes I've seen lately I was most pleased by the fact that Servelan and Tarran were trapped together on a hostile planet and evidently wound up having The Sex, and yet it was handled, dynamic-wise, in a way that I just can't imagine (modern? or US?) shows doing it. Love the female characters on B7 - they really are characters in their own right, as far as I can see, rather than the cyphers one generally got on STtos.

Also? Saw couple of eps of X Files t'other night. The COPS crossover was hilarious - I'd entirely forgotten about that episode and it made me want to hug GA and DD and everyone involved. But then it was followed by that Lara Croft episode, which was fun but inescapably also read like badfic, imho, and was riddled with needless distracting plot holes. Which, okay, it's The X Files and so the plausibility fairies are probably not going to be exactly in the building, but it could have still been a lot better. Sigh.

t OT

hit the wrong key and The Voice of Frodo just exclaimed breathily "I cannot do this alone!"...I may need to unTolkeinify my PC, actually, 'cause the sibilant whisper of "Mmmyyyy preccccioussssssssss" every time I shut the machine down is starting to scare me. On the other hand, Aragorn's "Are you frightened?" followed by Frodo's breathy little "Yes!" and Aragorn's "Not frightened enough" is...well, hot.

sigh.

Can anyone else hear the sound of Mr Tolkein spinning in his grave?

t /OT

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Still, I'm sorry he found it distressing.

To be fair, lots of fans of that era found slash distressing too. I think actors today grow up used to the idea and find it amusing/complimentary. The argument against slash was always "it's character rape" - or something similarly hysterical.

(Incidentally, Hec, you may recall a long, long time ago that we had a rps discussion in which I was very self righteous? lest I forget to apologise, let me take this opportunity to point to my shiny hat of hypocricy. You were right.)

I didn't think you were self-righteous. I thought you had well-articulated qualms about privacy and respecting the actor. However, I still stand in the corner of "subversive is more interesting" and "media images include fantasies about the performer sold as publicity." Once you step over the HoYay line you've already crossed the important line. Which is about you taking control (at least in your imagination) of the images you're being fed.

It all has to do with my epiphany while watching Fellini's 8 1/2. In that movie, Fellini mixes his personal history with memory with fiction with fantasy with the distancing character and all of them are projected on the same plane as equal within the film. What's the crit-speak? No image is more privileged than the other. It's also very J.G. Ballard - everything pouring out of your TV set and into your eyeballs is part of a media creation within which you exist. IRL it's a healthy sign of sanity that we can distinguish between the performer and the character. But the slipperier truth is that we experience both performer and character in the same media zone (unless you happen to know the performer personally).

Got to love Blake's 7. In one of the tiny handful of episodes I've seen lately I was most pleased by the fact that Servelan and Tarran were trapped together on a hostile planet and evidently wound up having The Sex, and yet it was handled, dynamic-wise, in a way that I just can't imagine (modern? or US?) shows doing it.

dash made the point that S6 Buffy/Spike also circled around unresolved ambiguities that was more like a European film than American TV.

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Had Tolkien had a computer, I feel sure he'd have had "A Elbereth Gilthoniel!" or a like Elvish verse as his start-up sound.

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Had Tolkien had a computer, I feel sure he'd have had "A Elbereth Gilthoniel!" or a like Elvish verse as his start-up sound.

*g* Yep, most likely. Probably not so much the snippets of dialogue that led to porny thoughts of pervy hobbit fancying, though. (Although Sam'll kill him if he tries anything. And he's still not king...)

Sigh. The internet doesn't need any Moloch to make it a corrupter. It does a smashing job all on its own.

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It's interesting to think how some pre-computer era writers would have related to the Internet -- Tolkien did enjoy free-wheeling literary discussions. H.P. Lovecraft would have taken to newsgroup discussion like a fish to water. The Bronte sisters (and brother) did RPF as their juvenalia, including the Duke of Wellington....

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wrod.

The Bronte sisters (and brother) did RPF as their juvenalia, including the Duke of Wellington

Heck, all their shared world fantasy stuff was Internetalicious. They were totally fictastic.

And this afternoon I wept my way through most of Shadowlands, and was very struck by "we read to know we are not alone". I think Lewis might have liked the Internet too. Possibly. Or not. But certainly that whole touching-somebody-else's-thoughts thing that you have with this style of discourse (without the same layers that tend to interfere with face to face interaction) is a lot closer to the intimacy of the printed page.

t /pretentious.

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Wrod sandwich on that, Fay.

The only thing I'd like to graft from Windows to my Mac is the startup sound bit.

Ooh, I'd love to have this RPF discussion again, but I'm bone tired. Let me just say:

However, I still stand in the corner of "subversive is more interesting" and "media images include fantasies about the performer sold as publicity."

And I see this point; but I still think that there must be an invisible line drawn between Alyson Hannigan the marketed image (object) and Alyson Hannigan the person; and I would be comfortable reading fiction about Alyson Hannigan the object, except for the part where they have the same exact name. That's really the problem, for me. And they wear the same clothes, most of the time; and they wear the same makeup. Alyson Hannigan the object and Alyson Hannigan the person are so closely related that sometimes it is impossible to say when it's AHtO and AHtP-- when the text you're travestying is a marketed image belonging to AH, her publicist, and her stylist; or the text is a mind just like your own.

I mean, when I dress up and go to a reading, I'm a professionalized object. I'm aware of that, and I know it's necessary for my profession (any profession!), and I like it. I like the feeling that I'm being looked at and measured up and listened to, just like every other writer in the room. I even use a professional name (my baptised name, but not how I think of myself, internally; Hec knows an embarassing amount about my name/identity ideas....) to mark my professional-object self and her work.

But I don't want people writing fic about Lauren Rile Smith. She's my creation, just the way Catharine (a character from a story I wrote) is. And just as Catharine did and does, she grew out of parts of my mind, and she lives in me. But she lives in me much more closely than Catharine does. We have the same face. To the majority of people that I know, she's all they know of me-- they don't know me at all; they know her and she speaks for me to them. How would they even distinguish between writing fic about *me* me, inner me, and Lauren Rile Smith me?

Do you see what I mean? I say that there is a distinction between the person and the marketed persona, just as (as I read him) Hec does; but I draw the line before it. It's okay to write fic about Joss Whedon's creations. It's not okay to write fic about Joss Whedon's inner self; and it's not okay to write fic about Joss Whedon's public self.

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I use a simple rule: how would I feel if it were me? I wouldn't care if someone wrote fiction about a character I play, or even a character I wrote. Or rather it might be more accurate to say that I wouldn't feel as proprietary about a character. But it would bother me a great deal if someone wrote a work of fiction in which I became a character she created. So that is where my boundary is set.

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... or, more briefly, who hasn't happened to know a famous person, and thereby become sort of protective of that person? I'm pretty parsimonious -- or, where parsimony is concerned, I err on the side of carefulness -- in my application of ethical rules; since I feel that way about a couple of people I went to school with, I feel that way about all famous people.

Of course, that wont' stop me from telling true stories about the famous people I went to school with. Heh heh heh.

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I'm with Nutty. I can't bear the idea of someone writing stories about me, but more viscerally, I'm appalled by the idea of someone ficcing Leslie Hope. And, by extension, Benjamin Bratt gets the same protection.

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