Posts by Emma Hart
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Megan Wegan,
Yeah, no, like I say, I didn't mean to diss the genre. I actually am interested in why I'm just not interested in it.
Sorry, we posted at the same time, but yeah, that was why I asked the question. If it's not a question of quality or originality, then why? I think it's a really interesting question. Whedon himself has said, for instance, that Angel/Spike is canon, but because he was working on network television, he could never make that clear. On television in particular, the "author's" ideal intentions can be really constrained, particularly (until quite recently) in portraying sexual same-sex relationships.
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Megan Wegan,
Or, maybe, it's just that I tend to think, if you're gonna write, come up with your own characters and backstory.
But then why not "If you're going to write, come up with your own world, your own society, your own environment"? If it's a matter of quality or originality rather than copyright.
It's probably snobbery, but I care what Joss wants to do with the characters and the story, not what someone else does.
But you know (committing a little heresy here) that Joss didn't actually WRITE most of the scripts for his shows, right? nor create a lot of the minor characters? If you want a job as a screenwriter, one of the things you need to produce is an original script for a show that already exists. They need to see that you can stick to an existing canon, capture the feel of a show, and also do something new and different with it. Everyone writing on every TV show you watch has done that. How is it different from fanfic?
Now just like Lucy I'm not saying you can't not like it, that'd be ridiculous. I think one of the hardest things to understand is the appeal of other people's hobbies. But "I don't get it" doesn't mean it's dumb, or lacking in artistic merit.
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Megan Wegan,
So, at what point does it stop being homage, and start being Fanfic, though? I hate those books that are like "let's take a famous novel and make a sequel to it.
And so do I, which is interesting because I do wonder why: they can't all be badly written. I think, with something like Scarlett, and the inevitable Jane Austen "sequels", the originals have been around on their own for so long that everyone has their own idea in their head of what happens next, what the characters would or wouldn't do, and something in the "sequels" is going to be wrong. Also, as a writer of something like that, do you use your own natural style, or try desperately to emulate that of the previous author?
We have two sister sites on our writing boards: Bardic Web and PanHistoria. Fanfic is banned on BW and pretty much a free-for-all on Pan. And the historical fiction? Is on Pan. We get the same problems as we do with the fanfic. People argue over the canon (the existing works or the historical record), over who gets to write the fun characters (Captain Jack, Queen Elizabeth I, same problem), over what they would or wouldn't do. At BW we only allow people to write fictional characters in an historical context, which cuts down (but doesn't eliminate) the bullshit.
Shakespeare and fanfic? Richard III. Pretty much entirely fiction. Politically-motivated defamatory fiction at that.
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I think we may need to send Emma a therapy bill
As I've previously said, my therapist's name is Ms Tanqueray. Take it up with her.
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to 3410,
Shippy, from shipping. And I believe we're building that glossary right here.
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to 3410,
Cis - born with your physical (external) and mental (internal) genders matching, as opposed to trans*.
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
To clarify, are we talking *actual* paedophilia, or US-style anyone-under-eighteen-constitutes-child-porn "paedophilia"? Because that word gets thrown around a lot more than it needs to be.
Yeah, if we could maintain a distinction between paedophilia and pederasty, that'd be nice.
I am surprised by the involvement (or rather predominance?) of straight cis women who enjoy writing about/drawing nominally heterosexual fictional cis male characters having sexual relationships with each other.
I asked my friend Ryan about this once (though, bear in mind, she's not straight-cis, she's gender-queer) and she said something which I then ran across again in Russell Davies' Writer's Tale. The idea is basically that boy-meets-girl stories have been done to death. All you have to do to signal a straight pairing in a tv show is to have one character of each gender and stand them next to each other - because also, men and women can't be friends. With LGBT pairings, the stories are fresh and new.
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"Girls don't come this way."
tee-hee.
If this EXTREMELY TRUE THING - "your opinion does not qualify you to speak for all of us" - was more widely accepted, I think 75% of women opinion columnists might be out of a job.
Also, my blood pressure would drop considerably. I just... I DON'T get the weird acceptance of the idea that women don't like sex. It makes no sense at all. Do these people think women don't masturbate? (or, only do it in a loving, relationshippy context after taking themselves out to dinner?)
And no, I'm not saying all women like sex. I'm not saying that, okay?
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it's the fine print in the Mark Sheppard Full Employment Act
Tangentially, our viewing lately has consisted of rewatching Battlestar Galactica with the children, and the new series of Doctor Who. I love Mark Sheppard and his stunning ubiquity.
(Kids are now on to Dollhouse, otherwise known as "Hey, look who it is!")
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Tom Beard,
I've always wondered if the casting in this was just Russell T Davies saying to fandom, "Oh yeah? What you gonna do now?"