--- Fiona Moore wrote: >
-Avon and Blake are in love, or at least in lust, with each other
Nope. Although I am reminded of one of the lines on the Evil Overlord website. "If a young couple come to town I will have them observed. If they are quite happy together I will ignore them. If they spend all their time insulting each other except when they are saving each others life when there are definite moments of sexual chemistry between them I will have them killed". Delete the word "sexual" from that and it's not a bad description.
Now, every fandom has its version of this (for DW fans it seems to be things like: "Genesis of the Daleks, The Curse of Fenric etc. were great, The Daemons is shite...
Blatant plagiarism of Quatermass and the Pit for my money, but quite entertaining none the less.
However, dissenting opinions *are* automatically assumed to be the "minority opinion" which isn't always true (as we've seen in the case of the Deliverance thread, in which a *lot* of people outed themselves as dislikers of Deliverance).
I'm slightly puzzled by this. I don't recall anyone suggesting that anyone else was wrong, merely by dint of being in a minority. I don't propose to go through a line by line exegesis of the entire thread, but as far as I can recall offence was generally caused by people not being prepared to (or being percieved as not being prepared to) accept that anyone who disagreed with them had a valid point of view.
My point is that all of these things *could be* the subject for debate, but they're *not* debated, and when you do, it stirs up hornets' nests.
Well you can't have it both ways.
Or becomes a non-starter. About a year ago I tried raising the "Blake is a noble idealist..." bit, and got a bit of decent debate out of it, followed by several posts reading "Oh, you'll never change my opinion of Blake! He's my fave..." (which falls kind of close to what I was talking about on the thread-hijacking thread).
Since I signed up to the Lyst about a month ago Deliverance and h/c have both been debated at length and I distinctly recall a lengthy debate about Blake's character the last time I was subscribed to the Lyst. Avon and Servalan, I imagine, wouldn't provoke a great deal of debate as the evidence is there in Deathwatch and Aftermath - although you've provoked a couple of posts neither of which were of the "Isn't Avon cute" variety.
Similarly, I've heard from other people that when a line in "Mark of Kane" suggested (didn't state, just *suggested,* since there's no reason to assume Tando was telling the truth) that Gan might have had a dark and evil side, a lot of people reacted with shock, dismay and denials in the letters-of-comment in Horizon instead of discussing the evidence pro and con.
I first watched this episode with my Dad when I was eight. When I asked for an explanation as to what was going on (having missed the first 15 minutes), Dad had missed some vital piece of exposition and concluded that Gan was a homicidal lunatic, hence the limiter. Not canon, of course, but we only have Gan's word in Time Squad and he might have lied to protect himself.
Again, this happens in other fandoms too (a gentle and well-spoken Old Oxonian friend of mine got savaged online last year for suggesting, with evidence, that Genesis of the Daleks was two episodes too long).
Pesky Cambridge graduates get everywhere :)
It also happens professionally (I regularly take stick in departmental seminars for suggesting that Levi-Strauss was not the recipient of some sort of divine revelation). So maybe it's part of human nature-- but part of *my* nature is to treat any sacred cow (sorry Neil) with suspicion.
Quite right too ! But I would suggest that sacred bovicide is not as uncommon on this Lyst as you imply :)
Stephen.
____________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.co.uk address at http://mail.yahoo.co.uk or your free @yahoo.ie address at http://mail.yahoo.ie