Fiona Moore wrote:
Exactly how *do* you regard canon, then?
I regard it as what we literally saw and heard on the show itself. Explanations of *why* so-and-so did such-and-such, what he was thinking or feeling, are interpretation, not canon.
If Blake reveals in the series that he is 34 at the time of "Breakdown", I may go away and write a story saying that he's 55 at the same time-- but it's not going to fit the canon, however good a story it is.
Well, if you came up with some reason for him to have *said* that he's 34, it would fit the canon because it would not contradict what happened on the show -- Blake said that he's 34. If you wrote a story where he actually *said*, at that point, that he was 55, then *that* would contradict canon and would hence be striking out into AU territory.
Just because you can cite canon for something doesn't mean the citation can withstand argument.
And coming up with an alternate explanation which you find more convincing doesn't mean that someone else's is invalid, either. Yours may not be more convincing to everyone, and it's still an *explanation* -- an interpretation. And interpretations vary between individuals. Some will be convincing to many more people than others, but there isn't a vote to determine one "correct" interpretation to which everyone is obligated to subscribe. No matter how much you support your own version, no matter how obviously "right" it seems to you, other people are *still* going to receive different impressions.
which can be both inferred from scenes in which the dialogue says that sexual interest is meant to be shown and extrapolated from there onto other scenes
"Inferred from." "Extrapolated." These are what I mean by personal interpretation.
"Possibility" and that other word you use, "potential," is a lot different from "canon."
Well, of course -- I was talking about what's being portrayed in fanfic, not about canon. I'm sorry that wasn't clear. Fanfic is an extrapolation from canon, and hence is concerned, by nature, with interpretations, possibilities and potentials *based* on canon.
Or, to get back to the slash front: as I said, yes, the slash interpretation can be made, has been made and will be made-- but retconning it back onto our screens is something else entirely.
I don't think I understand the phrase "retconning it back onto our screens". Clarify, please?
There's a very interesting passage in Bacon-Smith where she describes an older fan introducing a new one to a TV series, with OF talking to NF, telling her how to interpret what's on the screen.
Irrelevant, in my case, both as concerns B7 and my slash perceptions generally. I saw B7 years before I had any contact with other fans, and more years before I knew there was such a thing as slash fanfic for it -- by which time my own perceptions, which were based on my watching the show, all by my lonesome, were long since established. And as far as seeing slash elsewhere, I've been doing that virtually all my life (I can trace it back to age 5, which is about as early as I have coherent memories to draw from), and it wasn't until a few years ago that I had any idea other people did, too. That's around three decades of my forming very strong slash-type impressions, without any other fans telling me what to think. And then are all those pairings where I *don't* see slash, period, despite -- now -- having a lot of contacts in slash fandom who *do* see it.
Never said you were, but I'm also saying, 1) there is canon, and 2) that your interpretation is made within a particular social context.
I agree with both of those points -- though it sounded from the preceding paragraph like you might be making some mistaken assumptions about my own social context. Your interpretation, too, is made within *your* social context. But this is rather obvious, is it not?
If you'd like to play the game with me, you yourself can try and come up with a hard-evidence example of same-sex sexual interest by one of the principal characters on B7.
I don't understand at all what you're getting at here. There are lots of moments which strike me as slashy (forgive the shorthand), which probably *wouldn't* strike you that way, and which *canonically* consisted of, e.g., two characters looking at each other. Most, if not all, of them have undoubtedly been cited in the course of previous discussions. I don't know what you mean by a "hard-evidence example"; if you're asking for a mad, passionate clinch between two same-sex characters, we both know there wasn't such a thing in the series, so why ask? What is the object of this "game"? I'm missing something here, and I have an uneasy feeling you're assuming that I'm making some kind of claim that I'm *not* making... (I'm afraid Harriet may be quite right about alien mindsets.)
the world would be one denazification programme poorer.
And the shadow of Godwin looms... I was saying to myself only this morning that someone was going to invoke Godwin in this thread before very much longer (which indicates either that I am prescient or that I've been online *much* too long.) My comment was stating, very clearly and specifically, that fictional characters will be interpreted in different ways by different people, with no one interpretation being the single "correct" one. I believe taking it completely out of context to imply an "anything goes" attitude toward human actions, with gratuitous dragging in of a Nazi reference, is close enough to qualify for Godwin status, even if it doesn't strictly meet the criteria.
Well, I guess that's that, then. Thread over, thanks for playing. I've got a bunch of Eroica stuff to go work on, anyway.
- Lisa
-- Lisa Williams: lcw@dallas.net or lwilliams@raytheon.com Lisa's Video Frame Capture Library: http://framecaplib.com/ From Eroica With Love: http://eroicafans.org/