At 04:59 AM 2/10/01 +0000, Tavia Chalcraft wrote:
...We came to the conclusion that some of the problem might be that many fanfic writers spend a lot of time on the internet and so develop text-based ways of conveying emotion, including italics, ellipsis and emoticons, which they then find tricky to disgard when writing fiction.
I'm thinking maybe italics and ellipses might be particularly prevalent in the case of B7 fan-fictional dialogue because people unconsciously try and convey the rather theatrical way that the characters (and Avon particularly I think) tend to talk (whereas, for instance, in X-Files fan-fiction you'd probably get relatively few italics, but frequent overuse of the phrase "muttered flatly").
I find it hard to imagine how one would use emoticons in dialogue, though. "Vila, you're an idiot, colon hyphen right round bracket," Avon said.
(And, by the by, were any of said proofs connected to any paranoid types whose pseudonyms mean "trashy Victorian literature"?)
--Penny "Dave" Dreadful -- "It's still me, Mulder."