Shane replying to Dana replying to Shane:
There are a number of strong female roles in Blakes 7. Servalan,
Cally,
Dayna, Jenna etc...
There are a lot of underwritten roles for women who look good in tight jumpsuits.
I hope you're not referring to Servalan, Cally, Dayna and Jenna by that statement-- they do a lot more than look good in jumpsuits. Especially Servalan (jumpsuits? Her? _Dah_ling, _please_!).
I'm with Shane on this one. Costumes for the women were pretty much on a par with those for the men. Most of them were bloody awful:)
As for tightness of garb, wasn't it a person of the male phenotype who got to wear the close-fitting pantalons rouges of tanned hide?
Read enough fanfic, and you'll find stories about any mathematically factorable combination of characters (I was going to say any imaginable
combination,
but there are more than that).
True enough, at least while Steve Rogerson's around. Like Han Solo, he can imagine quite a lot.
Yes, which still makes me wonder why the gay version is seen to be the dominant one (whether or not it in fact is).
I don't know the proportion of het to slash, and it would be interesting to know. I perceive slash as being the commoner of the two, but that's just a perception. Anyone got any stats?
Why m:m slash? Probably simply because most fanfic, and virtually all adult fic, is written by women, who aren't on the whole terribly interested in other women (there are exceptions, though even they seem to like m:m at least as much as f:f, if not more so).
As to why slash rather than het: there are a number of reasons, though different writers are probably directed by different combinations of them. Possible reasons might be: *underwriting of the female characters *intensity of interaction between male leads (with or without positive gaydar reading) *failure of writer identification with female leads *deliberate subversion of genre conventions (romanticisation of action/adventure, feminisation of male-oriented culture product) *non-development of sexual relationships (gay or straight) within the show *writer identification with one of the male leads *male lead used for Mary-Sueing *two men better than one *no female competition
Plenty of reasons to go for slash, really. If anything it's amazing het gets a look in.
Again, why? Why do women, in your opinion, find it difficult to
identify
with Jenna or Cally?
Because the scripts give them so little background and so little to do
I don't think that's true. As for the background, can't you always invent some? The less you're constrained by background, the more you can make
up...
Except that fan writers, on the whole, seem to prefer not to do that if they can avoid it.
I would disagree with Dana that the female characters had relatively underdeveloped backgrounds. Blake and Avon might have got more than most, but we probably know at least as much about Cally and Jenna as we do about Vila and Tarrant, and no more about Gan than we do about Soolin.
OTOH, I'd agree with Dana that the women were generally underwritten and given less than their fair slice of the action.
Neil