----- Original Message ----- From: Mistral mistral@centurytel.net
Actually to me it sounds ironic. Wendy expressed a view of Deliverance
quite
different from the Gospel According to Lysator, and, good heavens, she
got
attacked for it. So did Neil, Dana and I for agreeing with her. Under
those
circumstances, I'd be a bit bitter too...
Well, this just proves how differently people can see things. You and Neil got _disagreed_ with. _Debated_. (Can't recall about Dana, but I'd be surprised to find anybody attacked her.) Sometimes you both got agreed with, even by those of us who don't agree with the basic premise
- I could have 'me tooed' large chunks of Neil's posts, but he'd already
said it better than I could have, so why bother?
We got disagreed with and debated, true, but sometimes the disagreeing got more than a little heated. I also found it kind of insulting when, after constructing a carefully thought-out argument with examples from the episode (and I'd watched it specially for that purpose), some people came on to say "Oh, that's just your *opinion,*" which made me wonder why I'd bothered to find all those supporting examples.
. ISTM the only thing that's
been clearly demonstrated is that we all have different ideas of what constitutes good debate etiquette - there is no Gospel According to Lysator.
I wasn't actually referring to debate ettiquette when I spoke of the Gospel. I mean that there are certain opinons which appear to be taken as the "mainstream opinion" on the Lyst. For instance:
-Deliverance is a great story and shows Avon in his best light [I think this one's changed status now, but for a long time this was held to be true] -Avon and Blake are in love, or at least in lust, with each other -Same goes for Avon and Servalan -Blake is a noble idealist whose singlemindedness frequently blinds him to other people's needs, making him cold and insensitive -H/C fiction is a great way of exploring the more intimate side of a character, and neither it nor slash particularly offend anyone -Women find brooding, soulful-eyed men inherently sexy -The female characters on B7 are all positive role models
(etc....)
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... Colin Baker's Doctor was shite and Tom Baker's bloody brilliant... the TARDIS is a living entity..."). I am also not saying that there isn't some justification in-series or in fandom for any of these opinions (Blake *can* be seen as a driven man, e.g.), or that dissenting opinions are automatically squashed (I regularly note that I don't happen to find brooding men attractive, and nobody has suggested that I'm misguided thus far :)). 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).
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. 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). 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.
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). 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.
Fiona
The Posthumous Memoirs of Secretary Rontane Available for public perusal at http://nyder.r67.net
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