----- Original Message ----- From: Tavia Chalcraft tavia@btinternet.com
You could think of it like going down the pub and starting out having intelligent conversations, which gradually get sillier as people get tired or merry.
Now, what bothers me personally about serious (like Neil I'd avoid the word "intelligent") conversations going silly is that often it's not a natural progression, it's a hijacking. To give a (semi-)fictitious example, some people can be having a discussion on, say, themes of class struggle in "Weapon," and then somebody else, who hasn't participated at all up until this point, will launch in and say "Ooh, I think Carnell's accent is dead sexy! What's everyone else think?" And there's the whole prospect of further serious discussion gone to pot.
I'm not sure how much of what people see as H/C today was intended to be seen as such by the
writers-- *I* think very little. And I don't think it was ever intended
to
be the focal point of the
episodes.
But that's what fanfiction's all about, filling out areas or ideas that aren't explored in detail in the series.
Now I like that aspect of it. A lot. But I also like them to keep to the same sort of tone as the series. What grates on me is not, say, someone writing a story where the relationship between Avon and Blake is explored, it's when it's explored by having them make long impassioned emotional speeches while staring into each other's eyes. I'd have no objection to the relationship between Buffy and Angel being explored in this way, cos over the course of that series they *do* have impassioned emotional discussions while in a clinch. But not Blake and Avon.
I imagine some of the episodes were written against tight deadlines and
the
writers had little time to explore the subtexts in what they were writing. (I seem to recall you arguing the precise opposite of this with respect to Deliverance, rockets, phallic symbols and the like. But I, for one, don't wish to get into that argument.)
Dunno about her, but *I* was arguing precisely that-- that the subtext in Deliverance was there because the writer didn't sit down and think through what he was conveying.
Fiona
The Posthumous Memoirs of Secretary Rontane Available for public perusal at http://nyder.r67.net
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