Dana Wrote:
Neil, entering the dialogue between Shane and me:
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:)
Oscar Wilde said that when he was traveling through the mining camps, he saw a sign in a saloon: "Don't shoot the piano player, he is doing the
best
he can." He said it was the only honest art criticism he had ever seen. No matter what the effect was, I'm pretty sure they were trying to appeal to that section of the audience that likes watching attractive women in outfits from the Reduced Wardrobe Company.
You don't watch too many other series I take it. By the standards of ST:TOS, Lexx, Farscape and mid-eighties Doctor Who, Jenna, Cally and company may as well be wearing Victorian ballgowns.
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?
...of course there are other constituencies in the audience as well.
Who shouldn't be ignored.
Plenty of reasons to go for slash, really. If anything it's amazing het gets a look in.
Except that I'd guess that nearly all slashwriters have had the experience of being women having sex with men (even if they later gave it up as a bad job), so they have recent or more remote experiences to work from.
That _does_ make the dominance of slash surprising. Never thought of it like that.
No doubt there are Six Degrees of Mary Sue (like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon) but the most direct seems to be the combination of the author's idealized self with her favorite character. The culture of LOCing fiction seems to be nearly always positive and encouraging, so the fear of being hooted at for overt Mary-Sueing doesn't seem to be a valid one.
It's interesting, since Mary Sue is an idealised version of the writer, that slash art consists of idealised versions of the actors.
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...
You have to care in the first place, and I've never been able to think of anything really interesting for either Jenna or Cally.
Yes, but you're just one writer (although a prolific one)... what about the others?
And this from the only person in world history to write three--THREE--Blake/Servalans.
Impressive.
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.
"R is no worse than S" is not always an endorsement--it depends on how bad S is.
No, but it puts things in perspective, doesn't it?
Shane
"Og, you sure are a big boy" --Dayna
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On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 11:30:43PM +0000, Shane Little wrote:
Dana Wrote:
No matter what the effect was, I'm pretty sure they were trying to appeal to that section of the audience that likes watching attractive women in outfits from the Reduced Wardrobe Company.
You don't watch too many other series I take it. By the standards of ST:TOS, Lexx, Farscape and mid-eighties Doctor Who, Jenna, Cally and company may as well be wearing Victorian ballgowns.
LOL! You're right. Leela's skimpy leather outfit springs immediately to mind.
Kathryn Andersen -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- "I'm glad to see you haven't been wasting your time on frivolities." -- Kerr Avon to Jenna Stannis (Blake's 7: Cygnus Alpha [A3])
From: Shane Little littles@angelfire.com
You don't watch too many other series I take it. By the standards of
ST:TOS,
Lexx, Farscape and mid-eighties Doctor Who, Jenna, Cally and company may
as
well be wearing Victorian ballgowns.
I wouldn't go as far as to make presumptions about Dana's viewing habits, but Shane's basically right. The costumes for the female regulars were, on the whole, neither particularly figure-hugging nor particularly revealing. The main exceptions would be Servalan (principally 3rd/4th Season) and Dayna (3rd Season). Jenna might have 'accidentally' exposed a bit of cleavage on occasion (though I had to have that pointed out to me), but not terribly often. Cally didn't, but then she didn't exactly have much to expose. Guest characters ran the whole gamut, from the distinctly underclad (eg Inga, Avalon) to the sensibly fully-attired (Lurena, Anna, Tyce etc).
Neil