From: Lisa Williams lcw@dallas.net
No, but they're not gay.
Your personal interpretation of the characters has been duly noted.
Actually, since I put in a lot of work on this :), I feel obliged to point out that there's more than just personal interpretation at issue here. Last month Steve, Betty and I spent a long time hashing out the evidence from canon with regard to the principal characters' sexual orientations, and came up with a solid straight in all cases (except Blake, and with him the balance of evidence was for straight--and the only reason for the doubt was because of the fact that the way the series was written in Series 1 and 2 left much less room for sexual themes than later on). Now, before you go accusing me of being anti-slash and Puritanical, I have to say that nobody on that particular thread, least of all me, was saying that people therefore shouldn't write slash-- just that there *is* evidence from canon for the characters' sexual orientations, they're not just blank slates.
If you want to read the argument, I suggest you look in the archive under "Fiona+Betty+slash" or something similar. I can hash it all out again but I think it might bore people.
Fiona
The Posthumous Memoirs of Secretary Rontane Available for public perusal at http://nyder.r67.net
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Fiona Moore wrote:
Last month Steve, Betty and I spent a long time hashing out the evidence from canon with regard to the principal characters' sexual orientations,
I know; I was here throughout the whole interminable business.
just that there *is* evidence from canon for the characters' sexual orientations, they're not just blank slates.
Sure; I have no quarrel with that -- but they're not writ in stone, either. I also note that different people received different impressions, and the whole lot could cite canon (generally along the lines of "He did this, which could mean that") in their favor. Only the "he did this" is canon. What it means is personal interpretation. There are people who can see possibilities for pairings (het or slash) which I find totally unbelievable, and those who can't see the ones that I'm willing to accept. When I see slash potential for a particular pair, it isn't something I'm inventing out of whole cloth and imposing on an unyielding framework, for whatever bizarre purpose -- if that were true, I'd be able to see a lot more pairings than I do (and would find them a whole lot less interesting.) If I see it, it's because it's blatantly obvious to me, not because I'm making an effort to twist things. There are cases where I can *intellectually* understand how other people are arriving at a slash interpretation, but I just don't *feel* it myself and hence don't find it believable -- and there are cases where it leaps up and hits me right in the face. Nor can I tell you exactly why, barring a few conditions I've managed to figure out. Either I see it, or I don't. I don't expect other people to regard things the same way I do, but I do expect them to realize that these are *fictional* characters and open to *multiple* interpretations, no single one of which is the One True Way.
- Lisa
-- Lisa Williams: lcw@dallas.net or lwilliams@raytheon.com Lisa's Video Frame Capture Library: http://framecaplib.com/ From Eroica With Love: http://eroicafans.org/
Re what Lisa calls:
the whole interminable business.
(and I agree with most of what she said)
I have been thinking on this interminable business as I stared out my insomnia, and have come to the conclusion that it is not actually impossible for Fiona and me to discuss it (which is why I have said very little), because our mindsets are completely alien to one another. It is not merely a question of how we interpret the series, it is a question of how we think it can be interpreted. Fiona, as far as I can make out, believes that an objective viewing of Blake's 7 is not merely possible, but easily defined, and can be separated from interpretations built upon it. I can't even imagine such a possibility, and therefore perceive every account as interpretation influenced by the individual viewer. All the things which she sees as evidence mounting up to proof (eg comments of writers and actors, individual gay people, fans in general), I see as interesting pieces of information to sift through and accept as enriching my interpretation - or reject as not. That doesn't mean that anyone else should pick and choose the same pieces of information, because I regard all interpretations as subjective. Consequently, I am often baffled by attempts to "prove" an argument. I read such debates in order to sift through other people's ideas and see what I'd like to add to my account. But it begins to seem that in some cases it's impossible to discuss this, because such discussion keeps falling back on an appeal to common ground which doesn't appear to exist.
None of which will stop me defending a tribe-member in any Blues War - we'll merely have to work out some sort of code for emergency communication...
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Fiona Moore -
Harriet Monkhouse -
Lisa Williams