Fiona wrote:

Me too. But what you also get is: [likewise, hypothetical example only]:

Person A: I think Blake is gay. Person B: Why do you think that? Person A: [cites a whole list of scenes]. Person B: Oh but... [goes through the same list of scenes, pointing out the dubiousness of each as evidence] Person A: Oh, but I'm not trying to make *you* believe it!

Which as I said is a hypothetical example-- but that's why I sometimes mutter about moving goalposts.

Yeah, this is exactly the sort of thing I was thinking of when I said (in one of my later posts) that it can look to an "approach #1" type that an "approach #2" type is engaging in an analytical "approach #1"-type discussion and then trying to back out of it. When what person A might *think* she's doing is simply explaining where she got her own interpretion from. Like I said, cross purposes.

(This may vary for specific values of Person A and Person B, of course. :))

<snipping for length reasons. Hope you don't mind. If you do, I'll requote it back in the next post in full... :)>

No prob.

OK, calming down a bit now myself, too, and I think you're right-- some of the people on this thread *have* been arguing at cross purposes. So what it all boils down to is: there's canon and there's exercises in imagination which refer to the canon without particularly feeling required to stick to it?

Well, that and there are different notions of what "sticking to canon" means. For many, that just means not contradicting canon in a blatant and un-work-around-able way.

To make sure I've understood, I'll refer back to the The Web example. So person B would say "yep, Blake and Avon at loggerheads again," and person A would say "but if you imagine they were lovers, then *hmmm*..."

More or less, I think. Person A might even put it more strongly, something like "Well, in my version of B7, they are lovers, so given that what's really going on here must be..." Etc., etc. That "in my version" is crucial, though, because it recognizes that that's not a take on things that is inevitably, logically, deducable from canon, but rather one that's a product of the unique interaction between viewer and canon.

If I've got it right (and I hope I have), then like I said to Steve, fair enough :).

Yeah, I think there's really a lot less actual *disagreement* here than would first appear, and that the conflict really boils down to a simple difference in approach. But then, I think that's true for 99% of intellectual conflicts, really...

(do you know, I can now quote whole swatches of 'Hostage' ? And it's YOUR fault :)...).

:)

But as I said before, that's a side issue from trying to map one of those hypothetical points back onto the canon... which I think we've argued into the ground :).

Yeah. :)

-- Betty Ragan ** bragan@nrao.edu ** http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~bragan Not speaking for my employers, officially or otherwise. "Seeing a rotten picture for the special effects is like eating a tough steak for the smothered onions..." -- Isaac Asimov