Dana said:
Yes, but the audience of a boyband and of Blakes' 7 are different, and receive each in different ways. The sole aim of a boyband is to appeal to the lusts of teenage girls (boys too, but that seems to be a sideline :)) and get them to part with money for CDs, posters, concerts etc. While some people may watch Blakes' 7 for the tight leather trousers alone, I very much doubt that this was its producers' sole aim, and a lot of people do watch it for the ideas, the dialogue, the characterisation, the shoot-em-up bits. The demographic of Blakes' 7 fandom has also changed over the years, and this is also interesting.
I hope you're not referring to Servalan, Cally, Dayna and Jenna by that statement-- they do a lot more than look good in jumpsuits. Especially Servalan (jumpsuits? Her? _Dah_ling, _please_!).
Yes, which still makes me wonder why the gay version is seen to be the dominant one (whether or not it in fact is).
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...
at
all (including yourself, I might add). I was talking about frustrated
fans
of whatever gender, fixated on an actor of whatever gender, which, even if
it
This came in when Leah brought the conversation off on a tangent about sexual obsession with actors, so yes, it is a side point (or a red herring). But it can be relevant because if we're talking about fanfic as an outlet for unrequited lust, it can (I repeat, it _can_, not that it inevitably will) fuel that obsession.
modes
of treatment, sure. Now, what does this have to do with whether my next story is about Avon pushing Travis over a cliff, Avon and Travis making
love
in the jacuzzi of the Fanficcea Hilton, or Servalan opening a charity bazaar?
Nothing at all.
Shane
"One more death should do it" --Avon
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Shane replying to Dana replying to Shane:
There are a number of strong female roles in Blakes 7. Servalan,
Cally,
Dayna, Jenna etc...
There are a lot of underwritten roles for women who look good in tight jumpsuits.
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:)
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?
combination,
but there are more than that).
True enough, at least while Steve Rogerson's around. Like Han Solo, he can imagine quite a lot.
Yes, which still makes me wonder why the gay version is seen to be the dominant one (whether or not it in fact is).
I don't know the proportion of het to slash, and it would be interesting to know. I perceive slash as being the commoner of the two, but that's just a perception. Anyone got any stats?
Why m:m slash? Probably simply because most fanfic, and virtually all adult fic, is written by women, who aren't on the whole terribly interested in other women (there are exceptions, though even they seem to like m:m at least as much as f:f, if not more so).
As to why slash rather than het: there are a number of reasons, though different writers are probably directed by different combinations of them. Possible reasons might be: *underwriting of the female characters *intensity of interaction between male leads (with or without positive gaydar reading) *failure of writer identification with female leads *deliberate subversion of genre conventions (romanticisation of action/adventure, feminisation of male-oriented culture product) *non-development of sexual relationships (gay or straight) within the show *writer identification with one of the male leads *male lead used for Mary-Sueing *two men better than one *no female competition
Plenty of reasons to go for slash, really. If anything it's amazing het gets a look in.
Again, why? Why do women, in your opinion, find it difficult to
identify
with Jenna or Cally?
Because the scripts give them so little background and so little to do
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...
Except that fan writers, on the whole, seem to prefer not to do that if they can avoid it.
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.
OTOH, I'd agree with Dana that the women were generally underwritten and given less than their fair slice of the action.
Neil
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.
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.
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. 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.
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. And this from the only person in world history to write three--THREE--Blake/Servalans.
"R is no worse than S" is not always an endorsement--it depends on how bad S is.
-(Y)
In message 004d01c0b32e$b24e0920$e535fea9@neilfaulkner, Neil Faulkner N.Faulkner@tesco.net writes
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?
I really ought to respond to all of this post, in a thoughtful manner, but I've got mental indigestion from spending the last couple of hours reading over a week's worth of Lyst, so I shall merely point out that there were *two* people on the Liberator dressed in skin-tight red leather, and the reason I only mention one of them on a frequent basis is that I'm straight.
----- Original Message ----- From: Neil Faulkner N.Faulkner@tesco.net
Why m:m slash? Probably simply because most fanfic, and virtually all
adult
Not disagreeing with the main point-- but I must admit that it puzzles me mightily that women who prefer women would prefer male/male erotica.
OTOH, some of those could be good reasons to go for *het,* too; esp. re non-development of sexual relationships, subversion of genre conventions-- I'd argue that a male-male relationship may not be the best way to feminise the action-adventure genre, and in fact may even *reinforce* the inherent masculinity of the genre, by failing to allow for a female voice within it and reinforcing the stereotype of action-adventure being a boys-only game (albeit one with sex in).
Similarly, I have no trouble identifying with many of the female characters (Maximum Power-- ahem, sorry, got a bit carried away there), and while I respect Dana's opinion, I doubt I'm the only one-- matter of taste. IMO it's more understandable in a series like Star Trek, with a dearth of strong women and a surfeit of sensitive males.
In fact, I'm at least partly inclined to view Star Trek as one of the reasons behind the popularity of slash. Star Trek fandom appears to be the dominant form of media fandom at the moment, and from what I can tell the slash genre seems to have originated in Star Trek fanzines. Furthermore, Bacon-Smith's raw data suggests that the transference of slash to B7 fandom occurred at least partly from the influx of Star Trek fans into its fandom (in America anyway), and her interviews with fans suggest that many of them analogise B7 to ST-- likening Avon to Spock, for instance, and referring to the Liberator crew as "ship personell," etc. Now, I'm not denying that slash in B7 has taken on a life of its own, but there may be an element, at least initially, of shall we say thematic transference.
As for the explanation from male relationships in the series-- frankly, after having spent the last two weeks of February going over and over the videotape looking for evidence of sexual suggestion, gay *or* straight, and coming up with nothing but straight for all the principals (anyone who missed that argument and wants the evidence can go to the archive and search recent posts for Fiona+Betty+slash-- I ain't reiteratin' it here), I'm likewise surprised at the dominance of m:m slash (I agree that the reasons from the psychology of the fanfic writer which you cite are valid ones, but not the ones from activities in the series itself).
So would I-- but relatively speaking, they get a lot more to do than any SF female character before the Buffy/Xena era.
Fiona
The Posthumous Memoirs of Secretary Rontane Available for public perusal at http://nyder.r67.net
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From: Fiona Moore nydersdyner@yahoo.co.uk
the
Slashing the characters feminises the characters, not the genre, in my experience. The inherent masculinity might be reinforced but it is also altered. And it's sex, not action-adventure, that becomes a boys-only game, and one with precious little action-adventure in it.
Almost as if rebellion or revolution were perceived to be mutually incompatible with sexual relations. I detect the implication that anything outside relationships is seen to be somehow asexual and sterile or even antisexual, whi strikes me as depressingly reactionary.
Neil
game,
and one with precious little action-adventure in it.
AVON: Time and again I've longed for adventure, Something to make my heart beat the faster. What did I long for? I never really knew. Gazing at you, I've found my adventure. Touching your hand, my heart beats the faster. All that I want, in all this world is...you.
-(Y)
From: Dana Shilling dshilling@worldnet.att.net
Very nice, but does it hold true? Some people at least with a genuine relish for adventure find that they neither need nor want relationships, since no relationship could ever make the heart beat fast enough. For those people, some things really are better than sex. Those that try to juggle both ends often find that excitement and adventure wins out.
Whether or not Avon is one of them is nothing more than a matter of personal preference.
Neil (catching up on the backlog after a long weekend of Bloody Hard Work)
Neil said:
those
personal
preference.
I don't think that canon depicts Avon as a person with any particular interest in adventure--he ended up there, more or less by accident, as an unwanted byproduct of his devoted interest in the Federation Banking Cartel's assets. (And he spends Harvest of Kairos chatting with a rock and repairing the lunar module instead of buccaneering.)
I suspect that the majority of fictional characters are interested in both adventure and sex--which tends to make the author's work easier.
-(Y)
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Dana Shilling -
Fiona Moore -
Julia Jones -
Neil Faulkner -
Shane Little