(no subject)

[solitary_summer]

I'm in hibernation mode, I think, I'm so sleepy all the time. All that cold can't be good for the soul. Where's global warming when you need it? And will push-up bras ever go away again? Picked up fingerless gloves (for work, *sigh*; early 18th century building, high ceiling, impossible to heat) at H&M, though.

And I feel so very blah about writing at the moment. My mind is like... something sticky and very, very slow moving? I'm even running out of metaphors. I'll type a couple of sentences, a paragraph, and then start wondering if whatever I've written is 1) even English, and 2) worth writing about, at which point it either gets deleted, or joins the other 'unfinished'-tagged entries.


Oh, and Merlin. As long as I was watching shows on (German or Austrian) TV, I always was anything from a year to... a lot longer than that behind everyone else; spoilers? *sarcastic laughter*. In fact S2 Torchwood, S4 DW and Merlin were the first shows where I followed fandom and fanish debates, squeeing and wanking in real time. So it's still kind of weird to see the adorable slashy little show that only a handful of people were watching, but that kind of got under your skin despite yourself and then suddenly turned out out to be surprisingly good and you found yourself writing meta even when you thought you never ever would, suddenly on the way to become the Next Big Thing, and watching or not watching suddenly becoming a question of ethics and whatnot...

On that note, I think I also just realised why I'm completely unsuited for fandom. With very few exceptions canon is canon is canon in my mind, and that's what mainly interests me about a show. There is no independent version of Jack or Ianto or... say, Harry Potter, in my head that's better or deeper or more complex or more whatever-it-is-that-people-are-(allegedly)-looking-for. And if it's complexity that they want, why do they so often disregard whatever complexity is already present in the source material? Why does (e.g.) so much of the Torchwood fanfic - oh, all right, admittedly this is a bit of a wild generalisation since I have given up looking for good fanfic a while ago, so everyone please feel free to prove me wrong and point out what I've been missing - fall back on clichès and simplify rather than complexify or explore? On the whole, the more I like a show, the less I'm interested in the fanfic, and vice versa, to the point that the fandoms where I read the most fic are those where I've only seen a few episodes, or am not familiar with the source material at all.


And I simply refuse to panic or even worry about the future of livejournal at this point. Granted, economic crises and all that, but I've simply seen this whole The End Is Near! thing one time too often.


Eh. Russian homework to do, which I'm not allowed to feel blah about.

Comments

[rivier.livejournal.com]

You probably won't be surprised that I agree with you on all of this, most emphatically of all on the essential integrity of the canon of any fandom. If the canon allows for - or deliberately creates - spaces to be filled by the audience, then I'll do that (in my head or by fic). If the canon includes things I feel uncomfortable about, I'll work with them insofar as they don't break my enjoyment. So, for example, though it took me a while to reconcile the Season One Torchwood's relationship angst, with Ianto in the end so clearly and helplessly entranced, and Jack perfectly truthfully able to declare to Real!Jack that there was no-one else in his life at that moment... I DID reconcile it! They weren't equals in the relationship then, such as it was. Which, indeed, is why Owen's barbs were able to provoke such an atypically passionate reaction from Ianto.

And if the season Two canon had continued with a sexually interested but emotionally indifferent Jack, and a doggedly besotted doormat Ianto - I guess my interest in the show would have waned somewhat, because that relationship in particular fascinates me so much, and I would find a passive, victim-y Ianto considerably less appealing than the clearly complex but reasonably self-interested young man we do have by the end of the season.

If canon itself is the thing in a fandom that's harshing your pleasure, I've never understood the logic of stomping right through it and creating something which is no longer fanfiction in the sense that I understand it. There is room for an AU which essentially plays intelligent what-ifs with the characters and circumstances as we commonly understand the,. But not so much, for me, in either the kind of rewriting which changes substantial aspects of character (Gwen seducing Jack, say) or that which transplants characters into an entirely un-canon universe (Jack and Ianto as two librarians on Saturn, say). If what you crave is librarians on Saturn, either find a fandom where you can take the canon there without losing sight of the point of origin, or write your own universe!

And ITA on not panicking over lj, either. People seem mad keen to throw up their hands in horror on the evidence of a half-mangled Chinese whisper these days. Oddness.

[solitary-summer.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I think this might have something to do with the whole Death of the Author thing, which (IMO) too many people seem to take as an excuse for sloppy reading and simply not paying attention to the text as a whole, and instead take the bits they like and forget about everything else. Which is an attitude that personally I don't understand because for one thing I tend to find authors interesting, and for another not all interpretations are equally valid - especially not those that blithely ignore context and whole parts of canon.


The one time I came close to almost apologising to myself and everyone else that I was still watching the show every time I wrote about it was with Andromeda, but even then it was the premise of the show itself and the relationship between the characters that kept me fascinated - that is, until it got so bad that I finally stopped watching.