WE BATE THEM!!!

[kennahijja]

pornish_pixies

Fandom rocks *so* very much!
You've all seen the long-overdue post, I guess.

Ecstatic as I am, though, I have two - well, two-and-a-half - issues with things as they are:

1) Some fanfiction communities and fannish personal journals still remain suspended (you can see the details here). Though LJ might be working on those.

2) I won't breathe easily until there are safeguards in place to prevent something like this from happening again - I don't want to have to look over my shoulder (or want anyone else to) for fear of being targetted for writing stories/producing art.

2 1/2) I'm still pissed off over the way last week's "hoax" was laughed off publicly by LJ people, when they were in the process of setting up *exactly* what has been described. I would love to apologise to the brave soul who leaked this for disbelieving along with everybody else when the dementi came...

Of course what I'm still pissed about to no end (and have been for a long time) is the way people throw those of us who write about the darker/illegal sides of sexuality into the same pot with those who actually commit crimes. If I'm be interested in the discussion of incest, it doesn't mean I'll go and, heck, proposition my mother! The several hundreds of LJ users listing 'crime' in their LJ interests are not promoting the committing of it, nor will they shut off their computers and embark on mobster careers!

Sometimes I wonder if there's something more to this sort of thinking than just prudishness and a distinct inability to differentiate between reality and fiction, discussion and practice... Is there something so intimidating in women (and it is to a large degree women) exploring sexuality, light and dark sides, through fiction-writing that leads to such irrational responses? Because really, they talk about fandom escaping into a fictional/unreal world to hide from reality? Fandom at least has enough of a grip on reality (with some few exceptions, that is...) to distinguish between fiction and fact.

Comments

[kennahijja.livejournal.com]

About your first point, yes, I see where you're coming from, but I'm still unable to make that jump fiction=author's real intentions (perhaps it sounds more outlandish to me than to others because I've been trained in literature studies, where the point author=/=narrator gets hammered into you from the start. And turned around, we've had tons and tons of positive depictions of 'kill the indians/commies/enemies of choice'... And there wasn't enough of a shitstorm (if much of any), over 'Silence of the Lambs', for example. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I still see a huge double standard when the issue of sex comes in (and not only with fictional portrayals of outright illegal things).

Of course you're right about one being unable to really distinguish between stories and intentions in anonymous net posts, but again, equating those seems (also from a personal pov) totally alien to me.

[snorkackcatcher]

I've been thinking about that off and on -- I probably shouldn't have got into this whole strikethrough'07 subject, as I have a number of different and often contradictory reactions to it -- but regarding the fiction=author's real intentions thing, well I suspect that's a perfectly reasonable assumption a lot of the time. It may seem alien to you because the field you're in doesn't habitually look at texts with that assumption?

All right, the author=narrator equivalence doesn't hold as a general result. It does hold rather often however, sometimes quite explicitly -- to use your 'kill the baddies' example, I happened to just be re-skimming a Tom Clancy story, and his authorial commentary is frequently quite obvious. From what I remember of Dickens, he's frequently the same (a standard Victorian style?). Even first-person in-character stuff can be -- if you read a lot of Dick Francis thrillers, although they're all first person, they all seem pretty much like the same person, having a sort of detached-observer feel (that can get irritating after a while). And as far as fanfic goes, there are certainly writers whose personal agendas scream at you from the text (including me sometimes, I imagine).

Therefore regarding anonymous net posts where you have little information but the post itself, and pornish_pixies specifically, well ... it does bill itself as 'The Community You Wank Off To'. Someone approaching it from outside could hardly be blamed for taking this at face value and thinking that chan/incest fics were included in that, and therefore that the comm contained some genuine paedophiles. (Among the 5000+ watchers, it very possibly does, but that's just bad luck.) As nineveh_uk said in a comment to my post on the subject, "re. the interest lists, part of me is inclined to think that if people choose to pour steaming yellow liquid into a swimming pool, they can't complain about being sent back to the changing rooms without chemical analysis being done first to discover that it's merely food colouring".