My head been feeling wrong again. Makes everything feel urgent. So, instead of actual sleep, I boot up the computer to share my thoughts on:

Original characters

In both fanfic and continuing TV series you have a set of characters that carry from episode to episode, the regulars, the canon characters, and you have characters that you the writer are sitting down to make up. And while you really love the canon characters, hence the wanting to write about them at all, you just meet this new person and suddenly they're the most interesting person in the 'verse. Slight problem: Interesting to the writer. Interesting to the reader? Trickier.

The biggest problem is forgetting who the story is about. Clue: Not the New Guy.
If it is about the new guy, you have written a spin off. It probably won't be as popular. Good luck with that.

To write original characters that work you've got to remember that even if you're talking about a person who looks, speaks, thinks, acts nothing like the established characters, they are secretly telling a story about the established characters. The new is there to illuminate the continuing. They highlight a facet, an aspect, a mood, a phase in the life of the canon characters. If done well enough they'll fit in with the theme, habits, conventions of storytelling of the source text so well they'll be popular with people looking for more out of those texts. They might even work so well they'll become the new regulars. But to do that they've got to generate stories about the central concerns of the show, and the regular characters.

So say we've got Lisa, or Beth, or Mary. Torchwood ( Read more... )

There's always characters that are tempting to write, corners of the 'verse you really want to fill in. The long lost secret brother or daughter or ex. People who logically exist. The number of stories I've read where one of those turns up? I lost count. The thing is though usually the camera is the wrong way around. Erm, that made sense in my head. Okay. What I mean: Usually when the newbie turns up the story shows how newbie reacts to existing characters. All we're likely to be interested in at first is how existing characters react to newbie. And then maybe the newbie can show us a side we haven't thought of, but if that's the whole story? Probably it leaves out what attracted us to the 'verse in the first place, what we're there for.

... see CoE.

It's all about the balance.

Why I love the character Ethan Rayne isn't just the power and the trickster fun. He brings out new facets in existing characters. Possibly too new - if every episode is Halloween we get... Dollhouse? Huh. I haven't watched that yet though. But who Ethan is to Giles gives us a new perspective on Giles, because it puts him in a role none of the continuing characters has with him - he's an equal, who knows the work in progress years, pre tweed and without the books. Giles has other relationships, but he has no one else who can bring up the tension with who and what he used to be. So who else could be productively introduced? And who would be a comparison or a competition? Canon characters have Giles in the role of mentor on the whole. So if we wanted a story about Giles we could put him in the role of student, have an old teacher turn up, which might be what happened when the Watcher's Council were around evaluating him. Or we've got the semi parental role, "Wish I could play the father". So to make him the child role could be interesting, though I've always vaguely felt his parents were probably dead before the series started because he seemed to be flying without a net. If they're alive, how did we go 7 years with not the slightest reference to them? A story could live there. Or, of course, this being the Buffyverse, they could be dead and yet still part of the story. Then again, flip it another way, with Buffy he only plays the father. If a biological child of his turned up, what would be the difference in his role with them?

I think one set of problems turns up when a character strolls in to new relationships with every canon character. The previously unknown daughter turns up and dates one, is best enemies with another, academic rivals with a third, and best friends with another. Having one character that can realistically mirror, shadow, re-emphasise more than one character? Difficult. And a fail becomes a cascade fail, card house falling.

Ethan walks in to be a shadow Giles, and for the space of two episodes sets up in relation to Buffy because of that. ( Read more... )

To set someone up in relation to every other character also suffers from probable duplication. There already is a best friend. Shadow best friend turns up? Okay, play with that a while - but eventually they either have to redeem or be rejected. Or the main characters start looking really very stupid.

New characters are not about showing us the new character. New characters are about showing us those we already know in a new way. Keep that in mind and they won't Superstar your story.


... and I'm eyeing a Torchwood fanfic I couldn't get to work properly right now and telling me this quite strongly. Always oh so tempting.

Make someone who tells the theme again and makes it new and you've made a great story.

Make someone who does that and makes the regulars new and you've made a great story in that 'verse.

Which is just a teensy tricky.

I watched some more Enterprise, some Primeval, and a bit of Smallville. Oh, and Moonlight, which I actually forgot I'd watched and it was only ten minutes ago.
I am no longer depressed about my own writing. My writing is plenty good.

Enterprise was about an alien race with 3 genders. ( Read more... ) I don't know what they were trying to do but it was a nasty mess when it was done.

Primeval was just... empty. ( Read more... )

Moonlight... they're well aware of the vampire fiction tropes. You can tell cause they're rolling through them one an episode, predictably. ( Read more... )

I think I'm over vampire stories for the moment. Except I still like Buffy rewatches. So, er, bad vampire stories? There's a lot of those.

Vampire stories have such potential ( Read more... )



I am so picky.

I should just write more scripts, lots of writing, make stories that work or fail to and see why it's so difficult.

Recently read C J Cherryh Rusalka, which had interesting rules for magic. Basically: It all works. Everything a magician does will work. Wish for something, want something enough, and it will happen.
But it will happen in its own time, in its own way, along lines of possibility you cannot track.

So the magician doesn't have absolute power. They can get one element of what they want - say make someone fall in a mud puddle - but the knock on consequences of that they cannot predict - he goes to get cleaned up at a really inconvenient moment.

But without the props, rituals, actions surrounding magic, all they have to do is want something enough. They can control the world, only if they can control their desires.

And without knowing the when of things, they set things in motion and have to live with the consequences. And know they did that.

Massive power, some control, absolute responsibility.



I didn't especially like the story, but the system of magic? Lots of interesting to play with. Highlights the 'be careful what you wish for' without any of the lawyering with words. Just hook up wanting to reality, but with only narrow control of results.


There's a whole section in Orson Scott Card's How to write science fiction and fantasy about the rules of magic. Like the rules of space travel, they shape the world. And there's ways of writing where you just be all handwavey about the whole thing, where you travel at the speed of the plot and pull of magic as and when convenient, but that gets kind of tired. You can call it concentrating on character or whatever, but what it does is make nothing make sense, including character reactions, because there's no predictable connections, no cause and effect. Boring. If instead you remember use of magic is a new technology, a new natural law, or to be precise a new-to-the-reader natural law that has shaped the world of the story since it began... like nuts and bolts SF you can follow through on the consequences of an idea. So say magic is powered by blood, or say you trade lifetime for results, say you can only give of yourself, or only of others... what does that do? Does it skew the world so it's easier or harder to be good people? What kind of choices does it allow? What does it highlight?

And then of course everything plays on a theme level, says something about choices, power, people, what it means to be human. So whatever rules of magic you set up you've got the people who get the good stuff, get story rewards, get the story calling them the good people, and you look back on the choices they made and see what the story seems to approve of. Can get complicated.


There's a line in one of the theory books I been reading that says SF stories are a cost-benefit calculation on science, on rationality and logic and technology and efficiency and industry and all the rest. All stories are a cost-benefit calculation on whatever their central issue is. What does it cost, who does it benefit, and do you really want to be saying that?

... I want to ask that of a lot of writers really. Do they really want to be saying that? And do they really want to live in the world that statement would shape?

And that's magic. Words to world, direct. And making you think about it.

I have been reading, very slowly, a book called 'From Faust to Strangelove - Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature' by Roslynn Haynes.
As I read something becomes obvious which I should have noticed long ago: A lot of people write Science Fiction because they really really don't like Science.

There are strands of Science-yaay. But there are a lot of strands where science is the problem. Not just technology, or specific inventions, but science, maths, efficiency, practicality, even rationality. Those things are held up as in opposition to Being Human, to emotion and empathy and lives worth living. The book said at one point that stories are a confused cost-benefit analysis on their central concern, on science. A lot of them think it's all cost and no benefit.

So look at SF TV. Look at what the Bad Things are. There's cybermen as a very clear example. Swapping out humanity for steel. Is the solution new science?

Looking at recent stories I had a problem with: The writer has said they stripped all the gadgets away to get at who the team are as people. They got rid of the technology. But did they get rid of the science? The maths, efficiency, practicality, was it all lined up as aspects of the Bad Things? And what does that leave the good guys with? Improvisation? And speaking. And feeling really bad about stuff.

Invention is part of being human. The ability to plan ahead. The kind of mind that can think around corners and have a contingency for zombie apocalypse or teleporting invaders. Science is central to being human, the ability to test a theory and see how it works out and modify your behaviour because of it. Failure of science leads to trying the same thing again harder in the expectation it'll turn out different this time. One definition of madness right there. Rationality and empathy aren't in opposition, they're different threads of a necessary balance. To say that you have to remove all that someone has built in order to find out who they are as a person is like saying you have to strip them down to a skeleton to really see them. Interesting, but not complete.

I want stories where people invent their way out of corners. Because that's the only difference between the lives we live now and the life I probably wouldn't have survived a couple centuries ago - cumulative invention. And that's the answer too to any charge that we ignore the bad things in life and just accept - we do not, because we set out to change them, and we use science to do that.

There's both dystopias and heroic adventures based on the idea of putting scientists in charge of the world.

If we look at the world we live in right now, the world that increasingly strikes me, at a fairly young age, as humans finally living in the future... did we ever put scientists in charge? Or science? And where on the dystopia to heroics scale are we? And how much of our lives are better?

That's what Science Fiction is about. Not just ripping it all down and bewailing our heartless fate. Seeing the possibilities it opens up for us, as well as the dangers.

I've been having fun worldbuilding for my space dystopia. I've thought up a bunch of stuff about government and neighbours and how to keep the citizens in line. I can think of tons of reasons for our small band of rebels to stand up and decide to change things.
The basic trouble is, I can't seem to think of proper ways they could succeed in making improvements.
I've apparently got a head full of stories where you can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game.
... I think I knew that ...

The problem is now I've thought up this world, which has a very Blakes 7 ending in store if I even bother running through it, I can't really think why I'd want to watch these stories.

So I sat down to figure out what I want to watch:

Disability stories. ( Read more... )

Women stories. ( Read more... )

Children stories. Not for children, with children being made. ( Read more... )

Multigenerational stories. ( Read more... )

Teamwork! With a range of characters that covers the range of actual humans! And saves the world a lot!

Also there should be people of lots of skins and cultures and beliefs. I remember to want that later than the other stuff though. And would be less good at it.

But that's my list of stuff I want.
Power inequalities to deal with through teamwork, and thoroughly diverse teams.
Also sex. Just as balanced part of story.

And then making homes that work. It's not much use stopping the monster if all you get out of it is stopping the monster again next week. Stopping the important monsters means being better able to build something worth having, live lives.

*rereads*

... so, just a modest little list of wants there.

There's also moments in stories that I like. The one where someone stands up and everyone notices they're brilliant. The one where someone stands up and declares someone else brilliant or beautiful or loved. The one where someone realises they've found something worth fighting for, and the rallying cry moment where they tell everyone else exactly why. The time when the monster thinks it has a room full of tasty snacks and they all take up arms and kick arse together. The times when knowledge keeps going, where the student steps up and becomes a teacher, where the students will keep going even if the teacher is stopped. You can't stop the signal. The last minute save, where someone is ready to make the sacrifice but they've got a team to save them. I'm not so fond of the non-save, though that always has to be a possibility; the idea of the noble sacrifice seems to get in the way of the idea that some jobs need doing every day a little. But I do like the big kabooms, or the moment where the villain thinks their tower is unassailable but finds it crumbling around their ears. Boom! But... only after giving them a chance. Making friends to go fight the next thing is the best way. Got to build a team cause there's always another bad out there.

If I worldbuild something bleak, even if I can't see any out at the end of it, I can still hit a lot of the moments along the way. And for that I'd keep watching. Then the story is about how you can't get out of the game, but you can grab moments along the way.
think I knew that too.

I slept most of today, since yesterday was Very Long, and that results in me thinking a lot of random stuff, recombining all the recent input. And after a semester on the Renaissance a lot of that random is about Elizabethan England and associated cultural threads. But I'm trying to write something SF lately, so: Renaissance styled cyberpunk. ( Read more... )

Renaissance preoccupations and our own are different but I think a lot of the tensions are still there, and can be played out in big space battles.

Also, in my head, it's all really pretty. Specially the outfits with the silver or gold edges, the fabric cut up so they're basically wearing ribbons, and the tiny flashy clever tech holding it all together.

There should be an upper limit on headaches. Seriously.

I have read almost all the books I got out about Hamlet. The one I bought I haven't started, but since it's bought I don't got to take it back anywhere so that works out. The one I was reading today I only read the first 5 chapters and the one on Hamlet but I think the reading list says 'first four chapters' or something so that probably works out. And now my head hurts. So reading will pause.

I've been thinking about quotes that mean something quite different in context. A lot of Hamlet gets taken and used as particular lines, and a lot more gets used to add a sort of Hamlet tint to something. But context is so key. Take 'To be or not to be', a speech so famous I didn't used to know what play it was in but I knew the speech from all the piss takes. (To pee or not to pee... :eyeroll:) That speech within the play is so complicated. The words on their own could be about suicide, tyrannicide, or some other thing entirely. But put it back in the play and it just gets all complicated. It is probably a soliloquy, with only Hamlet on stage and the convention that the character truthfully speaks his innermost thoughts. But then again it could be that Ophelia is on stage and visible to Hamlet, and we know that Claudius and Polonius are hiding somewhere around there. Those two might be visible to the audience but not Hamlet, or they just might have been noticed by him. And it's a whole different speech, depending on these things you can't figure out from the written word - who is watching and who knows who is watching and is it in fact a soliloquy or just a speech the others don't interrupt? And when you just stand there and quote it you don't get any of those layers.

Using quotes to add some Hamlet to things... well does just using the quote add Hamlet? Picard quotes 'what a piece of work is man' to Q. Is Picard being mopey, suicidal, and Danish? Not so much. In fact in that case he explicitly changes the meaning of the piece - "What Hamlet said with irony I say with conviction". Which is interesting... but come to think I haven't watched that episode quite possibly since it first aired so how is it I remember that bit anyway? Because Patrick Stewart rocks I think. ANYway... I looked on Wiki and it has a whole section on quotes just to that little speech... wherein I find it's in the Coraline film. Cool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/References_to_Hamlet has its own page, and it is a rather large one, despite being as hit and miss as Wiki tends to. Includes a generic revenge tragedy ghost or three, because Hamlet is the bit of the genre that survives in the popular imagination. Leaves out the Buffy film.

Buffy didn't recognise "The rest is silence" in the movie. Were we meant to? Given that it turned out to have practical relevance, somehow being how to break out of vampire thrall. If so, her not getting it is a haha look at the clueless, followed by a clueless wins anyway triumph. Same line gets quoted with rather more humor in The Dark Age, one of those episodes I at least used to have memorised. Giles says it when Buffy turns off her non-music. Is he being Hamlet-y or especially snooty British? Well he's not actually dying and he doesn't have to rely on others to tell his story... but the guy outside does. Is interesting.

Is also the episode that introduced Ethan. And in the Buffy comics his Hamlet quote is "I'm more an antique Roman than a Dane." Also, in context, the line that immediately follows it "Just remember what you see here." sounds rather like both old Hamlet's ghost's orders to his son and young Hamlet speaking to Horatio. But Buffy remains clueless, doesn't know the context, tries to figure out the words. She gets from 'roman' to XXX as roman numerals to Ethan's room. So far so simple, right? Like in the movie, the quote turns out to be simple useful information.

But...

If it keeps the original context, it makes Ethan that little bit more interesting. Because Horatio says that as a prelude to suicide. After all the buisness with the poisoned sword and poisoned wine:

Hamlet: Horatio, I am dead, thou livst, report me and my cause aright to the unsatisfied.
Horatio: Never believe it. I am more an antique Roman than a Dane: Here's some liquor left.

Seeing Hamlet poisoned and dying Horatio resolves to follow him, in the Roman style. Notes in the back of the copy I've got say 'like Cato or Brutus'. Notes from class say like stoics - the idea was you could bear everything unruffled, and if it ever got too bad you could always kill yourself. Classical Roman philosophy approved where Christianity was quite clear on it being unacceptable.

Hamlet goes on to talk Horatio out of it, "if thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw they breath in pain, to tell my story."

Ethan is talking to Buffy. Who doesn't even know what he means.

And does he mean it like Horatio did? Is he more a Roman? We know he worships Janus, a Roman god. So maybe that's as far as the reference goes... But then he ends up dead. So. The question remains: Did he know helping Buffy was suicidal? Did he know it would end that way? Did he choose the out?

The resonances the quote brings to it makes it ever more annoying that as far as we know Buffy hasn't even told Giles, Giles might not even know (does he? I haven't been reading with as much attention after that first volume.) Brings a lot of richness to it, stuff I can apply from recent learning, the clash between classical roman ethics and assorted christianities.

But it also pretty much inverts what it is Ethan's doing. If he's just telling Buffy his cell number he's making a sort of deal, taking a last chance to get out. If he meant it the other way, well, he's still out... but it's self sacrificing in a conscious way usually not associated with him.

I still say there's worlds of story to be had from Ethan&Giles. I don't appear to be writing them lately. *sigh*


I guess I'm more sensitive to context because I once figured out my autistic brother talked pretty much entirely in context. The words meant very little, the story they'd been said in on TV had all the meaning. Darmok.

But it's very difficult to know if intertextual references are meant, and with something like Hamlet where people have been referring to it over and over again for so long it's really very difficult to know *which* associations it is meant to bring.

Which is fascinating.

Space: It's Really Big.
So how does anyone get anywhere?
( Read more... )

I think I've decided on my technologies from knowing what I want my characters to do.
This is far more fun than the other way around, but given that my usual definition of science fiction is that it explores the effects of technology on people it feels somehow kind of dishonest.
Hmmm...

I read another 'what/why slash' post somewhere and have been thinking on it.
... I also closed the window so can't link/reply.
ANYway

Someone said in the comments that slash fic is about a / relationship between two people that have bigger stuff going on, like saving the world a lot.

That sounds about right.

If I read romance, which I only ever do on accident when amazon-recommends goes horribly wrong or a favourite author wanders off a bit, I'm left wondering when they'll hurry up and get to the plot already. I can feel like that even while quite liking the relationship stuff. Which is frustrating.

But if I watch or read F&SF there's a ongoing scarcity of relationship stuff, and while they do save the world a lot there can be a problem where you wonder if they're actual people. You get to see them getting on real well with their swords or something, but not so much relating to other people. Or, in the stuff I'm likely to keep watching, they'll connect, but there's like a wall past which they will not go. And I want to see past that wall.

So slash to me is not just same sex romance, it's seeing our heroes be people, seeing the hidden stuff, and seeing our people be heroes, with the world saving being an important part of things.

... I was going to say something smarter than that but (a) it's now two in the morning and (b) my other computer just made a fuss about updates and virus checking and interrupted. Pretend smart stuff went there.

So this morning, because I Did Not Want to get out of bed, I was lying back plotting the pilot episode to my series that is clearly not Blakes 7 except for where it is. I was very organised about it. In my head I got a piece of paper, wrote 1-60 down the margins, divided it up into teaser and tag, three act structure, central turn around point, and wobbly block of 'inciting incident goes here'. I mentally arranged my small stack of writing books, which is probably about as productive as the way I usually use them, since by this point they're pretty much for moral support. And then I decided what the teaser should be. Start with something exciting. Start with a chase!

... and then I got entirely stuck, because I suddently realised that the status and indeed existence of dogs would be one of the major defining points of my futuristic multiplanet dystopia, and while I'd been thinking of them as all clean and technological, I couldn't imagine a proper chase without dogs barking.

... *facepalm*

But, really, thinking about it, when humans leave the planet, do they take dogs with them? If dogs, what about cats, or horses, or canaries? We have a perfect excuse to never work with animals again! We have weight limits, and limited life support! We could have a future where humans are the only life that humans ever worry about!
... and wouldn't that be hugely different.

So there's Dystopia 1, techno version, where they have lots of cameras and TV screens and computers everywhere and little robot arms to do fiddly jobs and humans are just on the verge of being surplus to requirements, but then they'd have nothing to do but rebel so there's somehow precisely as much work as people. A chase sequence would involve silence. Silent black clad security forces with gas masks on, and silent security cameras scattered around like your actual bugs are now, and perhaps silent flying drones that make a whirrrrr sound only when they're too close to dodge properly. If there's things with wheels they'd make gravel sounds on the crunchy ground, maybe on a raised road right behind the rebels as they crouch unseen. To get around all that they'd have to be very, very precise, slow and stealthy. The opening sequence would all be silence and heavy breathing.

But then there's Dystopia 2, the one with dogs, and I think this would be the genegineered version. They didn't bring alive dogs with them, they brought the pattern to make them. The same guard dogs are used at every guard station, cloned again. Animals are all designed for particular tasks, just like humans are. They don't have the robot arms unless absolutely necessary, because they have humans made in the exact same spirit, to do those tasks. And now the chase is *noisy*. Dogs barking, running, urgent. To get away from dogs they'd do the blood pumping sort of things, traditional hunter hunted stuff. Would there be cameras? Maybe, but there'd be more concentration on who is watching them. It wouldn't be cold AI directing them towards movement, it would be rooms full of humans who were used to having fairly boring days and using the cameras to look down people's tops. To get around them you'd have to be unexpected or plausible, by turns. Sloppy would still work, as long as you mixed it with a bit of inspiration. And there'd be a lot more value to making friends. The computer doesn't care if you bring biscuits, though it might note a pattern if you do the same thing every day. Alive things doing the same job are going to care if you're nice people.

And the skillset of the crew, and the shape of the eventual revolution, would depend very greatly on what they're opposing. If technology is king then Avon understands how everything really works. If technology just extends the senses of a whole lot of people then Avon understands rather less of it.

Both dystopias have heavily controlled humans who decide they don't like it. But in the first it's because they're being made to do useless work, the technology could leave them at total leisure but they're not allowed to use it that way. In the second it's because they don't have the technology, they are it. That's a fairly important distinction.

And it all comes down to how does this teaser chase sequence work.

Do they have dogs?

I think the dogs version is quite interesting.

And really, I can't imagine a proper dramatic chase without dogs.

I have been reading fanfic some more. I have identified one source of my increasing disatisfaction with fic. It's the form, turning TV into prose. On TV you hear, you see, you get a lot of clues and you piece them together to create a picture with many if/then or alternate readings, and this is quite a lot like real life. Short stories, prose form, there's narration, and it pins things down. You don't just see Jack tell Ianto stuff and do stuff with Ianto, you get paragraphs of him thinking in great detail exactly what he feels and why. And it feels like a lie. Real life does not work like that. Even in your own head, you're always trying what and why on for size. I read a fic, Due South, where Benton was trying out labels for his assorted relationships and you got a lot of the power of the piece out of him realising he'd used the wrong one. And that feels more honest. But really, mostly? You look at the world, you see things, hear things, you have to figure it out from clues. Scripts, TV, they feel more honest because life is more like that.

I've been thinking about some of the reading for Renaissance class, about what Love can mean in Renaissance poetry. Love is a word with a whole lot of meanings. Not just the sort you can seperate out like Greek does, so there's friendship and erotic love, though fanfic typically plays around with that blurred meaning a lot. Love is a site of competing discourses. A discourse is a system of meanings that support each other and block out other possibilities. Googles 'definition' button says a discourse is "any coherent body of statements that produces a self‐confirming account of reality by defining an object of attention and generating concepts with which to analyse it (e.g. medical discourse, legal discourse, aesthetic discourse). The specific discourse in which a statement is made will govern the kinds of connections that can be made between ideas, and will involve certain assumptions about the kind of person (s) addressed." So say you have the word 'heart'. That can be read through a medical or a romantic discourse, and you get different meanings out of it either way, and those meanings are not compatible. So it's fair to say that Owen had heart problems towards the end of season 2. In a medical way, that means it got destroyed by a bullet, which is a pretty large problem. In a romantic way, that would be about him having feelings he didn't know what to do with.

You can get a lot of fun out of statements that can be read different ways like that. But you can also get a lot of... sad, conflict, muddle. The example from class was Shakespeare's sonnets to his young man. Every time Shakespeare says 'love' it can be read through competing discourses: romantic love, and patronage. Every time he says 'love' it can mean that he has squishy romantic feelings for the guy, or it can mean he'd quite like him to give him some money. You can't seperate out the meanings, the discourses compete. And one will be dominant, and that's usually to do with ideology and society. But the awkward sad difficult part is, even if he only meant romantic love, with the discourse of patronage current and indeed dominant at the time, he couldn't say love-not-money. Similar tangles exist due to Elizabeth I's encouragement of the use of the sonnet form and the conventions of courtly love to express the admiration of the courtier for their prince, which was then using what we'd usually read as the language of romance to express the sentiments of both patronage and politics. In sonnets addressed to the Queen they could say 'love' to mean they'd quite like to marry her, but it would always sound like they were asking for power, political preferment, a job. And to bring all this back to Torchwood: This is exactly Ianto's problem in his relationship with Jack, and exactly what makes that relationship fascinating to me.

Between the two of them the discourses of power, patronage, work, hierarchy, sex and romance, are all competing in every little gesture. And fanfic tends to take one particular read on the subtext and apply that as the dominant discourse, to see Ianto hand Jack his coat and see a gesture of romantic fidelity, to see Jack say 'I came back for you' and apply the singular and *romantic* even though in 1-12 we see how duty trumps romance to bring him back to his team. And this is partly because it's fun, and partly because we're applying an ideology where romantic love is the most important thing. But what it does is limit and simplify the meanings, flatten them out, until in some fics all you get is the snuggly romance. And at that point it has lost the very elements that appealed to me. Jack and Ianto, in order to have a romantic relationship, have to live with and negotiate the other ways their relationship can be read, and that makes it interesting.

And another level where this is interesting is how it ties in to how m/f marriages have typically worked, and the stuff from sociology class about how women in a marriage have not one job but three, the work they do for money, the work they do to maintain the space they live in and put food on the table and keep everything and everyone clean and tidy (which sounds like a lot of different jobs to me, but generally gets called housework), and the emotional maintenance work that's about keeping people happy and listening when they need an ear and telling them they're wonderful and all that. Studies repeatedly show that, while there's no good physical reason for this division of labor, men will do the money-work and women will do the triple job. And men won't even notice. So, then you get to Jack and Ianto's relationship, and Ianto has an interesting layering where his paid job starts out as the Torchwood equivalent of housework, he then takes on Jack's emotional maintenance in 1-08, and by second season he has the same kind of day job doing field work that the rest of the staff do. Triple job. And does Jack notice? And does Jack do the same for him? In fanfic, yes, Jack will cook or bring food around of an evening, Jack will take Ianto out for dinner, he'll ask how his day went. In the episodes? There's a few moments could be read that way, but there's also room to read it as Ianto looks after Jack while Jack is dashing and heroic. Put that dynamic on two men and you get it foregrounded, the inequality, the way people can think it's reasonable. And that's just interesting. For me in a pretty much academic sense, cause I've never shared a flat much less done all that complicated, but still interesting, possibly more so to different demographics.

To get interested in Jack/Ianto, to get plot bunnies and feel the urge to write about it, I need to concentrate on these tensions and conflicts. A lot of the fanfic I have been reading seems to feel an equally strong need to smooth them over. And to be honest, that feels again like lies, like taking all the spiky out of true to life. The appeal is obvious, in both cases, but it doesn't work for me at all.

I been thinking lately about my mixed reactions to certain topics. Starting with sex.
... as you do.

Part of how Torchwood fandom is different to previous fandoms is how we don't have to look for subtext. The sex is right there in the text, and proud of it. And this is win, and yaay, and other such good words. And then we go to conventions, and the new and different continues. Used to be if actors were playing along with 'shippers or slashers there'd be a few double intenders or some hugging. But with Torchwood? There will be kissing. And touching. And jokes about cock.
It comes as something of a surprise that I feel there's such a thing as too much cock. A little in the right place is fine, but all the time? I find myself vaguely irritated.
So then I wonder why.

I think it's a combination of three things. Rudeness, existing frameworks, and what precisely we're passionate about.

By rudeness I don't mean just using taboo words. Use words, whatever. I do kind of miss the artistry of a good double intender or a smutty pun, but it's also nice to just have stuff be right out there in the open (as JB clearly believes). I think what bugs me sometimes is more to do with the way power in conversation works. I read up on the rules of conversation in one of my degree textbooks. Who sets the topic and who can interrupt are both about power, ( Read more... )

But assume we start out talking about sex, we want to hear the talking about sex, and the sex talk is the topic. Okay. Even then? There's ways and ways of talking.

And those conversations will crunch into existing ways of describing and explaining the world, agree with them or not, and possibly end up praising or condemning stuff without directly meaning to.
( Read more... )

But the feeling that someone is making a joke of what one most cares about, or possibly what one *is*, that's not a good feeling.

And that's the third level that excess of sex jokes can bug me at, the one that's about what precisely we're passionate about.

Stories are... ( Read more... )
Leaving out all the middle of that paragraph leaves out the vast majority of what I've invested in a fandom, makes it nothing about stories, flattens it simply to fairly impersonal porn. And that's really rather boring. And kind of annoying to be misunderstood that way.


I think these are tensions that play out in other expressions of fandom too. Topic switching and telling you what to talk about, tension with existing frameworks, clashing genre expectations, different understandings within fandom and without, and the feeling that what you're being given is aimed at a very small understanding of you... we get that with canon text creators all the time, we get that with arguments about the amount of PWP in fandom, we get that whenever squee and meta kind of crunch into each other and annoy.

Flip side is the annoyance felt when 'telling you what (not) to talk about' seems to be knocking the value of squee, appreciation, men kissing, PWP. All that stuff is good. I like all that stuff. I want to be really clear about that. On LJ, on stage, on our favourite shows, it's all good.

But. The balance is always going to get right complicated. And leaving stuff out is going to lose some part of your audience.


I took this thought for a walk while the laundry ran. I hope I got it clearly said. Poke it and make it fall apart, please, is how better thoughts are made.

I think people saying 'there isn't x-ism in that text if you read the whole text' and people saying 'this person isn't x-ist really if you get to know them' are kind of saying the same thing. All a person's sayings = text of that person. This saying right here = tiny percentage of that text. Are both saying 'if you read/know whole text' then the most of it will not be x-ist.

They're also making the same mistake.

If someone is saying 'this saying can be read as x-ist', in both cases, since they've read it that way, they are correct.

some readers go from there to 'this x-ist saying is affecting this reader's interpretation of the whole text'.
Possibly also 'this x-ist saying trips my circuit breaker so I'm not going to read the whole text'.

They are also correct. They know their own interpretation and action.

Somewhere after that point things turn into a loud argument.
Possibly the somewhere exists between 'this reader finds in this text' and 'this text is'.


Thing is, I just ran 'racism' through this theory, and it crunched into something at the end there. I think the crunch was 'context'? Because a particular bit of text exists within language and within all this world we're living in. Like my black hole theory, existing structures are out there weighing people down and causing crunching. Structures of systematic inequality, x-isms, sort of thing. So, hmmm...

'this text within this structure of systematic inequality can be read as creating/promoting/containing inequality'? But the context is really a big bigger set of texts, yesno?

Ah... new theory:

'there isn't x-ism in that text if you read the whole text' relies on 'the whole text' being defined by paper and ink and the borders of the book, a somehow isolated text. But language doesn't work like that. 'the whole text' is not just this book here in front of you but every other book, in that genre, in that country, in that language, in this world. Big big context. And if you read that text, you find all the isms ever. So 'there isn't x-ism in that text if you read all of and only that text' is the, still mistaken, statement being made.

I think.


There's a discussion goes in here about if you *can* give accurate crit without reading 'the whole text'. But any chunk of text exists within a framework of language made from other texts, so 'whole' isn't achievable in human lifetimes, too much text. You can give crit based on different texts read by different readers. If you say how much text you have read then it is accurate crit. I think.


... I think my brain gave up on big thinking and this thought needs a *lot* more poking.

I've been thinking about diversity in fan and media texts, in conventions, in conversations, and I've been trying to pin down why I value it. I think it boils down to the same reason I participate in conversation at all:

I know what I think, please tell me what you think.

Otherwise the inside of my head is like a teeny tiny echo chamber. It's loud in there, but it's all just me. Blah.
( Read more... )

I want to listen more.

I want to read more widely, watch more shows with more diverse writers and actors, read LJs that reflect different experiences of the world.

And when I go to conventions or clubs and chat with fellow fans, I want to be hearing new things from them too.


There's this way of categorising fanfic, so there's some that's trying to be more-of, and there's some that's trying to get more-from.

Friends lists can easily be more-of. We look for people who see the same cool things and want to talk about them. Fun.

But I think we can also all get more-from, if we work to find it.

Yesterday I looked up % of white people in Cardiff for TV watching purposes. About 9/10 white would be accurately reflecting the city.

Today I look up the UK and White British plus White Other is once again around 91% in 2001.

So if you're at a UK convention, out of every 100 fans, 9 of them would be people of color if they're the same mix as the UK population. If there's 1000 people at a convention, that's 90 people of color.

I strongly suspect we're a long way short of that at many conventions.

I haven't the first clue how to improve that, but it would seem of the good.

Flip side, figuring out the numbers involves keeping track of people just like the census and all those government documents do, and that never seems very friendly. I'd worry about a convention that asked when you signed up. It would even seem rude to run an LJ poll asking. But not asking ends up with no useful numbers.

Hopefully someone has done more thinking than me about this one, because my thinking is *useless*.

I just realised something that has been bugging me about something said at Redemption.
Advice to newbie scriptwriters (or wannabe scriptwriters like most of us), my notes version:

Become a social being, observing humans. [In the process of that you will] Learn not to be rude. [Learn how to meet someone from a TV show and not start with talking about how bad it was.] Know how to talk. [Being polite to producers in bars.]

/notes

What I got from that is you can either crit a show or make an industry contact that might help you get in to a career. I made this connection partly because someone said on another panel that he's stopped doing crit because he can't crit his friends and patrons.

The connection I've made is not the thing they said. Should be clear about that.
But this is what was bugging me.

Why this bothers me? I've been reading metafandom. Right now the idea there's rude things you shouldn't say seems really complicated.

There are some people who, if I meet them, I have quite a lot of stuff to say to them. And I admit a ton of it is Comic Shop Guy 'worst ever!' type fan stuff, or stuff that's more like fanfic where I Have This Great Idea but I know full well it don't work for non-fanfic. But a lot of it is about the big deal categories, the cultural studies stuff that we have meta conversations about a lot. Gender, race, ethnicity, religion, class, sexuality, disability, and whatever else I'm forgetting right now. Stuff that matters.

The idea that saying that kind of stuff might be categorised along with 'being rude'?
This bugs me.

The idea that writers might stop making this kind of analysis on the very people they're in the best position to talk to? Bugs me a *lot*. Crit your friends and patrons! Someone has to tell them they've got no clothes.

If it's a choice between telling people they've written something of gender/race/disability Fail and getting something of mine made... Well, my journal is public, pretty sure I've done the telling part already, and will continue. But how I try to do it lately is 'This was fail, and here's the script that explains why and fixes it.'

That's why I write.

It would kind of suck if that's incompatible with paid employment.

Is Doctor Who bringing young people into SF?
Short answer: yes
( Read more... )

late night Friday.

Monsters vs Aliens
What’s the difference?
( Read more... )

Well dressed English science fiction hero
( Read more... )
Okay, so those aren’t very coherent notes.

Clothes are signifiers of class, and the relationship of that character to the class system. Smart suits and no mask says they’re the establishment. Scruffy and covered in badges is counterculture. Masked is hiding from the establishment. Clothes are never innocent. And many shows difference their heroes by their styles.

Not my favourite panel. Invisible womens.