you can lead a horse to water

The first four posts on my flist are about this, too.

( Don't think there aren't spoilers here )

retcon_rage is open for posting if you're already a member, and open for comments from any LJ-er. After tomorrow's episode it will be open membership and commenting for members.


( Definitely spoilers for the ep, also rambling )

( Spoilers, natch )

This is not actually the first episode I've live blogged. I tried it with Planet of the Dead, the most recent WHo episode. But then I never posted it. I though I might as well post this.

And also mention that retcon_rage is currently accepting membership and will open for Torchwood related raging on Wednesday to people who join before then. (It opens for more members and opening raging on Thursday.)

( Tonight's Torchwood )

Have spent the afternoon reading and occasionally writing comments (and even, occasionally posting them) to posts from metafandom, and you know what I've been driven to comment on here on my fannish journal: the rubbish collection system in Birmingham is frustrating and disgusting and significantly inferior to the rubbish collection in any place I've lived in in Melbourne.

I also finally got my head around "vanilla" as a sticky-out identity, just as white and able-bodied and cis and English speaking and culturally Christian are sticky-out identities, just as queer and female are sticky-out identities. (Positive is value loaded, non-neutral doesn't have the right connotations. Non-default, maybe, shouldn't-be-default, possibly.)

But mostly today I learnt: real life problems trump fandom problems. This is because they are actually smelly and involve picking my housemate's unsquashed cans and juice cartons out of the garden and then squashing them and putting them into broken rubbish bags. And then leaving black rubbish bags full of rubbish on the street in the sun. And having to walk past other people's black rubbish bags full of rubbish that have been left on the street in the sun. I'm sure there'll be bugs under the rubbish bags that are currently stacked in the backyard because no one else in my house in apparently capable of putting the bags of rubbish in the street themselves. (There was a nappy on the street for days after the last rubbish day, because it had escaped from its bag. urgh!) (Only eight more weeks left! Yay)

I want a wheelie bin. This will drive me home. (Along with the lack of Italian pastries.)

I am going to supermarket, where I will talk myself into not yet giving up meat or cream cakes. (After it stops raining, again. Next on the agenda instead, ANZAC biscuit mix and Stargate.)

Hey! I do have a "Do Not Want" icon. Yay.

Link this however and wherever you like. I'm going to bed now. Tomorrow I'm going to Wales and may be away from the internet until next Monday, so comments may not be answered and may not be moderated.

I am reading a treatise on context and predictability and process and experience and empiricism, so my last paragraph, has, on rereading, inspired further thoughts about the construction of fannish space/fic reading context. I don't want to go into it here, but I think I will revisit it, because I think may be a way to explore why people don't like to warn and the concept of authorial vision as applies to fanfic.


If fannish space is a space in which stories, generally, come with warnings/are labelled the fic without warnings or labels (the "default" fic, the way the Privileged is the "default" position for people):

• Is canon compliant up to a couple of weeks before it was posted
• Contains no pairings other than canon pairings and pairings that are established fanon for the author/community (if you consider that author and the place the story is posted are not themselves labels)
• Is rated no more highly than the canon source.

If fannish space is space in which stories, generally, do not come with warnings/labels, then the default fic:

• Is about the characters we particularly don't like doing things that will definitely make us uncomfortable to read about
• Glories in our favourite characters behaving in ways that we find repugnant
• Will trigger us.

These are obviously extreme illustrations. But it seems to me that the fannish experience advocated by the anti-labelling people is one that is unpleasant to everyone. Labelling give us an optimistic outlook on fandom, not labelling gives us a pessimistic one.

I seek out stories that are labelled first-time, because I like that emotional resolution. The disappointment I feel discovering a fic is established relationship is so totally not traumatic, is so totally worth the chance of finding a first-time fic that hasn't been explicitly labelled that. (Or discovering that this particular established relationship fic has the same emotional payoff I like.)

It is no way equivalent to suggest that people should be expected to seek out fic that is labelled "does not contain consent issues" because they like not reliving trauma and being left emotionally and physically drained.

I don't have triggers. I'm lucky. I've never been seriously physically, sexually or emotional assaulted or abused. I've never even been terribly embarrassed or ridiculed by someone in public (although I fear that viscerally).

I rarely read warnings. I don't have to. (I rarely read things that aren't from my f'list or themed rec lists, either, so I am, in that way, managing my fannish experience. I don't expect other people to do this. I except the mainstream fannish experience to be reading everything for one's OTP that isn't nailed down by warnings.) If I happen onto a part of a story that seems as though there will consent issues, then I check the warnings. If the warnings say "non-con" or similar, then I will keep reading. If they don't, I often stop. I am not prepared to read non-con by someone who doesn't know that that is what they have written.

Warnings are warnings (about helping people avoid fic they don't want to or can't read). They're advertisement and enticement (about helping people find fic they do want to read). But they are also a way to show that we have thought about our fic, that we have reflected on it and its themes, that we wrote it with a purpose (it's doesn't have be a morally or socially "good" purpose). Warnings for the critical and controversial aspects of a story show that we own that story and our identity as its writer.

I have a strange lot of SGA meta that's come out of thinking while reading and responding to L's philosophical treatise. I'm not going to post all of it, except to say that I am not yet convinced that watching the show would be give enough to make up for the loss of what I have in reconstrucing canon by the implications of fic. I like the way I'm building it up, like doing a jigsaw without looking at the box. I don't quite yet want to know what it looks like finished.

My cousin H and godbother m met on the weekend at P's 50th birthday party. They have been MSN-ing since. I am both giggy with the cuteness and a little weirded out. P is actually H's godmother, too.

Bro's broken up with his girlfriend. At least, according to his facebook page. (She hadn't updated hers last time I checked.)

Okay, and now because this has to have some fannish content:

( SGA Narrowboat AU )