Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I confess - I’m a logician. I’ve seen my share of malice in fandom, but it never bothers me as much as irrationality does. The ad nauseum disturbs me because it is an attack on the possibility of rational debate in the area which “bores” the attacker. The ad hominem likewise bothers me, not because I’m the scapegoat, but because, again, the actual debate is tossed out the window when the debater herself is attacked.

I don’t mention fan foibles unless I’ve seen them more than once. I don’t link examples when the people involved are malicious, but if it’s just something an average fan might say or agree with, I will. Maybe not this time, though. Instead of linking, let me just rephrase one of the more frequent ad hominem arguments of fandom: A tells B, You’ve already made up your mind, and walks away.

It’s an ad hominem in the literal sense of the phrase, since it’s directed not at the point at hand but at the person (B) making the opposing argument. However, it’s not used (fallaciously) to establish the truth of A’s side, but merely to excuse A from further debate.

First of all, it’s meaningless to say that B has made up her mind. Believe me when I tell you, A wouldn’t be bothering with the argument if she hadn’t also made up her mind, at least provisionally. People who don’t have an opinion in the matter don’t get involved in debates.

A’s real meaning might be taken as, even if I proved my point, you wouldn’t accept the proof, but unless A is psychic and knows for sure what B’s reaction will be, this is just a baseless allegation. It takes quite a bit of argument to get down to another person’s fundamental irrationality, if she’s fundamentally irrational - I know, I’ve done it more than once. If you haven’t done the work, you have no right to impugn someone else’s rationality.

Of course, A is always free to walk away, but not to blame her forfeit on B. People are busy, and not everyone enjoys a good debate. Some people are culturally biased against certain styles of argument, considering them frightfully impolite. I’d guess the majority of fans either don’t like to argue or can’t argue their way out of a paper bag, which makes fandom a dull place for me. Even so, I never find myself cutting off an argument with an irrational opponent by saying you’ve already made up your mind - that is hardly B’s problem. If I have the time, interest, or a sudden fit of educational zeal, I will argue until it has become quite clear that B is a hopeless case. Then I just walk away, and I don’t look back.

The most common logical fallacy in fandom is not listed in Stephen’s Guide, but I keep running into it so I’m giving it a name. I’ll call it the argumentum ad nauseum. It’s a cross between the argumentum ad hominem and the fallacy of style over substance. A crossover fallacy is singularly appropriate for fandom.

The ad nauseum is the act of attacking a position, not for being incorrect nor for any other logical flaw, but simply for having been said many times before. There is, the man once said, nothing new under the sun, and even less new in fandom, so the ad nauseum is never a valid criticism. Usually it’s not even true - that is, the positions under attack have not been stated more frequently than anything else, nor than the opposite stance in particular.

Just as it’s only meta when somebody gets annoyed, it’s only boring when somebody doesn’t want to hear it. Maybe they feel threatened by opposing points of view, or maybe they aren’t intellectually capable of defending their own. The motives behind the ad nauseum are probably as diverse as those behind any other logical fallacy - it only holds the power it does because fandom is a literary community. Boring is a damning criticism when it’s leveled at fic, yet it is hollow when pointed at a blog or any other discussion forum.

If you really don’t want to hear it, you have the delete key and the back button. When instead you go on and on about how dull someone else’s blog is, questions automatically arise: Why did you keep reading it? Why are you pointing it out now?

I do book reviews in my blog, and I’ve never criticized a book without saying exactly how I thought it went wrong. Saying that meta is boring, dull, or “grey” is just a cop-out - a statement that the (allegedly) poor style negates the underlying substance. Ad nauseum is also a way to attack someone without having to justify, or even mention, your own position on the issue - that is its kinship with ad hominem.

So I really can’t get worked up over people who have nothing more insightful (or inciteful) to say about me than the standard ad nauseum “ho hum.” For an even better example of ad nauseum than my recent appearance on fandom_wank, I would refer you to Jintian protesting too much at the manifesto meme - for example: I don’t see the need for all of this sudden flag-waving and State of the Union speech-making. [The following has been edited.] I took this to mean, my opinions are interesting; your opinions are boring, unnecessary, or repetitive. The first half of the statement is merely implied, and isn’t necessary to ad nauseum. [end edits]

To recap, everyone has the right to be bored. If you’re bored, go away. If you attack me for boring you, it means you’re just faking the boredom - you’re really feeling threatened, guilty, or just plain hostile. Either learn to defend yourself without the ad nauseum arguments, or go away. Whining that something is boring is, for lack of a better term, boring.

I made fandom_wank. Thanks to Seema for the link.

I didn’t read it all, but one answer I can provide is that I think Te is great. Give the gift of fic!

Seema informed me that it’s time for the Awesome Author Award yet again. I’ve entered in the past two years, and I’ll be carrying on the tradition this year as well. My goal last year was not to repeat any entries. I wasn’t sure I could do that again, seeing as I haven’t written any J/C to speak of lately, but when I checked carefully I still had more stories than categories. Here are my lists, including this year:

The only J/C stories I still haven’t entered are Taboo, Like This, Video Meliora Proboque, and A Maquis Holiday. That’s a good start for 2004, I suppose. Two repeats were allowed this year under the contest rules, but I’m not repeating. If I didn’t win last year (I didn’t), I’m never going to win, so no tactical considerations apply. I’d rather put out newer fic that people are less likely to have read and have a few people see it and think (to misquote Monty Python) she’s not dead yet.

Seema got hold of the Boskone program and asked Zendom about tired fanfic writers jumping the shark. I made a distinction between tired writing, with (perhaps) intentionally repetitious themes, and exhausted muses who won’t produce any new ideas no matter how you prod them. Maybe it’s just an issue of whether the author rests when the muse is silent or tries to write anyway.

I only mention it because I needed a title to go with this untitled meme from YCD via Sara G:

Fandoms:

1. Jane Austen
2. X-Files
3. Voyager
4. Buffy The Vampire Slayer
5. Stargate

Pairings I used to love and now thoroughly detest because they’ve been so [expletive deleted] up by both canon and fanon that they are no longer recognizable:

1. JA: Darcy/Elizabeth
2. XF: Mulder/Scully
3. VOY: Janeway/Chakotay
4. BtVS: Xander/Anya
5. SG-1: (not Jossed yet)

Pairings I look at with old affection:

1. JA: Bingley/Jane
2. XF: (there are no other pairings)
3. VOY: Chakotay/7
4. BtVS: Willow/Oz
5. SG-1: (I haven’t actually seen the show yet)

Current pairings I squee over:

1. JA: Charlotte/Colonel Fitzwilliam
2. XF: (I Said, There Are No Other Pairings)
3. VOY: Janeway/Paris
4. BtVS: Buffy/Spike (kick me, I’m a fan)
5. SG-1: Sam/Jack

With RSS, my virtual finger is on the pulse of the A-list blogs. Real Blogger Phil Ringnalda linked Clay Shirky’s article on Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, in which the power law is applied to blogging and most of us end up at the skinny, low-audience end of the hit distribution.

I read a couple of other articles on Shirky’s site: The Price of Information Has Fallen and It Can’t Get Up and Weblogs and Publishing, both of which deal with the devaluation of the electronic word when the market is, essentially, glutted with blogs.

Here’s a section from the original article:

Note that [the power law] model is absolutely mute as to why one blog might be preferred over another. Perhaps some writing is simply better than average (a preference for quality), perhaps people want the recommendations of others (a preference for marketing), perhaps there is value in reading the same blogs as your friends (a preference for “solidarity goods”, things best enjoyed by a group). It could be all three, or some other effect entirely, and it could be different for different readers and different writers. What matters is that any tendency towards agreement in diverse and free systems, however and for whatever reason, can create power law distributions.

I thought first of LiveJournal, in which the tendency is toward short, name-dropping entries aimed at one’s friends:

LiveJournal had this figured out years ago, by assuming that people would be writing for their friends, rather than some impersonal audience. Publishing an essay and having 3 random people read it is a recipe for disappointment, but publishing an account of your Saturday night and having your 3 closest friends read it feels like a conversation, especially if they follow up with their own accounts.

Then I thought, fanfic! This explains it all: Perhaps some writing is simply better than average (a preference for quality), perhaps people want the recommendations of others (a preference for marketing), perhaps there is value in reading the same blogs as your friends (a preference for “solidarity goods”, things best enjoyed by a group). Some fic is actually good (quality), some is famous or recommended (marketing), and the rest is cranked out to satisfy the voracious and undiscriminating appetites of subgenre fans (solidarity goods).

In another sense, all fanfic is solidarity goods - best enjoyed by the fannish group. Non-fans don’t even understand the concept, never mind value the results. Anyone, within reason, can read an A-list blog, and anyone, within reason, can read a sci-fi novel off the bookshelves. On the other hand, you have to be in a certain group to follow most LiveJournals, and you have to know and love Star Trek to read Trek fanfic.

I’m not much of one for solidarity. I’d rather write original sci-fi than fanfic. I’d rather read an A-list blog essay than a LJ about last Saturday night. I tend to write essays like this one, no matter how low my power-law standing. That’s not a matter of audience but of author preference.

LJ is too slow to look up the exact quote, but I believe A.J. Hall commented in RJ’s LiveJournal that she could understand people not reading slash for moral reasons. Ah, here it comes:

Some people, it is true, who I know and who write slash have difficulty in understanding the “I never touch slash on principle because it can never be canonical” attitude. Most would have considerably more sympathy with a consistent moral position.

I was thinking about that, and came to the conclusion that there is no legitimate moral reason for not reading slash. There’s a moral basis for avoiding smut, and insofar as slash is smutty it falls under that reason, but slash without the smut is not a moral issue.

Why not? We read murder mysteries, even though murder is wrong. Were there an entire genre devoted not only to murder but to the glorification of murder it might be wrong to write in it, but not to read the occasional story. Even in non-fiction, we read about terrible things without feeling that reading about them makes us culpable in them.

The objections to slash are more basic than moral differences, and I think they fall into two categories: the literary and the visceral. A visceral dislike for slash is often identified with homophobia, but it’s more commonly human nature. Heterosexual men, especially, are deeply squicked by the notion. It’s not as strong as the incest taboo, but it’s out there and it’s a good enough reason not to read slash.

My objection falls into the literary camp. I have nothing against reading fiction that’s about homosexuals - I particularly enjoyed LMB’s Ethan of Athos, even though it’s not one of her better works. I don’t even have anything against writing about homosexual characters, be they Willow/Tara or characters in my own original fic. It’s not homosexuality as a topic that disturbs me but slash as a genre. A host of fans explicitly devoted to reversing canon sexual orientations, to writing stories because they are risqué, and to being generally contrary or rebellious do not appeal to me. It doesn’t make me want to know them, to be part of their clique, or to read their stories. The slash description adds no value for me - it merely alerts me that the story wasn’t directed at the general reader but at a subcommunity whose motives and principles I barely understand, never mind share.

I think when RJ exempted “Lust Over Pendle” from the slash genre she meant it in this sense - not that the story wasn’t about a non-canon homosexual relationship, but that it wasn’t about contradicting canon for its own sake. It was not about being slashy. I haven’t read it so I can’t say for sure.

There are other subcommunities of fandom that are just as self-congratulatory and anti-canonical as slash is - J/C fandom comes to mind immediately - but most of them don’t assert or assume a literary superiority over other fans. It is entirely possible that slashers are better writers, overall, than non-slashers, but that’s a matter of statistics which does not make slashfic better in principle than other kinds of fic. Being slashy is not a literary good in and of itself, and no amount of claiming it is will make it so.

Cool link of the day: Borg, especially the Borg Queen wavs at the bottom.

I started this entry about a week ago in a spirit of BOFQness and didn’t finish. After a day of writing fic and playing with FicML, I’m not so jaded - but the conclusion should be the same either way.

There’s a lull on ASC between February 1st and awards time in April. (I know they start earlier, but I only do VOY so for me, it’s April.) I’ve been thinking of spending the lull not writing fanfic.

You may say that I already spend too much time not writing fanfic, and that I hardly need to dedicate two months to not doing something I fail to do so naturally. I certainly am not pretending that I will devote the next two months to not reading fanfic. I already don’t read so much fanfic that no extra effort is necessary in that area. Moreover, I don’t feel that I’m voting properly unless I read the entire year’s worth of Voyager fic during the month of April itself, and preferably during the actual voting period. I love a challenge…

No, I want to stop writing fanfic because for the past few weeks, the ghosts of original fics past have been haunting me. Wasn’t I a cool idea? they say, and I was almost ready for submission. It’s the Tolkien-inspired ones that have been at me lately, not that they’re fanfic in any real sense of the word - they’re more like Tolkien in Space. I’ve been neglecting the original writing impulse, and the muse should never be thwarted when she’s willing to work.

I’m counting on the ASC Awards to inspire me to write more fanfic, after my break for original fic. Wish the muse luck!

A Voyager fan manifesto, à la Liz.

1. I think publishing RPF is wrong, unless you have the Real Person’s permission.
2. I don’t particularly care if you think it’s offensive of me to say what I think. If you choose to read insults into other people’s opinions, then I’d recommend you stop reading other people’s opinions.
3. I have no interest in slash, mainly because I don’t see a non-political motive for changing canon sexual orientations (in either direction). I’m not in fandom for the gender politics. See #4 also.
4. I have no interest in smut. I’m not in fandom for titillation, pornography, or free biology lessons.
5. I have very little interest in angst, but I don’t mind a good tragedy.
6. There’s nothing in the world like a good crew story, unless it’s a good AU.
7. I have a muse and she’s not afraid to use me.
8. I have a not-so-secret weakness for J/P, and a well-known one for C/7. I’m still working on the T/K - the bun is in the oven.
9. No, you may not archive my fic. Why should your site get hits out of my labor? Feel free to link my fic with the links provided at the beginning or end of each story, but don’t think I’m going to pay any fic taxes to get you to do that, either. I’m not in fandom for the marketing degree.
10. It’s the 24th century, people! Please stop killing your characters in childbirth.

Title: Where is the Fic?
Author: Jemima
Series: VOY
Summary: A filk on the eternal question of Voyager fandom.

Where is the fic?
Where is the fic?
Where is the fic?
Where is the fic?
Where is the fic?
Where is the fic?
Where is the fic?

Where is the fic
You said you’d write for me, it would be J/C -
Will it ever be?
Where is the fic?

You told me J/P was disgusting, and you would never try to find
Those tired, misplaced lizard babies - they should be left behind!

Where is the fic
You said you’d write for me, it would be J/C -
Have you gone P/T?
Where is the fic?

If you’re still suffering through Enterprise, I wish that you would let it go.
Don’t leave me hanging on a cliffhanger -
Come back and fix my show!

Oh how I wish I’d never read you;
I guess it must have been the plot.
I got sucked in to such a weird AU,
The one you left to rot!

Where is the fic
You said would be J/C for eternity?
Have you gone C/P?
Where is the fic?

Where is the fic?
Where is the fic?
Where is the fic?
[repeat ad nauseum]