Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I never read media tie-in fiction, but I made an exception for the recent Star Wars novel Destiny’s Way because it was by Walter Jon Williams. I couldn’t have told you otherwise that it was by WJW - it was readable, but it didn’t have his special way with characters and universes.

I spent the beginning of the book wondering how it had come about - did WJW write a masterpiece, and then the Lucas Books people gutted it or dumbed it down for the masses? Or did he go into this assignment with the intention of slumming and raking in the big bucks? Did WJW get to write his own plot, or, like an unfortunate participant in a bad Virtual Season, was this Nebula-winning author expected to take dictation from the Lucasfilm people? By the time I’d reached the end, I’d decided that the “New Jedi Order” universe was sufficiently complex (or baroque and soapy) that the novel contracts must come with detailed outlines.

(Spoilers ahead!) As with most media-fic, the main characters were somewhat sketchy - Luke and Leia, Han and Lando were still running around, but they were rather wooden. I found myself sympathizing with the bad guys - in fact, I couldn’t tell at first that the bad guys were supposed to be bad. I thought Nom Anor was a double agent, and I agreed with Fyor Rodan that the Jedi cult had no natural place in a democratic government. I wanted to storm out of the room with him after Luke had had his smuggler friends bribe senators to throw the election to his friend. I was with Vergere in her criticisms of New Republic Jedi dynasties founded by Darth Vader, one of which, to my shock, had the nerve to name a child Anakin. Bring back the Old Republic!

Another problem of media fic is laziness the lack of description. While Destiny’s Way was good with the battles, I don’t recall any extensive descriptions of worlds besides Zonama Sekot. Much of the appeal of the movies is the gorgeous future scenery, like that of Naboo in Episode One, so it surprised me that I didn’t even realize much of the action was taking place in a floating city until someone aimed a torpedo at it.

And then there’s the Force. In the movies, the Force is mysterious, and Jedi knights are single, solitary, and monklike. In the books, the Force serves as a gigantic invisible calling card with which the various Jedi reach out and touch each other, not to mention reproduce with each other. All the Forcely reaching and sensing and touching and energizing got tiring quickly. Judging from the anvils of backstory, the Jedi bounce back and forth betwen the light and dark sides like so many ping-pong balls. At least the Real Anakin had the decency to stick to the dark side until the end, and to die immediately thereafter rather than tiring the reader with a perpetual repentance.

None of these problems are particular to Destiny’s Way, though. If you like the Star Wars thing I’m sure this was a fine example of the genre, if not of Walter Jon Williams.

It’s snowed twice already this week, so the rain, even in torrents, is a nice change of pace.

I just thought I’d blog for a minute, and maybe I’ll get over this sudden (or really, not so sudden) urge to quit my job.

No, it’s not going away.

It’s still not going away.

In fact, it’s sounding better every minute.

It’s finally over - “Shootout at the Nokai Corral” has come to the traditional yet satisfying conclusion of all Westerns. The stereotypical Western characters didn’t evolve much to speak of over the course of four issues of Analog, but that’s sci-fi Westerns for you. “The Monopole Affair” wasn’t bad, and I highly recommend “A Good Offense” by Don D’Ammassa, a tale about the diplomatic challenges of dealing with aliens who communicate entirely in insults.

I read the first volume of Otherland by Tad Williams, but those first 800 pages were barely even a start. I realized 300 pages from the end that the margins would not allow space for a conclusion at the author’s current pace. I’ll have to wait until Book 4 for a proper, reviewable ending.

Desperate for something that concludes, I decided to read Crossfire by Nancy Kress. I figured she could be counted on for a simple, one-novel, ends-at-the-end plot, and I was almost right. Most of the book was good - wacky characters and mysterious aliens, a little space travel, more than one moral conundrum, and a running Quaker theme. The only trouble was the end, in which a vital and somewhat vague plot point happened off-stage. In fact, for all I know it didn’t happen at all, and there will be a sequel dealing with the non-event.

I’ve been playing with icons. I downloaded a bunch of them and replaced my story files’ boring document and folder icons with cool planets, aliens and PADDs. Along with one of the sets, World of Aqua 4 from the Icon Factory came a lovely icon of the One Ring, and I wondered where I could use it.

The answer, in the end, was obvious. There’s only one artifact of a dark, all-consuming power on my bright and sunny mac - Internet Explorer. I did the standard Show Info, copy new icon, paste over old icon with IE, and you can see the results here:

(Click to see more of my desktop icons.)

My One Ring transplant into IE was only partly successful. It shows up in the dock, but not everywhere in the finder. I put it into the dock so I could admire it - I never actually use IE. Directly above the One Browser is the result of a more complicated icon transplant. I hated the default AIM icon enough to do ResEdit surgery on it. I got the directions from Resexcellence - you can see the original version there. The replacement icon is from Spiffy Apps at Icons.cx.

I can’t believe I mentioned Anakin Skywalker without linking to Weird Al’s video of The Saga Begins. The title of this entry is taken from that epic filk of “American Pie,” and it relates to the protests of HP fans that Harry is just a normal, average wizard. I’d be more willing to believe that if he weren’t a first-year Quiddich phenomenon. (Please pardon my spelling, if I’ve gotten it wrong - I find the HP books extraordinarily forgettable, even though I just read one a couple of weeks ago.) I’m not judging HP from the perspective of a student of canon but from an overall impression of its themes. Of course, people may differ on the themes they see in a text, which brings us back to…

…subtext. When I made my off-hand comment that I don’t believe in subtext, I didn’t realize I was playing a “get out of slash free” card. I’m not complaining, by any means. Seema, in between lewd comments about my dude Weird Al, gave me this link to AJ Hall’s thoughts on subtext and backstory. Caught between an RJ and an AJ, I asked Seema whether she believed in subtext. She said she didn’t believe in J/C subtext.

I’d mentioned exactly this example before - that Janeway/Chakotay fans see J/C subtext and Chakotay/Paris fans see C/P subtext, and rarely the twain end up meeting. While certainly something happens to the story in the readers’ minds, that something has very little to do with the story itself. Thus I’ve heard J/C fans raving about all the J/C subtext, and C/7 fans raving back that J/C is the most nauseating, unbelievable, and chemistry-less pairing known to Trek - there was never any such subtext. And that’s without even involving a slash pairing!

I’m not saying there isn’t more to a story than just the words themselves, but when you get into an aspect of characterization that people violently disagree about, such as J/C vs. C/7 or C/P, then the most likely explanation is that neither one is part of the shared world of canon. I’ve been down that fanon road before, and all slash looks like to me is another fanon’s rose-colored glasses - the odd thing being the use of “subtext” in place of “fanon.”

I’ve been going back and forth with RJ about Harry Potter, and this time I hit her comment size limit, so I’m going to have to put it all here. For those who have missed my other discussions with RJ, I should mention that I don’t consider Tolkien’s works to be “Christian” in any important sense - the category was brought up by RJ and I’m not relying on it when I criticize HP any more than Brin was when he lit into Star Wars (chuckle now if you know Brin). I also don’t believe that children need to be shielded from literature.

In response to RJ’s first entry, I commented:

One difference between HP and your other fantasy examples is that in Tolkien and Lewis, the human/hobbit characters do not have inherent magical powers. HP is more like Star Wars that way than Christian fantasy, and is susceptible to the criticism David Brin once made of the Force, which I linked in my blog back when I saw the first HP movie.

In brief, Brin calls Star Wars a “demigod tale”; analogously, Harry Potter isn’t worshipping another god, he is another god. He is born with powers no one else has, and he and his class despise the general run of mankind - the Muggles. Brin’s main concern was the democracy of equals vs. the depotism of the genetically superior, but I think that the deeper concern for children’s literature is the very concept of the boy born to be king. Most boys are not born to be king.

Frodo is a positive moral example because, like the Narnia children, he was sometimes weak, and paid the price, and ultimately he chose to do good despite the temptation not to get involved. Harry Potter, on the other hand, regularly lies to his family and his teachers. He breaks the rules and is rewarded for it because he is the anointed one. He does good accidentally, as part of his mysterious demigod nature, starting with his defeat of Voldemort while still an infant.

HP certainly is a pagan book, but not because of the magic.

In response to RJ’s comments on the above, I said part of the following:

Harry isn’t the analogue of Anakin Skywalker, but of Luke Skywalker (unless something unexpected happens in the later books). Part of Brin’s point was that Luke was born to be a demigod, and that that is a bad sort of person to star in fiction. His points about Anakin are valid, but irrelevant to HP.

I admit I’ve only read the first two HP books, but it’s not clear to me that anyone else is as powerful as Harry. Other characters constantly reinforce the specialness of Harry and the belief that Harry defeated Voldemort as an infant - and therefore, his unusual power even among wizards. Later revelations won’t negate that initial impression for me. How would you disprove Harry’s superior powers, unless by a faceoff between, say, Snape and Harry? That’s unlikely to happen, and any apparent superior skill among Harry’s elders can be attributed to education and experience rather than innate talent.

It is likewise clear to me that Muggles are, if not to be despised, at least to be pitied. I don’t think you can excuse Harry’s behavior by his bad Muggle parentage - it was the author’s decision to give him bad parents, to put him in that situation, and therefore to glorify his rebellion, however justified, to minors. It’s certainly true that the story of the boy born to be king (with a side of evil stepparent) is quite common - for example, it occurs in Star Wars - but that doesn’t make it an admirable story. I find it morally questionable.

You know I don’t believe in protecting children from literature, so what I’m really questioning is the appeal of HP. I think it’s so popular with children precisely because it tells this fantasy (in the bad sense of the word) of the boy born to be king, who’s the most popular in the school, who’s the most talented at sports, who has the most magical powers, who’s the most oppressed by his clearly evil guardians, and who saves the world in every novel.

Anyway, in real life we don’t see every infraction summarily punished…

Good literature does not copy real life, it idealizes it. What happens in the books expresses the ideals behind them. Especially in a fantasy, you can’t say that the author was just being realistic - that’s not the nature of literature, and certainly not of fairy tales.

So why do we expect anything different from fiction?

Well, the reason I expect more from fiction is that I still remember reading Lewis and Tolkien and Leguin as a child, and you mentioned two of them. When I read HP, I was surprised at how flat it seemed, how little it had in common with the books I remember. Lewis’ and Tolkien’s stories took average characters and put them into difficult situations which they overcame because of their moral qualities (and possibly supernatural aid), not because of native power or birthright. Frodo was the best hobbit in the Shire because of his character, not his parentage or his inheritance of the Ring. At best, with Harry it’s unclear whether his choices or his powers are behind his success, and though that doesn’t make the HP novels particularly evil, it does make them inferior as literature to the others you mentioned.

Since they were getting long, here are some responses to the last entry’s comments:

Scrollgirl said: I’m just not ready to say that, just because we don’t see it, it is therefore uncanonical.

The definition of canon is that which appears on-screen. Anything that doesn’t appear on-screen is not canon, for my purposes. (Jeri Taylor novels are not canon.) Anything we haven’t seen, such as a sexual orientation for which there is no evidence, is therefore non-canonical. I don’t think I used the term uncanonical, which is a bit stronger. If something contradicts the actual facts of canon, such as saying Tom is exclusively gay when in fact he had heterosexual relationships in canon, that would be counter-canonical.

I’m not saying you can’t make an attempt to found a non-canonical characterization in canon facts - just that it’s still non-canonical, and therefore not what I’m after in fanfic.

Caffey said: I certainly do believe in subtext or else the only VOY pairings I would care for and/or accept as valid (for lack of better term) were P/T and C/7.

I don’t care for P/T myself - they bore me. I do like some non-canon pairings, especially J/P and J/C, but that fondness is not based on subtext. Maybe because it isn’t, I rarely find J/P or J/C fic convincing, and so I don’t read much of it.

Fay said: What puzzles me still […] is what you would consider NOT to be non-canonical, short of copying out the scripts verbatim.

The example that comes immediately to mind is my fic 148, which is a Spike monologue based on the events of Bargaining and After Life. As far as I recall, there was nothing controversial about my characterization of Spike and I just followed along with the relevant canon events for the plot.

However, I never said that I don’t read non-canonical fic. What I don’t tend to read is fic with non-canonical characterizations. Non-canonical events are fine by me, in the form of parody, AU’s, and adventures that go beyond simple novelizations of canon events.

Katta said: There are, in general, the kind of ficcers who want “more of the same” [and] there are also the kind of ficcers who want a twist - they like what they see, but something is missing.

I certainly don’t mind more of the same, but I’m more interested in twists to the canon universe and situations (AU’s). I’m not interested in major twists to the canon characters (slash, angst, etc.).

eleanorb said: The divisions for readers […] are breaking down, at least in the eyes of SF readers who read far wider than the delimited genre and recognise the themes of SF whoever writes them and whatever it is listed as in the publishers catalogues.

I don’t see any such breakdown. While I mentioned that there are stories which are hard to classify, they’re the exception that prove the rule. A similar theme doesn’t make something sci-fi, because sci-fi isn’t identified by theme any more than mysteries or westerns or thrillers are. Mass-market genres are classified by plot - they are the bastions of plot in modern literature.

Previous links are in the previous post.

Fay has another essay, some of which I addressed in the comments, but not the question of my literary disinterest in slash.

First of all, for my purposes genres or subgenres are self-identifying subsets of fiction into which stories can be classified by any reasonably aware reader. When someone posts a slash story to a slash-only list, or otherwise marks a story with the classification “slash,” then it’s self-identified as slash. Most fanfiction readers will classify any story featuring a non-canonical homosexual relationship as slash. For the purpose of classification, it doesn’t matter that some stories are better than others, or that some are smuttier than others, or even that a few stories are more difficult to classify than the majority. People who want to read slash will look for fiction identified as slash in some way.

Consider, for example, the genre of science fiction. Sci-fi is a self-identifying genre, in that short stories are published in magazines that accept only science fiction, and that novels are published by sci-fi houses and/or marked “sci-fi” on the spine. Readers can identify sci-fi by content even without these clues. Most sci-fi readers will classify any story featuring futuristic science as science fiction. It doesn’t matter that certain stories fall in between sci-fi and fantasy, or in between sci-fi and thrillers - the classification is still useful for people who want to read sf, and equally useful for people who don’t.

Before the pulps, there was no genre of science fiction. If you wanted to talk about sci-fi, you would have to refer generally to, say, the works of Verne or Wells. Now we can look back and classify those pre-genre works into the genre; in fact, we can’t help classifying them. The days in which a sci-fi writer could pass for mainstream are over. Likewise, we can’t help classifying slash as slash. The genre will not go away anytime soon, and the label functions to tell people that this is a subgenre with certain known characteristics.

I have a literary reason for liking science fiction: I read sci-fi for the exploration of futures and the heroic plots. In general what I consider to have merit in fiction is the heroic and skill in the depiction of a world, whether a future world, a past one, a fantastic one, or a slightly altered version of our own (eg., in Ayn Rand). People might dismiss sci-fi for literary reasons as well: usually such critics feel that the antiheroic has more literary merit than the heroic, or they want more attention to character and less to plot and milieu. People also dislike sci-fi for non-literary reasons - they have a visceral dislike of the fantastic or of the heroic.

So, as I’ve said before, people can have a literary or a visceral disinterest in slash. I ruled out moral disapproval of non-smut slash because literary works (as opposed to erotica) are not usually judged on a moral basis. In any event, moral considerations are not literary ones, so for those who think they apply they can be lumped into the visceral dislikes.

Fanfic is about playing with canon or fanon. What you do with them is a matter or literary or visceral tastes. As with sf, my interest is in the universe and the heroic plot, and also in humor, especially at the expense of either canon or fanon. So I prefer AU stories (particularly numbers 3, 4, and 6 from the Borg AU Classification), adventures, parodies, and filk, all of which are closely based on canon characterizations, canon events, and/or the canon universe as a milieu. I don’t care for angst, fluff, or slash, all of which are based on altering canon characterizations. (In the case of Buffy, the show’s level of angst is tough to top so the real crimes against canon occur on the fluffy side.)

So I have a literary disinterest in slash, because I have a more general literary disinterest in non-canon characterizations. Someone else might have an opposite literary interest in tweaking canon characterizations - this might include slash but would not be restricted to it, there being so many other ways to alter the characters. That leaves the question, can someone have a literary interest in slash alone? I’m not going to say it isn’t possible, but the pro-slash factors people usually cite are not, on the face of them, literary in the sense I mean it. “Pretty boys” is clearly a visceral taste, and the interest in slashy subtext would have to be accompanied by comparable interest in other kinds of subtext to be a general literary interest. I don’t believe in subtext, myself, but I hear people go on at length about alleged J/C subtext in Voyager episodes, and it doesn’t seem to capture the attention of the C/P crowd.

So instead I attribute the interest in slash to modern sexual politics - the romanticization of friendship, a certain J/C author would, ironically, call it. (Ironically, because J/C is exactly the same phenomenon, right down to the alleged canon subtext - why can’t these two friends be just friends?) I would call it the homosexualization of romance - because the opposite gender is no longer “other” enough, and romance is no longer star-crossed enough, the way to recapture that old troubadour spirit is to complicate relationships by making them same-sex. This theory explains (to me) why one particular kind of alteration to canon characterizations, making them gay, is so much more popular than, say, making them Mormons, or gourmet chefs, or hermaphrodites.

None of the above is a comment on the quality of slash or on the right of slashers to slash. It’s just an explanation of what it means to have a literary disinterest in slash as a non-canonical genre, something that is frequently said to be impossible.

Once again, people are writing essays in my comments. One of them is easier to read here. The two previous entries which have attracted so much interest are The Morality of Reading and Agendae, but I’ll recap. In the first entry, I made an argument about why reading slash was not a moral issue in the way reading smut (of any orientation) could be - not even if the reader finds homosexuality itself immoral. I went over what being slashy says to me as a non-slasher. My second entry was directed not so much at the commenters but at some stupid remarks that were made at fandom_wank about my manifesto. I defined “gender politics” and fic agendas, and said that women writing gay male erotica was weird. My general point in all three entries is that people can dislike slash as a genre for literary, as opposed to moral or visceral, reasons.

So, on to the comments. There isn’t really a thread of argument in them, but they are interesting in their own right (and long), so I’ll address the bits that stood out. First and foremost is the “good for the gander” argument - that it’s not unusual for women to like m/m slash because it’s not unusual for men to like f/f pornography. However, men and women are different. Men fill the jails, and women fill the fanfic mailing lists. What men see in f/f videos is not, until proven otherwise, what women see in m/m fanfic. If you went out and polled a hundred non-fan men and women about their interest in homosexual erotica involving the opposite gender, you would not get the same results for both sexes. Mainstream women are not consuming m/m erotica in any appreciable numbers, while f/f pornography is a large part of the porn industry. So when I say that women writing m/m erotica is weird, and that the “pretty boys” explanation doesn’t explain anything, that’s what I’m basing my ideas of what’s unusual upon - the mainstream population. Why do slashers like pretty boys in such greater numbers than average women?

Likewise, the percentage of homosexuals in the population has been estimated at 1.5% for women and 3.5% for men. So in real life, one can assume that most people are not gay unless they indicate that they are, by word or deed, and be right most of the time. Likewise, in fiction one can assume that most characters are not gay, unless TPTB say otherwise. In fact, in most fanfictional universes there is no stigma attached to being gay, so there is even less reason to assume that a character who isn’t gay in canon is anything but heterosexual - especially since most characters are given heterosexual backgrounds in canon. For instance, every main and recurring character on Voyager except the Borg Queen was known to have had heterosexual relationships, many of which occurred on-screen. No homosexual relationships were ever mentioned or shown for any of them.

Nothing I’ve said implies that women should not or cannot write homosexual characters, or male characters, if they need to - say, if they’re writing about a canon Willow. The question is why slash writers “overpopulate” the fictional world with gay characters. Clearly, as I said, it’s not because the m/m writers are homosexual men, which would be the most obvious explanation.

By the way, by slash I mean the fanfiction self-identified as slash. Like science fiction, it’s a known and well-understood term in that sense, even if in my mind real sci-fi has more stringent requirements.

Fay said: If you are determined to believe that all slash is simply “weird” porn, or that it is all Harlequin-level writing, then I suppose you will continue to believe this whatever I say. In this you will be sorely mistaken, but perhaps it is more comfortable to cling to a preconception than it is to question its validity and risk having to reassess one’s stance.

I never said that all slash was weird porn or bad writing. I reassess my stance every time someone makes a logical argument against it. The most irritating thing about discussing slash is how it always comes back to the assumption that slash is somehow a challenge to the morality or “preconceptions” of everyone who’s not interested in it. Slash, as I’ve said before, is just another fanfic agenda. If you told me there was a wonderful subgenre out there where canon characters were suddenly Mormon, or handicapped, or axe-murderers, or gourmet chefs, I would find the existence of such a subgenre interesting, but not the fic.

Go ahead, start complaining about my preconceptions about Mormons.

It’s sleeting.

This week, in a fit of geekiness, I installed Privoxy for OSX. Privoxy was formerly known by the more descriptive name “Internet Junkbuster.” It’s a local proxy that provides privacy by blocking ads, cookies, referrer information, popups and other Javascript pestware.

My main interest in privoxy was blocking cookies, because I’m just ornery that way. Cookies annoy me. I don’t mind sending a referrer, because that’s not really information about me, it’s information about the structure of the world wide web. The referrer is the previous page, if you clicked a link to get here, or empty if you just typed in the URL or used a bookmark to get here. Your referrer is:

I track referrers myself, since I’m curious who’s linking me. I don’t set tracking cookies, so I never know whether it’s your first visit to the site or if you stop by all the time. I don’t think that’s any of my business. I do set untracking cookies, so I won’t be tracked when I hit my own pages. If you really want to opt out of my tracker, tell me and I’ll give you the untracking URL. My blog will set a cookie when you choose a stylesheet, but otherwise, Jemima’s Trek is cookie and evil-javascript free.

So I have this one don’t-track-me cookie that I wanted to let through privoxy, and I also had this little problem where the default privoxy setup killed Camino. My Camino is oversensitive - this was the second or third time I’ve had to reinstall it after it ate a bad webpage for dinner. In this case, privoxy was sending it corrupt javascript. I didn’t want privoxy “fixing” the javascript that way - I just wanted it to block ad images and cookies. Camino already blocks popups on its own, and the other javascript annoyances, like links that open in new windows, aren’t worth another Camino reinstall to avoid.

When all else fails, RTFM. I found a PDF version of the privoxy manual and printed it out to read on the T. By the time I got home, I was ready for another evening of tweaking config files. I turned off all the filtering options - the bits that rewrite a web page to turn off gif animation or remove popping-up code - and my new Camino was much happier. I turned on the cookie cruncher, but added an exception for jemimap.freeshell.org. I left in all the ad blocking and turned on the checkerboard pattern that privoxy uses to replace ads. (The other choices are to use a transparent gif or an image of your own choosing.)

It’s a great little program, though it doesn’t seem to be quite as smart about multitasking as the browser itself. That’s a typical problem with proxies, though. I admit, I’ve been so busy with last-minute ASC voting that I haven’t had much chance to admire the checkerboard of nuked ads on ad-heavy web pages. Because I have all the filters off, cookies set with javascript can still get through, but those are rarer than HTTP cookies and Camino is still set up to ask me if I want them.

Obviously, the answer is no.