Follow-through is underrated.
I am coming down with something unpleasant and have to hang around for at least 15 more minutes of office hours, so it seems like a good time to answer the five questions that queenzulu asked me. (I'm happy to ask people questions, too, although they will probably suck.)
I'm leaving this unlocked since it seems pretty trivial, but on the off-chance it's not: no linking to this in comms, please. Personal journals are fine.
1. Did Tanith and Ben break up? (Were they ever together as more-than-partners, or have I read too much fic?) Can you explain what happened to a non-skating fandom newbie?
Tanith and Ben have never (officially) been more than friends. The facts are these: Ben has a long-term girlfriend, Merrie Parr, whom he has been with for something like nine years now, almost as long as he's been skating with Tanith. They live together and have a bunch of dogs and aren't getting married until the gays can, or something like that. Tanith dated the Canadian men's skater Fedor Andreev for a number of years; he is the son of her then-coach, Marina Zoueva. She broke up with him circa 2005 and started dating Evan Lysacek a little less than a year later. There is something smurfy about the Evan/Tanith situation: a lot of people think he's gay (including fellow skaters - jokes about beards have been made), and they never seem happy or in love when they're together. But as of now, officially, both Tanith and Ben are dating people other than each other.
For me as a writer, Tanith and Ben really play into my opposite-sex no-attraction BFF kink. I find the prospect of Tanith/Ben kind of oogy, and it seems like they do too - they kind of laugh nervously when the question comes up and say, "No, we're skating soul mates." In their case, I find that kind of dynamic - and what it means for their lovers - more interesting than romance. In general, I tend to prefer ice dance teams who aren't romantically involved, both on the ice and off.
2. What's your current favourite album/artist? (Link me some awesome songs if you want!) Do you still have indie cred? (I seem to remember you were worried about losing it at one point.)
My current favorite album is the 1800+ song playlist of "favorites" on my Zune, which is now on constant rotation in my car. I honestly don't even know what I'm listening to these days, beyond the standbys of R.E.M. and Ani DiFranco and the Mountain Goats. I'm kind of obsessed with "Sex on Fire" by Kings of Leon, which I linked to on YouTube last week, but that's more of a song I can't get out of my head than a favorite, per se. I guess beyond that, I'm listening to a lot of covers and bad Japanese pop music and horrible things that I download and immediately delete after hearing how horrible they are. I know, I'm a big help.
I am not really worried about losing my indie cred, so much as I'm embarrassed by the smugness of people who think they have it. If you shoot for indie cred, you cut yourself off from all kinds of good mainstream music, or you have to shield yourself with irony. Which I totally do, but I also really enjoy Kelly Clarkson and that one Leona Lewis song. Still, I'm completely judgy and snide when it comes to music, and there is a part of me that believes that bands are better if no one else has heard of them, and thistle90 wishes I would stop smirking and just enjoy Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. So I guess, yes, I have indie cred but not in a good way.
3. What was the last straw that made you stop watching Stupid Doctor Show?
I quit watching when Carter left. The show just didn't seem cohesive to me anymore once he was gone. But it wasn't really a last straw so much as an excuse to quit.
4. Hee, this one's a bit of a cheat, but--when's it gonna be femslash09 time?
That is such a cheat. And we're doing it in the summer again, starting with the polls sometime in early May.
5. What's the biggest appeal of RPS and/or a reality show versus a scripted show, for watching and/or for writing?
RPS and reality TV are appealing for different reasons. I don't prefer reality to scripted, per se, so much as I recognize that reality TV can be very good and often is better than a lot of scripted TV. It's also something I can enjoy when it's endearingly bad, whereas bad scripted TV often just bores me. The impetus to write reality TV fic comes from exactly the same place as the impetus to write scripted fic: I see something in the text that I want to build on. The boundaries of reality contestants' lives are often as firm and as frustrating as those of fictional characters. You really only know them from the show, in a specific and limited context, and often they are edited until they become more like characters than real, multidimensional human beings.
The pleasure of writing about athletes is that I'm making a narrative out of something that isn't a narrative already. We want our lives to be stories, and we want the people in our lives to cleave to certain roles. So there's something primally satisfying about turning the non-narrative of someone's lived experience into a story. Real people - unedited real people - are messy and contradictory. There's actually more freedom in writing RPF than non-fanfic, in that respect: we know that these real people have acted "out of character" in the past, so as readers we accept a wider range of behavior from them. But at the same time it's not limitless. Real people are coherent but not always consistent. So it's again with the primal desire to impose narrative: RPF writers are (among other things) trying to make sense of the crazy shit people do.
Also, in both reality TV and other RPF, we see a lot of people who just don't exist in fiction. Not many TV/film actors look like ice skaters, and I think ice skaters are pretty. There's a lot more ethnic and sexual diversity on reality TV than on scripted TV, and that's also true of most sports (to varying degrees: lots of queers and Asians in figure skating; lots of African-Americans, Pacific Islanders, and people from invisible strata of white America in the NFL). A lot of the time, the kinds of people I want to write about simply don't exist on scripted TV.
I'm leaving this unlocked since it seems pretty trivial, but on the off-chance it's not: no linking to this in comms, please. Personal journals are fine.
1. Did Tanith and Ben break up? (Were they ever together as more-than-partners, or have I read too much fic?) Can you explain what happened to a non-skating fandom newbie?
Tanith and Ben have never (officially) been more than friends. The facts are these: Ben has a long-term girlfriend, Merrie Parr, whom he has been with for something like nine years now, almost as long as he's been skating with Tanith. They live together and have a bunch of dogs and aren't getting married until the gays can, or something like that. Tanith dated the Canadian men's skater Fedor Andreev for a number of years; he is the son of her then-coach, Marina Zoueva. She broke up with him circa 2005 and started dating Evan Lysacek a little less than a year later. There is something smurfy about the Evan/Tanith situation: a lot of people think he's gay (including fellow skaters - jokes about beards have been made), and they never seem happy or in love when they're together. But as of now, officially, both Tanith and Ben are dating people other than each other.
For me as a writer, Tanith and Ben really play into my opposite-sex no-attraction BFF kink. I find the prospect of Tanith/Ben kind of oogy, and it seems like they do too - they kind of laugh nervously when the question comes up and say, "No, we're skating soul mates." In their case, I find that kind of dynamic - and what it means for their lovers - more interesting than romance. In general, I tend to prefer ice dance teams who aren't romantically involved, both on the ice and off.
2. What's your current favourite album/artist? (Link me some awesome songs if you want!) Do you still have indie cred? (I seem to remember you were worried about losing it at one point.)
My current favorite album is the 1800+ song playlist of "favorites" on my Zune, which is now on constant rotation in my car. I honestly don't even know what I'm listening to these days, beyond the standbys of R.E.M. and Ani DiFranco and the Mountain Goats. I'm kind of obsessed with "Sex on Fire" by Kings of Leon, which I linked to on YouTube last week, but that's more of a song I can't get out of my head than a favorite, per se. I guess beyond that, I'm listening to a lot of covers and bad Japanese pop music and horrible things that I download and immediately delete after hearing how horrible they are. I know, I'm a big help.
I am not really worried about losing my indie cred, so much as I'm embarrassed by the smugness of people who think they have it. If you shoot for indie cred, you cut yourself off from all kinds of good mainstream music, or you have to shield yourself with irony. Which I totally do, but I also really enjoy Kelly Clarkson and that one Leona Lewis song. Still, I'm completely judgy and snide when it comes to music, and there is a part of me that believes that bands are better if no one else has heard of them, and thistle90 wishes I would stop smirking and just enjoy Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. So I guess, yes, I have indie cred but not in a good way.
3. What was the last straw that made you stop watching Stupid Doctor Show?
I quit watching when Carter left. The show just didn't seem cohesive to me anymore once he was gone. But it wasn't really a last straw so much as an excuse to quit.
4. Hee, this one's a bit of a cheat, but--when's it gonna be femslash09 time?
That is such a cheat. And we're doing it in the summer again, starting with the polls sometime in early May.
5. What's the biggest appeal of RPS and/or a reality show versus a scripted show, for watching and/or for writing?
RPS and reality TV are appealing for different reasons. I don't prefer reality to scripted, per se, so much as I recognize that reality TV can be very good and often is better than a lot of scripted TV. It's also something I can enjoy when it's endearingly bad, whereas bad scripted TV often just bores me. The impetus to write reality TV fic comes from exactly the same place as the impetus to write scripted fic: I see something in the text that I want to build on. The boundaries of reality contestants' lives are often as firm and as frustrating as those of fictional characters. You really only know them from the show, in a specific and limited context, and often they are edited until they become more like characters than real, multidimensional human beings.
The pleasure of writing about athletes is that I'm making a narrative out of something that isn't a narrative already. We want our lives to be stories, and we want the people in our lives to cleave to certain roles. So there's something primally satisfying about turning the non-narrative of someone's lived experience into a story. Real people - unedited real people - are messy and contradictory. There's actually more freedom in writing RPF than non-fanfic, in that respect: we know that these real people have acted "out of character" in the past, so as readers we accept a wider range of behavior from them. But at the same time it's not limitless. Real people are coherent but not always consistent. So it's again with the primal desire to impose narrative: RPF writers are (among other things) trying to make sense of the crazy shit people do.
Also, in both reality TV and other RPF, we see a lot of people who just don't exist in fiction. Not many TV/film actors look like ice skaters, and I think ice skaters are pretty. There's a lot more ethnic and sexual diversity on reality TV than on scripted TV, and that's also true of most sports (to varying degrees: lots of queers and Asians in figure skating; lots of African-Americans, Pacific Islanders, and people from invisible strata of white America in the NFL). A lot of the time, the kinds of people I want to write about simply don't exist on scripted TV.