Comments | b_hallward: Pros rantage: Fanon Bodie

b_hallward

Pros rantage: Fanon Bodie

Apr 01, 2006 20:18

I almost didn't post this. Then something hit my 'annoy' button, hard, and I was off running again.

The Professionals frustrates me. I don't think I've ever come across a fandom where I like the characters and universe so much, and the great preponderance of fanfiction so little. I mean, I love Bodie. Flat-out. No kidding. But, unfortunately, I ( Read more... )

character discussion, meta, pros

Comments 11

wordsofastory April 1 2006, 22:38:06 UTC

I've never seen The Professionals- I'm not even entirely sure of what it's about, really- but you made it sound amazing, here.

b_hallward April 2 2006, 13:20:05 UTC

It just slays me: you've got these difficult, edgy characters and this neat dark-but-not-so-dark-as-to-be-wholly-disconnected-from-reality universe (they're on a sort of officially sanctioned but shady domestic terrorism squad with the sort of supra-legal powers that only the show's creator and the Bush administration would think are a good idea.) I mean, the potential here is just so huge!

p_zeitgeist April 2 2006, 11:25:51 UTC

I'm not going to complain about you posting the intriguing rants that make me want to talk about things, because I feel this is a Good Thing that should be encouraged. But I am going to complain about the way I'm not going to get to talk about it adequately right this minute because I'm taking a short break, and any minute must return to trying to make a vest hang properly, which is what I ought to be doing at this second.

But you've touched on something with Bodie here that seems to me to be one of the main channels of the Fannish Aesthetic (a thing I can only regret, since it's an aesthetic that I dislike on a deep emotional level, the sort of thing you never do get past as an audience member). There seems to me to be a deep unwillingness to let any character have those private and unspoken recesses of the mind, or emotions and ways of coping with emotions that are left other than transparent as air by the end of a story. (This, indeed, may be where some of what often reads as refusal to let men be men comes from -- that is, it ( ... )

b_hallward April 2 2006, 17:56:08 UTC

Man, I'm starting to think that you and I live in some sort of consensus reality that is only tangentially related to the world inhabited by the majority of fandom. Because you've just summed up the larger issue behind what I was trying, diffusely and without quite realizing it, to say: why can't there be some places that, however close two people get, aren't knowable, aren't shareable -- gaps that can't or won't be bridged; things that are left implicit, opaque, unresolved. And, obviously, you don't need to be as fixated as I am to be put off by it.

I can read mild hurt/comfort but extreme versions -- that reduced characters to the level of children, infants practically, and usually fetishizing the process while they're at it -- I just don't get, on so many levels I can hardly talk about it, because I don't know where to start. Maybe it is just a kink like mpreg, that you either are born with or not.

The other place this issue has really forced itself on my attention is those BDSM-is-really-about-love fics you find in virtually ( ... )

p_zeitgeist April 9 2006, 18:48:16 UTC

And here you probably thought I was done with this discussion. Or set of matching rants. Or whatever it is.

Have you seen hth's post about emo-porn? Because it sounds to me as though she's getting at the same maddening phenomenon from a slightly different angle: if I'm reading her correctly, what she's calling emo-porn is all about that kind of emotional opening-up. And her argument that it's a central fanfic aesthetic (if no longer the only one out there) certainly marches with my experience.

What I'd add is my own sense that for those who truly love it, emo-porn is indeed a heavy-duty kink, and that's where things get dicey for the rest of us. Where the rhetoric and structure of the source is matched to the emo-porn, as with Wiseguy (or, for that matter, the Kyoto Arc, I suddenly realize), the whole thing can work and have an extraordinary effect. But where the source's rhetoric isn't matched to it, which is definitely the case with S&H and Pros, fanfic that puts it there anyway will read as horribly off for readers who don' ( ... )

b_hallward April 13 2006, 00:50:15 UTC

take it that having missed them is a good thing...

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's a good thing, since these fics are basically BDSM, but without any meaningful consideration of power dynamics and their effects -- and, usually, served with a large helping of jarring, unexamined romanticism on the side. They almost always rewrite the characters to fit pre-defined roles (which often don't fit at all), have a fuzzy, self-indulgent, disconnected-from-reality feel -- and well, my list of complaints is longer, but perhaps this is reason enough already?I've somehow managed to miss the whole emo-porn meta string. And now I feel dense since I don't quite get it. Is the identifying requirement merely intensity? (And what is 'purity' anyway? 'Unmixed' with what?) Or is there a certain characteristic kind of explicitness involved -- that, whatever the mode of communication, the characters are acknowledging their feelings, and, however tangentially, the relationship is being treated with on a meta 'relationship-qua-relationship' sort of level? Or is ( ... )

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