#intellectual exercise

[fieriframes]

[So, first, what we're gonna do is start off soaking some dried wild mushrooms -- and there is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless, and some dried shiitakes.]

[anghraine]

Okay, breaking my principles hiatus again for another fanfic rant despite my profound frustration w/ Tumblr currently:

I have another post and conversation on DW about this, but while pretty much my entire dash has zero patience with the overtly contemptuous Hot Fanfic Takes, I do pretty often see takes on Fanfiction's Limitations As A Form that are phrased more gently and/or academically but which rely on the same assumptions and make the same mistakes.

IMO even the gentlest, and/or most earnest, and/or most eruditely theorized takes on fanfiction as a form still suffer from one basic problem: the formal argument does not work.

I have never once seen a take on fanfiction as a form that could provide a coherent formal definition of what fanfiction is and what it is not (formal as in "related to its form" not as in "proper" or "stuffy"). Every argument I have ever seen on the strengths/weaknesses of fanfiction as a form vs original fiction relies to some extent on this lack of clarity.

Hence the inevitable "what about Shakespeare/Ovid/Wide Sargasso Sea/modern takes on ancient religious narratives/retold fairy tales/adaptation/expanded universes/etc" responses. The assumptions and assertions about fanfiction as a form in these arguments pretty much always should apply to other things based on the defining formal qualities of fanfic in these arguments ("fanfiction is fundamentally X because it re-purposes pre-existing characters and stories rather than inventing new ones" "fanfiction is fundamentally Y because it's often serialized" etc).

Yet the framing of the argument virtually always makes it clear that the generalizations about fanfic are not being applied to Real Literature. Nor can this argument account for original fics produced within a fandom context such as AO3 that are basically indistinguishable from fanfic in every way apart from lacking a canon source.

At the end of the day, I do not think fanfic is "the way it is" because of any fundamental formal qualities—after all, it shares these qualities with vast swaths of other human literature and art over thousands of years that most people would never consider fanfic. My view is that an argument about fanfic based purely on form must also apply to "non-fanfic" works that share the formal qualities brought up in the argument (these arguments never actually apply their theories to anything other than fanfic, though).

Alternately, the formal argument could provide a definition of fanfic (a formal one, not one based on judgment of merit or morality) that excludes these other kinds of works and genres. In that case, the argument would actually apply only to fanfic (as defined). But I have never seen this happen, either.

So ultimately, I think the whole formal argument about fanfic is unsalvageably flawed in practice.

Realistically, fanfiction is not the way it is because of something fundamentally derived from writing characters/settings etc you didn't originate (or serialization as some new-fangled form, lmao). Fanfiction as a category is an intrinsically modern concept resulting largely from similarly modern concepts of intellectual property and auteurship (legally and culturally) that have been so extremely normalized in many English-language media spaces (at the least) that many people do not realize these concepts are context-dependent and not universal truths.

Fanfic does not look like it does (or exist as a discrete category at all) without specifically modern legal practices (and assumptions about law that may or may not be true, like with many authorial & corporate attempts to use the possibility of legal threats to dictate terms of engagement w/ media to fandom, the Marion Zimmer Bradley myth, etc).

Fanfic does not look like it does without the broader fandom cultures and trends around it. It does not look like it does without the massive popularity of various romance genres and some very popular SF/F. It does not look like it does without any number of other social and cultural forces that are also extremely modern in the grand scheme of things.

The formal argument is just so completely ahistorical and obliviously presentist in its assumptions about art and generally incoherent that, sure, it's nicer when people present it politely, but it's still wrong.

[waywardted]

Believing in rom-communism is all about believing that everything is going to work out in the end... Now, it may not work out how you think it will, or how you hope it does, but, believe me, it will all work out.

[cctinsleybaxter]

was going to reblog the post debunking all those other posts about how crucifixion in Japanese media is insignificant imagery because 'um actually very few Japanese people are practicing catholics,' but now feel like i have to debunk the debunking post because it's insane to say there's rarely an intentional theological message- japanese people know what catholic iconography is; american movies are huge in japan, russian literature is huge in japan . what are you talking about

[eldritch-elrics]

speaking of dark souls yaoi. i'm thinking again about that genre of posts that basically implies that shipping precludes thoughtful analysis of a piece of media.. and those always annoy me because i GET it. i have read fanfics/posts that have made me think the exact same thing. at the same time..... my favorite intellectual exercise is "how much thoughtful character analysis & thematic resonance can i fit in this gay sex fanfiction" so sometimes it feels like the authors of those sorts of posts have not expanded their minds to the possibilities of what can be achieved through gay sex

[writerly-ramblings]

Deeply (Catholically) grumpy with my decision, for Lent, to exercise everyday, because I should be giving something up instead. Mildly worried (conventionally) that my life so resembles a decrepit pensioner’s that there isn’t much to renounce.

[fideidefenswhore]

Mantel says in her notes on Anne Boleyn that “no one will ever know” if she was a convinced reformer. But this is to ignore a substantial stock of evidence. We know, from her books, that she was an avid reader of the radical religious works of the day (many of them banned from England and smuggled in for her), both in French and in English. Her surviving library includes a large selection of early French evangelical works, including Marguerite de Navarre’s first published poem (“Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, 1531), which was later to be translated into English (as “Mirror of the Soul”) in 1544 by Anne’s 11 year-old daughter, Elizabeth. Anne’s library also included Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples’ French translation of the Bible, published by the same man (Martin Lempereur) responsible for publishing Tyndale’s New Testament, and numerous other French evangelical tracts. Significantly, James Carley, the curator of the books of Henry and his wives, notes that all the anti-papal literature that Henry collected supporting his break with Rome dates from after he began to pursue Anne. So it is highly likely that it was indeed she who introduced them to him.

Howard Brenton’s Revision of Our “Default” Anne, Susan Bordo

[puckpocketed]

when all you ever do is salivate over a players large frame + lament that he doesn’t throw himself around enough you gotta look at yourselves in the mirror and ask why you haven’t just got him parked net front so at least he can passively provide a screen. if ur sooo obsessed with his big boy status. idk . it’s not like he scored a bunch of goals in front of the net on the power play on the other team he played with or anything <3 and yes i AM making ten million concessions and demanding special treatment, this is MY bewretched fuckup, MY prized and delicate show horse who would spook at his own reflection and explode from a single pebble in his hoof. and i’d go to war for him !!!!!

[mccoyquialisms]

really cool and exciting for me to have a relationship crisis triggering yet another sexuality crisis

[fieriframes]

[So Julian and I do a great program called "Best Buddies" in Boston with Tom Brady, and there is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless. In your regiment of training for the season, this is the kind of food you're allowed to eat?]

[lesenbyan]

Like, I'm still Working On It but seeing semi verbal and ID people posting is legit Good for me as an ADHD dyslexic with memory problems and sometimes fine motor issues. Like I used to frequently just Fuck Up grammar by either rearranging words or dropping them- not to the point I couldn't be understood but enough that it Annoyed my (read: emotionally abusive) father so that I "fixed" my speech to stop getting lectured on grammar. And it always startles me that you can just. Only use the words you gotta and be understood. Even if you use the wrong version or tense of one word. Like I don't do it talking so much 'cept when tired or speech impediments poking back in, but it means I worry less when I do it when just chatting on discord. I drop a "the" or repeat a word instead of the word that grammatically goes there (i.e. the the instead of to the) or whatever and it used to be like. One of my big OCD points and I would just fucking spiral off of the smallest things. But now I can sometimes notice and not even bother to go back and fix it unless I think it confuses the sentence.

[leatherbookmark]

i know it's probably because of the strict word limit, but god i kinda hate those music reviews that go "Songtitle is a blindingly scrumptious bobble through heterochromia, splashing through lush gametophytes to bulbous spangled frocks, more like a scrimbled bimblo than a sclumpered frungle" that's very nice, a+ on thesaurus usage, but did you like the song or

[romanceyourdemons]

my partner and i tried to figure out who would be the red coded one and who would be the blue coded one in the relationship and we couldn’t come up with a good answer because both of us generally wear black and brown

[girlblocker]

why is everyone suddenly online the second i post something embarrassing

[pleuvoire]

i think a good litmus test for a certain strain of reactionary thinking is to at certain points ask yourself (or ask of the conversation you are witnessing) "am i getting angry at anonymous strangers, belittling them, or treating them as lesser for not doing things i think are beneficial to them, or for doing things i think are detrimental to them? why, if the (supposed) harm is to themselves, am i getting angry at or contemptuous of them?"

[tlacehualli]

9

09.     “junk” drawer.

five different lighters, two packs of cigarettes, blunt wraps, a ziploc bag (empty), a screwdriver (not used), long forgotten make up brush she used to be really sad about