More Interview Answers

[alixtii]

The rules are here. Also, I assumed people making non-random comments to the previous Interview post didn't want to be interviewed, but if you did and I responded to you and didn't ask you questions, but instead said something boring like "Thank you!" respond again here and either be clearer (e.g., "Interview me!") or randomer (i.e. a complete non-sequitor). Spoilers for the season 8 comics in the first answer, and for Heinlein's later novels in the last one.

ETA: I should probably mention that these questions were posed to me by wisdomeagle. And I have no clue why my cut-tag text is so huge. (Sorted, I hope.)

1. Do you expect S8 canon will affect Watcherverse canon - in explicit ways? - in implicit ways? Have the comics changed your perceptions of any things about the 'verse?

Well, for many reasons, but most clearly because the Watcher!verse does not follow Whedon's retcon of "The Girl in Question," that universe is not reconcilable with the season 8 comics. That doesn't mean I won't steal something from Whedon if it is cool enough, but I don't find it very likely.

Of course, further additions to Watcher!verse will be influenced by season 8 in the nebulous way that anything I read (in the inclusive pomo sense of "read") influences what I write. But right now The 4400 has had a much more major influence on the timeline I've plotted out in my head (and on my hard-drive) than anything I've read in Whedon's canon. (The resulting plotline is cracked ou, but I won't spoil you despite having no clue when it--or any of the other planned epics--might get written down.)

The most likely way for S8 to influence my writing is for Whedon to do something silly so that I have to do the opposite in my fic. In a way, that is already retroactively the case with the "TGIQ" retcon. If Joss had, say, butchered Amy, I'd probably be ficcing up a storm. 

2. What's the opposite of a canon whore?

A fanon whore, I suppose. My card to the canon bordello should really revoked; I'm much more relaxed now than I once was, especially when a) I realized just how gendered canon whoredom can be, and b) I become much more postmodern generally. Still, I love fics that incorporate as much canon as possible and engage with the nuances and little details and minor characters, and the claim that all fanfic is AU still drives me nuts. Part of me still wants to see the fic in which Buffy and Faith are sexing each other up all through season 3 without going AU.

But really, do as thou wilt shall be the sum of the law. Everything is permitted and nothing is forbidden. Ave Discordia!

At first I tried to find an opposite for the "whore" part, but I everything I came up with, such as "canon slut," seemed like it should actually be closer to the meaning of "canon whore" than to its opposite. Although I do suppose whores have more discipline, so to speak, than sluts. But then when words like "scan" can be their own opposite, one acknowledges that language is a wacky thing/

3. If you could only live in one, which would you choose: meatspace or cyberspace? Would you have answered the same a year ago? Five years ago?

I have no social life at all at the moment, so other than my gainful employment and what family life I can't avoid, I sort of do live in cyberspace. For one thing, I can handle the social interaction better than meatspace encounters--I said hello to a parishioner's college-aged daughter on Sunday and I seriously could not get her name out. I felt like I was fourteen again.

On top of that, you guys are really the only people I know who are intellectually stimulating. Maybe that'll change when and if I go back to school in the fall (I've been accepted and the deposit is in, but I still need to figure out housing and take out loans--anybody know anyone in NYC with an appartment and/or needs a roommate?)

And even when I had a girlfriend (who was smarter than I am), our best conversations were usually via AIM. Not to knock making out or anything.

None of which is to answer the question exactly, but I'm not sure what it would mean to live in cyberspace without living in cyberspace. Would I still get hungry? Have a sex drive? Or would I be a being of pure information? Because that would be pretty cool in a whole huge number of ways, but reading and writing pr0n probably wouldn't be as interesting?

4. Why haven't you read the Harry Potter books?

Because I don't really feed any need to. I did finally read the first one at some point in the last year (I think), but in general there are more things I'm more interested in reading elsewhere. I'm not really all that interested in what JKR has to offer. There's a note of elitism and anti-populism as well.

A nice side benefit, though, is characters in HP fic (which I do read, occasionally--se above wrt things I'd rather be reading than canon) rarely come off seeming as OOC.

5. Assuming I had some spare time, what book would you recommend I read?

Usually I would recommend Heinlein, probably Time Enough for Love, but I know you read Stranger in a Strange Land and didn't like and while I'd argue that TEfL is better and less homophobic than Stranger I ultimately have to admit that they're more the same than different. (Number of the Beast is published fanfic, though--cracky metafic that reads like fanfic, at that. And The Cat Who Walks Through Walls--the first Heinlein I ever read, although a rather crazy book on which to begin--begins and ends in the universe of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which I believe you enjoyed, while being a wacky crossover metafic in the middle.) And if you can find a copy of "All You Zombies," which inspired my remix of "Incurable," that's a must-read.

But all that being as it is, I won' under the circumstances rec Heinlein (for the reasons given). Have you read much/any MZB? Some of Bradley's Darkover novels are better than others, but Stormqueen! is fantastic (without being artsy, the way Mists of Avalon is), and I'm not just saying that because I've always wanted to read femslash (or any fanfic, really) with those characters.

Comments

[wisdomeagle]

Thanks for the answers! I was stumped on the "canon whore" question since it seemed counterintuitive to say that a "canon prude" or "canon virgin" was, well, someone who took reckless liberties with canon. (Though I suppose the extreme of someone who writes fanfiction in fandoms where she hasn't consumed any of the source would be a "canon virgin," and would certainly also be a "fanon whore."

I have also become much less of a canon whore (not that I ever was much of one) as I'm further removed from source and can't actually recall what happens in what order. I'm probably still pickier about BtVS, but with my own fic I tend to think more "somewhen that feels kind of Snish" than "between these two scenes in episode n.xy."

Also, the sudden affiliation of large percentages of the flist with comics fandom has done something to loosen my definition/understanding of canon.

Speak more about genderedness of canon whoredom? Does this relate to the series of fandebates?

Because that would be pretty cool in a whole huge number of ways, but reading and writing pr0n probably wouldn't be as interesting?

That is a very valid point.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I was stumped on the "canon whore" question since it seemed counterintuitive to say that a "canon prude" or "canon virgin" was, well, someone who took reckless liberties with canon.

Exactly! Which was why I was thinking canon slut, which seemed to better fit the reckless liberties, but wasn't semantically removed far enough from "whore." Despite my acknowledgement above that "I do suppose whores have more discipline, so to speak, than sluts." And there does seem to be something problematic about using both sex workers and the sexually promiscuous in our terminology.

Well, the concept of canon whoredom requires, if not a single privileged meaning (which the authorial intent people of course have, or at least claim to have), than a set of priveleged meanings which exclude a set of other meanings. One can see me working towards this in some of my earlier meta in which I try to perform a conceptual analysis of what makes something AU. Making Tara a robot doesn't make a fic AU, because we don't know she isn't, but...

...but what? If you take it far enough, there really isn't anything that can't be reconciled with canon with enough fanwanking, even if it seems like a fairly straightfoward objective claim like what was written on Buffy's tombstone. The text becomes radically manipulatable, and there are no priveleged meanings--which is pretty much where I am now. A Wittgensteinian response would probably be to recognize that within a group of socially positioned readers, certain meanings would emerge as more central than others, in the way that a microwave oven is less "oven"-y than a toaster oven, but would resist the notion that we could ever systematize that spectrum, since to do so would require a position outside of language. That is, to the Wittgensteinian, what is important is that it "feels right," which is I think what we go for in fanfic over and above technical accuracy. So we end up with an approach that actually priveleges fanon over canon.

Anyway, I do think that the impulse, which I manifested as a baby fan, to delineate a set of acceptable meanings is a gendered one, especially insofar as it seeks to ally the gendered subject with a system of Authority against the violator. These issues have been brought up in fandebate, but the best example might have been that guy in fanficrants who claimed that all the people who were writing SPN/BtVS should a) use comics canon, b) use the "right" interpretation of canon, in which Willow's level of power in comparison to that which they've seen in the Winchester's universe was X. Bargining in and telling the women how to write their stories. Not to mention how it fits into the fanboy stereotype of knowing all of the exact technical specs of the Enterprise. All the focus on facts and dates and measurements, and relatively little on character--my (previously-held) notion of canon-whoredom/AU-ness just sort of shrugged and swept that into a separate category of OOCness, and then ignored it.