The Tradëscan Codex

I've seen this meme several times, and I'm always a little confused by it -- it's in both the first and second person, and I'm not sure who is suppose to be the first person and who is supposed to be the second person. When you say I, I imagine you mean you, but when you say you, do you mean me?

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Also, Firefly, if you want to actually answer the meme (I am easily swayed by Kaylee, I admit it).

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1. The first character I fell in love with: Kaylee
2. The character I never expected to love as much as I do now: River and/or Simon
3. The character everyone else loves that I don’t: Inara
4. The character I love that everyone else hates: Simon
5. The character I would shag anytime: River, if not for the consent issues; Kaylee, otherwise
6. The character I'd want to be like: Simon, as much as some might find that hard to believe. Also Mal.
7. The character I'd slap: Inara, if that didn't have a lot of skeevy associations informed by the politics of heterosexuality
8. A pairing that I love: Mal/Kaylee
9. A pairing that I despise: Despise is too strong, but I dislike Mal/Inara, and Jayne/River and Jayne/Kaylee have to walk a very thin line in woobifying Jayne in ways I can stomach--a too canon Jayne in those pairings is a recipe for disaster!
10. Favorite character: River
11. What are your five favorite things about your fandom? Summer Glau, an excellent female/male ratio (among the characters, I mean), loads of subtext always on the verge of becoming text, a possibility of really good River voices and fic writers who can write such,
12. What are your five least favorite things about your fandom? You can watch it in a day and have time left over to do something else. Having to create grammatical constructions and diction which pain me.
13. Who are your five favorite characters? River, Kaylee, Mal, Simon, Saffron
14. Who are your five least favorite characters? Inara, Jayne, . . . Zoe and Wash would be next, but this isn't fair to them--there's too few characters for this to be a meaningful category
15. What are your five favorite pairings? Mal/Kaylee, Kaylee/River, Simon/River, Mal/River, Simon/Kaylee
16. What are your five least favorite pairings? Mal/Inara, Jayne/Kaylee
17. Which character are you most like? Simon
18. What is your deep, dark fandom secret? Not a secret, but for the longest time I found River really, really hot but Summer only sort of pretty. Summer grew on me.

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Given your answer to the other question (and I agree with the parsing and also the conclusion), do you think you could answer 11-18 from my (or any other interlocutor's) perspective? I don't think I've posted much on Firefly -- although my brother texted me on Sunday and said, "River is a terminator on the tv show on fox right now! I think." He is not a fannish person at all.

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I could make a good attempt (not necessarily answering everything accurately, buit at least doing so in a way which drew on what I knew about them) at answering 11-18 from Ari's perspective wrt any fandom we're both in. I could answer from Karabair's, Elizabeth's, Samantha's, or a couple of other flisters' perspectives for some but not all of their fandoms.

I have no clue who your 5 least favorite Firefly characters are.

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Unless we count people who had five minutes of screen time (or Saffron. And Niska), I don't have five least favorite Firefly characters. I mean, I'm not a big fan of Jayne, except that I kind of am. I adore, fairly unreservedly, all the other credits characters.

And given what happened with 3 ships this year, I think you and Ari could probably do each other's version of this meme for quite a few fandoms.

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wisdomeagle

I think you and Ari could probably do each other's version of this meme for quite a few fandoms.

No lie. (As Alixtii said above, not that we'd get them right, but we'd be able to guess at least).

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Not that we'd get them all wrong, either.

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Well, first off, I totally c&p-ed it, as you could probably guess.

Since the "I" in the preamble clearly means me (and the understood "you" in the imperative clearly means you) I would assume the first person in questions 1-9 also is meant to refer to me. In 11-18 we get a shift not only from first to second person, but also from categories (noun phrases) acting as the object of the preamble to complete illocutionary speech acts (the asking of questions). Syntactically speaking, it seems that "you" should mean you ("I will tell you: [. . .] What is your [. . .]?" should be equivalent to "I will tell you what is your [. . .]?), but pragmatically speaking, I think it makes a lot more sense if "you" means me, and questions 11-18 are questions I need to answer. Although it would be fun if I had to guess your five least favorite pairings.

But yes, whoever constructed this meme desperately needs a lesson in parallelism (something not always required, but which here would be quite useful). At least they didn't skip any numbers.

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Oh, I'll be blindingly obvious and say Buffy.

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1. The first character I fell in love with: God, I can't even remember. It was season 7, and I was already a fan of Michelle Trachtenberg's work, so maybe Dawn?
2. The character I never expected to love as much as I do now: Any of a whole slew of minor characters?
3. The character everyone else loves that I don’t: any of a whole slew of male characters
4. The character I love that everyone else hates: Dawn. Kennedy. The list goes on.
5. The character I would shag anytime: Amanda, Vi. Kennedy, except that she's gay. Have you read the flocked post in which I consider this in depth? It's here, if you (or anyone else on my flist who reads this) are interested.
6. The character I'd want to be like: Dawn, or at least my idealized version of her. Giles.
7. The character I'd slap: None of them.
8. A pairing that I love: So many! Dawn/Giles is one. Canon, there's Willow/Kennedy.
9. A pairing that I despise: It's difficult to even so much as dislike a pairing, there's so many pairings that one can just ignore the ones one isn't interested in.
10. Favorite character: Dawn
11. What are your five favorite things about your fandom? Will-to-poweriness. Awesome female characters. So many characters, and authors and readers interested in exploring all the little niches and interstices, so there's always room for everything.

femslash_minis (which is also an Angel and Firefly thing, but I'll mention it here),
12. What are your five least favorite things about your fandom? Infrastructure that is no longer in place because the show's over and people stopped caring. People thinking the comics are canon. Despite being, along with Xena, one of the fandoms which put femslash on the fannish map, the genre still being marginalized within it. Character bashing, especially of female characters.
13. Who are your five favorite characters? Dawn, Faith, Kennedy, Drusilla, Amy
14. Who are your five least favorite characters? a lot of the male characters I tend not to get excited about
15. What are your five favorite pairings? I don;t know about give favorite, but Dawn/Giles, Faith/Kennedy, Dawn/Faith, Spike/Drusilla, Willow/Kennedy are all good pairings
16. What are your five least favorite pairings? I don't think about pairings I'm not interested in; there's too much stuff I like to focus on
17. Which character are you most like? God only knows. Jonathon?
18. What is your deep, dark fandom secret? I dunno.

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I've always read the "Which character would you shag" question as pure fantasy, and I've always answered it in that spirit. So from my point of view, Kennedy would be a fine answer for you to give to that question, since after all, the fact that she doesn't exist is a much bigger obstacle to you shagging her than the fact that she's a lesbian, and we're willing to waive the former for purposes of this exercise, so....

I mean, we are talking about fictional characters here, so fantasy is a given.

But anyway, that's just my point of view. Thanks for the answers!

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But do I really fantasize about shagging a lesbian? Maybe so--I think a lot of guys do--but if so it's more than a little problematic.

And if we're just going by their physical appearance without taking into account their personality, then shagging personality-less bodies squicks me more than anything else.

So the question is: If Kennedy were not a lesbian, would she still be Kennedy? And if not, would I still want to shag her?

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Hmm. I guess, for me, lots of things could be problematic if we were talking about real people. But since this is about fictional characters, it all seems pretty harmless to me.

*shrug* Just my opinion.

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I just don't have a way to conceptualize "having sex with fictional characters" which is different than with real people. I mean, sex is pretty intimate regardless of whether one is a constructed fabulation or not.

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Well, just to play devil's advocate for a moment, would this mean that one couldn't fantasize about a character who's canonically in a relationship with someone else? I mean, say you fantasize about shagging Princess Leia - would she still be Leia if she were cheating on Han?

Also, would this mean that gay men and women would be largely excluded from this particular exercise, since a majority of contemporary fictional characters are canonically straight?

I guess what it comes down to for me is, I think most people have had inappropriate fantasies about real people at some point in their lives without it having much of a negative impact, so fantasies about fictional characters seem harmless to me.

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youngest-one.livejournal.com

X-men movieverse.

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1. The first character I fell in love with: Rogue
2. The character I never expected to love as much as I do now: no such creature for this fandom
3. The character everyone else loves that I don’t: Logan
4. The character I love that everyone else hates: Bobby
5. The character I would shag anytime: X3 Kitty
6. The character I'd want to be like: Kitty
7. The character I'd slap: Pyro
8. A pairing that I love: Bobby/Rogue
9. A pairing that I despise: any Pyro pairing
10. Favorite character: Rogue for X1 and X2; Kitty for X3
11. What are your five favorite things about your fandom? The huge freaking gaps to be filled in, and the wealth of comicsverse material one can adapt and transform when doing so; the unstable, multivalent textuality which results. Bryan Singer's deft adaptation of the comics into something which worked on the big screen. Brett Ratner's horrible adaptation which didn't work, and thus provided inspiration for fanfiction (I never really had any desire to write for the fandom until X3). The Bobby/Rogue/Kitty love triangle.
12. What are your five least favorite things about your fandom? The way the same OTPs get written over and over again. The way canon minutia isn't poured over and dissected the way it is in Buffy fandom (because to dissect XMM canon would be to go crazy). The fact Rogue never once says "Sugar" in canon.
13. Who are your five favorite characters? Bobby, Rogue, Kitty, Mystique, Erik
14. Who are your five least favorite characters? the adults, at least from a fic perspective (their adventures were perfectly exciting and enjoyable from a moviegoer perspective)
15. What are your five favorite pairings? Bobby/Rogue, Bobby/Kitty, Kitty/Rogue
16. What are your five least favorite pairings? any adult/adult
17. Which character are you most like? Bobby, Kitty, or Rogue
18. What is your deep, dark fandom secret? What does this question even mean?

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wisdomeagle

Vmars!

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