Rambling Incoherence
Oct. 26th, 2009 03:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alixtiiIt seems to me that fantastic texts, through the always-already present reification of the deus ex machina, allow for a type of meta move--although in a limited, constrained way (which arguably ultimately undermines the meta-ness of the move). Buffy can talk to the camera if there's a demon making her hallucinate she's on TV, but not otherwise. My understanding, through fannish osmosis, is that in Supernatural that's done through the device of God and the angels, which--not having watched the show--seems a reasonable in-universe device.
So when I wrote![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wisdomeagle into my remix of her story, I used the device of the White Room--also a deliberate homage to annakovsky writing herself into "Critique of Pure Reason" (is that long enough to deserve italicization?) the same way.
There is a generic difference between "Once More With Feeling" and "Seeing Red"--but so too is there a generic difference between "The Trouble with Tribbles" and (say) "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky." (And there are some quite meta episodes in Voyager seasons 6 and 7, arguably beginning with "Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy," which is hilarious, but now I'm rambling.) I'm just not sure what the difference is; it seems a different kind of difference than between characters who talk to the camera and characters who don't. (And I'm so used to the way thatannakovsky undermined the meta-ness of Jim and Pam talking to the camera in her Office fic that I can't help but let that influence the way I view canon.)
I think I would be quite disturbed if a Devil Wears Prada fic I was reading suddenly got all meta-y. (Of course, RPF seems to me as the natural place for meta and wall-breaking, and presumably there's less in-text foundation for that than in any fictional canon, so.)
So when I wrote
wisdomeagle into my remix of her story, I used the device of the White Room--also a deliberate homage to annakovsky writing herself into "Critique of Pure Reason" (is that long enough to deserve italicization?) the same way.There is a generic difference between "Once More With Feeling" and "Seeing Red"--but so too is there a generic difference between "The Trouble with Tribbles" and (say) "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky." (And there are some quite meta episodes in Voyager seasons 6 and 7, arguably beginning with "Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy," which is hilarious, but now I'm rambling.) I'm just not sure what the difference is; it seems a different kind of difference than between characters who talk to the camera and characters who don't. (And I'm so used to the way that
annakovsky undermined the meta-ness of Jim and Pam talking to the camera in her Office fic that I can't help but let that influence the way I view canon.)I think I would be quite disturbed if a Devil Wears Prada fic I was reading suddenly got all meta-y. (Of course, RPF seems to me as the natural place for meta and wall-breaking, and presumably there's less in-text foundation for that than in any fictional canon, so.)