MetaMetaFandom

[alias_sqbr]

Home again from work, but under orders: I went in yesterday and when they realised my max volume was a whisper too quiet to travel over walky-talky (let alone teeming masses of children) was told to go home and rest, so no guilt today :) It's annoying, I actually felt pretty good last night but a 3am-4am coughing fit has made me hoarse and sleepy (hey I do actually enjoy my job. Plus, you know. Money=good)

Still! Thanks to following links from emma_in_oz's recent POTC post (which I always read as "Peturn Of The Cing" or "Prisoner Of TazCaban" depending on mood) I have discovered what I've been looking for for a while....metafandom, a place with lots of interesting but not too achedemic discussion of fandomy stuff to keep my repressed art student soul happy without hurting my beleaguered¹ science student brain.

Any other similar things I should know about?


Some random thoughts my reading has inspired:

POTC2 scores amusingly highly on the POTC Mary Sue Litmus Test

*******Mild Buffy Spoilery Paragraph******


Apparently Joss whedon was tossing up which of Xander or Willow would become gay before Seth Green left making his decision for him. I think Xander makes much more sense as being repressed and bi, though I can't see him acting on it so happily :)
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Quite a bit of discussion on cultural appropriation, very thought provoking. It's very easy to forget how much easier it is to be white. I know my mum (who's half jewish but looks generically ethnic to many people²) has gotten crap for being "maori" etc which made her even more anti-racist than she might otherwise have been. The closest I've experienced is sexism, and while its corrosive taint in infused throughout our society it's still not the same thing. Then again, as an Australian my situation is a little different to that of the almost entirely american metafandom-essay writers. We may be white and English speaking (which is a Big Deal, don't get me wrong) but I'm hard pressed to think of a dinkier, less powerful white english speaking nation (Oh no wait New Zealand. heehee :)).

EDIT: interesting link, much more eloquent than me.

Of course I don't know how much of this would apply to me anyway: I'm never going to make money of my work, I can't see anyone using it as a Text to Learn From. Yet I do think about it.

I have a feministy³ slant that makes me want to explore all the gaping holes in fiction noone explores, and one of them is the "civilised" non-western societies that don't get much fantasy. I mean you get noble-savage stuff about native americans, say, but I can't think of any where the main country is based on say India. (here the fact I dislike and thus don't read 90% of fantasy may mean I'm making an idiot of myself) I'm not counting historical fantasy in which history majors regurgitate lots of dull details with few if any interesting ideas that aren't cribbed from history. Not that I can think of any about India anyway, but I wouldn't be suprised. I'm talking about stuff like Mercedes Lackey or Tamora Pierce, or even Lois McMaster Bujold, where the main characters are from pseudo-european societies and the only 'advanced' non-europeany societies are the scary pseudo-Arabic would-be invaders.⁴

Yet worldbuilding Amniat (which is somewhat based on India (also ancient greece), as a nicely non-european-but-'civilised' society to contrast with the psedo-european⁵ Sabeduria) I am very aware of how little I know about India. I can't be bothered learning that much for a silly little webcomic noone reads, and yet..I don't know. I still feel a bit wierd about it.

Then again, the kids I and Cam plan on having will be 1/4 indian so I should probably start learning stuff now so I can force their culture on them like my mum forced russian culture on me :) (One prong of her teach-my-children-not-to-be-ignorant-racists strategy is to emphasise the less-whitebread aspects of our heritage)

Final thought for anyone who got this far: it struck me watching Simon Shama's "A history of England" that I'd really like to watch a similar history of somewhere else, even just France/Spain etc Most histories of other countries seem to just be the bits that relate to "our" country(s)⁶ plus anything important enough that we outsiders should know about them, but the feel is of an outsider looking in and it's quite different. I think it'd be very educational to look at the past 500 years through the eyes of Spain, say. Or a middle eastern country. Or...India. Just saying :) If I could be bothered I'd track down such a history and watch it with subtitles.

1) Thank heavens for rightclick-spellcheck, who would have guessed that's the right spelling? Yes, fine, actual arts students, I know :P
2)Mum hates having her photo taken, this was the most recent closeupish one I could find that wasn't horribly unflattering! Also it shows how adorable my siblings were as kids :)
3) This is the wrong word
4)This isn't because I think 'civilsed' cultures are better than 'primitve' ones, I just don't like the traditional view of history as savages-> egyptians->greeks/romans->medieval europe-> modern europe and it's colonies.
5) Yeah, I know. In my defense I am fairly new to this whole writing thing.
6) For an australian doco, thats australia, america and england.

Comments

[alias_sqbr]

Honey?

Against racism? Or colds? Or ..uh....bread?

[col-ki.livejournal.com]

HONEY. FTW.

[alias_sqbr]

I...ok