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5511 discussions

Re: [B7L] Sally-speak
by Tavia Chalcraft 23 Feb '01

23 Feb '01

Wendy wrote (in two different posts): >You're following a discussion on, say, Travis 1/Travis 2, and suddenly someone pops up under >the same header to talk about how much of each of them you can see through their costumes? I believe most people have bodies under their clothes. I may be wrong. >By the time I've read enough to know I should delete it, it's too late. It seems like any subject can >be given a sexual or innuendo twist, which IMHO often means turning an intelligent subject into a >dirty joke. Some people who are intelligent also have sex. I believe. Some of them even talk about it occasionally. I've always read the Lyst 'no sex' policy as suggesting that one should refrain from posting material that is explicit, and in particular, more explicit than the Blake's 7 series itself. What you're talking about doesn't sound to be so. There's a reasonable amount of sexual innuendo in the series (Avon re Dayna in Aftermath, the human bonding ceremony in Ultraworld, lots of Vila's comments, Servalan and various assorted sidekicks &c &c). You could think of it like going down the pub and starting out having intelligent conversations, which gradually get sillier as people get tired or merry. >around I've seen a whole lot of threads which start off intelligently degenerating into talk about >whether Avon or Tarrant is sexier or descriptions of Steven Greif in black leather. It's hard to get away from the fact that some of the costumes appear to have been designed to look sexy. >It also seems like IMHO some people have become so wrapped up in fanfic (not just the slash >stuff either) that they read it back intoparticular episodes too. This is an interesting point. Certainly there are trends in fanfic that appear to be enshrined in custom from the earliest works, that have little (or disputed) basis in the series. I'd love to see more fanfiction that tried to break new ground. I'd even write some if I had the talent, ideas, time &c... I'm not sure how much of what people see as H/C today was intended to be seen as such by the >writers-- *I* think very little. And I don't think it was ever intended to be the focal point of the >episodes. But that's what fanfiction's all about, filling out areas or ideas that aren't explored in detail in the series. Very little attempts to write extra episodes similar to those existing, though that is the motivation for some. I imagine some of the episodes were written against tight deadlines and the writers had little time to explore the subtexts in what they were writing. (I seem to recall you arguing the precise opposite of this with respect to Deliverance, rockets, phallic symbols and the like. But I, for one, don't wish to get into that argument.) Tavia http://www.viragene.com/

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Re: The Romance of Hijacking (was Re: [B7L] Sally-speak)
by Bizarro7＠aol.com 23 Feb '01

23 Feb '01

In a message dated 2/23/01 7:48:53 AM Eastern Standard Time, N.Faulkner(a)tesco.net writes: << As I hope I've made clear enough by now, I can't argue with this. It's turning the thread *into* whimsy that gets me heated. >> Well, it's gonna happen, Neil. Occasional forays into levity come with the list territory. Sometimes, the pillars will be granite. Sometimes, they'll be marshmallow. Generally, if you just sit back and wait a short while, the light stuff will subside and you can shift it back into the serious mode you prefer. But I don't feel it's appropriate, practical or even possible to control these things. Leah

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Re: [B7L] Thread hijacking (was Re: Sally-speak)
by Bizarro7＠aol.com 23 Feb '01

23 Feb '01

In a message dated 2/23/01 7:45:45 AM Eastern Standard Time, ragan(a)sdc.org writes: << littles(a)lycos.co.uk wrote: > But there's another sort of thread hijacking which neither of you mentioned, > which is when somebody comes on the serious thread and makes a point, but > does it in a silly way, say calling Blake "my sweet baboo" or calling > Servalan "She who must be obeyed." Which IMO trivialises the the character, > the argument and the poster's point, all at the same time. Can that properly be called "thread hijacking," though? I mean, I can see where it would annoy you, but it seems to me that that comes down to less a matter of list etiquette as a simple matter of some people not liking other people's style or tone. Which, IMHO, is a very different matter. >> Perfectly put. And a very, very old issue of taste in media fandom. I remember that way back in the early 1980's, there seemed to be some kind of almost universal consensus among B7 fanzine editors that B7 fanfic *must* be every bit as grim in tone as some of the most grim moments of the series. Blacker, if possible. There was a lot of utterly terrific storytelling out there, but the vast majority of it was grim. I finally reached a flashpoint, and the first Bizarro 7 story was written in reaction. When I submitted it to Regina Gottesman for her zine, she dolefully declared that it had 'too much levity' for a B7 fanfic. It violated the dignity of the show, somehow. Naturally, Annie and I promptly went forth and created the entire Bizarro 7 universe in retaliation, where *everything* was levity and anything that ever appeared in the series was fair game for satire. Dignity was forbidden. The series itself had its delightfully humorous episodes and moments. I don't hear anyone complaining about these, ruining the tone of the show. Leah

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Re: [B7L] What's Silly ? (was Excalibur, Blake's 7 (but no Zulus))
by Bizarro7＠aol.com 23 Feb '01

23 Feb '01

How can *anything* be more silly than a giant, inflatable grasshopper that eats red rock candy? Leah

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Re: [B7L] Sally-speak
by Natasa Tucev 23 Feb '01

23 Feb '01

Fiona wrote: >No stats on it either, myself, but I'm also pretty sure that my uncle, a >retired Church of England clergyman who is both as strictly moral and as >compassionate and gentle as they come (and who preached strict morality from >the pulpit for thirty-odd years), would be more than horrified to learn that >he is about to start wielding a butcher knife on the neighbours :). Don't know the gentleman, but I think he would be equally shocked, or at least frankly amused, to learn that someone is making so much fuss about a broken leg in a SF story, when there's so much real suffering in the world around us. My elder son pulls off arms and legs from a baby-doll and I know he does this because he is jealous of his baby brother. What good would it do if I reprimanded him or forbade him to molest the doll? I'd only cure a symptom. Instead I try to devote more time to him, to show him that I love him as much as I love his brother, etc. If he stops being nasty to the doll, I'll know I've changed something. I think the same rule applies to fiction. There is pain in our stories because there is pain in us. If you ardently try and prove to people that it is immoral and outrageous to write such stories, the pain will have to come out some other way. Some other ways may be destructive. To transpose your emotion into a work of art, OTOH, may be constructive and healing. The emotion in a work of art differs from the emotion in real life. It is more complex, it comprises many elements, it transcends the author's personal motivation, and if a work of art is successful, the emotion will also reflect on wider issues - society, culture, human nature. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet when his father died, and we still read it today for reasons which have nothing to do with the personal pain of loss which initiated it. The paintings of Frida Callo (I'm not sure about spelling) show intense suffering, and it's small wonder they do, knowing she spent a great deal of her life in a cast. I find them extremely disturbing and I wouldn't hang them on the wall, but there's no doubt that they're real art. If, OTOH, a story doesn't succeed in transcending this initial, irrational urge to inflict mental of physical pain, it will simply be a badly-written, unsuccessful story. In any case, to make a moral issue out of this is IMO ridiculous. It reminds me of the priests in 'The Name of the Rose', who were so pious that they even refrained from laughing, but maybe you recall the things they did 'backstage'. >Finally, I'd >also like to point out that some of the loudest defences of this sort of >fanfic have come from America, which, I'm sorry to say it but it has to be >said, has one of the worst records in the world for attempting to impose its >worldview, moral standards and values on weaker nations. I'm not trying to defend h/c genre in particular - actually, I disliked many of the h/c B7 stories I read, because they were boring and badly written. The 'Vila-speech' I cited on the Lyst some time ago as an example of bad writing was from a h/c story. But I will defend a good work of art, even if it's wading in blood. I'm not making great distinctions between professional writing and fanfic, because the branch of literary criticism I'm practising is primarily concerned with the underlying mythical patterns of a story, with the world-view the author displays and the way in which he/she responds to the dominant culture. If the response is pain, it might tell us something about the culture. Actually, it is a notion which was cherished in communist countries, that new art should only reflect happiness and enthusiasm, because there's no reason anyone should feel unhappy in the brave new world. Recently a literary critic in my country recalled how thrilled he was when, as a young man, he first discovered Dostoyevski, "because I realized it was OK to feel depressed." I agree, it is as ridiculous to accuse you of promoting communist agenda as it is ridiculous to accuse me of promoting coca-colonialism. I didn't even know h/c was an American genre. N.

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Freedom of Speech in the Federation (was Thread Hijacking)
by Betty Ragan 23 Feb '01

23 Feb '01

Responding to me, Una McCormack wrote: > > I would certainly think so. But I do wonder to what extent the > > Federation attempts to preserve an illusion that freedom of speech > > exists... > > I'd say very little. I don't see the Federation as being as subtle as that, I > suppose. I think they *are* fairly subtle in some ways. Certainly, as we see in TWB, they apparently try very hard to preserve the illusion of a fair justice system. I think freedom of speech might well be a different issue, though. It's very easy to put a spin on the issue that says "Those dangerous subversives shouldn't be allowed to corrupt the minds of our children with their misguided ideas" or something like that. -- Betty Ragan ** ragan(a)sdc.org ** http://www.sdc.org/~ragan/ "The truth shall make ye fret." -- Terry Pratchett

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Re: [B7L] Re:Deliverance/H/C
by Marian de Haan 23 Feb '01

23 Feb '01

Neil gives examples of h/c stories: >"There was a Time When..." by Robin F Atkins (Horizon #?),< >"In The Wake of Ruin" by Linda Willard (I think) in another Horizon zine,< >"Alone and Silent" by Kathryn Cutmore (another Horizon offering),< I enjoyed those stories hugely, but I never realised they classify as h/c, which shows what an innocent I am :-) Actually, "In the Wake of Ruin" is my favourite PGP story, if only because it really gets Avon off the hook for killing Blake <veg>. Marian

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Books and Movies
by Dana Shilling 23 Feb '01

23 Feb '01

I think it's an interesting commentary that one can watch all 52 episodes without being able to say for sure what they use for books--I think the typical fanfic solution is to refer to "book placques" and/or "datacubes." We know from canon that there are Walkman- like objects for playing music. I assume that there's some equivalent of movie theaters because of the advantages of public entertainments (and, from the government viewpoint, the greater ease of censoring the prints of a movie in X number of theaters than self-selected video rentals or downloads). Or is one reason to use suppressants to eliminate the need for popular entertainment--even bread and circuses? -(Y)

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Which United strip would they wear? [was Re: fandom]
by Harriet Monkhouse 23 Feb '01

23 Feb '01

Peter asked: >Is this related to the "Cally In Red" thing at all? >A touch of the David Mellor? An intriguing idea... The Auronar, sponsored by Vodafone? Avon, obviously, would wear the Black Strip of 1993, which Eric Cantona had on the evening he attacked the fascist. Soolin's jumpsuit was probably adapted from one of the grey strips that Fergie insisted on dumping halfway through a match because he thought they were having an adverse effect on the team's game. Harriere

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Tariel Cells
by Andrew Williams 23 Feb '01

23 Feb '01

Peter wrote: > The cells are never mentioned directly outside of the episode > "Orac" (that I can find with a quick search anyway) Tariel cells were mentioned in other episodes, such as Orbit (where Egrorian explains that Orac & the tachyon funnel will survive the shuttle crash due to the resilient nature of tariel cells & lyclinic plaques(?)). However, there is not much extra information that can be used to explain how they work. Perhaps the reference to Orac's carrier beam in Star One is a clue. Andrew. - - - - - "Tariel Inside" - - - - -

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