Fiona Moore wrote:
Last month Steve, Betty and I spent a long time hashing out the evidence from canon with regard to the principal characters' sexual orientations,
I know; I was here throughout the whole interminable business.
just that there *is* evidence from canon for the characters' sexual orientations, they're not just blank slates.
Sure; I have no quarrel with that -- but they're not writ in stone, either. I also note that different people received different impressions, and the whole lot could cite canon (generally along the lines of "He did this, which could mean that") in their favor. Only the "he did this" is canon. What it means is personal interpretation. There are people who can see possibilities for pairings (het or slash) which I find totally unbelievable, and those who can't see the ones that I'm willing to accept. When I see slash potential for a particular pair, it isn't something I'm inventing out of whole cloth and imposing on an unyielding framework, for whatever bizarre purpose -- if that were true, I'd be able to see a lot more pairings than I do (and would find them a whole lot less interesting.) If I see it, it's because it's blatantly obvious to me, not because I'm making an effort to twist things. There are cases where I can *intellectually* understand how other people are arriving at a slash interpretation, but I just don't *feel* it myself and hence don't find it believable -- and there are cases where it leaps up and hits me right in the face. Nor can I tell you exactly why, barring a few conditions I've managed to figure out. Either I see it, or I don't. I don't expect other people to regard things the same way I do, but I do expect them to realize that these are *fictional* characters and open to *multiple* interpretations, no single one of which is the One True Way.
- Lisa
-- Lisa Williams: lcw@dallas.net or lwilliams@raytheon.com Lisa's Video Frame Capture Library: http://framecaplib.com/ From Eroica With Love: http://eroicafans.org/