Neil, entering the dialogue between Shane and me:
I'm with Shane on this one. Costumes for the women were pretty much on a par with those for the men. Most of them were bloody awful:)
Oscar Wilde said that when he was traveling through the mining camps, he saw a sign in a saloon: "Don't shoot the piano player, he is doing the best he can." He said it was the only honest art criticism he had ever seen. No matter what the effect was, I'm pretty sure they were trying to appeal to that section of the audience that likes watching attractive women in outfits from the Reduced Wardrobe Company.
As for tightness of garb, wasn't it a person of the male phenotype who got to wear the close-fitting pantalons rouges of tanned hide?
...of course there are other constituencies in the audience as well.
Plenty of reasons to go for slash, really. If anything it's amazing het gets a look in.
Except that I'd guess that nearly all slashwriters have had the experience of being women having sex with men (even if they later gave it up as a bad job), so they have recent or more remote experiences to work from. No doubt there are Six Degrees of Mary Sue (like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon) but the most direct seems to be the combination of the author's idealized self with her favorite character. The culture of LOCing fiction seems to be nearly always positive and encouraging, so the fear of being hooted at for overt Mary-Sueing doesn't seem to be a valid one.
I don't think that's true. As for the background, can't you always
invent
some? The less you're constrained by background, the more you can make
up...
You have to care in the first place, and I've never been able to think of anything really interesting for either Jenna or Cally. And this from the only person in world history to write three--THREE--Blake/Servalans.
I would disagree with Dana that the female characters had relatively underdeveloped backgrounds. Blake and Avon might have got more than most, but we probably know at least as much about Cally and Jenna as we do about Vila and Tarrant, and no more about Gan than we do about Soolin.
"R is no worse than S" is not always an endorsement--it depends on how bad S is.
-(Y)