Nothing much to add to the warnings thing everyone's been posting about

[bladderwrack]

However, I do feel like complaining about the fashion for framing debate and edification in terms of contrived analogies that are more confusing and difficult to follow than the actual subject beiing discussed!

Cropped Scan Theatre says it: "Tsuzuki: Well, you see, this candle represents your life. And, this shoe... represents Maria. And, uh, this pitcher of water represents the guy who's been controlling Maria! So, if you don't want your shoes to be on fire, metaphorically speaking... wait, no, your shoes are on fire. So the only way to put them out is... uh... ... wait, no, I've got it. This chair represents bringing Maria back to life, and the shoe--"

You're making my head hurt here, gaiz*.



*The actual reason I have a problem with this technique is because it smacks of being talked down to, and that is a thing that bothers me considerably more than is rational.


Have gone through the knees of my one passably smart pair of jeans again. I don't know how this happens, it is always the knees. =_=

Comments

[bladderwrack]

Eh, s'ok. You're a lawyer; lawyers use rhetoric.

It's the intensity of my reaction that I consider irrational, not the reaction itself. It's 'triggery' ahaha wait is someone going to come and jump on me now. But I think you know what I'm talking about here.

^^ *blush* I don't feel terribly oppressed, though? Metafandom-fandom is only tangentially relevant to my circles anyway. (I actually do have strong opinions re warnings etc, but as far as cost/benefit analysis goes getting involved is ftl, and besides I've already spent three hours composing the below part of this response =_=)


Going slightly off topic, but have been meaning to mention this: (I don't have the post in front of me as I type this, so stop me if I'm wrong, but) ... you realise YnM is a salad of genre tropes, right? They're not the same ones as you'll find in Wmedia, to be sure, and sometimes just the knowledge that there exist things other than one's own apparently monolithic culture is enough, but ... to construct an argument about how genre doesn't work for you using something as cheerfully self-referential as YnM is either disingenuous or missing the mark.

Or maybe the post was primarily about fanworks, I don't recall. Either way I think I remember you making a similar proposal about the series itself somewhere before. It's like ... I don't know if you followed the metafandomish arguments, a couple of years ago? when someone's mpreg fic was nominated for a Tiptree award, and people were like, 'but this fic is not in itself doing something NEW and INNOVATIVE with gender, it is part of an ESTABLISHED GENRE' etc etc. Thing is, there are a few series, like Utena, that do go above and beyond the call of pattern-breaking duty, and it makes me uncomfortable to see special qualities assigned to a series primarily because it is unfamiliar and exotic.

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

And reading backward, now I see that I've already said that thing about originality. Annoying *and* repetitive, For The Win! But like Elizabeth Bennet, I am a very selfish creature. And I want to be as certain as I can be that no one comes and tries to do any oppressing of any interesting writers in the future.

What happened, of course, is that my own buttons got pushed at some point in the original argument. There was just something about the combination of triumphal tone -- 'Look at my cost/benefit analysis! I win, plus everyone who doesn't agree is evil!' -- combined with really basic, obvious problems with the analysis that turned me straight into Law School Girl. Or, as the classic cartoon has it, 'Someone is wrong on the Internet!'