Creature of Mad Enthusiasms

I hadn't realized until this morning just how much of my immediate fandom experience is being affected by something that happened decades ago. I've mentioned it in passing, but the words are probably meaningless to anyone who doesn't know the background. And so, I thought an explanation here in my LJ ought to be in order. There is no point or moral to this post; it is here to explain only my headspace and how it got there. (Plus, quote chunks of a Blue Oyster Cult song.)

You see me now a veteran of a thousand psychic wars
We see everything through the lenses of our experiences. My experiences include the Beauty and the Beast war. It's hard to explain now, to fans whose experience is primarily online and whose idea of a fight is a flamewar and maybe a few bannings and new communities, just how vicious a scorched-earth war of attrition that mess was. At the time, and for several years afterwards, panfandom spoke of it in whispers - one of the two great atrocities of fandom-gone-feral, the Beauty and the Beast war. (The other one, fought a few years earlier, was the Blake's 7 war.)

I'm not sure that there's anything left of me
A quick primer. Beauty and the Beast was presented as a modern fairy tale; he's a hairy guy who lives in a magical world under NYC; she's a chic society lawyer. They fight crime. Then there was a major casting change (she left for reasons that depend on which side you talk to) and the motto changed from "Once Upon a Time is Now" to "It's Not a Fairy Tale Anymore." Factions instantly sprang up - Get Her Back or Replace Her vs Trust the Guys Who Brought You the Show in the First Place. (All this before shooting even started on the final season.) When the shows did air - ARMAGEDDON!

They say that academic infighting is fierce because the stakes are so small. Imagine the cosmically miniscule nature of a TV show, and then do the math.

I cannot claim to have been a helpless victim; I was a front-line fighter. It seemed important at the time. I look back at some things and think even now, "Yes, that was an abominable thing for someone to do, and someone had to speak up and say so." Without refighting or even announcing what side I was on, I will simply list some of the battles in that war:
- The dissolution of charities in the name of the show, with no regard to the recipients of the charities.
- A full-page ad taken out in Variety venting fury on the producer
- Clubs disbanding, or requiring loyalty oaths to a side in the war, driving out anyone who wouldn't do so
- The silencing of the other side by "losing" letters or editing them before publication (this was when the role of the internet was played by newsletters)
- The silencing of the other side by refusing to allow "the wrong" art to be hung or "the wrong" stories to be published.
- Harrassment of folks on the wrong side... not just via letters to the letterzines, but to their homes and sometimes their families
- Outing fanficcers to the Powers That Be and/or their employers

You ask me why I'm weary, why I can't speak to you
I saw people being led through art shows blindfolded, lest they see the "wrong" art, and then complaining furiously to the art chair about the "filth" hung. I heard people snarling at auctioneers "nobody wants to bid on THAT!" when the wrong items came up.

I had a former friend look me dead in the eye and announce, "The reason you like [that side] is because you don't know the difference between good and evil."

I was harassed for four years about a letter I sent to Starlog. One in which, ironically, I was pointing out that the current Gulf War was far more important than a TV show regardless of outcome. (If I had a dime for every time I was told that letter "hurt someone's feelings" I'd be Bill Gates. [Don't use the word 'heartfelt' around me. After all that conditioning, it's an instant purgative.] If I had a buck for every "Starlog is a magazine about fans; how dare it print a letter dissing TV!" I could go to Cardiff right this minute.) If I had a penny for every hissed reiteration of "if the shoe fits, kick yourself with it" - a line I had swiped from the other side, actually - I'd be Paul McCartney.

Four years ago - a good 15 years after the original war - someone came to a panel I ran at Media*West with the firm intention of having me thrown off of the panel for said war.

I'm young enough to look at, and far too old to see / All the scars are on the inside
This is what I remember when I see a fandom start to angst over cast changes. These are the lenses I'm looking through when I read lines like "When she goes, I go!" and "This will ruin the fandom!" and "Fans ought to..." and "Fans shouldn't..." and certainly "Producer/writer/actor/TPTB has ruined OUR show!"

But the war's still going on, dear
I'm ashamed to say that the old warhorse got a sniff of the gunpowder and lept into the wank yesterday, challenging someone who announced they would leave as soon as their favorite character left. Fortunately for us both, she disarmed me instantly with a response of grace and dignity, allowing me my preferences while holding quietly to hers.

I lept into it again in a disagreement with a friend; having stated my side and putting the friendship over "winning," that one gets chalked up to agreeing to disagree.

I can't say if we're ever gonna be free
Actually, I can. My responses are forged into me, like Witchblade; my experiences are intertwined in my life and cannot be disconnected.

And this, too, is why I squee, and celebrate cheese, and smile at silly communities, and revel in airy, fantastical castles in the air like Steve the Oood or preposterous unified theories of future events. They delight me because they are not war. Ingenuity, cleverness, intelligence, and even sarcasm for the greater fun? Count me in! (ETA: That's saying the same thing three times, isn't it? Ingenuity, passion, amusement and sarcasm, then. Can't forget a good snark.)

I'm not asking for pity or argument or (from the chunk of my f-list who aren't fannish) even understanding. Since there are only 1 or 2 people on the f-list who were there at the time, I just needed to explain.

Reviewing the Evidence has finally updated (link in my LJ). My review for Remains Silent is up.

While Remains got one of my few unqualified raves (go read why), I'm going to take this space to bitch about two things I'm really, really tired of in the genre:

1) Dating the cop. Yes, it's a perfectly good way of dealing with the problem of the police. But when I read three books in a row where the amateur detective solves the case while keeping the real policeman as a personal pet (good for advice and sex, but not good enough to do the job for which he is trained, paid, and has experience), I've read two too many.

2) Everybody is Somebody. Just read a thriller where even the most inconsequentially mentioned character had something major to do with somebody else. Y'know what? I think spy novels are stronger when sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and a bystander is just a bystander. Not because "when everyone is somebody than no one's anybody" but because it gets to be too damned obvious. Having the occasional actual bystander leaves the reader guessing. You want the reader guessing in the thriller, not saying "Oh, that guy's gonna show back up by page 200."

2a) Y'know, people can be dedicated to their jobs without having a major relationship fuckup in their past. You don't have to snuff the boyfriend in a terrorist incident to encourage someone to want to work in homeland security. You don't have to kill the parents/spouse/child/best friend to "drive" someone into law enforcement. You don't have to boot a good cop off the force for a stupid reason to "make" them become a private eye. Believe it or not, people can passionately believe in law, order, and security without a Deep Personal Angst.

Y'know why CSI original is more popular than any of the spinoffs? Because in the original CSI, they enjoy their jobs. They have personal lives that involve hobbys and fun as well as disappointments. They love their jobs and love learning and exploring for the sake of learning and exploring. Therefore, they are people that other people want to spend time with on a weekly basis. By making the spinoff characters humorless and driven, they made them less interesting to hang out with.

It's the same with books.

Was late to work mostly because I spent so much time reading the paper this morning. Not pleased with the SCOTUS ruling over the 10 Commandments; because it was so muddy, at least one group is announcing that they're going to try to set up 100 more monuments to force the issue. According to the Post, they have the free time now that Terri's dead & buried, and their hospice picket is over. *sigh* ( Rant )

*blink* Okay, I'm not sure where all that came from. Well, I know where it came from, I just don't know why it came pouring out today.

On the good side of things, it's lunch with friends today, and this Saturday is the Team Wench Midsummer Fantasy Ball. I'm going to bring wads of cash - there are some prizes I *really* want - and I finally find out how well the book baskets go over. It's been a hard haul to keep myself from making dozens until I know how popular a ticket draw the first four are. (I've only saved aside 20 baskets, about 4 goblets, and three double-stacked shelves of books, not much at all, just in case...)

Reminder - if you're interested, all the details can be found under my Team Wench links, and tickets will remain on sale until Wednesday night. The theme is Alice in Wonderland, and no, I don't know what I'm wearing yet...

I've pretty much made up my mind about a book by page 20 and this one is so slow it's putting my fillings to sleep. So far we've seen a little girl wake her family up, the mother announce she's pregnant again, the kids go outside and play, the father hide in his study, and everyone poke at dinner. Page 19, and that's it for the action. The rest of the space is taken up with what everyone thinks about it all and how they feel about each other (vaguely resentful).

Guess I'm one of the crew, because I hate 'em all too.

Thing is, it's not because the writing's so bad - it isn't. Oh, it's turgid and all, but it's a prime example of a literary movement I've decided to dub "70s Sociopathy." Remember books and movies like The Graduate, Virgin Suicides, Separate Peace? They were all the same - such boring people leading such boring lives that they're all clinically depressed, and they're so pathologically self-centered that they blame everyone around them for their stultification. I remember when such things were considered "edgy" and "real" because they "peeled back the artifice" - but if you take a closer look, who was REALLY the cause of everyone's misery? Themselves. They never talked - excuse me, were "unable to communicate" - and they were so empty that even they couldn't figure who they were, and had to go "find themselves" as if their personality had gone out for a gallon of milk and never come home.

Everyone blames every other person in the world for limiting them, trapping them, not dedicating their lives to entertaining and sustaining them. Caught without empathy but with plenty of resentment, whatever dirt one person does to another becomes ennobled, because it is somehow striking back at the oppressor. (The Graduate is a really classic example of this. Everyone finds their only gratification in hurting someone else - the circle shit instead of the circle jerk.)

At the end of the book or movie, some people might be dead and maybe even one or two have had a lesson hammered home with such a big clue-by-four that it made a shallow dent in their concrete self-absorption, but the rest of the cast is just left with the eternal, unanswered question of "how did it get to be about anyone else when the world is all about me?"

This particular book - nameless because it will eventually be reviewed - is theoretically a private detective novel, although we have yet to see crime or detective. Instead, we have passages like these:

"Amelia, dreamy and languid with the heat, lay on her back on the scorched grass and fired earth of the lawn, staring up at the endless, cloudless blue, pierced only by the giant hollyhocks that grew like weeds in the garden. She watched the reckless, sky-diving swallows and listened to the pleasing buzz and hum of the insect world. A ladybird crawled across the freckled skin of her arm. A hot air balloon drifted lazily overhead and she wished she could be bothered to wake Sylvia and tell her about it."

or

"But one thing was true - Victor would be nothing without her, but he was also nothing with her. At that very moment he was toiling in the cool dark of his study, the heavy chenille curtains closed against the summer, lost in his work, work with never came to fruition, never changed the world or made his name. He was not great in his field, merely good. This gave her a certain satisfaction."

Get a life, people!