Sometimes reasonable rocks::

[maygra]

...

a day or so ago, I pointed you to heatherly's meta post...

Today, I offer you xanphibians repsonse. Xanphibian touches on some of my objections to heatherly's post, but only peripherally, and her perspective is certainly different from mine (not in a bad way -- we just don't share a particular common background).

Anyway, it's well reasoned, and again, even-handed and well thought out.

I'm still working on my own shake down of my overall response to both Strikethrough07 and the way fandom is responding to it and the issues surfacing as a result of it.

Comments

[twistedchick]

I read all of this, and the other posts, and the comments, and I am left with a very few thoughts that may have been unaddressed (and this is not a plea for them to be addressed here but perhaps addressed elsewhere without further comment from me):

-- There appears to be confusion about the audience of fanfiction. Most people seem to be assuming that it is fandom, by whatever definition. That is the primary audience, just as Duncan/Methos stories have a primary audience of Duncan/Methos shippers within Highlander fen within fandom. But that does not mean this group is the only one reading the stories. The WfI mess should indicate that other people outside fandom do look for them, with other purposes. I do not have an answer to how fandom might deal with this (other than what's being discussed elsewhere) but this aspect of audience-as-hostile-political-reality should not be ignored.

-- We live in a real world, even though the country has taken far too much of a 1984 turn in recent years. Actions can have unintended effects. One of the more alarming trends within modern policing is the increasing latitude given to police/FBI to seize private property without a warrant and search through it in order to find evidence of something they can arrest the person for. (Thank you, PATRIOT acts.) Homeland Security, for example, has more than once been involved in doing this in search of child molestors -- with the evidence for suspected child molestation being stories the person kept on their computer. This is a dangerous situation for many reasons, and it is something I believe fandom as a whole may be unaware of. I doubt that either DHS or your average local police force is going to be particularly knowledgeable or nuanced in their response to chan, non-con or some other common fanfic forms found on the computers of anyone who is suspected of anything. I am concerned in a general "I hope it never happens" way that fans who are involved in protests against the Administration's activities might be put into very difficult situations legally because of this, since the Military Commissions Act pretty much defines "enemy combatant" as anyone who opposes the Bush Administration's opinions on the war. (Which is why we no longer have habeas corpus rights in this country, which I have written about at length elsewhere.)

-- Everything anyone says is "their own opinion". It would be lovely if people would stop throwing that at one another as either accusation or defense.

-- In my own opinion, if someone has not been through an experience, it may be possible to write about it capably (with much research) or fantastically (through use of emotional empathy or observation) but it will be missing something real -- although the fantasy version may actually come closer to ticking off a bad reaction in me. Some fans who have never had sex seem to be pretty good at writing about it, but something will be missing, for me, in their work. This is not a plea for everyone to go have sex so they can write about it, any more than it is a suggestion that anyone who wants to write about rape or incest go line up an abuser (or collaborator, or relative.) That 'something missing' may make it possible for me to read stories where abusive situations are not the main plotline. And I'm all in favor of writing stories to both explore alternatives in terms of dealing with difficult real-life experiences and to provide catharsis -- I have written more of them than you want to know, but not one is ever going to see the light of the Internet. That just feels too naked. IMO, a lot of true catharsis fic is so personal and intense that posting it publicly is probably inappropriate as it lets the world-at-large know too many details that could be traced back to the author's own life. Then again, writers have been writing apologia and confessionals for centuries, as well as novels; it's an acknowledged form, just as war stories and ballads are acknowledged forms. The emotional cost to the author of putting a war story or ballad out in public is less, I suspect.

Enough. Apologies if this is too long, detailed, or other.

[maygra.livejournal.com]

It's not too long and I'm glad you posted -- because I do think you've manage to categorize not the issue but the confusing and yes, in some aspects dangerous aspects of conflation among many issues -- and the fact that there is no universal or even broadly accepted quantification of impact in any of these areas (except possibly the issue of opinion *g* as both offense and defense.)

I think ellen_fremedon does an excellent job of pointing out that reality as a touch stone is a shaky anchor at best.

For myself, I'm very clear that I don't seek out the "very real" in what I read or the movies I watch. Much of what I do in fandom is very much about getting away from all that is real because I have dot deal with it so engrossingly every day. My outlook is that happy endings are rare and it matters not one wit if you deserve them or not, ergo, I seek them out special prizes when I read.