Mock. Mockmockmock. Mockity-mock-mock

8:59pm: But WHY!?!
[Note: Alas, my fandom wank posting virginity, I hardly knew ye!]

So, piedmargaret writes an essay about slash. sarcasticwriter responds with a question. All she wants to know is "[Why slashers are] breaking canon and projecting a different sexuality on the original character. That word 'projecting' is important here. None of the characters on Angel are gay. They just aren't."

She gets a series of unsurprisingly long responses and decides to move the discussion to her own lj. (There she also mentions X-Files, Star Wars and Harry Potter as examples of canon that is totally not gay. It's pan-fandom wank people!) Big-ass essay-length meta-heavy replies start pouring in and everything hovers just on the edge of flaming.

I thought it was about time for some annual "But why do you like slash!!?! I don't understand!!! They're not gay!!!" wank.

10:56pm: "Oh, look, wank!"
My fandom... oh, my fandom invented wank. Not without reason is the main newsgroup known colloquially as 'The Eternal Flame' True, no Doctor Who wank will ever surpass the infamous post-September 11th flamewar in which someone demanded that all pacifists be expelled from the newsgroup. "You mean, pacifists like the main character of the show we're talking about?"


This wank is brought to you by the Outpost Gallifrey forums, home to such threads as 'Do we all have low-level autism' and 'Have you seen my lapel pin'? The thread wanked here is entitled 'The Five Stupidest Things Fans Say...' Light-hearted comments happen. Then... people get offended! Huzzah!

"How dare you! This is so arbitrary!":

Both of these are completely arbitrary. The first season could as well have been seven or nine stories long. Season 2 was nine stories and thirty-nine episodes long; Season 3 was ten stories and forty-five episodes long. So much for holding fast onto "8=10." I don't have Andrew Pixley's memory, but I would bet the sixties are full of "discrepancies" between seasons and production blocks. Again, let me spell it out for you: At this point in the show's history, these distinctions are completely arbitrary. I'm willing to concede the differences between seasons and production blocks. However, I'm not willing to concede that one necessarily trumps the other. I still don't know why you're so distraught over this; it hardly seems worth calling anybody "stupid" over.

(No, I don't know what that means either.)

Oh, and no one likes this thread. So they comment in it to say so:

>This was something I had hoped had died a deserved death. Haven't we moved on..?

Sorry Dad, didn't realise you were in. Of course, by posting that you pushed the thread back up again.

Duuuhhhh!

But don't we all live for mad assertions and the wank they cause?

Yes yes yes...along your claim that the Target novelizations were of equal worth as the broadcast series.

It's not so much the wankery of pointing out daftness, as the wank that ensues as people write entire essays on why X was wrong to say Y thing, because Y thing is BLATANTLY NOT MAD!

Oh, and we always need intellectual one-upmanship, yes?

"I'm very very clever and eclectic. So my opinion counts for MORE!":

And what about the incredibly condescending and self-congratulatory "Rad vs. Trad" formulation? Those of us who love Doctor Who as a TV show are often made to feel as if we're old-fashioned troglodytes who think the world stopped in either 1989 or 1996. In my case, that's pretty hysterical. I'm a gay vegan atheist nudist (I'm not jotting down those labels to be smug, which many people in those categories undeniably are, but instead to give a thumbnail sketch of where I'm coming from) who loves artists like Diamanda Galas, Jan Svankmajer and James Joyce (or Jon Shear and OutKast if you want someone more current), and yet these little novels are supposedly too challenging for me? No, I just find the ones I've read to be joyless and self-important. They're not honestly trashy but regard their trashiness VERY seriously. And I imagine that there are plenty of other posters here who don't care for the books and resent being told that they're stuck in the past.

No wank is complete without pedantry and semantics, is it?

Actually, the pedant in me has to say "hypotheses", given the way that creationists have shamelessly abused and/or misunderstood the scientific application of the word "theory"

But love to the person who says the truest thing ever:

Dunno if we'd had this one : "In the days when it was cool to like Doctor Who". When exactly was this then?

*sigh*


PS: How the hell do I do a journalfen cut-tag anyway?