Below are the 3 most recent journal entries recorded in Nabiki GMYW's LiveJournal:

Friday, April 2nd, 2004
10:43 pm	I...I...can't... ...can't...speak... I just... *babbles incoherently for a few minutes and makes crazy hand gestures* I don't know if this has been posted before, but...GOD, WTF is this indeed!? Of Self-Hating Fen and Time Wasters, or, The Fandom Wank, in Two Movements Oh, God, it's so beautiful I don't know where to begin... —And we're the time-wasters as well as being pretentious and insincere. Oh yes. The Fandom Wankers refuse to believe that anyone could really care about such things. They are offended by the very idea that strangers could take things that don't interest them seriously enough to get into semi-private heated arguments about the topics. Not only are they offended enough to mock the concept, it is itself a concept outside their pea-brains, that we could have been having this debate (these debates, rather, as like all symposiae it diverged into overlapping segments) in all sincerity, and not to impress some fictional audience (after all, we didn't know that Azusa was lurking there, or who is/was or isn't, unless/until they jumped in and started arguing) or to "make ourselves look intelligent" (again, to whom?) by giving ourselves airs… And later... But the Fandom Wankers don't let anyone who doesn't already belong to their community, the JournalFen setup, to post there. And to log in to JournalFen, you have to be friends with someone who has already been made an Initiate of the Circle, rather like joining a secret society (is there a JournalFen handshake, I wonder, or what would the net equivalent of one be? Some sort of ASCII art?) Just pick a paragraph, ANY PARAGRAGH! Now, one particularly interesting thing about all the Fandom Wankers, is that they are extremely narrow-minded in their focus. They don't seem to fully realize that there is a wider world out there than their own particular fandom, despite their stated aims of mocking those who take fandom too seriously on a panfandom level. Instead, they each mistakenly believe that their own fandoms are the worst, the only circles of human civilization filled with such pettiness and concern for issues of such triviality (q.v. Azusa's rants on anime fans.) And: But the poor Fandom Wankers are stuck in their circles of private hell, obsessing over the behaviour which offends them, and doing absolutely nothing creative8 about it (well, they can't, since what offends them is nothing specific, really) but puffing themselves up with spiritual pride over this negative status as universal critics — when they merely are like the Bandar-log, the howling monkeys of the Mowgli stories, envying the world of sentients, first seeking to mimic it, and then in spite mocking it when they cannot accomplish it themselves, for their limited attention spans and abilities. And my personal favorite... Now, is this article, in turn, a waste of my time? *wipes tear from the eye* It's...so...beautiful! *falls to her knees...and quietly weeps as a light washes over me* I have reached it! I can touch it! Orgasm Wank Nirvana! (First-time poster. Apologies if it was posted before...it was just too hard to resist...) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 28th, 2004
10:25 am	A replyto Milday H, because the comments cut me off (stupid comments...) Victoria Bitter. Yea gods, where to start? Here's a couple of links to help you out. Now, I jumped in FW rather late, around december last year, and my first taste of fandom insanity was here. In that link, VB's background is explained, who she is, who she conned, what drugs is the on, ect ect. To get more info in this wank of wanks, go here, Turimel's Journal , one of the conned from the charity, who is fighting tooth and nail for her money back while putting up with VB's latest antics, like, say, fake C&D orders. Has to be seen to believed. As for the L/A thing, please take in mind that, like a Vietnam vet, I've seen things too horrible to describe (a certain story about a cartoon cat and the 13 year old hemophrodite who loves him still makes me wake up screaming at night) so when unusual pairings come my way, I'm less than eager to embrace them. Call it a knee-jerk reaction or a defence mechanism. With things like VB, that horrible cat story, I've found that drawing imaginary lines in my head keeps me sane. The voices in my head say to keep away from RPS and stick to (what I percieve) to be cannon-based pairings so all is well in my world. In other words, if L/A makes you happy, go forth and write! As long as you don't imagine Orlando Bloom's holy sprit-type mojo visiting you at night to make sweet, sweet fangirl love to you, you're ok by me! ^_^ (I am not making this up. It was an actual wank.) Really, I'm a reasonable person. When in doubt, I reach for the middle ground. You know, everything in balance. After all, isn't that the whole subtex of FW? Balance, people, balance. As for the cannon evidence, I suppose it's possible, but I really don't see it. I'll keep it in mind, though, for the next time I read the books. It didn't whack me on the head like Sam/Frodo, you know. But maybe I'll catch some of that lovin' the next time! ^_- (Comment on this)
Monday, December 22nd, 2003
4:38 pm	The Thin Line Between Reality and Fandom (or 'you won't believe what I've read in Fandom Wank!') So years ago, one or two at most, I found myself reading this fic from the Gargoyles fandom by a girl named Princess Trinity. It was a slash f/f fic and a Mary Sue, portents of doom in any fandom, but the series since then has quite a few fans. In it, Trinity (same name of the author, har har) somehow manages to bed all the females of the cast, including a married one, one with a boyfriend, a clone with the mental age of 12 and a mother/daughter team. For a long time this bothered me as heck... was it the rampant OOC? The incest? The bad plot? Lord knows I've read worst things in my times. So is this bothering me so much? There's plenty wrong here, but not necessarily in the slash department. It's taken me a lot of time to put into words, but this made me see the light. The story goes like this: Once upon a time, in the LOTR fandom, there was a woman called Victoria Bitter. VB is a trobled individual. How so? She said she was channeling Merry (yes, THAT Merry) and that she was remembering things of that past life. Then she drops out of the net, somehow finds a girlfriend to tell everybody she commited suicide and returned to the net as Mr. Frodo. Then it REALLY starts getting interesting. Not only is channeling Merry...she's channeling and becoming Elijah Wood, AND HE AIN'T DEAD YET! And between becoming a guy (including growing a dick, or so she claimed) and making up languages (channeling Merry, she started to write Westron, which has absolutely no relation to Tolkien's Westron according to LOTR languages fans), she also managed to embezzle $3000 out of A Bit of Light (a Sam-based fansite and charity.) She even showed up in a police department's website. So... what does this tell you? Is there a lesson here? I read of VB's misadventures and couldn't help but rethink the whole fandom/fanfic relationships in other terms. Never in my wildest fantasies could I envision somebody taking it THAT far. I mean, its one think to write about a character, another to think you ARE the character. It's one thing to write Mary Sue fics. Trinity, for all her failing, never crossed the sacred line between real and fiction. Yes, it read too much like her real life when all I wanted was Gargoyles life. (Suddenly Goliath isn't the hero and voice of reason, now he's a bigot a la fundamentalisto! Men like Xanatos are emasculated. And all the hot sexy women flock behind the Mary Sue. Then again, that's the whole POINT of a Mary Sue, isn't it?) Yet in the end, Trinity really doesn't ever cross the line. As time went on, she was able to seperate her character's life from her own, and ended up creating other poeple and situations. Mary Sues may not be my cup of tea, but I know that it's just harmless fiction. As long as authors can seperate themselves from their fandom, I think there's really no problem when writing fiction of any kind, slash, het, ect. While I don't wanna read anyone projecting anything in a fanfic, as long as they keep it sane, there's no problem. For me, the most important part of this essay is that it's important to keep a seperation between the net and the real world. Sometimes, it just doesn't really matter, as in Trinity's case. When all is said and done, she's not really hurting anyone. Yes, her fic has flaws and yes, she does keep projecting her life in the story, but 'projecting' isn't the same as 'becoming', say, a book character or a real life person (or BOTH as in VB's case). And given the nature of fanfic, we all can't help but project a little of ourselves in what we write. Its one thing to write a fic around a character, another to think you ARE the character. In other words, I think its ok if you put a little of yourself in a fic as long as you understand that in the end its just a fic/a character/a fandom. Even Real-Life Slashers (that I don't support) know there's a distiction between fact and fantasy. In the end, they too just turn off the computer and go home and that's that. (Most of them... click here for the details ) There's a thin, thin line between fantasy and delusion. It can be walked, yes, but you HAVE to be careful. There are some who can walk it just fine, like the RPS. Some poeple can read it and be just ok with it, while I keep thinking of the real person and just icks me. But both the RPS authors and me know that it's fantasy and that there's a line somewhere in there. And we both know that once the line is crossed, you are in Weirdsville and it's downwards spiral from there. (4 Comments |Comment on this)