Another Different Kind of Meme

A post Synecdochic made noted something I've thought on occassion myself, and got me thinking. The particular passage:

...fandom, as a whole, is more women than men. And women are taught, are trained, to step aside. We're told a thousand ways that it's not right to take credit for what we do, and it's not modest to accept praise, and it's not good and it's not right to say yes, I worked hard on this, and I am proud of how it came out; we must say oh, it's nothing instead.

And, you know, I've seen an awful lot of that just lately, and found myself doing it, too.

So here's my response, and a meme if you like since I highly encourage my flist to give it a try:

Guidelines: Say what you're good at, what you work at, what makes you proud. Use at least two superlatives (eg. wonderful, excellent, fantastic, very, extremely). No qualifications (eg. maybe, mostly, generally, sometimes) allowed. Don't worry if you have to edit a few times to manage this. Do not lj-cut it.

Being Proud of Myself

I am an excellent writer. In fact, I am an equally excellent writer of both fiction and critical analysis, and I'm damn proud of that fact. I am superb at tracing out all the details of a text and setting out the ways they could fit together. I work hard to satisfy myself that an essay or story is good before I post it, and when I go back to stories, even years later, I always find things, often a lot of things, that make me say "Yeah, that was it; that's good". I am aware enough of how many different ways stories can work to make deliberate choices about how I want the one I'm working on to go, and I can make my choice come out. My characters are who I want them to be, and I'm proud that I can make that happen.

Also? I write really hot smut.



(*trying not to twitch* This is really hard to do when I know I'm going to post it openly. There was a lot more profanity in the first go.)

Adrift history

It seem to be my day for thinking from other posts. Cathexys says some interesting things, while revisiting a post about fandom history, and how there are a lot of distinct fandom histories (media, sci-fi, music, celeb, book, etc.) that have all found their way onto the internet and now clash a lot over whose fandom history we're talking about at any given moment.

And it made me think about p_zeitgeist's Not-capade post about how western anime fandom may accept altered, skewed, denied canon more often than media or book fandoms because western anime fandom is already at one remove from the source. The culture that spawned it was not ours, and the cues and reasons and references probably go straight past most people without registering at all.

And it made me think that maybe US anime fandom is a-historical for the same reason. It's always just invented yesterday, and there are so many different levels of engagement (raw, sub, dub, etc.) that the fandom itself has very little cohesion except in small pockets. History? What history? The one that starts with Sailor Moon? Or the one that starts with Astro Boy? Or the one that's spent all its time studying Akira and Wicked City? The history that starts with Genji Monogatari, or the one that starts with Takahashi Rumiko in Japan, or the one that starts with a translator on the Tokyopop staff who may not even know the gender of all the characters?

Myself, I think this is helped along by the tendency Japan and the US share of freely reinventing their own histories every few decades. But even aside from that predisposition, US anime fandom has little that any large segment can agree on in the way of roots. Rather, it's an aerial--seeds drifting on the wind to lodge on a branch somewhere.