3 things: smoke shop news; "The Transient and the Eternal;" thoughts on watching White Collar

[edenfalling]

1. The second day of training for RE went fairly well. There were some things MS and I didn't get to, and some things that I ran out of time and so only showed/told him about instead of having him do them himself while I supervised, but since he's closing with PM on Friday, and I told him to tell her which parts he hadn't actually done (mostly counting cigarettes and related stuff), hopefully she will run him through those tasks properly.

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2. I have been working on "Babies," another component fic in "The Transient and the Eternal," which is starting to behave rather like Snowfall and insist on zig-zagging to hell and back instead of winding down to an ending. First I thought it was going to be about Setsuna and Sara taking some kids in their apartment complex under their wing. Then it turned out to deal with one kid in particular. Then Lucifer insisted on showing up. Then the kid turned out to maybe be Kato's reincarnation, or at least very similar. And now I seem to have gone off on a tangent about truth and lies and Uriel, of all characters. *headdesk*

It all flows logically from one paragraph to the next, but I have completely lost hold of the thread I started from, and am struggling to find a path back to some point that resonates with the beginning and also feels like any sort of actual conclusion. Because right now, the story is nothing but middle, middle, middle -- I need an ending!

Argh. (4,300 words and counting. *sigh*)

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3. I am kind of dipping my toes into White Collar fandom -- thus far, I have watched the first two episodes of season one and read some meta and a bunch of fic. So far, I am cautiously pleased. I'm probably not going to be writing here, though.

I always feel a bit wrong-footed in audiovisual media-based fandoms as opposed to print-based fandoms. You will note, for example, that my four main writing fandoms -- Harry Potter, Naruto, Angel Sanctuary, and Narnia -- are two book series and two manga series, and that I do not consider the film or anime versions of those series canon. I am just not comfortable being hardcore fannish about audiovisual media... or no, that's not true. There are films and shows I have loved to pieces, sometimes more viscerally than I love books. But I am not comfortable being fannish in the same way. I will read fic, I will squee and bitch, I will even meta. But I will only rarely write fic.

There are various reasons for my discomfort with audiovisual media fandoms. First, I dislike the way film imposes its own time structure on me, rather than letting me experience a story at my own pace. The best I can do is pause or rewind or skip forward -- I can't slow down or speed up the way I can while reading, which drives me nuts. Second, I have to rewind and listen three or four times to get various bits of dialogue straight, because I am not great at distinguishing conversation from background noise, as people who know me in real life can attest. *wry* Third, I have a sympathetic embarrassment squick that kicks in much harder for audiovisual media than for print media, and that cringe reaction is exacerbated by my inability to control the pace of the story. (In other words, you can't skim a film.) Fourth, I can't take film with me the way I can carry a book around, nor can I find and rewatch little relevant details with anything remotely like the ease with which I can flip through a book to find a scene I am trying to remember, which makes it harder for me to feel I have the... the grasp, or the mastery, I guess, of the text that makes it easy for me to play around.

So film is simultaneously more immersive (because of its closer mimicry of real life, and its insistence on a real time experience of the story) and more distancing (because I can't get hold of it, and it is much more likely to be emotionally offputting) than words on a page. Which is why, as I say, I tend to feel a bit wrong-footed in audiovisual media fandoms.

But still, White Collar seems promising, which is odd as it's a show without any fantasy or science-fiction gimmick. We shall see if my interest continues.

Comments

[ineptshieldmaid]

First, I dislike the way film imposes its own time structure on me, rather than letting me experience a story at my own pace. The best I can do is pause or rewind or skip forward -- I can't slow down or speed up the way I can while reading, which drives me nuts. Second, I have to rewind and listen three or four times to get various bits of dialogue straight, because I am not great at distinguishing conversation from background noise, as people who know me in real life can attest. *wry* Third, I have a sympathetic embarrassment squick that kicks in much harder for audiovisual media than for print media, and that cringe reaction is exacerbated by my inability to control the pace of the story. (In other words, you can't skim a film.) Fourth, I can't take film with me the way I can carry a book around, nor can I find and rewatch little relevant details with anything remotely like the ease with which I can flip through a book to find a scene I am trying to remember, which makes it harder for me to feel I have the... the grasp, or the mastery, I guess, of the text that makes it easy for me to play around.

YES THIS!

SO MUCH THIS.

It doesn't really have an effect on my ability to write for audiovisual fandoms - in fact, mostly what I write *is* for audiovisual fandoms, so. But all of these are things which I find difficult about audiovisual media.

[ineptshieldmaid]

in fact, mostly what I write *is* for audiovisual fandoms, so

... actually, correct that. Mostly what I write is for things with audiovisual CANONS. I treat fandom as my text. The classic example would be Merlin - I was reading for Merlin before I ever saw it. In Star Trek, I'm writing fic as part of the fandom textual conversation as much (probably more) than the movie itself. I rarely write fic for an AV canon without being heavily involved in the textual community of fandom - I wrote one Holmes fic, and one Toy Story fic, and I think that's about it.

Whereas I've written rare lit and historical fic, without any reliance on a fandom community to write in/for.

One standout oddity - I've also written a bit for an *audio only* fandom. I've never seen Bare, but I was obsessed with it on the basis of the soundtrack.

[edenfalling]

Huh. Now that you mention it, I think I do the same thing. The audiovisual canons I have written the most for are ones where I have had a long-term and/or intensive involvement in the fandom (often that means silent lurking, but still, involvement!), and where I am writing in relation to a fandom conversation as much as, if not more than, in relation to the canon. I think the only exception is my first Labyrinth fic, and even that was more a piece of literary analysis (ie, meta) than a proper story.

On the other hand, I went off and wrote a 7,000 word Gormenghast fic with blithe unconcern for that series's complete lack of a fandom, just because I felt like it. :-)

So yeah, I know what you mean, and that is a really interesting and useful distinction!

[proanon.livejournal.com]

...I so very much know what you mean about the embarrassment squick. It's a rare episode or movie - /anywhere/ - that I don't end up leaving the room, or at least burying my head, plugging my ears and humming, at some point. I'd never thought about it in comparison with reading, though - but you're right.

And that explains why I can read through a book and like it just fine, but find myself squirming when I'm reading aloud to my mother. Can't just skim past the unpleasantness where a character is being bitchy when you /know/ she knows better, that way...

[edenfalling]

Yes, it's so much worse when you're reading (or being read to) aloud! I remember when I was little, my dad used to read books to me as a family bonding thing, which stopped one day while we were in the middle of The Wind in the Willows. Toad was about to do something stupid and embarrassing, which I could not bear to listen to, so I made my dad stop reading and we never got back to the story.

...I should probably go finish that book one of these days.

[vehrec.livejournal.com]

So how about video games? More like movies, or more like books as a rule? Would you rather read/watch a Let's Play or experience them directly?

[edenfalling]

This is where I confess that I have never played video games. The closest I have come is some really old children's semi-educational games that ran on my parents' Atari computer in the 80s, and once or twice fooling around on my cousins' tv with... I think a Mario game and a racing game.

(Which, yes, does in fact mean that I wrote FF7 fic based totally on reading other fic, reading other people's meta about the game, and reading Wikipedia's article/s on the game. *is sheepish* There's a reason I never tried to write anything "canon"-based in that fandom and was instead involved in a kinda-sorta conversation among various people as we built a crack AU.)

[vehrec.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. It seems to me that there are certain games like the Persona series or indeed FF that might go either way. On the one hand, you can't really skip much, and there can be a pretty high squick factor at play. I am looking at you, Ar Tonelico series, with your sexual innuendos dripping from every gameplay mechanic! On the other hand, you can always pause, or save and quit for a week, or play a minigame to break the flow.

But since you don't play any of them, this is all just hypothetical.