Notes and Errata of Mark of the Asphodel

Dear Chrom/male!Robin shippers:

I like this pairing.  Wouldn't mind reading 'fic for it.  However, if the "Avatar" you're writing about is not the character from the actual game, the one who has loads and loads of conversations with every playable character defining his (or her) personality, but is instead an OC in the Strategist role bearing the looks and name of "your self-insert," there is a special place in FANFICTION HELL for you.

k'thx'bai

PS: But thank you for admitting it up front so I don't waste my time with your Gary Stu.  

In the past I've defended sporking 'fics as well, part of the territory.  Big fandom, losta crap fic, lotsa trolls, it's sporking time.  And in a vast fandom like Harry Potter, it really doesn't matter.  You can piss off 5,000 Snape waifus and be confident you didn't want to know a single one of them, and they'll just form a clique of their own and keep churning out crap, and someone like me will just sit back with a bag of pretzels and watch the ebb and flow of carnage.  It's almost as good as Usenet.

Browsing some old HP-related haunts of mine, it occurs to me that the exact nature of the crapfic there, especially the latter-day crapfic, is what really makes the difference.  

Death Eater Apologists
Pseudo-Aristocratic classist tripe that extends to indictments of the author's personal life
People who legitimately seem to think Voldemort and his gang were misunderstood
Dumbledore is the true evil in Potterland, and it's not an exercise in subversion
Weird shit that puts high school bullies in a deeper tier of hell than, well, blood bigots who torture and murder the inferior sort of people

Really gross stuff.  Really gross stuff by prominent writers, spanning multiple comms and archives (and flamewars) and meta sites and on and on and on.  And some of them are decent enough writers that I can see why people would find it "refreshing" and "seductive"-- I sure did back in the pre-Deathly Hallows days before they all revealed themselves to be BATSHIT. 

Sporking this shit-- dissecting it, holding up to the light the ugly guts that make up an ugly, ugly worldview that uses fanfiction as a means of evangelizing The Truth about Harry Potter and his world-- basically amounts to a public service.  There is no parallel to it that I've seen in a fandom like Fire Emblem.  It'd be like if the major strain of Tellius fanfic amounted to heaps of things "proving" that laguz really are subhuman and Ashnard was right about everything.  I've seen a little bit of Ashnard apologetics on tumblr, but nothing like what the Harry Potter crowd does for the Malfoys, Snape, and such. 

Shouzou Kaga's final Fire Emblem game was the ambitious and underperforming Thracia 776.  With former driving force Kaga gone to pursue other things, FE went in a new direction-- handheld games instead of console games, with a new system of support mechanics.
 
( Cut for length, again )

Since FE8 and FE7, with their similar support systems, were the first to be released worldwide, many fans have the idea that these A-B-C supports with paired endings are simply how Fire Emblem works.  Clearly that is not the case.  You may like it the best, but that doesn't make it the norm.  

The next continental saga challenged that assumption, hard.

I suppose DW isn't the best place to air my grievances with Tumblr-fen, but I'll just post two things here:

1) Discussion of sexuality, gender roles, and what is and is not "normal" in Fire Emblem that uses the GBA Fire Emblem as a starting point and Radiant Dawn as an end point is, shall we say, missing a large part of the picture.  As in, missing six to eight installments of the franchise. 

2) Referring to complaints over the new OA and DLC art as "slut-shaming" when part of the problem is that the male characters are not being portrayed in the same sexualized manner as the female characters, which appears to be a glaring and problematic double standard, honestly misses the point entirely.  

Then again, people who throw around "slut-shaming," like people who throw around "sheeple," are usually not worth the time to debate.

I'd kind of like the next FE to be a "small scale" guerilla-style war instead of "continental/intercontinental epic" warfare.

But not like FE7, because having to hew to FE6's canon AND GBA-era gameplay opened too many plotholes and gameplay moments of silly, IMO.

Also, while I'm not bowled over by FE7, this has to be the most amazing, incredible, astonishing piece of wank in FE meta.  I think the TC usually has his head up his ass, but GOOD LORD, people.

/read FE13 forum thread about what hypothetical support conversations between DLC characters might be like

/giggle

/eat popcorn

/watch as thread is derailed on page two by debate over how many guys Lachesis was doing it with

/shrug

/eat popcorn

I've been wanting to talk about this for a while, and conversations with amielleon  and scarletmorning  spurred me to post it now.  Now, originally I had the post formatted in a proper fashion, defining my terms and explaining the difference between fandom "theories" and a true scientific theory, but I'm guessing nobody cares.  If you want to go into that sort of detail, please ask.

Anyway, use of Occam's Razor in fandom (or anyone else, really) amounts to this: the more complicated an explanation is, the more machinations it requires to work, the less likely it is to be true.  Doesn't mean it can't be true; some "elegant" explanations are wrong.  But the "elegant" explanation is more likely to be the correct explanation for whatever it is you're trying to explain and/or predict.

As Ammie said here (locked post), one explanation for Ike's FE10 ending is that he's a selfish character.  Well, that's pretty simple and to-the-bone.  But accepting that Ike is fundamentally selfish above all else requires ignoring, or bending, a great deal else in Tellius canon.  It's a seemingly elegant explanation that requires pretty complicated machinations to work, and is therefore suspect. 

Fandom isn't science, so perhaps it makes sense that we've borrowed terms from religious debate for fandom discussions.  We invoke "canon" aka "Word of God" to indicate that we get material from a media creator that can't be overturned, but creators can be sloppy.  Creators can change their mind  Creators can give supplemental materials to explain (or contradict) what's in the text.  Things can get altered in translation (see: when Ammie exploded my nice little idea that used the wording of the NoA FE8 script as opposed to the NoA FE7 script to explain the relative ages of the Lord characters).  

And then we can always play "Death of the Author" or exploit readings of the text that are likely unintended but nonetheless make sense on some level (ex: Kirby is the true villain of the Kirby games).  That's part of what makes fandom compelling for those of us who are into the meta and fanfiction.  But the basic rules of constructing a logical argument shouldn't be ignored, even when it's all in fun.  Delightful crack theories are delightful precisely because they make an alarming amount of sense.  Delightful theories exploit "gaps" in the canon, or explain things that hang out there unanswered.  Ideas that exist completely inside a gap in the canon with nothing to support or contradict them, or that explain things that don't require an answer, don't have quite the same impact on a reader. 

Example: Raphi and Sriya were batting around the crack idea that Lyon somehow got transformed into Legault.  It's cute, there's not really anything to contradict it, and Raphi even made a 'fic out of it.  It doesn't really shed any light on Elibe canon or Magvel canon, though-- it's a self-contained little bit 'o crack.  Whereas the idea that kyusil  proposed regarding Roy and his marriage options (that Roy's various unromantic matchups are in fact a demonstration of his alleged political ability in action) is, to me, a highly compelling one.  Do I think that it's necessarily what the scriptwriters intended?  No, I think they were likely just being sloppy.  But the political angle is to me a very interesting one that a 'fic writer can (and should!) exploit to good use.  It offers a new way of examining Roy that takes two things from canon (his diverse marriage options and his stated political skills) and unites them in a way that can be used to shed light upon the characters, their world, or both.  And with Roy being the arguable central figure of the entire Elibe saga, something that illuminates his character "matters" a great deal, inasmuch as any meta-fun "matters". 

And then there's the deep end of fandom meta.  Or the "off the deep end" sector, the kind that constructs amazingly elaborate theories, air-castles of assumptions piled upon tiny projections of canon, just begging to be demolished.  Harry Potter fandom was terrible in this regard.  Please look up "Archiving the Banana Peels of Imagination" if you want to see some of this in action; I will say for this particular theorist that they seemed to be a very nice and enthusiastic person, but their meta was just... incredible.  In the original sense of that word.  The problem with a lot of the HP meta crowd, both the cheerfully zany sort and the oddly... malicious... sort, was that they started with one assumption, slapped another upon it, and then another upon that, and finally they had this great towering edifice of headcanon that made sense to them but had little to do with the actual, you know, books.  Whether the idea was "Dumbledore didn't really die" or "How Snape will save everything" or "Dumbledore is evil" or "Ron will become a Death Eater," they cherry-picked canon (took what they wanted and ignored the rest) and employed complicated machinations to make everything work.  We're talking Rube Goldberg contraptions, if not MC Escher mechanisms.

Well, elaborate contraptions, whether physical constructions or meta constructions, break down easily.  These meta writers had made themselves the meta equivalent of the Space Shuttle-- magnificent and fundamentally faulty.  And when their meta-shuttles exploded, many of them had the nerve to get pissy with Rowling.  If they'd showed respect for basic logic and the principles of argument on the front end, not to mention a bit of respect for canon, they might have come up with sturdy and functional vehicle for their meta instead!

By all means, ignore Occam's Razor in fandom if it's all fun and games.  But if you're expecting to convince other theorists, or if you're trying to provide a serious explanation of a problematic text (film, book, videogame, TV script...), or if you're so invested in your pet theory that it makes you upset and angry to see a rebuttal[*], it's good to keep the basics in mind.  The more convoluted your pet explanation is, the less likely you are to convince anyone, and the more likely you are to be entirely wrong.

And we've all gotten things entirely, 110% wrong. 

* Not kidding about the HP crowd when it comes to anger and vitriol re: exploding headcanon.  Not kidding at all.

So, every writer 'round the world is now able to take out the Steve Jobs tributes and obituaries they'd likely written months... or years... in advance.  

Me, I'm flashing back to a different place and time-- the early summer of '99, at the north end of that region of California once known as the Valley of the Heart's Delight, now better known as Silicon Valley.  It was the end of my sophomore year, and I was eyeball-deep in slash fandom... and TV had just added some grade A fuel to the mental fire.

On the surface, a film about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates sounds like the opposite of sexy.  I mean... Bill Gates, man.  Come ON.  But this particular TV drama, Pirates of Silicon Valley, had Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates... and Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs.

I didn't give a shit about Noah Wyle until I saw him impersonate Jobs.  I hated ER and all of its ilk.  But Pirates had an unmistakable sexual subtext that caused my teenage self to gape at the screen, thinking, "Am I really seeing this?"  For me, that was the moment at which I started thinking of slash as something that might plausibly be mainstreamed.  And the concept of these two young, searingly ambitious, ambiguously amoral characters locked in a technical, economic, political, and sexual deathmatch was a big, big, turn-on.  

Now, Pirates came out at kind of a weird time-- again, it was '99.  Apple had just come back from the brink.  I was using a first-run iMac.  Microsoft ruled the world, Bill Gates was Public Enemy #1 in the books of many of my friends, and there was no such thing as iTunes, much less iPhones or iPads.  These days, it's the other way 'round; Jobs became the big polarizing figure, as hated and feared as Gates ever was, but also loved in a way that Gates never was and likely never will be.

I think it's time for a sequel.  Ring up Hall and Wyle and let's roll with it, baby.

This is kind of an intersection of fan-interests wrt Fire Emblem and personal experience, because personal experience is, after all what we often bring to the table when writing.

( Read more... )

So, it was 97 degrees Fahrenheit today, at least until a massive wall of apocalyptic storms hit and dropped the ambient temperature down to 75.  Nice.

Anyway, in spite of the atrocious weather, I'm on a cooking binge because it's a three day weekend and we have (gasp!) guests coming over the next two days.
Breakfast: Fluffy Yucca Omelets

Anyone who remembers the "caterpillar soup" escapade from last year can relax, as I made sure to sort through the yucca blossoms before bringing them in the house this year.  This recipe is very simple aside from the challenge of finding fresh pesticide-free yucca blossoms.  Basically, they're two-egg omelets seasoned with a little salt, pepper and paprika.  The whites and yolks are beaten separately and folded together, and then 1/3 cup of yucca petals (simmered in a little water for ten minutes and drained) is mixed into each portion before cooking.  It ends up being like a puffy golden pancake with the yucca petals adding a texture not unlike very soft sauteed onions, though the flavor is far more delicate.

Strawberry Ice Cream

In progress.  Custard overcooked a little despite constant stirring and one eye on the thermometer.  But the berries I'm using are the last of this year's Michigan strawberry crop-- tiny, meaty, intensely flavored berries.  So hopefully all will go well when I mix it up tomorrow.

Cherry Clafoutis

Making this one on Monday, haven't decided on the recipe.  Definitely leaving the pits in this year for full flavor.  Will serve with store-bought vanilla gelato.  I'd prefer pistachio, but one guest is allergic to nuts and a ton of other things.

Also, the red raspberries are ripe over in Grandma's yard, and the black ones are just starting to be.  Spent the last of the day's light picking as many as I could while weird yellowy clouds swirled overhead.  It was like being on another planet.

***

Only one request left to fill out of the one-word prompt thread.  thenicochan , how you confound me with the "vortex" prompt.  I keep thinking of roller coasters...

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"Militant"?

I've got my sentence, I've got my command, they said they'd make me major if I met all their demands...