Contemplating fandom

[sholio]

Meta links - I don't know how I got here (tabs tabs tabs), but I came across this list of five obnoxious, pan-fandom fanon cliches by selenak and I was just nodding my head going, yup, this all sounds awfully familiar. *g* There's also a tangentially related post on the Insignificant Other, aka characters who are introduced into a romantic triangle just to make the main romantic contender look good by comparison. I think one of the reasons why I dislike romantic comedies as a genre is that they tend to rely so heavily on this -- one of my pet peeves is the fiancé who is a complete asshole or just Mr. (or Ms.) Bland, so that the character goes fleeing into the arms of that shiny new lover they met at the pet store or through the personals column or whatever. I guess it can theoretically be done well, but just once I would like to see the protagonist realize that that the boring fiancé is really not that boring after all, and end up with him/her instead of the new love interest. (I also reserve a lot of affection for movies that don't go down the "evil fiancé" road -- it was one of the many reasons why I liked the first PotC movie and resented the second one.)

Reading both these posts, and the comments, makes me feel a little better about SGA (both canon and fandom); I've been in a lot of fandoms, but have spent the last three years being primarily a fannish monogamist, and I think it's helpful for me to be reminded that all the things that drive me nuts about SGA fandom, and the things I find bitterly disappointing in canon, are more or less universal to just about every big fandom that there is. In fact, some canons/fandoms are quite a lot worse with the things that make me miserable; the things I've heard about the ship wars and cliquishness in, say, Buffy fandom make me think that I wouldn't survive five minutes there. *g*

Comments

[klostes.livejournal.com]

Keller, to piggyback on a comment below: I don't consider her a MarySue; she simply stretched MY personal willing suspension of disbelief so far it broke. But she is a great example of the problems with the "definition" of MarySue. In too many fandoms she simply comes to equal any original female character, period, and that's more about what the fans want from the fandom than anything else.

I have no brain cells left for comments, but on your boring fiance issue, the Accidental Husband actually plays that fairly well. The guy SEEMS boring and blah, but he turns out to be pretty cool in his own right. Just, not for this girl. ;-)

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

Yeah; I think Mary Sue is a very useful term for a concept that really didn't have a word before (notice how it's spread far beyond its fandom origins -- a surefire sign that it fills a needed linguistic niche) but along the way it seems to have lost the specific set of connotations that it started out with; I don't even know if a lot of people using it now have any idea what it used to mean. I'm not really convinced that it's wrong so much as a case of linguistic drift, except that the word's become so generic that, as you pointed out, it's in the process of becoming just another word for OFC (or, rather, "OFC that the reader doesn't like").