Thank you so much for your thoughtful response! That does make a great deal of sense to me, and it really helps. Thank you.
I also want to know what other people have seen that I haven't, but that's a double-edged sword. What I really hope for, deep down, is to find things other people have seen that I can take into my own view of canon and deepen it.
::nods::
I think that what most people are looking for in other people's reader responses is something that will deepen their own reading, something that will add depth and resonance, and meaning. I'm sure that nearly everyone has had that experience of reading some fandom discussion or another and thinking it "irrelevant" or boring or nonsensical - basically, feeling that it adds nothing to ones appreciation of the source material.
In my experience, one all-too-frequent problem in fandom discussions comes up when people differ over what they find meaningful or enhancing or significant. But I guess there's another problem as well, a slightly different one, the one you've so clearly described, which is what happens when an opinion or argument does seem to have meaning to you, it does add something to your own experience of the text, but what it adds is unfortunately not at all something that you wanted.
A lot depends on the tone and context of the discussion. Most of the time ideas are presented in a way that leaves me free to take or leave them. What upsets me, though, is when I feel placed in a position where I either have to refute the distasteful idea or accept it.
Oh, I know exactly what you mean! Sometimes debate can be fun, but it is not the only type of discourse that exists, and I find myself getting very irritated and bored with it after a while. It can be frustrating if you want to have a conversation, while everyone else is far more interested in having a debate. And also, as you point out, it does tend to create this weirdly competitive atmosphere where if you don't care to argue or refute a point, the other person seems to have "won," and you therefore feel compelled (either by yourself or by other people on the boards) to accept their reading as your own when - well, really! Why should you? That's a dynamic that can really get under my skin as well, as does the corresponding dynamic, where everyone is supposed to "take a side" on whatever the big fandom debate of the moment is, and if what you want to do instead is to talk about where the readings might actually be coming from, rather than which of them you think is "correct," then people look at you as if you've grown a second head. That's my own personal "drives me nuts" one, myself. :-)
I don't want to feel forced to adopt a reading I don't like, because it would diminish my pleasure in canon.
That's fair enough. I fear that I can sometimes be a bit insensitive to that dynamic, perhaps because I myself find it quite easy to appreciate a nasty, horrible, no-good reading that I don't like on a purely intellectual level, while simultaneously not feeling particularly compelled to adopt it myself. So it's all too easy for me to miss how easily a spirited attempt to communicate a reading can cross over a line somewhere and come to feel to others like an attempt to insist on it - almost like a conversion attempt.
(Hello, nice to meet you! I'm very glad that you found nothing on the site traumatizing. :-D)
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Date: 2005-11-15 01:02 am (UTC)I also want to know what other people have seen that I haven't, but that's a double-edged sword. What I really hope for, deep down, is to find things other people have seen that I can take into my own view of canon and deepen it.
::nods::
I think that what most people are looking for in other people's reader responses is something that will deepen their own reading, something that will add depth and resonance, and meaning. I'm sure that nearly everyone has had that experience of reading some fandom discussion or another and thinking it "irrelevant" or boring or nonsensical - basically, feeling that it adds nothing to ones appreciation of the source material.
In my experience, one all-too-frequent problem in fandom discussions comes up when people differ over what they find meaningful or enhancing or significant. But I guess there's another problem as well, a slightly different one, the one you've so clearly described, which is what happens when an opinion or argument does seem to have meaning to you, it does add something to your own experience of the text, but what it adds is unfortunately not at all something that you wanted.
A lot depends on the tone and context of the discussion. Most of the time ideas are presented in a way that leaves me free to take or leave them. What upsets me, though, is when I feel placed in a position where I either have to refute the distasteful idea or accept it.
Oh, I know exactly what you mean! Sometimes debate can be fun, but it is not the only type of discourse that exists, and I find myself getting very irritated and bored with it after a while. It can be frustrating if you want to have a conversation, while everyone else is far more interested in having a debate. And also, as you point out, it does tend to create this weirdly competitive atmosphere where if you don't care to argue or refute a point, the other person seems to have "won," and you therefore feel compelled (either by yourself or by other people on the boards) to accept their reading as your own when - well, really! Why should you? That's a dynamic that can really get under my skin as well, as does the corresponding dynamic, where everyone is supposed to "take a side" on whatever the big fandom debate of the moment is, and if what you want to do instead is to talk about where the readings might actually be coming from, rather than which of them you think is "correct," then people look at you as if you've grown a second head. That's my own personal "drives me nuts" one, myself. :-)
I don't want to feel forced to adopt a reading I don't like, because it would diminish my pleasure in canon.
That's fair enough. I fear that I can sometimes be a bit insensitive to that dynamic, perhaps because I myself find it quite easy to appreciate a
nasty, horrible, no-goodreading that I don't like on a purely intellectual level, while simultaneously not feeling particularly compelled to adopt it myself. So it's all too easy for me to miss how easily a spirited attempt to communicate a reading can cross over a line somewhere and come to feel to others like an attempt to insist on it - almost like a conversion attempt.(Hello, nice to meet you! I'm very glad that you found nothing on the site traumatizing. :-D)