Hee! Yes, I found new icons. I love the rant one. I used to call the Neville one "Magpie on a rock" but he just looks like Neville to me, if Neville were a magpie.
You mentioned 'loving your speculations more than canon' and until they're disproved, mine are, to me. I recognise logically that not all of them can/will feature, but that doesn't prevent me from seeing them. I mean, I don't think you can read something wrongly. You read it the way you read it.
The longer I'm in fandom the more clear it is that people have real trouble sometimes following what a person is actually saying too, and seperating it from emotional things. For instance, there was that thread on FAP called "HP Structure Demands More Draco" and all the person was doing was pointing out how much page time he had, how he was introduced as the first magical kid Harry met--a lot of the things that Chief has said in the past. But of course people started talking about how he couldn't change, how he wasn't the hero, how people like that are just bad. It was totally not what the person was saying. Or similarly in that thread about Sirius' death, people kept saying that "real life didn't have character arcs" or "in real life people didn't always have good death scenes" when the whole point was, "Yes, but this isn't real life, is it. This is fiction." The point was just that the way the death was written didn't do it for this person and maybe there were structural reasons for that, not that they couldn't deal with Sirius' death or they wanted him to marry Remus first. (That, btw, was why I loved it when in the other thread somebody said something about how Sirius just died as part of the hero's journey and the person could say they'd studied that and that wasn't his role anyway.)
Yeah, the thing that is sort of amazing in that other discussion is anyone not understanding (or claiming not to) understand why people wouldn't want to be misrepresented by them. Like, "Gee, why would you be annoyed by my saying that anyone who holds the opinion you do about a fictional character is conceited and jealous and is doing it to spite me and btw you can't read?" One could just as easily turn it around and say, "Oh, anybody who likes the books just thinks they're cool if they like JKR and must have some strange attachment to the books" or whatever. There's lots of reasons for people to think whatever they do. If their arguments don't hold up then they don't. Pretending to know their secret motivations doesn't really help you. It's kind of funny, really, that someone would need a nefarious motive for...not liking adverbs. Maybe the person just doesn't like adverbs. Maybe an adverb killed their grandmother; that doesn't mean the writing couldn't possibly be improved by fewer adverbs or not.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-01 04:35 pm (UTC)You mentioned 'loving your speculations more than canon' and until they're disproved, mine are, to me. I recognise logically that not all of them can/will feature, but that doesn't prevent me from seeing them.
I mean, I don't think you can read something wrongly. You read it the way you read it.
The longer I'm in fandom the more clear it is that people have real trouble sometimes following what a person is actually saying too, and seperating it from emotional things. For instance, there was that thread on FAP called "HP Structure Demands More Draco" and all the person was doing was pointing out how much page time he had, how he was introduced as the first magical kid Harry met--a lot of the things that Chief has said in the past. But of course people started talking about how he couldn't change, how he wasn't the hero, how people like that are just bad. It was totally not what the person was saying. Or similarly in that thread about Sirius' death, people kept saying that "real life didn't have character arcs" or "in real life people didn't always have good death scenes" when the whole point was, "Yes, but this isn't real life, is it. This is fiction." The point was just that the way the death was written didn't do it for this person and maybe there were structural reasons for that, not that they couldn't deal with Sirius' death or they wanted him to marry Remus first. (That, btw, was why I loved it when in the other thread somebody said something about how Sirius just died as part of the hero's journey and the person could say they'd studied that and that wasn't his role anyway.)
Yeah, the thing that is sort of amazing in that other discussion is anyone not understanding (or claiming not to) understand why people wouldn't want to be misrepresented by them. Like, "Gee, why would you be annoyed by my saying that anyone who holds the opinion you do about a fictional character is conceited and jealous and is doing it to spite me and btw you can't read?" One could just as easily turn it around and say, "Oh, anybody who likes the books just thinks they're cool if they like JKR and must have some strange attachment to the books" or whatever. There's lots of reasons for people to think whatever they do. If their arguments don't hold up then they don't. Pretending to know their secret motivations doesn't really help you. It's kind of funny, really, that someone would need a nefarious motive for...not liking adverbs. Maybe the person just doesn't like adverbs. Maybe an adverb killed their grandmother; that doesn't mean the writing couldn't possibly be improved by fewer adverbs or not.