While I Wait for the Last of My Shabbat Food to Cool...

[gnomi]

...I give you "Essays I Would Love to Write But Probably Never Will":


-- Is it slash if it's canon?
-- Jewish characters singing religious Christmas carols
-- Glee: What's Up with That? (myriad topics under this umbrella)
-- How "Argo" would be different if the event took place today

Comments

[42itous.livejournal.com]

Is that a new userpic? It's cute. But it reminds me of one of my [admittedly many] pet peeves at work: most of my coworkers think that "gaiter" is spelled "gaitor." And yes, this comes up more often than you might think.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

It's relatively new, yes. And grr at your spelling-challenged coworkers.

[bluepapercup]

Glee: What's Up with That? (myriad topics under this umbrella)

My mom is obsessed with this show, so I would love to read this essay also!

And...that icon is adorable AND witty. May I steal?

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

My sister is heavily involved in the fandom (to the point of making protest videos) so I'd love to see this one too.

Or indeed any of them.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

OK, cool. Thanks.

(Protest videos? I'm now wondering what topic within the Glee fandom she's protesting.)

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

She 'ships Kurt/Blaine and there was a question of whether they were going to be allowed to sing a particular song (Come What May from Moulin Rouge) and there was an organized campaign to make videos around a filk someone wrote of If I Had a Million Dollars on this topic.

Apparently the group video didn't go through, but the one my sister made was posted on YouTube, and they're apparently doing the song on the show. My sister and many of her cohort feel that Ryan Murphy is actively trolling their part of the fandom, and with the way he did the reveal about the song (panning over the script in a video) I suspect she may be right.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes. I heard about that controversy. I'll have to poke around and look for the video.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

It will probably be a series of essays, should I get around to writing on the topic. It seems to be the most popular, though, so I might just tackle it sooner.

And feel free to steal the icon. I got it in a similar fashion.

[rivkaesque.livejournal.com]

I would happily read any and all of those essays!

And I adore that icon.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the input!

And the icon is one of my favorites. I saw it and kind of fell in love with it.

[batyatoon]

Is it slash if it's canon?

My immediate answer to this is "... uh, obviously not?"

I am aware that the term slash has many shades of meaning and many varying usages, but come on, if it's canon then it by definition isn't slash.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

See, that's my thought, too, but I'm old-school. So to me, Kirk/Spock is slash and Kurt/Blaine is not. But I seem to be in a minority on this one.

[batyatoon]

Evidently I'm old-school as well, then. Honestly I think it's kind of insulting to refer to a relationship as slash solely because it consists of two guys.

Willow/Tara isn't femslash either. Willow/Buffy arguably would have been.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

Willow/Tara isn't femslash either. Willow/Buffy arguably would have been.

I agree. And, interestingly enough, there's a "Glee" spoiler* from the most recent episode that is relevant to this discussion.

*For me, "spoiler" applies until a week after an ep has aired, because, again, old-school USENET patterns. Apparently now "spoilers" are only for eps that haven't aired yet.

[batyatoon]

I don't watch Glee, so I'm not spoiler-protected if you would like to tell me.

I consider "spoiler" to apply for as long as one can reasonably assume that there are still interested parties who have not yet seen the thing in question. It would be nice to have a different term for pieces of information that come out before anyone has seen it.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

I agree with your "spoiler" definition.

And the short version is that there are two characters who have been slashed in fanfic almost since the beginning of the fandom, and suddenly the show actually put them together, at least for a night.

[batyatoon]

Huh. So I guess the question is, does that retroactively change all the previous slash to non-slash, or are the older stories still considered slash because it was pairing them before they were canonically paired, but any newer stories are no longer considered slash?

A further tricky question: what do you call it when fanfic pairs a canonically gay character with a member of the opposite gender?