That Ever-So Essential Issue - Flists

Time for some pretentious musings on the flist. Woo!

This morning I performed the regularly scheduled flist maintenance, removing and adding some people. Feel free to add/delete my journal from your own flists as you like.

I've taken up the netslang term 'flist' because it doesn't contain the word 'friend'. That alone should tell you everything you need to know about how and why I keep up my flist. I look on it as a reading list and add journals that interest me and usually they fall under the following categories:

a) friend
b) meta
c) amusing
d) special interest

If I've defriended you it's probably because you haven't updated in ages, our interests have diverged, or because we never really connected on a personal level. I have never yet removed someone from my flist because of an offense (I'm easily angered, but not easily offended), though I have removed people for making annoying posts. An inability to use the shift key sends me into spirals of rage, as does excessive netspeak use and quiz and meme posting. I'm short-tempered like that. Usually when I'm removed I'll remove in return, mostly because I'm as bored with his/her journal as s/he is with my own, but I haven't gotten around to removing it. I find that overwhelmingly, one removal is logically followed by another because one doesn't up and remove one's friends or kindred journalists.

I don't feel particularly close to most people on my flist, no matter how many personal entries I've read, and I like it this way. I don't think that flists were designed to be personal support networks or cliques - the security features preclude this - and I haven't any interest in trying to create one. These things have to be organic or they won't work at all. There often seems to be a forced intimacy to the lj community, an expectation of friendship and liking. I think if we take a step back, we'd all realize this is absurd. Contact and proximity may encourage friendship but it doesn't guarantee it. This attitude is most visible in the blanket journal adding that many people engage in when joining a new community. Similarly, many people new to lj will add friends of friends. Neither of these is necessarily a good idea in the long term and trimming one's flist becomes essential.

LJ is a necessarily political environment, so it's not surprising that adding and removing journals is so often fraught with melodrama. Naturally there will be ridiculous power plays and snitty removals but thing to remember throughout is that it is all inherently ridiculous. And, well, kind of stupid. Generally, I figure that anything that fails to move me to pre-verbal rage on occasion isn't worth worrying about and journal politics just don't do it for me. Community politics on the other hand...

Last week there was a flist meme going around, wherein the journalist would outline what readers could expect of her. Behaviour, flist policy - that kind of thing. I think there's a case for adding a brief of the above to one's lj info, in one cares about such things. Personally, I'm so inconsistent and fickle that it would be useful, but for the emotionally flighty, it might be nice for that to be plainly listing. It might prevent some of the all too regular flist angsting, at any rate.

Please see this post for unPC flist remarks. I bet you two imaginary cents you'll laugh or want to spork me, unlike this post, which probably put you to sleep. Hell, I know I'm yawning.

I LUV TEH META

acadine talks about owning one's writing and women and slash. Wholesome ranty goodness, mmm. Read now.




READ!




Also this.

OTPs and LBDs

Definitions for the acronymically impaired:

OTP: the One True Pairing which you ship above all others. Some have argued that an OTP chooses the shipper, rather than the reverse and that it's all but impossible for an OTPer to ship anything else.

LBD: a Little Black Dress is a character (usually the writer's favourite) who the writer can pair with anyone. As long as the LBD is in the story, an LBDer is happy to read it.


Ok, so I have this feeling - not backed up by anything even vaguely resembling research, mind you - that OTPers and LBDers are two sides of the same dysfunction, i.e. over-identification and eventually isolation from other characters/groups in the source text. (I'm using the term dysfunction for two reasons, 1) it's nifty and 2) the behaviour/tendency I'm talking about could be considered contrary to the norm.)

A few days ago I wrote a post on OTPs and H/D in particular, which talked about how being an OTPer can limit one as a writer. The same is true for being a LBDer. Most OTPers and LBDers over-identify with their character(s) and since they're writing them exclusively, the two factors combine to allow the writer to subtly (and usually) unknowingly write his/herself onto the character(s). This is when you see ballerina!Draco (as mentioned in the linked post), or skaterboy!Lex.

This is not to say that there is anything wrong with having an OTP or a LBD. I'm merely trying to suggest that focusing on one character, or group of characters limits one's writing.

It's difficult to escape one's fellow writers in a social context and even more difficult to avoid their stories. We're in this part of the fandom because we like to read and write fanfiction, so it's just slightly more than absurd to claim fandom and - by logical extension - fanon have no influence on us. Fanfiction is not a singular activity, it is communal. Like everyone else with strong preferences, OTPers and LBDers tend to group together - think of ships and cliques. Over time one develops the illusion that this group is all of fandom.

I think it's easy to see that is going to be limited, if only in the scope of one's imagination. Unless one is particularly rebellious, one will be regulated by the group, perhaps without even realizing it. It is in this sense that having an OTP or an LDB can be dangerous for a writer. Again, it isn't necessarily limiting, but it is more likely to be so, than an OTP/LBD-free state.

musesfool has an excellent post on the whys of OTPing, but I can't find it as my computer is being wonky. (Where is it Vic? Where?) If someone could link me that would be fantastic. It was her post that got me thinking about the similarities between an OTP and a LBD.

Like Vic, I would argue that a LBD chooses the writer, rather than the other way around. There is a near-visceral connection to the character and eventually over-identification. One feels that one knows the character intimately and consequently, can see enough layers to the personality to make him/her sexually and emotionally flexible: a Little Black Dress. Here's how it works - the LBDer can find a way to pair the LBD with any character, not matter how canonically implausible. They can do this because they see something in the character that someone else (read non-LBDer) cannot. Hagrid/Lupin is impossible, you say? Well someone for whom Hagrid is a LBD would argue otherwise. She knows they work and she'll tell you how if you let her.

Vic has OTP tendencies and it should be obvious to anyone who's chatted with me that I have LBD tendencies. Cheifly I over-identify with Severus Snape and Lex Luthor and it's a constant trial to resist that. I resist it because if I didn't? My writing would be all about MHC!Snape and MHC!Lex and therefore Of Teh Suck. Every time I take a break from writing one of these two and try out someone else - Lily, Ron, Lillian, Lana - it's amazingly refreshing, as if canon has been reborn for me. It's clear that I've been putting too much of myself into Snape or Lex and have been putting too much of that construct into my reading of canon. Judging by conversations I've had with other LBDers and the attitudes of rabid Snapeslashers and Lexfans, I think I can safely say the same is true for others.

Thoughts?