First times

[wiseheart]

Firstly, the good one: I went to Etka Yoga for the first time today. It's not yoga in the traditional sense, rather a series of stretching and twisting exercises, which will probably be good for my bad back. I have no high hopes for the hissing and whistling noises in my ear that I've been having on and off for months by now. All women in our family had them, at least up to three generations. It's stress related, and once it appears, it won't go away again. But one learns to live with it. Etka Yoga is fun, though, so I'll go there again.

Secondly, I got my first rabid homophobe reviewer. Some idiot poured out his/her hatred against homosexuality in general and slash fic in particular on my FF.Net review board, leaving a long rant disguised as a review for "The Equinox Logs". More or less along the line "you write well, why do you write such utter shit and why don't you warn us poor, sensitive souls that there will be perverted stuff".

Idiots tire me so much.

Comments

[ithilwen.livejournal.com]

Homophobic rants are kind of fun, in a twisted way. The writers are so earnest! They genuinely seem to believe everone else in the world ought to bend over backward to accomodate their prejudices.

The yoga sounds like a good way to release tension. I hope it helps your back!

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's kind of "slash upsets me, how do you dare to write such stuff". Or, in the aforementioned review, "why made you a pervert the captain of the Equinox.

The only sad thing is that the rant is actually longer than all my (postitive) reviews for the story counted together. I wish people who like what they read would be equally verbose. I love praise. *g*

[rcfinch.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry you had to suffer such an idiot running into you. The least negative thing I can say about it is `Well, it keeps them from the street'.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Well, it keeps them from the street'

Very true. As long as he - because I'm almost certain that it was a man - bashes my story, he isn't out bashing real people for being gay. It has been my experience that while there are horribly prudish women (and not a small number of them), the really raving homophobes are usually men. As if they felt threatened by their fellow males who aren't interested in the same things as they are.

I still won't put up slash warnings in my stories. Everyone with an FF.Net account is supposed to be older than 13, and everyone older than 13 can be expected to tolerate things they don't like. We tolerate the homophobes, too, and I most certainly don't like them.

[lhun-dweller.livejournal.com]

Good for you! At least he's taking it on fics - here in my town of residence, the charitable organization of the Catholic Church has said it will stop arranging adoptions rather than be forced to continue allowing homosexual couples to adopt children. Now, mind you, they've been quietly doing just that for many years: several dozen kids have been placed over that time with no reports of any problems. But this is the New and Improved Church, morally consistent through and through (we'll just overlook that little child sex abuse problem), and it's better for hard-to-place kids to bounce around the foster system than to have stable homes with the damned, I suppose.

As to ranting about a fanfic which *absolutely no one* forced this poor sod to read, I sometimes fear the downside of the 21st century ability to buy / listen to / watch exactly what we want exactly when we want to is making folks far less willing to have even a moment of their time consumed by something that isn't exactly what they want to experience. But if one is never exposed to anything different, anything possibly disagreeable, how does one grow? A mind unchallenged gets rusty and covered in cobwebs. I may not agree with everything I read, but at least it makes me think about my own beliefs and why I hold them.

[lhun-dweller.livejournal.com]

P.S. The yoga sounds like a brilliant idea! I hope it helps with your back. I find body work of that sort often does wonders for my general energy level and mood - may it be so for you, as well!

[makamu]

I just don't get people like this guy. Because I seem to remember and am fairly sure you do say in the first chapter of your slash-contaning fics that this is slash. I just can have very little sympathy for people who don't read warnings when they are clearly in place and then complain about the "trauma" they got from reading them...

As for the general ideas behind homophobia: So, homosexuality is a sign for a satanic/damned world? Sorry, but as it happens there are cases of homosexual relationships in the Catholic Church during the early and high Middle Ages and there are societies on this earth for whom relationships with either sex are "normal" in their society.

Unfortunately, believing in freedom of speech and pluralism of ideas as I do, means I actually think it's good that the guy has an opinion and he is free to voice it. I just reserve the right to empathatically disagree :)

Glad to hear the yoga is working for you and maybe it can help you relax a little *crosses fingers*

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Well, it certainly could have been expected that with Pope Ratzinger the Catholic Church will do further steps back to the Middle Ages. Or, actually, to a time after the Middle Ages, as during the so-called Dark Age there was actually sacramental marriage for people of the same gender. I've put up a link in one of my entries a year or so ago, with the subject "To Pope John Paul II - with love!", or something like that. I might dig out that link again.

As for the reader, I absolutely agree with you. That's why I'm not willing to put up slash warnings. Or het warnings.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Yup, and it's great fun, too. A good two-hour-workout with fifteen minutes of meditative relaxation every Thursday will do good for me, I guess. I already got up a little easier today.

Now if I only could find a wonder cure against the ear sizzling, it would be too good to be true.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Erm, no. As I said above, I don't put up slash warnings. Actually, I've turned my back on the first year of the MEFAs because some prudes wanted to make everyone do so (they didn't after all, but I was too pissed to return).

I don't put up het warnings, either. I actually subject poor gay people to the horrible het stuff I might write sometimes. They could whine and complain, too, n'est c'est pas? (Sorry for the butchered French. It has been a while... some twenty years or so.)

The warnings I put up are: AU, adult contents, perhaps violence. I find violence much more disturbing than two people of the same gender having a relationship. Besides, I don't write graphic stuff often. "The Equinox Logs" is rated R for a reason, but it's well within that boundary.

Needless to say, that the warnings I do put up are routinely ignored, too. I've got a lot of grief because my characters behave differently from canon (we are speaking about sci-fi here). Ah, well, I guess there are no herbs against idiocy.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

What I forgot to mention: People like this guy remind me of an interview with Hal Sparks, the (very straight) actor who played one of the lead roles in the gay drama series Queer As Folk. He told the reporter that he was often asked (by idiots) whether he had become gay after playing a gay character for x years. He always replied them that being gay isn't the flu, one can't "get it". But he still had the impression that many people think they could get contaminated with it if they don't fight homosexuality with all their might.

Interview here (http://www.sparksfan.com/art_lumino.html)

It's very interesting stuff.

[makamu]

Actually your argument against labelling for the kind of (lack of) romantic content does make sense and I suppose truly "extreme" stuff is covered in a warning :) I think it weird anyway that excessive violence is less a factor in ratings (films and fanfic both) than perfectly healthy, consensual sexual actions between two or more adults...

I probably never noticed that you do not warn for slash because I can deduce such stuff from the pairing, most of the time and/or am looking for that kind of relationship in the first place. ;)

Re: Differences from canon: I have read my share of film!based Lord of the Rings stories where the characters were not whom I had seen on screen and/or read about in the books (I put both sources together because they both inform each other and my "reading" of Tolkien or the films). Most of the ones I actually finished were at least well-written and logically done once you just accepted the changes. Elfslash is a very good example of a subsection of fandom where you have to learn to shed your own canon reading to enjoy a story :)

And you know what? Even if you (general you, what we Germans would use "man" for) don't like the story there may be people who do. The author's bad grasp on canon and writing skills (says she who does not have many herself) can only improve if she is helped along rather than condemned for it.

And normally you are more of a canon conscious person than I am and your deductions and extrapolations in LOTR were so good that some thoughts and ideas forced me to look at my own Ardaverse critically. I cannot imagine it to be any different with your sci-fi (Star Trek Voyager? Stargate? something else?) stories.

So don't let yourself be discouraged, you are one of the best writers of LOTR fanfic I know *hugs*

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

And normally you are more of a canon conscious person than I am and your deductions and extrapolations in LOTR were so good that some thoughts and ideas forced me to look at my own Ardaverse critically. I cannot imagine it to be any different with your sci-fi (Star Trek Voyager? Stargate? something else?) stories.

Thank you. :)
You are right, I do hold canon in very high regard, in all my fandoms - which, in my opinion, actually gives me the right to break or bend it, when I find it necessary for the sake of a particular story.

As for my other stories, I write Star Trek (all incarnations except Enterprise, which I hate with a passion), Babylon 5, Stargate - Atlantis, Space: Above and Beyond, Battlestar Galactica (original only - I hate the new version so much I can't even watch it), mostly AUs or crossovers.

Plus I work occasionally on my insanely huge vampire crossover AU, which contains Angel, Buffy, Kindred: The Embraced and Poltergeist: The Legacy, and some parts of it are crossed over with the US-version of Queer As Folk.

It's all on my Otherworlds , (http://k.domaindlx.com/otherworlds2/) website for sci-fi and horror stuff, in case you are interested.

[jilba.livejournal.com]

I guess....it's better on a computer screen then this person is off annoying people on the streets...at least you can ignore it unlike the whistling noises in your ears. Apparentely, William Shatner didn't know he had the same thing until he went camping and in the silence he could finally hear the weird noises!!

Congrats on the yoga, this is why I bellydance, for the stretching and twisting. You feel so good afterwards, but please, watch your back!

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Fortunately, the stupid noises aren't there all the time - although having anything common with William Shatner is really shocking. *g*

I'd prefer bellydancing, if I had the choice, but this yoga course is held in our school, and in exchange for the woman who lead ist not having to pay a fee for the room, we get it for free, so it's a mutually advantageous arrangement.

I enjoyed it very much, she's really considerate towards our age and shape (or the lack thereof, hehehe), and the relaxation at the end is wonderful. We lay rolled into blankets on these thin isolation mattresses, a candle is burning and meditative music is playing - it's really very, very nice.

[jilba.livejournal.com]

Well, not so much in common, mayhap! William's noises are there all the time! LOL

Glad you enjoyed your Yoga. The teacher sounds great, and really, it's kinda like a belly dance minus the costumes and middle eastern music. Who knows, maybe a belly dance class will come up, and all that Yoga will have been so useful.