Cimorene

(Big version here)

Please click for the bigger version. This is based on data taken from two polls performed by thefourthvine, with the data in my tables taken out on 22 Feb 2009.

This plot follows the same format as my earlier graph here, which, of course, did not have any Science behind it, only me squinting at the screen and placing the dots by the seat of my pants. I've reversed the axes in this one, however, so that better-written canons are at the top of the graph and gayer ones to the right this time. I prefer placing slashiness and quality on the two axes so that there's one data point per show and one show per data point, which lets the interaction be more easily seen.

(ETA: The clearest example of skewing I see on the plot is Highlander. LOTR might be skewed, too, by people's childhood memories or something, I guess. But Highlander? Look at it! IT HAS THE SAME QUALITY SCORE AS SGA. I'm pretty sure that it's not just my personal... weirdness, or whatever, that wants to ROFL at that. SGA is bad, but it's not that bad.)

It should be noted that mean is only one measure of central tendency and, at these sample sizes - which is to say they're all rather small but they vary from fandom to fandom - it's important to look at the others as well. To that end, here is the table I used to generate the graph:


(big version here)

Median and mode (ie, the most popular rating) are just as interesting as mean in their own ways. Scanning down the standard deviation columns, a few of those numbers will jump out as extremely large, representing a much higher degree of disagreement on the rating in question: the slashiness of Supernatural (no surprise where the primary pairing is incest) and the quality of Merlin (I'm kind of at a loss for this one but there it is), for example.

It's well worth checking out the results in the two posts of thefourthvine's where I took the data because you can easily see the bell curves for some questions, and distinguish others where the distribution shows much higher or lower consensus. (The Science of Slashiness & Moar Science!)

If I'm going to keep printing out slash, we're going to need more paper and scotch tape. The whole process is dauntingly time-consuming and painstaking, though, so possibly the solution would be to Just Not Do It. I made a second one of short pros pieces yesterday, which wax_jism promptly confiscated, and has apparently taken to work with her. Much joy may it bring her! And may she refrain from mocking my choice of stories any further. ( Which is what, you may ask? )

There's also the small matter of a giant M-bag at the post office. How do we pick it up? How are we supposed to carry it? Since we don't have a dolly, a supermarket cart, or a little red wagon... maybe a sled? And a couple of huskies?

Somewhat to my surprise, it's now been a week since I became really sick. I'm not exactly weak and miserable anymore, but I certainly can't breathe through my nose. Unfortunately, the free week between terms missed its ideal placement by one week.

I watched a couple more old episodes of The Professionals. I guess everyone always writes Doyle into tight jeans because they prefer him in them, because from my sample to date coloured velveteen trousers are beating them hands-down in relative frequency. (Of course we're dealing with sample size = 5 so I guess I've got a pretty gigantic confidence interval...).

I keep eating my own words while watching The Professionals, like so:

time: 0:30 "The funniest thing about this show is definitely the music."
time: 5:00 "You know, the funniest thing about this show is definitely the clothes. OMG, look, it's like a - black woollen motorcycle jacket with pale green velvet pants!"
time: 8:00 "Dude, the MUSIC. The music is the funniest thing about this show."
time: 15:00 "Everything about this show is hilarious."
time: 20:00 "The funniest thing about this show are the tiny little cars!"

etc.

Also, Bodie keeps wearing this thigh-length shiny pale grey leather jacket that's cut and styled like a shirt and it is one of the most hideous things I have ever seen. Then he finally got rid of it (well, changed out of it, anyway) in favour of a brown leather one... with a random, mysterious beige knit inset in the collar. It's almost enough to distract one from the parade of Doyle's velvet pants.

Of course, Doyle's velvet pants have nothing on the canary yellow pair worn by Dominic West in the first episode of Cambridge Spies. I think they emerged on the other side of "wtf" firmly in "omg" territory. Alas, wax_jism has been seized by the desire for cake, which may put a crimp in my intention to watch the second two episodes of the miniseries. She's abdicated to the kitchen for her usual two hours or so of waffling indecisively over her cookbook, I suspect. She doesn't bake very often. I was trying to tell her a highly significant anecdote in that it marked the only time Professor Surprise said something that made me want to cheer and was actually pretty witty:

cim: So Professor Surprise was like, what do you mean by ethnicity? And they were like, uhhhh, like race or something, and she was like, what do you mean by race.
wax: Do you want cake or not?
cim: I mean, in a discipline that has to problematise the concept of ethnicity you can't just ask "What does ethnicity do -"
wax: CAKE.
cim: In a scientific sense, it doesn't necessarily even exist.
wax: ETHNICITY OR CAKE???

So you probably had to be there, but I thought I'd record it for posterity anyway.

i am actually pretty much done with the archive now, so this is the last crack au report. i'm sure there are some more crack aus at the archive which i didn't read, but i'm probably not going to read them, either.

• (one of the ones) where bodie is an elf - who can, in this instance, read minds and teleport miniscule amounts of liquid, and explains all about Elf School and the origin of the idea that elves are immortal. i kind of thought you people who mentioned these were making them up. on the plus side this is the first one i've read of what is reputedly a large subgenre. 


• what amounts to another subgenre that looks almost just like canon, except that cowley is inexplicably bodie's father and everyone has a loving fluffy relationship around it. more of these than you can shake a stick at can be found at anne higgins's author page. i've never seen anyone else do it.


• the one where bodie's an ancient egyptian and doyle is a maaaaagical atlantean (you can tell by the slanted eyes!) and both are sold as slaves to crete. who bond over doyle's incredible jumping-over-a-bull acrobatics and run away together.


• the one where bodie's a sailor and doyle's a cross-dressing cabin boy who seduces him in a bar. it's hard to figure what period this is supposed to be, but that's the least of the crack involved.


• the one where doyle seduces bodie the teenaged - um, something? - at a masked orgy/ball full of whores in the 18th century and then leaves him and bodie gets rather obsessed with him. this one might be trying to say something, but i'm not sure what.

this fandom is really, um, strong in the crack aus.

• the one where bodie and doyle are dogs. it starts with them having a conversation and the fact that they're dogs is the surprise ending.


• the one where ray quits art school to run a b&b and a farm and bodie is a gay baronet raised in france who goes there for vacation.


• the one where bodie is beauty (but he's evil) and ray is the beast who teaches him to be a nauseatingly good person.


• the one where doyle is a medieval fisherman and bodie is a selkie.


• the one where doyle is the little mermaid and bodie is the dude he falls in love with except he's not a prince, he's a merchant captain, and he teaches doyle to talk and walk and eat and wipe his arse. and they fight crime.

cim: now bodie is daydreaming about fucking through an essential briefing about the fact that a safehouse was broken into on their watch, and their charge assassinated. omg, and he totally tuned out and missed a direct question and doyle had to kick him.
lilah: yeah, right.
cim: because bodie is a lameass teenager, not oh, a badass SECRET AGENT or anything...
lilah: and they call themselves the *professionals*?
cim: ...BURN.

cim: So. 3.7 and 4.5 were... there was an American phrase he'd heard once, 'asshole buddies.' They hid it well; neither of them seemed at all--well, gay, or effeminate, or whatever.
perhael: OMGGHGGGGGGGDBGFNKGMKNKJFFHSHDF
cim: ASSHOLE BUDDIES?

cim: it's american? i feel so culturally impoverished!
wax: *goes to the urban dictionary*

1.        Asshole buddies
       
During WW2, sex was hard to get, and masturbation and fellatio were totally unacceptable practices. But in a foxhole environment asshole buddies could sodomize each other, in turn, without problem, as long as it was kept on the down low.

I get along pretty good with Pvt X. We're asshole buddies.

I'll bet those guys are asshole buddies.


2.        asshole buddies
       
Pals, accused of being so close they have become fudge packers.

John Kerry and the Breck girl weren't exactly asshole buddies until Kerry bit his tongue and chose him for Veep.

okay, so, several things strike me about this.  like for instance:

1. ASSHOLE BUDDIES?
2. anal sex was more socially acceptable than masturbation?
3. ASSHOLE. BUDDIES.

cim: there should be like an ann taintor icon. a 50s guy making a thumb's-up, going, "WE'RE ASSHOLE BUDDIES!"
perhael: YES.
perhael: now i want icons with like, every otp i've ever had
perhael: with ASSHOLE BUDDIES on it!

statistics: the class that makes you get up at six twice a week and trek halfway across town for computer practise from 5-7 pm. the faculty of social science is nearly 50/50 in terms of gender, with women leading slightly, but it's another matter over in the humanities complex. finding two guys in one ethnology class today gave me a bit of a shock. although i'm sure guys don't account for fifty percent of the grades in social science. in statistics i overheard one of my classmates from sociological methodology saying how he'd passed it with a 1 (out of 5, so that's like below a D, or 'barely not failing').

for one reason or another, i've been re-reading the professionals slash at the circuit archive - a fandom for which i've never seen more of canon than a handful of bad fanvids, from a period in my life when most of the slash i read had to do with tv shows i'd never seen, and wax_jism had just started watching the show when they aired it on finnish tv, and talked about it enough via aim that i caught the bug. it's funny, as i was telling her, how i resent badfic in old fandoms less. of course it's probably partly because i don't know the canon, but also i just find a lot of it endearing - purple prose, injudicious use of modifiers and epithets, and comma and semi-colon abuse that falls about ten miles outside the boundaries of 'artistic license' alike. (i've seen all these things in the past week, too.)

i started thinking about this peculiar tolerance, and also about the peculiar qualities of "old" fandoms, a few weeks ago at yuletide, when i read that delightful poirot/hastings story and then craving led me to rifle the internet's pockets until some others, not quite as delightful, fell out. one of them was long and possessed of an entire mystery plot but, as i described it at the time, had "old fandom" written all over it, which led me to ponder some of the most outstanding characteristics. i think what a lot of them boil down to - the purple prose, the loving lingering over emotions and the much more explicit discussion of them (often in dialogue), the highly palpable influence of harlequins and other members of the romance genre, the need to see everyone married by the end of the story instead of fading to black after it's established that they've made it into bed - boil down to what you could call postmodernism. that is to say: an ironic or meta attitude to what we do is what is now in vogue in the main body of media fandom. to borrow a metaphor from wax, the harlequin genre and old fandoms would be tackiness, whereas modern fandom is not tackiness, but kitsch: what happens when tackiness, thoroughly in love with itself, grows hip and gains an elaborate theoretical education and joyously rediscovers, refurbishes, and restores its roots. (this isn't to say that old fandoms weren't witty, intelligent, or highly educated; it speaks, rather, to a general paradigm shift, and obviously to the fashion and not to the whole population.)

either by way of illustration or by way of a slight change of topic (you make the call!), today i've been reading some stories by someone named lizzie who really seems to have a thing for ghosts. first there was the story where doyle the travelling salesman saw the ghost of bodie the war veteran and fell in love, then there was the one where doyle fucks ghost!bodie in the woods and when he meets bodie the next day (he turns out to be a caterer) bodie dun-dun-dun does not recognise him, and finally the one where bodie is a victorian gentleman retired in cornwall for the birdwatching and runs into what i figured from the title was doyle the ghost!librarian in a library, only it turns out doyle is a paranormal enthusiast who is  ironically unable to see ghosts. (i'm afraid she had no more ghost stories after that, but there were some other crack aus.)

AHAHHAHAHA.

He knelt between Doyle's outstretched thighs, gaze raking down Doyle's body with the passion of an explorer inspecting a national wonder for the first time.

no joke, TOTALLY fuckin' serious. it really says that. earnestly.