(no subject)

[botias]

Seems like a lot of the conflict between what Spuffies wanted and what they got from the show comes from Spuffies wanting a fantasy and ME wanting to deliver something real, something true to their own experience of the world, and a morality tale besides.

The fantasy that the girl can tame the dangerous bad boy and turn him into a good family man (or at least tame him enough so that he doesn't eat her friends) is a tremendously popular one. It has sold billions of books and been the subject of countless films. And a pox on anyone who would knock it. It's a fantasy. But I honestly don't think it was right for BtVS.

I'd given up on TV for many years before BtVS lured me in. In the subsequent search for substitutes, what strikes me is how contrived other shows are. The writers seem like they are writing purely to entertain, and not to say something that is real and important to them and entertain. (I haven't even tried the shows that are just about saying something 'real and important'.) Even VM is kinda fluffy that way. Not to knock fluff, but... ya know? I wouldn't want to trade that for hot vampire romance.

Comments

[rahirah]

I might be nit-picking, but I actually don't think there is much pandering in fan fiction. To me the word pandering implies some sort of space between the panderer and the panderee in which contempt may form.

In that sense, I'd agree with you. But there are plenty of fan writers who pander in the sense of writing what they know is popular and will get them lots of feedback, or in the sense of writing stories which don't demand anything of themselves or of their readers. That's what I thought you were getting at in your original post in saying that a great many S/B readers want a fantasy as opposed to Joss's harsh-yet-(implicitly)-far-better-for-them reality.

Probably I'm being bad in misusing the terminology,

I wouldn't say bad, but it's sometimes a little confusing. *g*

The rest of this got a little too long to post here!