Things I thought of

This is just a list of stuff I thought about while writing the main post and then cut out because they weren’t directly relevant.

 

• Fights that preceded my appearance and continued for quite a while after about raunchy Guy of Gisborne fanfic, in the wake of Armitage’s request — in turn provoked after a group of fans complained to him about the fans who wrote the problematic fiction — to keep them away from the eyes of young people. (They led to the creation of a protected site where those of us who weren’t worried about the children could cultivate our more explicit fantasies — and that still has updating authors, but has been mostly forgotten except among people in the know a decade ago.) From my perspective, the disputes on this issue bordered on insane: one fan threatened to report another fanfic author for copyright violation; the author published a very popular fanfic that has now been rewritten for a non-fan audience.

 

• Arguments that erupted intermittently for years about whether Armitage only did Between the Sheets for the money and professional (cough) exposure (discussion in comments). Press at the time he made it reported he had no regrets, said he hadn’t really read the script, and told his mother to make some tea during the parts of the show she didn’t want to see — although he later made a comment somewhat agreeing with the idea that he did it to be working, not because he loved it. I wondered when reading his comment about sex before intimacy coordinators if he was specifically thinking of Between the Sheets. Armitage’s alleged self-distancing from the explicit parts of Between the Sheets may be drawn into question again after Obsession. Who IS Richard Armitage, anyway?

 

• I thought about the fandom response to my own decision (almost exactly eleven years ago — maybe there’s something about April) to make semi-explicit posts on this blog, which unleashed a storm of opprobrium, triggered the creation of the first anti-Servetus blog (“Sexy Times with Dr. Servetus,” which never got very far), and ultimately set in motion a development on my part (deciding to blog about Richlee) and a response in the fandom that permanently changed my feelings about the whole experience. I admittedly always sense a relentless compulsion to go one further when I am told what I should not say or write, fortunately or unfortunately. I knew what I was getting into with Richlee, although I didn’t imagine the dimensions.

 

• The post that led a fan to “report” me to Armitage’s agents for the first time (I am aware of two other “reports” after that).

 

• The insistence in some corners that a topless (we were supposed to say “shirtless,” according to the fan police) John Proctor should not be ogled. Armitage was free to remove his clothing, but fans were not supposed to comment on it (the opposing position; the group that articulated this argument is mostly gone now).

 

• The whole discussion about RPF that recurred here repeatedly and was eventually unmasked as hypocritical after it turned out that while other people were okay to write RPF, I was specifically not supposed to do it. And then A03 made everything everywhere okay all the time anyway.

~ by Servetus on April 3, 2023.