Dragon Scholar ([info]dragonscholar) wrote in [info]fanthropology,
@ 2005-09-12 20:17:00
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"Soap people are jut happy to be there. Sci-fi people want to know why in episode 2221 the molecular dithigium didn't split the atoms in half."
- Forbes March, actor (Mutant X, All my Children)

From Soap Opera Weekly (my wife's copy! Honest.)

I found this amusing as its something I hadn't thought of - expectations of continuity varying among subgroups of fans.

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[info]brokenbacktango
2005-09-13 12:49 am UTC (link)
I think it just depends on how much a fan is willing to devote themselves to the series/movie/book--if they are very devoted, details matter more than someone who is a casual fan. I wouldn't necessarily say soap fans don't pay as much attention, or sci-fi fans pay too much attention.

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[info]melata_fic
2005-09-13 01:44 am UTC (link)
It's character continuity versus scientific continuity. If someone breaks mathematics or science, you tend to notice it. Whereas breaking a character is pretty difficult, considering soap opera characters are OTT anyway.

*shrug* Am generalising like whoa, but still.

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[info]meritjubet
2005-09-13 03:43 am UTC (link)
Well, I don't think that there are many people who have high expectations of a sound plot in soapies. It's just comedy/romance/drama to the extreme. While with sci-fi it's like you a building a universe, a very fragile one and if go against that...

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[info]ghostgecko
2005-09-13 03:48 am UTC (link)
Yeah, I think sci-fi folks tend to be a lot more "into" the workings of their fandom, since it's not reality it has to have a certain level of suspension of disbeleif that a soap just doesn't have, which means the fans have to naturally put more thought into it. But then again, after hearing my mom and sisters dissect the plot of a soap they like, I was really surprised at how involved they were - maybe they're trying to recreate the chemicals of re-agent for a fanfic, but they are putting a lot of mental effort into it. Maybe soap opera fans at conventions are not a representative sample? Or maybe they are more starstruck than the average sci fi conventioneer and just can't formulate questions? (been there)

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[info]delurker
2005-09-13 11:30 am UTC (link)
Rather than continuity, could it not be how fans perceive the fan-creator relationship?

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[info]mad_maudlin
2005-09-13 01:59 pm UTC (link)
It's a matter of where the focus of the story is.

Soaps are entirely character-focused: they're about pretty people suffering prettily. The plots may get complex and convoluted, but they're always there to serve the purpose of character (in my admittedly limited experience).

A sf/f show, OTOH, is about the setting. Even if it's not, it totally is: in no media should the plot and characters be totally independent of its setting. A genre show can be a space opera (DS9) or have action elements (X-Files) but plot and character have no meaning outside the context of the setting, so the setting has to be foregrounded. That's the fundamental difference between sf/f and other types of fiction, and the reason that this genre lable tends to trump all others.

So it makes sense that sf/f fans would obsess about the setting, to the same degree that soap fans obsess about character or whatnot. The thing is, though, unless the story is a travelogue with a cosmologist or something, massive amounts of information about the setting are just implied: the foreground is in the background. Since so very little is stated explicitly, assembling a coherent picture of the world is kind of a detective game: collect random bits of detail and generate a coherent picture to fit them together. And it's really, really great when your theory turns out to be even a little bit right. (If you're a detail freak like me. :-))

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Dramas, focus on tensions where?
[info]agnosticmantis
2005-09-14 07:55 pm UTC (link)
This kind of fits in with what we were talking about in another community. I'm writing in MonkSlash, two cops. One is the other one's boss. Some of my friends who are also writers are very interested in getting that relationship correct, you should spend X amount of words, time in the story with their saying, we're going to have to face these problems on the job, we know these will be the challenges, we're going into it with our eyes open, etc.

Other friends don't want that much of a focus on that part, but think it should be more 'relationship' oriented, we want to have an intimate relationship, see how that develops, the two of them, away from work. Fewer discussions of work. Show them at work but this is a story about how they are off-duty. You cannot ignore the risks they're taking, but you can't dwell on it either. Each author should find the level where she is happiest. Research is a good thing for a foundation, regardless.

AM

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[info]joanne_c
2005-09-14 02:29 am UTC (link)
I will just point out that the "criticism of the genre" phrasing in Soap Opera Digest which I read faithfully (I'm so addicted it's not even funny) are so similar to the fannish phrasing that I almost feel I'm reading fannish meta.

Also "issue stuff", eg black characters, gay/lesbian characters often follows similar phrasing.

I'm not sure if it's because SOD is a fan/industry publication or because our vocabulary is limited of a little of both.

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