The Good, The Bad, and the Browncoats

I really ought to beposting about my week at VA beach (I swear said post will come), but I've decided to rant/lecture instead. Hey, people are probably getting tired of the distinctly non-fannish journal content of late anyway.

I recently read a post on metafandom wherein a lukewarm Firefly fan lays out all of her reasons for not liking Firefly, starting off with the brown filters and ending up with the fact that (in her view, at least), Mal and company have no real goals or defined character arcs, and come off as bullies and criminals much of the time. And she doesn't like the dialogue.

( wherein Elspeth babbles at length about Firefly, Westerns, and the Civil War )

*sigh* And I've now outed myself as a Civil War buff. A Southern Civil War buff. Wank and fannish censure from more culturally sensitive fans is surely headed my way. It could be worse. I could be telling y'all I voted for Bush.

Real life post, to make up for the rant.

Virginia Beach was, as always, a mixture of fun and slow torture--fun in the form of swimming, surfing, meeting up with figliaperduta, and my family, and slow torture in the form of… my family.

ADD runs in the family. So does alcoholism. So does the irresistible desire to say nasty things about those relatives not physically present at the moment. Enough said.

On the plus side, I managed to avoid sunburn, my hair is a good three shades blonder, I didn't maim myself with the nine and a half-foot long surfboard, and I had great fun getting my picture taken at the old-time photo place with figliaperduta. After getting another photo done the day before with my sister and cousins. And I read Persuasion and found several of Fritz Leiber's Faffhrd and the Gray Mouser books at a used bookstore.

Other fantasy fans read Conan the Barbarian as teenagers. My pulp fiction heroes of choice were Leiber's homoerotic buddy cops with swords pair of perpetually bickering sell swords. Faffhrd, the barbarian who ran away from home because he thought being a barbarian tribesman was boring, and the Gray Mouser, the former wizard's apprentice with a sizable con-man streak. Even as an adolescent, I was secretly a slasher.