Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
case) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomsecrets2011-12-22 07:42 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2011-12-22 07:42 pm
[ SECRET POST #1815 ]
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 41 secrets from Secret Submission Post #259.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 1 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 - too big ], [ 1 2 - repeats ]
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments and concerns should go here.
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(Anonymous) 2011-12-23 02:47 am (UTC)(link)A lot. Every single time I enter a fandom where one of the characters of my preferred pairing is supposed to be bookish.
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(Anonymous) 2011-12-23 04:45 am (UTC)(link)I'm pretty sure it's the latter in the overwhelming majority of the fics I read, combined with what seems to be some degree of cluelesness that most modern men ARE NOT that into Austen. Not even the bookish ones.
The other examples of authors the bookish character supposedly likes (usually high-school required reading authors, or Tolkien) tend to be dead give-aways, too. No one even tries with a throwaway mention of Borges or a Melville or an Elkin. Jesus, I'd take Vonnegut, Bukowski and Virginia Wolf at this point.
And the bookish character's favorite book is always Pride & Prejudice, too, amazingly. Not Sense & Sensibility, or Emma, or NA, or Persuasion. P&P every time.
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(Anonymous) 2011-12-23 04:50 am (UTC)(link)no subject
On the other hand -- well, I probably wouldn't go on arguing, but I find your sweeping assertion about some degree of cluelesness that most modern men ARE NOT that into Austen awfully dogmatic and overbroad. Of course not all readers love Austen, or would if they read her work; that's true whether they're men or women, modern or not modern. But some modern men demonstrably are that into Austen (for proof, once again, you can look at Coates and his remarkable array of commenters). It may be that it's both overused and used badly as characterization in the fic you've been reading, but it's just not that implausible, in the abstract, that a modern man who reads fiction for pleasure, and whose reading is not limited to disposable mass market bestsellers, will love Austen. Nor is it implausible that such a man will be a stereotypical manly man in other respects. It happens. And it feels oddly essentialist and prescriptive to insist that it doesn't, merely because at the moment some parts of our mass culture consider Austen a women's writer.
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(Anonymous) 2011-12-23 04:17 pm (UTC)(link)How so? I'm not budging on that one: it is not common for modern men to be into Austen, even bookish ones. (Actually, in my PERSONAL experience, *particularly* bookish ones. They know who she is, have read some of her work and *don't* like it.)
I'm sure there ARE men out there who are into Austen, even though I personally don't know any. I'm not denying they exist and asking for anecdotal evidence to the contrary. But it is not common. If a writer knows this, they SHOULD mention it in their fic.
So no, not implausible. But it's unlikely enough that it throws me off unless there's some foundation laid around that.
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If your assertion is simply that most modern men aren't Austen fans, that's clearly right. Assuming that when we say "most" we mean a simple majority, most modern men don't read novels at all; Austen's books are a small subset of the general set of novels, and by no means the most popular subset; ergo most men do not read Austen. Similarly, those who love Austen will be a subset of those who have read her, et cetera, et cetera. (The same is actually true of modern women, who are somewhat more likely to have read Austen, but are less likely to have read her books and love them than to believe they love Austen based on popular culture and movie/tv adaptations -- which bear very little resemblance to the books.)
So if that's what you mean, we agree.
However, I have the impression, perhaps incorrectly, that your assertion is that it is so peculiar for a modern man, as contrasted to a modern woman, to love Austen that you require all sorts of special pleading from an author to make it convincing that a man of our time would do so. As far as I can see you have no support for this but your own immediate experience. You may have a very wide set of circles of acquaintance, but even so what you have there is at best anecdotal experience that is inconsistent with anecdotal evidence brought forward by others in this very thread. So you can reasonably say it feels weird and unrealistic to you; you can't reasonably say that it's objectively weird and unrealistic.
At least, not on the level of individual characters. If you take it as an aggregate, it might be weird and unrealistic -- or at least, weird and an illustration of how the laws of statistics don't mean you aren't going to see what look like implausible runs now and then -- if you take all the fic you're complaining about as an aggregate, and say that what's off is to have, say, 80% of all modern male characters turn out to be rabid Austen fans. But they're not one set for is-it-plausible-for-this-character-to-be-reading-this purposes. They're just a bunch of individual characters, and you have to judge the plausibility of them thinking highly of Austen individually. And when you do that, we're back to a universe where, in the experience of large numbers of us here, it is not implausible for a modern guy to be into Austen at all.
Not even one like, say, Alex Krycek. Jane Mortimer did a brilliant job with a Jane Austen-loving Alex Krycek some years back. I don't have a link handy, but something tells me you wouldn't want one anyway.
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