Oblique Reviews: In Summary

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Title:	Oblique Reviews: In Summary
Creator:	Erin Horáková
Date(s):	January 23, 2017
Medium:	online
Fandom:	Blake's 7
Topic:
External Links:	Summary
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Oblique Reviews: In Summary is a 2017 Blake's 7 essay by Erin Horáková.

Its focus is Blake's 7 fandom and the Blake/Avon fics in zines by Oblique Publications.

The essay follows the reviews by this author at Oblique Reviews.

Some Topics Discussed

• "B/A/V is almost always really unkind and damaging to all three characters."
• there is "little variation" in the stories in Oblique:, and "it feels like there are relatively few story types"
• there's a lot of pen names in the zines, and these names don't appear much anywhere else
• Oblique's house style
• "The serious weirdness of Americans looking at Britain and the Edwardian class-fetishism of these fics..."
• comments on woobies, an example: "Trying to scrub out all your beloved woob’s faults and to consistently locate the sympathy of the whole moral universe with him evacuates and deranges said woob as surely as the worst character bashing."
• MUCH more

Almost immediately, we can pick up on Oblique’s House Style. Edgelordy, with shades of But Of Course It Can Never Be. Inevitable Doom, Mandatory 90s Promiscuity (see also: 90s comics). Darkness is Adult (see also: 90s comics–these trends aren’t developing in isolation from the culture). Glasgow writes a significant amount of these fics. She gives us a lot of ‘Avon and [Vila have known each other a long while’ (totally undeveloped in these stories in question as an reading of the source text) and a significant number of B/A/V triangles. I would say that overall, Oblique is no better written than your average zine. Out of this run of 57 stories there are perhaps 5 really exceptional works and 10 additional pieces of respectable competence. That’s not–a good average. It’s significantly worse than some, and the monotony of the ways the house can displease exerts extra wear and tear on your correspondent, who positively fought through her way through some of these stories.

What it is is ‘gritty’, in that way that often passes for ‘harder-hitting, more thoughtful, riskier and more skilful’ [sic] than more sentimental offerings. In case it needs saying, the artistic capital and seriousness we afford to Darkness!! is bullshit. There is nothing a priori better written, more thoughtful, or even more IC/truer to this text about an Oblique fic versus a piece of fluff. ‘Grimdarkness’ has its own ideology and purposes: it’s not simply ‘more realistic’ than other fiction traditions. In fact it’s quite marked, loud in its biases and at times obvious in its objectives. ‘Realism’ is itself a mode, and not the end-all be-all goal of fiction, but don’t let anyone tell you Grittiness has a unique claim to access and represent art or life. There is nothing sexier or more morally necessary or more intellectually challenging or more fun about that register, per se. Oblique’s sort of shared-world is not a particularly reliable or authoritative interpretation of the characters and canon.

I hope I’ve shown at a few points that a lot of what Oblique takes as read is actually not terribly established fanon, which we accept unblinkingly because it’s been said so many times, with such complacent knowledge. A wider diversity of readings and tones and an interaction with the source-text less fettered by this not particularly great aspect of our fic tradition is both possible and desirable. There is good stuff to be gleaned from Oblique, but to have let it dominate fandom to the extent it has, for as long as it has (and don’t make the mistake of thinking it vanished when Judith, Nova and Willa turned up: it was still alive in that era’s work, and is still with us now) is frankly silly. We’re not exactly at ‘de-colonise your mind’ levels of seriousness here, but do try and think of where you’re impacted by this, and about what it would be to relate to canon without these frames, without readers trained to expect and writers trained to recapitulate them. It’s HARD for me, personally, but one has to start somewhere.

The way zines came out must have REALLY exerted a strong influence over your development as a fic writer. It must really have really affected your ability to hit your stride, to expand out, to shake up your typical schtick, etc. I don’t know that I’d want to be judged on my first three fics in the fandom. It’s also very odd to think that I’ve easily written more even than Nova, who I think of as a Big Name, and in a shorter time, in part probably just because I can hit ‘post’ and she couldn’t. TBH I’m obviously Me off the bat in my first B7 fics, showing some indication that I’d come to write the sort of stuff I’m writing now, but that’s also BECAUSE I was in Who first, and this was not my first rodeo. The way I thought about and wrote the pairing developed immensely over the course of multiple publishing opportunities. Not so much via feedback, here, outside of immediate conversations with friends, but that was certainly true of my time in Who.

Even as the ghost of Oblique haunts us still, it’s in some ways almost unfair to say there’s a continuity between what this magazine was doing and us now. We received a tradition, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly, via reading, but we’re not in the same spaces or the same medium. We don’t share the same level of access to material (this is the elephant in the room when talking about Oblique: did they have good access to visual copies and transcripts?), the same assumptions, the same social moment of queerness or the same social conditions of fandom: are we the same pairing? There are a few people knocking around who remember these people, but they aren’t them, and I have no such direct contact. Is there a meaningful sense in which we’re equally ‘the B/A community’, or the SAME B/A community? Or are we into the realm of imagined affective trans-historical queer communities?

You cannot have your cake and eat it too. You cannot make Avon victimised and blameless and cool and really in control and a moral authority and amoral!sexy. You have to, for the sake and duration of the fic, choose your Avon and also your (tyrant vs manchild vs canon) Blake. This can be complicated or, if you’re careful, ambivalent or uncertain, but that shit’s for advanced players who’ve mastered the basics. What you can’t be is: serving a pizza topped with cake topped with sushi topped with thai green curry because you wanted to eat out and you wanted the best of EVERYTHING at once and you have a primitive desire for fusion cuisine. I don’t want to eat that, no one does.

Likewise, you cannot have Blake ALWAYS be wrong so Avon is ALWAYS right, or whatever it is you want. You can’t bend the plot and the moral weight thereof around how you want a character to come off: you can write a plot that facilitates what you want, but you can’t just assign meaning where you want it to fall.

THIS SHIT IS NOT EVEN HEALTHY FOR YOUR BELOVED WOOB, WHO YOU ARE TRYING TO USE IT TO VENERATE. When you impoverish a character in the fic via bashing, every action and decision connected to that character is dragged in a different direction accordingly. This is true anywhere: you can’t have awful cunt Buffy and ‘loving refugees from her awfulness’ Spander without raising questions as to why Xander is friends with Buffy, and Spike obsessed with her. You are saying things about the characters you like, their circumstances and persons and relationships, in saying something about other figures in the story who their lives are intertwined with. The more weight you want that bashed character to bear, the more distorting the effects of this decision. It does less to the story to be mean to Tarrant in an S3 fic than it does to be mean to Blake in an S2 fic, if the focus of your relationship is Avon’s Choices, because Avon’s S3 choices and actions are less involved with Tarrant than his S2 choices and actions were with Blake. Also, being mean is sour and distasteful, potentially alienating some readers and limiting your reading of the text/impoverishing your own story: do it with caution. On the other hand, however, to some extent a rising tide does lift all boats. Avon looks better when Blake looks better. Mutually-constructed competence is a neat plot mechanic and also a great character mechanic. It’s also canon, not just in that both these characters ARE competent but also in that Boucher does this trick all the time (Redemption has some good examples).

For an example of what Oblique-hangover has done to fandom: You cannot post the MOST candy-ass Nice Blake without people rolling up to say they loved how Blake was dark and terrible and probably beating a puppy in this one. Meanwhile THERE IS LITERALLY NOTHING YOU CAN WRITE AVON DOING THAT ANYONE WILL ASCRIBE EVEN AN INSTANT’S BLAME TO. If Oblique has one lasting legacy, it is these particular bad B, A and B/A characterisations and dynamics, which are now hard-wired in reception. I am exhausted by this weaksauce meme that constantly crops up in what I read and in responses to my own work. The emperor is nude. Kirk doesn’t actually fuck that many women. Ferrero Rocher aren’t even really fancy. THAT THING ABOUT LEAVING FOOD TO COOL BEFORE REFRIGERATING IT IS AN URBAN LEGEND!!

Fan Comments

“The serious weirdness of Americans looking at Britain and the Edwardian class-fetishism of these fics has me in my ‘write a paper’ feelings, but no one needs ‘Britpickier: Figurations of British Class in Fanfic’.”

Fandom needs this like it needs Jesus. --Jon

I really enjoyed your series of reviews because I’m (relatively) new to the B7 fandom but have avidly consumed as much of the “classic” fan works as I can- and found much of it not to my taste. It has been interesting to observe the historic patterns of writing and I really appreciated your insightful “time and place” view on this set of writings. I hope that writers in this fandom will be able to move beyond the Gritty and Bleak hangover to some of the more (to me) real moods and attitudes of this show (that became My Primary Fandom the from moment I was exposed to it.) -- Fireswan