>... you wake up after a week of mild illness and realize that the
>people who told you you were Doing It Wrong in 2003 were probably
>right, but that to fix it now you would have to bin 2.33 megabytes of
>text and start 2410 completely over. ... huh.
A quick poke at the archives doesn't turn up the thread with my old comments, but I don't think much of value was lost there. Certainly, I'm not going to lose sleep about an embarrassing flame-out from my bad old CANNOT LET SOMEONE BE WRONG ON THE INTERNET days being lost to the ages, even if I might have had a point under all the misaimed vitriol.
That's not to say I don't have issues with how stuff went down around there -- I didn't like the Corwin/Utena/Anthy triad then, and I don't now. Back then, I couldn't articulate why it bothered me very well, which is why what came out was (I'm guessing, based on past experience) a bunch of elliptical rhetoric and exceedingly caustic word salad.
I suppose I could explain, in non-hostile terms, why I think it was a bad idea, drawing on what I've learned about criticism and critical theory, literary structure, gender theory, and queer theory (the latter two have become quite important to me, what with me coming to grips with being trans and all), but ... there seems little point to doing so at this late date*. I will say that working out why it didn't work for me in a non-public space gave me a lot of insight into the craft of writing and, in particular, character arcs and narrative logic.
I have no suggestions about how to go about patching it up -- I'm sure anything I could come up with Gryph could as well (if he hasn't already) -- and I'm not sure I'll be partaking of that particular corner of the EPU output in any event.
"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding
* I can't help thinking of the crypto-lesbian fiasco, which was bizarre and off-base on a number of levels (the original criticism, I mean). Gender theory and queer theory aren't my field -- as I've said many times, I'm an economist by training and profession (it's even my job title) -- but in coming to understand gender identity issues and making friends with other trans women, I picked up a fair amount anyway, just so I could begin to frame my experience. Considering that some of my criticisms would include words like "heteronormative," I can't imagine that they'd be terribly well-received no matter how courteously I phrased them.