Sue writes a long response to my comments about BLAKE's 7. I don't want to rehearse all of her arguments here, except to say that I totally agree with her conclusions and her assessment of what fan writing is doing in relation to that series. Sue, you might think about your comments about the series as the embryonic form of a theoretical argument about what fans are doing there. How do we explain why fans want to create such a strong continuity when the program writers seemed relatively indifferent to the problem? What do we make of the need to add psychological depth to account for character inconsistencies rather than refering outward from the text to production circumstances to account for these shifts? To what degree is this a product of B7's status as a serial rather than an episodic series, or rather its ambiguious relationship to these two programing categories? How do fans' justify their decision to rewrite the ending of the series? Do they appeal to ambiguious cues in the text (such as Cally's off-screen death)? Do they appeal to authorial authority (such as comments by the producer that suggest he wanted to have more seasons)? To some notion of generic expectations which says the forced closure was an unsatisfying resolution to a story of that type? Etc. So, what you have to do when you locate an aspect of fan behavoir that interests you is to try to determine:a)what that behavoir means in relation to the primary text -- what strategies of interpretation does it employ and b) what it means in relation to the fan community -- how it builds a common ground within the group, etc. This is something of an over-simplification but it is a good illustration of what I mean by suggesting that each fandom poses a different set of theoretical questions. Much of film studies has been founded on the construction of meta-theories which can account for all spectatorship. The recent issue of CAMERA OBSCURA on the "Female Spectatrix" suggests real dissatisfaction on all sides with this approach. A new approach would say that theoretical exploration must beginning with the particularities of local examples and then try to consider what must be theoretically true to account for these situations. Rather than searching for a master theory, I want to encourage work that starts from a body of questions which originate from an immediate interaction with a text or cultural phenomenon or... Sorry to rattle on so, but this does seem to me to be a central issue facing Film and Media Studies as an issue and one which is not fully understood. I would welcome comments from anyone on the list, whether they are interested in fandom or not, about the advantages and disadvantages of shifting from meta-theory to a "local knowledge" approach. --Henry