lunabee34

So, as you all know, I'm a NOTPer. I don't ship in the classical sense of the word. I am interested in lots of different pairings, and if a writer can sell it (no matter how unconventional the pairing may be), I will totally buy it with glee. I also enjoy writing rare pairs; so, for instance, in SGA, I'm just as likely to write Bates/Kavanagh as I am John/Rodney and to read Teyla/Sora as John/Elizabeth.

All this lead-up to say that I just realized I do kinda ship within the canonicity of the show. Oh, this wine makes the talking to be hard. LOL Let me give you some examples. When I watch episodes of SPN, I think Sam and Dean are totally straight. I don't really see canonical evidence to the contrary, and while I am sitting on my couch watching the show, I am rooting for Dean to figure out some way to be with Lisa and wishing Sam could have totally hot demony sex with Ruby again. But when I read and write fic for the show, I pair the two of them all over the place: with each other, with Castiel, with Ash (heee!). Or take NCIS. While watching the show, I am all about the Tony/Ziva. Love it. I have a hard time shipping Gibbs with anybody. He seems pretty much asexual to me; I think he gave up on that part of his life when his wife died, and any hints that canon gives us for relationships with him are all straight. But I can totally dig some Tony/Gibbs or Tony/Tim or Tony/Abby or whatever. Spander is another good example. I cut my fannish teeth on Spike/Xander, and I adore the pairing, but to me it makes absolutely no sense from a canonical standpoint. Or Harry/Draco. At any given point, I am more likely to be reading a Harry/Draco fic than anything else there is to read, and yet I never ever would have pegged that to be the dominant pairing of the fandom after finishing the series.

Does anybody else do this? Have kind of a disconnect between what seems plausible to you while watching the show or reading the book and what you want to read/write for fanfic? One set of ships for consuming the media and other set of ships for behaving fannishly about them?

(Caveats: Obviously subtext exists to some degree for all the pairings I've mentioned (even if it's just one arch look in one episode and a half season spent sharing a basement sullenly) and YMMV on that; not raining on anybody's subtext parade here. Also not saying that an unconventional ship can't be canonically compatible; in fact, that's the kind I like to read and write the most.)

If everything I learned about life I learned from fanfic, this week I learned that what we all really want most in life is for the person who rips off our button down to not merely suppress nausea at the sight of our hideously disfigured bodies but to love the freaking shit out of those burns and knife wounds.

I have seen this trope in every fandom I have ever spent more than two seconds in--whether it's Xander Harris's daddy-broken back that Spike lovingly licks into coagulation or a more milder take on the theme such as a Rodney McKay who despairs of Laura Cadman seeing his unfit naked body as she wears it.

And just this week, I saw it again in warholhp's Incurable, a Harry/Draco non-magical AU HP fic in which Harry spent four years at St. Brutus's Secure Center for Incurably Criminal Boys before transferring to Hogwarts. [Chapters are listed out of order; scroll down and find chapters 1-2 somewhere in the middle; all chapters are linked internally. However, there is one chapter towards the end where you get a "this journal has just been deleted" Frank message. I was all, "Nuh-no-nuh-no. I did not just read almost all of this fic and the writer DELETED HIR JOURNAL WHILE I WAS READING?! *wail* Never fear, my friends. The internal link is FUBAR; go back to mems, and you can click on the chapter just fine.]

In this story, Harry has multiple burns and knife wounds courtesy of Uncle Vernon (including the word freak carved into his chest) and a plethora of whip wounds on his back and buttocks from the corporal punishment meted out at St. Brutus's. Part of his romantic journey with Draco is allowing Draco to see and touch those parts of his physical body that Harry sees as irreparably damaged.

And here's why I love you, fandom, because rather than reading this trope as very obvious and anvilicious (I don't like my body, and I am using Harry and Draco to work through those issues), I see a lot of very interesting things going on here. Yes, there is a not insignificant part of this trope that is about the very real desire of all humans beings to be accepted and loved despite their physical flaws. But I also see that physical disfiguration as symbolic of internal darkness. The characters in these stories don't just hide their scars because they think they're ugly; they hide them because of what they represent--what they see as the consequences of a shameful event or their own propensity for violence perhaps, that dark passenger that rides shotgun with us all. And so when the beloved accepts--nay, even adores--that broken flesh, what s/heis really doing is accepting the inner demons, that darkness within. And that is ever so much more powerful than simply seeing beyond an imperfect body.

I think there's also a fair amount of fetishization of the damaged body in these fics--a nearly Rabelaisian revelry in the grotesque--and I find that fascinating.

So. *chinhands* What do y'all think of this trope? Is it as ubiquitous as it appears to me? Love? Hate?

Talk to me. :)

Sooper seekrit message to crazydiamondsue: YOU WILL LOOOOOOVE THIS.

It's a lazy, rainy night, and I'm thinking about BtVS. I'm thinking about the Buffyverse because some kind soul recced one of my stories from last year in buffyversetop5, and that got me to thinking about maleslashminis and how much I really enjoyed participating in that comm last year. I also happened to catch a few episodes of the show on LOGO this week--events all conspiring to make me very nostalgic for my first fandom.

One of the things I liked so much about maleslashminis was that it forced me to be really creative and think about canon in new and interesting ways. I'd never have written Ben/Xander on my own or Giles/Jayne or even Graham/Riley. I liked the uncertain nature of the request, the fact that I never knew exactly what my recipient was going to want from a story. I miss that comm. *sniffle*

I met most of you guys in Buffy fandom, and most of you have mostly moved on, I think. We all occasionally foray back into the old stomping grounds, but I think most of us concentrate most of our fannish efforts in other places at this point.

So, I'm wondering--if you're ever nostalgic like me, what's the Buffyverse story that got away? The one you always meant to write but didn't? The one you always wanted to write but didn't think you could? The one you think that time and distance makes nearly impossible to write now? The story you always wanted to read but never found?

I suppose I am asking for writing prompts in a way, but even more than that, I am endlessly fascinated by the stories that we hold close to our hearts but never quite manage to commit to paper. Also, bored now, and talking good. :)

So I just finished The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (which I highly reccommend; it's a well told story) and I've caught up on fannish gossip with Sue and I'm thinking about reading some Snape fic, but before I do, I wanna talk to you guys. I miss y'all. I'm making myself crazy with this reading regimen. Like scary crazy. I'm a have the vapors eeeeeny second now.

So here is a talking point, gentle flist:

What keeps you reading a piece of fanfic despite a horrific abuse of the rules of punctuation and grammar or rampant OOC-ness or weepy!Ron who weeps and weeps all over the place? What sorts of things in fic keep you reading when you'd have backbuttoned out of another story? In other words, what are your bulletproof fanfic kinks (and I'm defining kink here as that which you can't resist, which satisfies you deeply, which you are drawn to, which gets you off in some way (not necessarily a sexual one))? What are your narrative kinks (ex. mpreg, epigraphs, lots of dialogue, aliens made them do it), your character kinks (ex. Inara has a secret, Giles is a closet fan of Blakes 7, Sam is jealous of Dean), your fanon kinks (ex. Buffy smells like vanilla, Xander's parents are abusive)?

I'm back from Writercon wehre I had a fantastic time. Thanks for all the well-wishes for Josh. He's doing a lot better; it's still unclear if he has any nerve damage, but he's mobile and the pain is getting more manageable. (As a side note, somebody please write the story about realistic levels of pain for wounds. Sheppard does not just go and go and go after getting shot several times. Just saying.)

I will eventually make a more personal and namedroppy post about the social aspects of Writercon, but I wanted to start with a post about some of the panels I went to before I forget them.

IS FANDOM GONNA HAVE TO CHOKE A BITHC? LANGUAGE AND GENDER IN FANFICTION
Moderator: mosca
Panelists: enigmaticblues, Kristina Busse, denny_dc

This was a really good panel, and as all good weighty discussions should be, one that raised more questions for me than it answered. The panel initially proposed to talk about the language used in the source texts we fan, our own fics, and our fannish socializing and infrastructure. Unfortunately because of time constraints, the last talking point wasn't really covered. I would have loved a conversation on the implications of the language we use when we squee, when we post to comms, when we communicate outside of what our fics have to say. One of the thing things that I have noticed in my fannish interactions is a real shift toward the use of and the awareness of gender neutral pronouns, which I appreciate. Although many of us are women, I have a kneejerk negative reaction to the default assumption that fandom is a wholly feminine space because it feels very exclusionary to me. This does not mean that I do not recognize and celebrate that fandom is a place where women have created power and agency for themselves; it does mean that I am uncomfortable with the narrow definition of fandom as a community that is by, for, and about women.

Back to the panel: Who gets to use sexist language? Can women, in real life interactions and in fic, reclaim sexist language much in the same way that minorities and queer people have reclaimed words used to hurt them? And in mad props to alixtii for the best question asked at a panel I attended: at one point would language stop being reclamation or an accurate representation of the way a certain character acts or thinks and become mere perpetuation of the problem?

Nina talked about genderfuck stories and said some really interesting things about them.
1. They don't reflect trans reality and aren't really intended to, although that is changing.
2. If a woman is writing, they are often a form of venting about aspects of our lives that we don't like.
3. She read a quote for which I did not catch attribution and couldn't write fast enough to get all down, but essentially, the idea was that womanhood is a thing to be performed, a masquerade, and one of the draws of genderfuck is to transfer desire and expectation onto the male body (the "unmarked body"). Maybe one of y'all can link me to the actual quote used?
4. Nina also discussed the homophobia, misogyny, and heteronormativity that are often part and parcel of slash, particularly Old Skool Slash.

There was also a brief mention of We're Not Gay, and I just want to take a moment to reiterate how much I hate that trope. LOL I know it's an old stand-by for slash, but I just hate it. I think if you experience same-sex attraction and sexual activity then you are at least bisexual and possibly gay. I get that the trope is supposed to make the OTP special--what could be more special than changing one's sexual orientation, right? It's supposed to prove that they are so inevitable and magical that nothing can stand in the way of their epic LOVE, but mostly it seems to me to be a way to get two guys to have sex without acknowledging homosexuality at all. Although I have read it before and enjoyed, that enjoyment is usually despite the WNG trope rather than because of it.

denny_dc started her portion of the panel with a list of insulting terms, some of which I already knew like using "gay" as a perjorative. I had not realized that dreadlocks actually is a term originally used by colonizers of Caribbean peoples to describe their hair (dreadful locks).

ENOUGH KISSING, GET ON WITH THE MAIMING! GEN-FIC
Moderator: redeem147
Panelists: Debra Doyle (who I actually think was not there), general_jinjur, bastardsnow

This panel really made me want to read House of Leaves as SPN. Like really, really, really, really bad. Really bad.

There was a discussion of bob and gron and porny gen and I brought up queerly_gen on Dreamwidth (which only Jinjur seemed to have heard of) and essentially I thought the entire discussion was hampered by a lack of consensus about what gen really means and what its conventions are.

One of the panelists used the phrase "slash minus one" to describe stories that have slashy elements but seem very light on them or don't include sex and I think Dasha's "Salt of the Earth" was cited as an example. I think this story falls neatly into slash according to my personal definition (full discussion in comments). I also have never heard the phrase "slash minus one" and was tempted to ask during the discussion if anyone would ever use "het minus one" as a descriptor. My feeling is no. I suspect that were a story to contain a Buffy and a Spike who pined for each other and yet never consummated their relationship, that story would be called het.

IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME: HOW THE INTERNET BUILDS COMMUNITIES AROUND FANFIC
Moderator: scarlettgirl
Panelists: Kristina Busse, shaddyr, kalichan, and versaphile

scarlettgirl was an excellent moderator. I mean, really really good. There was a plan and a structure and I was impressed with the way this panel worked in terms of each panelist's contribution building on the one that came before. shaddyr started out with an excellent discussion of pre-internet fandom, versaphile told us all about the vagaries of archiving (and OMG, y'all, the amount of work that goes into making fandom an accessible place for us all is astonishing), kalichan talked about reccing, the lovely mod discussed newsletters and what goes into maintaining a successful one (again with all the work!), and Nina finished with a discussion of OTW and how it is addressing a lot of the issues brought up in the other panelists' talks.

I've got one more panel to discuss but I think I'm calling it quits for the night. Sister-in-law is here and SHE IS AWESOME! I just introduced her to SPN and I think there's more of that on the plate for tonight. She's being too heavily influenced by Josh's opinion that Sam has cro-magnon forehead. Off to remedy that!

I've been thinking lately about fandom milestones, war wounds as it were, the kind that you're not so secretly proud of because they're evidence that you accomplished Something Awesome. And probably Porny.

So, in ascending order

1. Post fic to Yahoo listserv
2. Misunderstand how Yahoo listserv works; think no one likes your fic until you actually, oh, check your Yahoo mail
2. Get coerced into using Livejournal/Dreamwidth/Insanejournal/Fanfiction.net
3. The one-shot fic
4. The multi-chaptered, serially posted fic
5. The multi-chaptered fic posted all at once
6. Participating in your friend's ficathon
7. Participating in a stranger's ficathon and not getting a story in return
8. Running your own ficathon because, dude, exchanges are cool but also kinda sucky
9. I made a comm! I made a comm!
10. People are joining! People are joining!
11. Yuletide!
12. Maintaining a huge recs list
13. Remix
14. The Big Bang

I make this list because Big Bang is very much on my mind right now and it seems to be the pinnacle of the fannish milestone, the sort of "no really, my fingers were BLEEDING. THEY BLED. MY KEYBOARD DOES NOT WORK NOW" kind of moment we've all been waiting for. The second fic I ever wrote qualifies in length for Big Bang, if you know, I'd posted it all at once and the Buffyverse had had Big Bang. ariadne83 and I are writing this epic SGA fic right now that's at about 19000 words and will probably be twice as long by the time we're done and part of me keeps wondering, in an abstracted and rather facetious way, how we will post it because damn it! I want the war wound, but I think Big Bang (in SGA at least) has all these inexplicable rules about pairings rather than just being the free-for-all that SPN Big Bang appears to be (Good job, SPN!). I can't help thinking of Big Bang as the last established fannish thing that I have yet to do.

So, what are your fannish milestones? What did I leave out? Can I achieve top fannish street cred if I don't ever write a Big Bang fic? LOL Talk amongst yourselves.

I'm teaching Epic of Gilgamesh this week and there's that scene where Enkidu interrupts Gilgamesh's wedding, they fight, and then decide they absolutely love each other.

Mortal enemies that after their enmity becomes physical esteem each other above all others.

Sounds familiar. Spander*cough*Spander

So I've got questions. Why do you think this trope exists? Why is that a compelling storyline? It's really not a very plausible one (people that hate each other somehow being so impressed by the person who's giving them a black eye that friendship abounds) but it happens in published literature and in fanfic over and over. Why? And is it always guys that have this relationship trajectory? I'm trying to think of a story in which it's a guy and a girl fighting and then BFF-ing and the only thing I can think of is Buffy and Spike and that doesn't really fit.

Also, can you guys think of any other examples in movies or in published literature (fanfic examples welcome as well although I think my students will be less familiar with those *g*).

After the last post I made about the lack of femslash discussion in sga_talk, I was inspired to look a little more closely at my own writing to see how often I write het, femslash, m/m slash and gen.

( A Breakdown by Fandom )

It's quite possible I added wrong in SGA and SPN as those are the biggest categories of fic for me, but these numbers should be close enough for government work. That means of roughly 140 total pieces, I have written roughly 57 gen pieces, 49 male/male slash, 25 het, and 9 femslash.

*muses*

It's gratifying to see that I write even more gen than I assumed (and so much gen that is from the POV of women), but I really thought I had written more pieces of femslash than that. Must rememdy soon.

When it comes to Writing People Who are Not White, I do even more poorly than with femslash. One of my Spander fics is an ensemble fic and Gunn is featured there. I have written one fic from Inara's POV and one Inara/Kaylee drabble. In SGA, Ronon appears fairly regularly in my writing and there's a drabble from Miko's POV. Teyla is featured in two fics and Bates is featured in two fics as well. In SPN, I have a Gordon-centric drabble and Agent Henricksen features prominently in one of the Sam-centric gen pieces. *boggles* That's pretty pitiful, actually. So yes, resolve on that front as well.

Stay tuned....Coming up soon, Whispers! Why SGA is made of Gigantic Fail.

I've been reading metafandom posts this evening and in one of them, musesfool makes a comment about hitting the fannish sweet spot, capturing the zeitgeist. You know what she's talking about. Those writers that manage to write the pairing/plot/kink/whathaveyou that suddenly becomes the rage in fandom X.

My question is, how do we predict the fannish zeitgeist? Are the writers who do so just extremely lucky and prescient, or is something else at work?

For example, is the zeitgeist ususally episode based? (OMG Rodney has to earn back John's trust! Bring on the lemon chicken and the moves to China!) Or is it BNF-based? (notlorraine wrote some Ruby/Bella that galvanized SPN to a flurry of femslash (oh, god please, this would be nice)) Or something else? Maybe interviews with the cast or writers? (Even in a non-RPF fandom)

If you are one of these kickass persons who manages to give us what we want BEFORE WE EVEN KNOW WE WANT IT *g* please to be explaining the whys and the wherefores.

I've been following the latest wank, and normally when Wank Happens, I don't comment (usually because I know people on both sides of the issue and don't agree in a clear cut manner with either side and the thirteen year old girl in my heart gets sad when excellent writers whose work she admires argue with each other and also because I'd rather be reading about Chad Michael Murray boning Jay-Red) but I think that this time I will, if only to you guys.

I think I fall somewhere in the middle of this issue. For instance, I do believe that fandom is a community, or perhaps better said, a collection of communities. I enjoy the friends and acquaintances I've met. I enjoy that I have a built-in audience for the stories that I want to write via various newsletters and fic comms. I like knowing that if I just randomly wanted something--someone to tell me a good place for Spike to eat in London, or a black and white icon of Michael Rosenbaum *cough cough totally a request*, or advice on which DC comic I should start with as a newbie--these are all things I could find from someone through fandom.

I don't think that there are overarching rules for how to behave in fandom, although I think "Treat people how you'd like to be treated" is a pretty good one. We are a collection of communities, each with different standards and expectations; each of us comes to fandom for different reasons and those reasons dictate how we participate.

I also believe very strongly in concrit. I want people to offer it to me and I enjoy beta-ing because it is a situation in which I can really delve into something someone is writing. It makes me sad that as mod of sga_talk, I can never offer up my own work for critique because boy do I think I could benefit from that. I think sga_talk is a very good example of my middle of the road stance on this issue; sga_talk is a comm devoted to concrit but as a concession to what I feel is the very important communal nature of fandom, author permission must be given for a piece of fanfic to be discussed.

I believe concrit is important, not only for the author of the piece, but for other authors. I learn more about how to make my writing effective by discussing yours. As I dissect what you have written, as I discover what you do that works and what you do that doesn't, my own writing improves.

However, concrit and reviews are two different things and I think they're being conflated in this latest kerfluffle. Reviews are also not feedback. Posting a negative review in your own journal and posting a negative feedback comment to a fic are two different things as well.

I think that it is an acceptable practice in fandom to write negative reviews. I don't think it's acceptable to conflate a person with her writing (It's not okay to trash Author A's character because you think her McShep is cheesy, for example) and I think there are ways of registering dissatisfaction with a piece without being overly rude, but a negative review does not have to do either of those things.

I personally do not give negative reviews. This is because my recs serve a very clear cut function for me. I do not rec anything that I don't want to read/see again. My recs are a way for me to keep track of material that I would like to look at again in the future. I am glad that other people benefit from them and use them, but on the whole, they are for me. Sometimes I will make a qualified rec (as in, I want to read this again, but I think X story element was not so hot), but I don't review stuff that I'm never going to look at again. The stories I enjoy for the moment but forget about the second they're done, the stories I start that I don't like at all--these never make it to my journal because I am never going to be set with the burning desire to read them again. Other people rec/review for other reasons, and the content of their reviews will reflect that.

If I read a negative review of my work (which I have before; in fact, someone has delicioused one of my fics and in the notes has commented that I really didn't do enough with the story, which is SO TRUE) it might make me angry or hurt my feelings or it might make me go, "Yeah. That sucked," or "Okay, *that's* how I fix that," depending on what was said and the tone of it. But I still think that person has the right to evaluate what I've put out for public consumption.

I feel like I had more to say but I can't remember what it is and I'm not sure this is all that coherent anyway, so um. The end.

ETA Also, to be clear, I am linking to Grace's post here, not because she is the instigator of wank but because she is on my flist and it is through her post that I originally found the matter. In retrospect, I should have also linked to lamardeuse's post.

ETA redux I'm going to unlock this post; I'm not certain why I locked it in the first place.