Meta-meta: on fanfic, genre and categorization

[sholio]

The recent conversation about gen and shipping on Abyssinia's LJ, spawning its own meta elsewhere including Synecdochic's take on the discussion's references to her fic, got me thinking about a number of things, not the least of them being why we spend so much time sitting around at our computers meta-ing about fan stuff.

But when it comes right down to it, fan meta is just another form of sitting around the dorm room (cafeteria, coffee shop, teahouse, bedroom, Acropolis or wherever) and hashing out ideas. I bet the ancient Greeks spent at least as much time talking about their wives, the sorry state of politics in 400 B.C., or the hot naked boys practicing their javelin throws down the hill, as they did on figuring out the principles of geometry.

College and I had an unfriendly parting of the ways, but one of the few things that does make me look back on it fondly is the dorm-living experience, and the many late nights sitting around in the lounge having wild conversations about anything and everything. I wish sometimes that I'd taken notes, because I think I'd hardly have to write another original line of dialogue again as long as I live; everything I need is in there somewhere.

And one of the reasons why I really love those kinds of conversations is that they make me question why I believe the things I do, and where my convictions on some of this stuff comes from ... and start reassessing them if they don't make sense. The discussion on gen got me to thinking about that.

As a reader of fanfic, I usually want to know ahead of time what I'm getting into. I want to know if a given fic is gen or slash, what characters it has, what pairings it has, if it's a deathfic, if it's angsty, if it's AU, if it's got explicit sex or not. And here's what makes this weird: my tastes in original fiction tend to go exactly the other way. I hate spoilers and love to be surprised; I adore genre mixing and seeing odd things put together in new and interesting ways; and most importantly, I really hate categorization of original fiction! I hate the fact that to find all of (taking an example of an author who writes widely disparate kinds of works) Madeline L'Engle's books, you'd have to look in YA and SF and literature and non-fiction, and maybe other places as well. I would loathe seeing published fiction as tightly categorized as is done with fanfic: a book going on one shelf if it's got a heterosexual romance in it, or another shelf if one of the main characters dies in the end, or another shelf if it's got a gay pairing, and yet another shelf if somebody gets raped. That's not just insanely stupid, but stifling to both writers and readers. Just the way that books get niched by their publishers into extremely broad categories like science fiction or romance is bad enough, because so many of the really good ones are genre-defying. What genre is Mark Helprin's modern-fairytale-esque "Winter's Tale"? Is "Catch-22" a satire or a war novel ... or both? Orwell's "Animal Farm" tends to get shelved in young adult while Alan Dean Foster's brainless adolescent fantasies get put in the adult SF section alongside Clarke and Heinlein ... what the hell is up with that?

I appreciate genre and categorization in published fiction from a reader's standpoint because it *does* help me find the sorts of thing I like to read. But I also hate it, as an institution, because of the way it chokes creativity -- not just because genre makes it difficult for something truly different to get published and find a readership, but because it's hard for writers to think outside the box. You discover that you like fantasy, so you read a ton of what the bookstore categorizes as "fantasy", and so you start writing your own novels and they end up picking up the fantasy trappings without the depth. And they sell. So you write more. And kids pick up and read them, and thus you end up with the umpteen gazillionth re-iteration of The Adventures of Blandman in Generotopia.

In light of all of this, it truly doesn't make sense to me that I want to shoebox fan fiction so completely. So now I'm trying to figure out why that might be -- why I lean so much more heavily on genre and category in fanfic to sort out the ones I want to read. For me, I think, a lot of it comes down to the presence, in fanfic, of the "one true path": canon, the source from which all else springs. And in fanfic, much more than published fiction, there are a lot of deviations from canon that are due to lack of skill or knowledge or self-restraint on the writer's part, as opposed to a desire to explore deliberate deviations from the source material. Author X doesn't write Rodney as a soppy doormat because she consciously wants to explore Western social norms of emotional expression and the way that varying this pattern can cause feedback that changes the existing canonical relationships; she writes him that way because she's 17 and really sucks at depicting an adult male viewpoint. Author Y doesn't write Sheppard and McKay as lovers because she wants to explore a subversion of our heteronormative society and gender roles; she writes them that way because she gets off on the idea of two straight guys having sex with each other. Not that there's really any reason why you can't do that, but it does tend to show, and there's a certain amount of logic in using genre categorization to avoid the types of stories where my least favorite fanwank fantasies tend to be concentrated. Avoiding deathfic (I don't always, but I often do) might mean I'll miss some real gems, but it's a quick way to avoid all the horrible, OOC, teen-angsty "OMG, I'm so sad, I think I'll go slash my wrists now" fics. 9 out of 10 rapefics squick me hideously, and it's not really worth it to me to wade through a sea of rape fantasies in order to find the occasional fic that uses rape as a means to explore character and society.

With Synecdochic's story, I never in a million years would have figured that she'd put Sheppard and McKay together as a couple in order to do a deliberate subversion of societal roles and then have that play out in subtle ways in the way that Rodney related to the society around him. I'd seen it as a straight-up slash genre thing, where sexual love trumps all other kinds of love (which is the feeling I often get from a lot of slash). Knowing that it's deliberate and was done with calculated effect, and for a reason having nothing to do with romantic love being deeper than platonic love ... you know, it *does* change how I feel about the story.

To be honest, I still don't think that it worked all that well, because neither I nor (as far as I can tell) most of her other readers really figured out what she was up to ... but part of this, I think, is because slash, as a genre, is framed a certain way and exists for certain reasons, and "Freedom" doesn't really do that, BUT ... most people already respond to slash a certain way (whether it's for or against or "OMG John & Rodney 4evah!" or "ewww, that's not my OTP, I'm not going to read any more"). In other words, it's kind of like using Nazis or Muslims or rape victims or anything else that people have strong reactions to; people are going to be so polar about it that you'll get a lot of people reacting to the story in ways you never intended, just because they already have a huge host of preconceived notions about Nazis and about the sort of person who would put them into a story. Your message kind of gets lost in the "Gah!" reaction.

Anyway, I think that between all the musing I've been doing lately on genre and categorization, and Synecdochic's own musings on the reasons behind the narrative decisions that she made in "Freedom", I think I actually *am* sold on the idea that it's not necessarily automatic for a story that hinges around two canonically straight characters having sex to translate to "slash genre", even though 95% of the time that would be the case ... any more than it's automatic for the presence of magic in a story to make it fantasy -- most of the time one would tend to imply the other, but I don't think that "Gulliver's Travels" or "Hamlet" are fantasy in the same sense that Book XVIII of the Adventures of Thorg the Barbarian is fantasy. You can use genre trappings as a tool and not just because the author likes the genre and wants to write more of it -- and what you end up with is a story with a very different feel than the other kind. Does that make sense?

But the caveat is that if you do that, you have a lot of work to "sell" the story to the other audience -- if I put ghosts and goblins in Manhattan, I'm going to have a hard uphill road to convince a mainstream, non-fantasy audience that they need to be there and aren't the reason for the story. This isn't because my readers are being jerks about it; it's just that it *will* take a little more convincing for them than for people who already read and like fantasy and are likely to say, "Oh look, an orc chasing a jogger through Central Park, cool!" and move on, as opposed to a non-fantasy reader who gets stuck on the "But there ARE no orcs in Central Park!" aspect of it.

As a gen reader, I don't think that "Freedom" quite convinced me of that necessity, as it was supposed to have done. But I'm quite a lot more open to the idea that you can have the trappings of a genre without necessarily being a part of that genre, depending on why those trappings are present, what role they serve in the story, and how closely the story as a whole conforms to the tenets of the genre overall. It's clearly a "your mileage may vary" situation, but I *do* kinda see the hypocrisy of applying a much looser standard of categorization to published fiction than to fanfic -- even if part of the reason why that double standard exists (again, IMHO) is because so much fanfic is basically ... porn. Emotional, sexual, platonic or otherwise, most fanfic is fantasy taking tangible form, in a much more direct kind of way than published fiction (where the same is also often true, but filtered through a lens of plot and theme and editors and bookstores.) You have to do SOMETHING to sort your own particular fantasies out from the ones that squick.

Obviously I'm not just singling out slash writers here. The vast majority of the fanfic I write, and read, is essentially wanking material for gen h/c fans; I'm well aware of this. I like to think mine are well-written wankfests with a good plot, but I'm not kidding myself -- I don't stick Sheppard and McKay in a hole in the ground and torture them because I want to make some kind of grand statement about human nature or want to retell the story of the Labyrinth of Crete in a sci-fi setting (though that would be kind of cool, come to think of it); I do it because I have a kink for half-dead guys hugging each other, and if I'm going to blow every evening for a week writing a story I can't ever sell or use in a portfolio, I'd damn well better be getting some warm fuzzies out of it. Not that I'm a total hack, not that I don't ever write fanfic that's supposed to be "serious", but at the end of the day, I write fic for fun, whereas I write original fiction for fun AND profit AND to chase out some of the demons in my own head. Fic ... it's just escapism for me.

And I tend to approach fanfic, as a reader, in the expectation that it's written largely for fantasy purposes, rather than to explore a serious plot or theme, and that it's written within its genre branding, and that it *can* be branded in that way. In some ways I also do the same with published fiction, at least to the extent that I do most of my browsing in certain sections of the bookstore because I know that I'm a lot more likely to find a book I like on the SF shelves than than the Harlequin romance shelves. But the difference is, with published fiction I see genre as sort of a necessary evil, and broader is better; whereas with fic, I want categorization and lean on it and get annoyed when writers either refuse to categorize themselves or play the genre-switch game on purpose. And there's a definite hypocrisy in that.

Goodness, this is a lot of meta. I'm going to bed.

[Side note: I have no clue what gender Synecdochic is ... and no way to prove the gender of anyone else I know online, either. I just use "she" as my usual generic pronoun, especially when I'm talking about fanfic writers because most of the ones I know *are* female.]

EDIT: Due to the potentially flameworthy topic of this discussion and the new people coming in from Metafandom, I wanted to mention that I'll be moderating with a fairly heavy hand. Please feel free to speak your mind as long as you're polite, reasonable and can do so without specifically insulting other people in the discussion. Also please be aware that this is a gen fan's journal and the opinions expressed herein tend to be more gen-friendly than slash-friendly. However, as long as you're polite and willing to listen to other people's viewpoints, you'll get no pestering from me. ^^

Comments

[gaiaanarchy.livejournal.com]

I read mainly slash and I write a whole lot of slash. This is all very strange, considering that in the non-fanfic world I wouldn't touch something with the plot of a lot of the slashfic I read with a ten foot pole. McShep in particular has a thing for Harlequinesque AUs. I often feel as though I'm doing it out of habit. I meets my checklist - more than a certain number of words, mcshep, well-written. I at least skim it and if the plot's griping, then I read it. But I don't learn from it, because really, most fics are kinda the same.

There are some amazing gen fic out there - cool scifi ideas, characterizations, historical truths (I actually based an answer on an upper-level econ test on one), all-around awesomeness. But most gen fics are a shameless excuse for whump (and I will actually skim them and just read the whump without paying attention the plot at all). Sometimes there's a little action-adventure thrown in there, but there are really only a few that have really stuck with me. 'Your Cowboy Days Are Over' and 'Twelve Things They (will someday) Say in the Pegasus Galaxy' for example, though there are many others.

There are also some absolutely astounding slashfics out there, that take a relationship and the scifi premise and use it to really say something about life, the universe, and everything. I actually don't think 'Freedom's' is one of those. It's gripping and entertaining and well-written but if it were just a book I picked up one day, I wouldn't remember it. There are some authors that I think really take slash and use it to do amazing things. I'm pretty in love with trinityofone and in_wintertime and those who like don't my creeping their audience out. And probably the most thinky fic I read in fandom is slash - Ardhanishvara, which really wouldn't touch me as much without the porn.

And in my own fics, I'm the first to admit that I don't have the timing for suspenseful action adventure, but I still want to send the boys where no man has gone before. Looking for a plot? Romance always seems to work.

With one exception, all of the fics I'm proudest of are slash. My favorite story of mine is about warcrimes and gender norms in the military and good people doing horrible things. It's McShep because I needed to take something good and twist it. I also did McKay/Hermiod to explore the idea of physical verses emotional attraction.

But then there are those that I'd much rather write as gen. I just wrote one about a device that lets people see who is going to ascend and I pulled a 'Freedom's' in a fic about John living among a community of Wraith turned into humans, because they're both slowly unwinding mysteries, which put a lot of burden on the reader to figure out what's going on and be suitably creeped out, and I know that if I don't either whump someone or label them as slash, nobody is going to stick with it, no matter how cool the payoff. Ideally, these would be short stories but I know where readership lies. It's also helpful, because while I love what you can do with the short story genre, there's not that element of surprise you can get with fanfic, because you have to create the characters and the audience then knows that you've created them with a purpose.

Most every fic I've written has had themes and morals to the story and intentions other than sheppard and mckay making whoopee, but while slashing liberates me to not worry about lenghty plotiness, it also does depress me, seeing as how the most popular story I've written was a very sappy AU chock full of cliches (though I got them in the end).

So, as a reader, I end up reading a lot of crap to dig out the little gems that are really innovated fic that take the world and use it to create something amazing. At first I thought I was reading all this romantic crap to satisfy some wacky inner girly girl who never gets to express herself, but your comments really made me look at my reading in response to my reccing and what I like in literature and I'm beginning to see that while I like porn and I like whumpage, I mostly read the things I do because I'm anal and I'll be pissed if I miss that one awesome story that everyone looks over because its not gen or slash or has rape or a deathfic or whatever.

[sholio]

But then there are those that I'd much rather write as gen. [snip] ... and I know that if I don't either whump someone or label them as slash, nobody is going to stick with it, no matter how cool the payoff.

See ... I don't *get* that, the whole idea of sticking incongruous elements into the story or intentionally mis-labeling it just to gain readers. That's so far outside my own creative boundaries that I just can't even wrap my mind around it. If the story reads better as gen, isn't it more creatively honest to write it as gen? I've read quite a few slash stories where the slash felt very grafted-on to me, and though I may have enjoyed other elements of the story, found them interesting or insightful or whatnot, I'm probably not going to review or rec such a story because to me it didn't hold together as a whole. You can have a great idea in a story, but if the rest of it feels cobbled together, as a story it's going to fail -- or, worse, you'll drive away readers who just fixate on the genre elements; like me, for example, bypassing a lot of slash stories that might be otherwise good simply because of the slash elements. (And yeah, I know people review schmalz in droves. That's just people. People love Grey's Anatomy and Desperate Housewives, but that doesn't mean they're my cup of tea or what I want to write.)

For example, my story The Man in Black and the Baker's Daughter -- I really think that it's one of the best ones I've written, and that it deals with a rather uncomfortable issue that isn't addressed on the show nearly as often as it should be: the fallout from the main characters' activities offworld. (Which, incidentally, I JUST realized in the process of looking up the URL for it, you reviewed way back in January and I never replied! Urk!) For those who haven't read it, that story deals exclusively with an OC and Ford, and yeah, it's nowhere near as popular as my more "mainstream" stories. But there is no way I would have sexied it up by sticking in a whump subplot with more popular characters, because that is absolutely NOT what that story is about. If that means that a lot fewer people read it, then I'm perfectly okay with that, because I told the story that I wanted to tell, in the manner that I wanted to tell it.

most gen fics are a shameless excuse for whump ...

Oh, I absolutely don't deny that that's true! But most slash fics that I've read are equally shameless about using the plot as a pretext to stick two characters together. And this isn't to say that you can't get a good story out of it; for example, I really like astolat's "Time in a Bottle" even though it's quite obvious that the trapped-in-VR scenario (as nicely as it's executed) is an excuse for hot mansex more than an actual plot.

And just so we're clear, it's not that I think there's anything *wrong* with writing wankfic of whatever stripe. Actually, I think what most writers do (fanfic, or not) is to identify what they personally like in stories and then write their own. That's exactly what I'm doing, and I'm not in any way ashamed of it. I guess this just makes it doubly baffling that someone would write in a genre that doesn't come naturally to them, or insert elements that don't belong in the story, for no other reason than to get more readers or "because it ought to be that way". See, THAT is where genre becomes a straitjacket, and that is precisely what it is about categorization of fiction that I really loathe.

[sholio]

And for me, giving up on a gen fic that nobody reads (yes, this is inevitably what happens whenever I try to go this route) feels a lot more like wanking than writing a more creative slash fic that just happen to add some porn to keep everyone interested.

*boggle*

*boggle again*

I ... I just really can't wrap my mind around this. I mean, I'm not trying to be a jerk, really ... I just really cannot understand this. Why would you give up on a fic just because no one reads it? This makes no sense to me. I truly do not understand it; it's completely alien to me. I'm not joking when I say that I would write if no one read my stories at all. In fact, I have a million stories on my hard drive (well, not a LITERAL million), both fanfic and original, that no one has ever read or will ever read, and I'll probably write more. In order to write original fiction, you HAVE to be willing to write for no gain at all, because it's very likely that you won't get feedback; at most you might get one or two people saying, "Hey, I really like that" -- and that's just about the most wonderful thing in the world. But I'd still go ahead and write even if they didn't say that. I mean, I *have*. For many, many years.

so even though I'd prefer it if we didn't care if something were gen or slash or het, I'm not a good enough writer for people to read my stuff without a hook like that. Wish I were.

See, here I think you're selling yourself short. I haven't read your fic, but from what you say about the kind of fic you write, it sounds quite good. I probably haven't read it because I rarely read slash, but it sounds well worth reading if I could get past the slash aspect (which tends to be an uphill road for me, but it depends on the story). If you *truly* believe you're not that good (and no one can say that but you), then why not get better? And even if no one reads your stories, why is that a problem? That's their problem, not yours!

Let me tell you about my fan history. I've talked about it a little in my LJ -- that I started out in fandoms where I was one of the only gen writers. I just went back to look at the review count on my ff.net for my Dragonball Z fics. (Yes, Dragonball Z, you heard me.) The review count on there *now* doesn't tell the whole story, because a lot of people went back and reviewed my earlier stories once they read my later ones. What we're looking at is that I'd post a story and get maybe 3 or 4 reviews trickling in over a couple of weeks. What I was writing wasn't what people were writing *or* reading; plus, I was a total unknown in a fairly large fandom. But I went along on an "if you build it, they will come" and "I want to write this, so who the hell cares" mentality. I had a certain kind of fic that I wanted to write, so I wrote it. And I found that the longer I wrote for it, the more readers I picked up; it just took them awhile to find me. By the time I left DBZ fandom, I was pretty well known -- not really a BNF, but not a nobody. In fact I've had some readers follow me over from DBZ to SGA.

I know from experience what a comedown it is to be used to getting 20 or 30 or 150 reviews on your new stories, and then start over in a new fandom or with a new kind of story and get 2. It's disappointing. But it doesn't mean the audience isn't out there; it just means they haven't found you yet. Word gets around, you get rec'd and favorited in a few places, and eventually you have a whole new readership. There are certainly larger audiences out there for certain kinds of fic, but as a strictly gen writer I don't find myself suffering for readers in any way. I've gotten oodles of reviews on some of my stories. But I didn't get there overnight; I worked my ass off and watched quite a lot of my stories fall into the fandom black hole before some of them happened to catch on.

God, I hate LJ's character limits ... ahem, moving on to a new post.

[sholio]

My recent SG-1 slash/polyamory story got very few reviews. I don't think that's a condemnation of the story or that it means there's no audience out there for Teal'c/Cameron or Daniel/Vala pairings. But *my* audience, the people who follow my fic, don't read for that. Similar with the Supernatural episode tag I wrote awhile back -- very little response, even though there's a huge SPN fanbase; it's just that the people who know me and read my fic are largely SGA fans and are looking for a certain kind of fic.

The thing is, I don't consider those stories flops because they didn't get much of a reader response. It's lovely to get reviews, but that's so peripheral to WHY I write fanfic that it hardly even registers on my radar. I really like my little story about Caldwell and his daughter ("Empire") even though not many people read it.

And I'm really not trying to be an ass or to disagree with your narrative decisions. That's none of my business at all. It's just that I can't get my mind around the whole idea of "adding some porn to keep everyone interested" because that's such a complete and total ... well ... just ... *boggle*. I didn't really know people made narrative decisions for reasons like that. Yes, I am a total innocent. *laughs*

what I want to *write,* which is fics that make people think about them afterwards or discuss them in comments.

I have nothing but respect for this! I think that's AWESOME and I wish there were more writers who were willing to do that!

I wish we had a category for MYSTERY or SHORT-STORY or PHILOSOPHY or COOL CONCEPTS or CHARACTER DRIVEN,

I think this is a very cool idea ... and have you thought about doing this for your fic? I mean, fandom is totally community-driven. If you do it, and then a few people come along and start doing themselves, eventually it may truly end up being that way.

I don't like posting on ff.net or getting one or two reviews on a story I've worked really hard on,

It sucks! I've been there! BELIEVE ME! The SGA fandom is the first time in my whole fannish "career" (10+ years) when I've just been able to post gen stories and get more than a couple of reviews without having to build up a readership first. It was like the gen promised land!

But I just never considered it a reason not to write the kind of stories I wanted to write.

I'm glad people write wankfic for me to read, but I don't much see the point in writing more of the same

But how is this different from including story elements "that sell" -- I mean, if you write slash because you see slash as the only way to gain an audience, then why not write other kinds of wankfic (e.g. gen h/c) for the same reason?

[sholio]

Edit2: SON OF EDIT: I just realized after taking a look at your website that I actually *have* been to your site before. I just had forgotten. My reading tastes in slash run almost exclusively towards fluff, and I seem to recall looking up some of your "popcorn" type stories in the past.

Re: your side note

[ratcreature]

FWIW, she identifies herself as female in this post about her LJ: "[...]there are enough people working here now that it's not as personally-identifying as it used to be back when I started this journal, when I was one of two women on staff[...]"

Re: your side note

[sholio]

Ah. Good to know I had the pronoun right, although I don't really mind if she's male or female or an asexual being from Mars -- I just need a pronoun to use for her that isn't "it" or one of those hopelessly pretentious gender-neutral ones of modern coinage.

[derry667.livejournal.com]

I shouldn't respond to such a detailed analysis in point form but...

1) I have always hated being "pidgeon-holed" myself. I think that I resent people thinking that because they know one or two things about me, they think they know what makes me tick (eg. to keep with your theme, I resent people thinking that because I have little interest in slash it's because my mind is closed against the idea of two same-sex characters in a lvong relationship - frankly, don't put your issues onto me, mate!).

2) On the other hand, the very nature of analysis is to see patterns and to infer one fact from other facts, to make judgements on the evidence you have (which is never the complete evidence). And I do love to analyse in these ways. I think the key is to remember that all such analysis is theory and not the established "fact" that some people seem to think it is. I do believe that is how fanon is generated.

3) With original fiction, I think I prefer to be surprised because I go into it expecting or even hoping that sort of thing. In fanfiction, the revelation that two canonically straight characters are going to be in a gay relationship fails to impress me as a "narrative statement" because it's been done so often before. People talk about Kirk/Spock and I think if I'd been around then, I might have even found that interesting because it would have seemed new back then. Wincest is not new. It's the same old, same old - just the fandom involved don't care even if the protagonists are brothers. Deathfic isn't new. Gender-swapping isn't new. Non-con isn't new. Mpreg isn't new. It would take something genuinely new in fanfic to impress me with "exploring boundaries" - and frankly I think I'll be a long time waiting.

4) Frankly, when people say their fics are high-minded explorations of the intricancies of social phenomena, etc - well, I just think "wanker". (Harsh? Moi?) I've become quite the disciple of "show, don't tell". So if you had to tell me that you were subverting the cliche to show how assumptions about sexuality can lead to conflict yada yada yada - well, if you had to explain it, then you failed, buddy! But if I read something and, without any heavy-handed prompting from the author, think "OMG! She's sending up all those emo cliches by presenting it as a genuine AU in a story with a real logical narrative!" - that impresses the hell out of me!

5) I kinda wish that I didn't feel that I had to say "gen-preference" - but I feel I do because if you don't, then there is an expectation that you will "follow the norm" and frankly the norm in fandom these days is either porn or sappy romance either as het or more frequently as m/m slash. I hate following the crowd. I always have. I want to be me and being different does reassure me of my own individuality (or at least give me the illusion of individuality). I don't tend to label the fannish stuff I make as "gen" because unshippyness is my default setting. I post to "gen" sites, so the people who find my stuff there would know it's gen. I don't care if others find my vids slashy, even if that wasn't what I intended when I made them. But I got a comment at my LJ recently asking if a WIP fic I was writing was "gen" - because of my default setting I'd never mentioned it. In a way, I was slightly irked that I now felt that I had to. But yeah, now some of my fics at my own LJ are labelled "gen" which is new for me - because apparently, if you don't say so, some people assume it will eventually become het or slash further along in the story.

6) I have no clue what gender Synecdochic is ... and no way to prove the gender of anyone else I know online, either. I assumed that because "her" handle ended in "chic" that she was a chick. But that's just an assumption. And I have actually had people mistake me for a guy once or twice. But no, in case you were unsure, I'm female. ;-)

[sholio]

Gotta go to work in a minute here, so a longer reply will have to wait, but somehow you've managed to say in one sentence what I spent 3000 words trying to figure out last night...

In fanfiction, the revelation that two canonically straight characters are going to be in a gay relationship fails to impress me as a "narrative statement" because it's been done so often before.

Yes! I *will* buy that a person might intend it that way, but since 99% of slash writers don't, and since slash is what EVERYBODY is writing, what you're really doing is pinning the central theme of your story on a cliche. The social norms of fanfic writers are quite different from those of society in general.

For the other half of what I wish I'd been smart enough to figure out and articulate last night, see my answer to Abyssinia below.

(And oh, I do hate the "You don't like slash? Homophobe!" argument. That's like saying that because I don't read romance novels, I must have something against people falling in love in real life. Sheesh.)

Longer and more articulate answer coming this evening.

[sholio]

Still at work, but entertaining myself during the boring parts by thinking. (Always dangerous.)

People talk about Kirk/Spock and I think if I'd been around then, I might have even found that interesting because it would have seemed new back then. Wincest is not new. It's the same old, same old - just the fandom involved don't care even if the protagonists are brothers. Deathfic isn't new. Gender-swapping isn't new. Non-con isn't new. Mpreg isn't new. It would take something genuinely new in fanfic to impress me with "exploring boundaries" - and frankly I think I'll be a long time waiting.

See, I'm thinking this is the main problem here -- that the author is ignoring the last 30+ years of fannish history and expecting her audience to react the way that a non-fanfic-reading audience would have reacted to seeing a relationship like this play out in canon. But obviously that's not realistic. At all. I think she'd have gotten much more the reaction she'd wanted (and had it look less like pandering) if she hadn't gone with a really common, "popular" pairing. If she'd done, I don't know, McKay/Hermiod or McKay/Caldwell, I think it would have come a lot closer to giving the reader the idea that this really shook up Rodney's world without saying so. As it is, the problem is that the relationship doesn't require any sort of equivalent paradigm shift for the reader -- it's passe, even primarily-gen readers have seen pretty much every conceivable variation on a John/Rodney relationship that *doesn't* shake up either guy's worldview in that way, so it's a flawed narrative choice to assume that the reader would *know* without being told that in this one case, out of 10,000 Sheppard/McKay stories, the relationship is really supposed to be treated with all the baggage that a superior/subordinate, straight guy/straight guy relationship would be treated in real life -- when usually, the exact opposite is true in slash fic.

There are a few issues that I would love to explore in original fic (e.g. incest) that I probably will NEVER write into a fanfic, because it's overdone here and it's got all that baggage along with it.

[sholio]

I have always hated being "pidgeon-holed" myself. I think that I resent people thinking that because they know one or two things about me, they think they know what makes me tick

I think this is basically the sort of thinking that set me off on my meta-ing above, because I really don't like pigeon-holing in real life, and I was trying to figure out, or possibly justify, why I'm so anal about it in fanfic. Personally I don't like being seen as a member of (x) subculture; I've always been friends with a wide range of people rather than sticking with a particular clique. I don't restrict my reading to a certain kind of book, and I've always been vaguely suspicious of people who make claims like "I don't read SF" or "I only read non-fiction". I mean, even though I don't really like romance as a genre, there have been a few straight-up romance books and movies that I really loved (like "As Good As It Gets", one of my all-time favorite movies in all its sappy glory -- though granted, that one had a pretty heavy friendship element as well).

So it didn't really make sense to me, logically, that I tend to fly off the handle, in a metaphorical kind of way, when a writer bills their work as gen and then sticks a slash relationship in there.

With slash at least, it's the canonicity (er, is that a word?) that gets me rather than the slashiness. I do NOT have a problem with two guys getting it on. It's more like ... hm, the same way I might get weirded out by a novel that is supposedly historical and then all of a sudden starts dealing with Martin Luther King Jr.'s love affair with Queen Elizabeth. CLANG!!! I can at least justify THAT. But I also generally want to know what kind of story it's going to be ... whether it's goofy or serious or dark/depressing. I think it's helped me a little to read other people's comments and realize that you usually DO get those sorts of cues from books in various ways. It's pretty rare for me to just pick up and start reading a book with NO idea what it's going to be about. The cover gives a clue, the blurb copy gives a clue, the author and the publishing company all indicate what general kind of fiction or nonfiction it is. And even with regular fiction, I usually stick to authors that I know, or books I've read good reviews for, or ones that have been recommended by people or grab me by their cover copy. It's not nearly as different from fic as I'd been thinking; I just had to think about it a little bit to realize that it really *isn't* a case of "I'll read anything" in real life. It's more like, I want to be surprised in published fiction so I gravitate to different kinds of "markers" to identify what I'll want to read: author, cover, reviews, recs.

Frankly, when people say their fics are high-minded explorations of the intricancies of social phenomena, etc - well, I just think "wanker". (Harsh? Moi?)

LOL. I think I'll address this topic in more depth under one of your other replies. But generally, I have that same reaction to all forms of pretentiousness in literature. I hate it. The vast majority of mainstream fiction seems too caught up in how fantastic it thinks it is to bother telling an interesting story. I'll never read a book that says "A NOVEL" under its title. (Except, you know, when I do.) So, yeah. Telling me "This fic contains penetrating insights into the human condition", if it doesn't actually deliver those insights, just gives me that English 101 sort of feeling. (Roughly paraphrasing something my sister once said of "Moby Dick": It may be the greatest novel ever written in the English language, but even the Cliff Notes are boring.)

[sholio]

Over the word limit! What, me? Never!

I don't tend to label the fannish stuff I make as "gen" because unshippyness is my default setting.

Yeah ... although I've always kind of thought of myself as a gen writer, it was basically just in contrast to ship/slash. Looking back on my early stories, there were some of them that contained a fairly high level of UST or even actual "getting it on" without the thought even crossing my mind that it might not be technically "gen". Actually, in my really early stories, I didn't have the first clue that such distinctions even existed. I remember very clearly one of my first WTF? moments in fandom, when I was posting a very long story (what, me? Never!) and I ended one chapter on a cliffhanger that made it look like I'd killed the main character. I got a slew of reviews that basically said "OMG! Please tell me you didn't really kill (x)!" And I was just boggled by that, because I couldn't believe that anyone would actually think I'd mess with the canon characters in that deep a fashion. (Obviously I had not yet discovered deathfics.) Similarly, at the end, quite a number of people complained that I hadn't gone ahead and paired off the hero with his main UST, even though I'd dealt with the UST (which was, basically, canon). And, again, the thought hadn't even occurred to me; I did, over the course of the story, have her come to the conclusion that she actually did love the hero, but she wasn't anywhere near ready to admit it, and I wouldn't really have thought to take it any farther.

I suppose that our early influences in fandom shape us heavily. I'd come up, largely, through anime fandoms with heavily established central pairings (e.g. Ranma). The only Western fandom that I really knew much about was SG-1, and in that case, the one big het pairing (Sam/Jack) was semi-canon -- well, this *was* 1999, and it hadn't really become canon yet, but they'd played the UST card in the series enough that I could see where people were getting it from. I knew about slash, but I sort of put it in this "other" category in my head, a "WTF? well, whatever" sort of place. Fanfic, to me, drew upon canon in the same way that I'd draw upon actual historical events if I were writing a novel about Marie Antoinette or Julius Caesar. You can't ever really KNOW what they were thinking or exactly what happened at key points during the narrative, but there is some kind of objective reality and you don't just go having Caesar survive the stabbing and run off to live in a peat bog in the Netherlands. Unless you're Dan Brown. *rimshot*

Nearly ten years later (GAH) it still strikes me as weird that I even have to define my stories as "canon-based" or "gen" because that is so much the default that I have trouble wrapping my mind around the idea of anything else -- unless it's a very specific deviation, say "slash" or "AU", but it wouldn't just be stuck in there as if the show actually would do that; that'd be like putting Lincoln in a dress and making him a cabaret dancer and then saying, "Why yes, Lincoln was quite an accomplished can-can dancer in his spare time; no one has specifically said that he wasn't..."

But no, in case you were unsure, I'm female. ;-)

Somehow I did actually know that ...

[http://users.livejournal.com/tesserae_/]

I appreciate genre and categorization in published fiction from a reader's standpoint because it *does* help me find the sorts of thing I like to read.

Plus, there are so many other markers you can use with books to figure out if it's your thing, or worth taking a risk: the cover art, the jacket copy, the blurbs; even the size and feel of the book tell a story about what's inside. (Reading a few pages, too!) I can avoid great swathes of things I *know* I won't like on a purely visual basis - as somebody said, never read anything that's got a strand of pearls and a pair of underwear on the cover.

Fic, I think, uses the headers to do the same thing, in a way; most serious fic readers know how to use them as meta-data in the same way serious book readers do. As Yin said, three beta's doesn't bode well; I am really pleased that people do warn for the 2 or 3 big squicks I have.

Beyond that, though, fic is comfort reading. It hits a different set of emotional buttons than, say, English police procedurals do, but at the end of the day it gets read for pretty much the same reason, during days that are already too short, and so, yeah, the labels let me prioritise. And I may miss stuff when it's first published, but SGA is like a bookstore I go to every week: I'll probably find everything I want to read eventually.

(Like your fic!)

[sholio]

Plus, there are so many other markers you can use with books to figure out if it's your thing, or worth taking a risk: the cover art, the jacket copy, the blurbs; even the size and feel of the book tell a story about what's inside. (Reading a few pages, too!) I can avoid great swathes of things I *know* I won't like on a purely visual basis - as somebody said, never read anything that's got a strand of pearls and a pair of underwear on the cover.

You know, this makes total sense to me. (And LOL at the pearls and underwear.) Your post got me to thinking about WHY I choose certain books out of the near-infinite reading material available at bookstores and libraries and Amazon.com -- I mean, generally I don't walk into a book store, grab the first thing with pages that I see and buy it. There's a whole winnowing process -- I'll pick books based upon recommendations from other people, or reviews, or whether I liked an author, or the cover or blurb or, yes, genre.

Categorization of fic actually makes more sense to me now because there aren't all that many cues that we get with fanfic to see if we'll like it, whereas published fiction has a lot of filters that fanfic doesn't. (e.g. you know that everything you read will be grammatically competent, and that you are unlikely to run into certain major squicks in mainstream fiction).

And, as you say, fanfic is comfort reading for me. I don't really go to it to have my worldview shaken up; I just want to relax with some happies for a while.

[abyssinia4077.livejournal.com]

I never in a million years would have figured that she'd put Sheppard and McKay together as a couple in order to do a deliberate subversion of societal roles and then have that play out in subtle ways in the way that Rodney related to the society around him. I'd seen it as a straight-up slash genre thing, where sexual love trumps all other kinds of love (which is the feeling I often get from a lot of slash). Knowing that it's deliberate and was done with calculated effect, and for a reason having nothing to do with romantic love being deeper than platonic love ... you know, it *does* change how I feel about the story.

Yes. I could be imagining it, but I think either in her post or in one of the comments, she admits that she wasn't even fully thinking that idea out (that it was a way for Rodney to see around societal privilege) when she wrote it - that it was only later that she realized the extent to which it was playing a factor in her own story.

And, reading her explanation was great because it answered my question of why put Rodney in this relationship with John - but I'm not convinced the story did what it was supposed to, and, actually, I'm not convinced the relationship would have necessarily had that effect. Atlantis is a small, enclosed community and is going to be a different environment from Earth. From Rodney's "widow" comment and other story hints, I got the impression that the relationship was common knowledge on Atlantis. I also got no impression that anybody reacted poorly to the relationship and I'd be very willing to believe that the culture of Atlantis would not have reacted the same as the culture on Earth - that nothing would have directly happened to make Rodney learn about this "privilege" thing.

So, nothing in her story indicated to me that Rodney got this different perspective on society. I had impressions of a different perspective shift - of looking at the bigger picture, at colonization, at the way the military ran things, the trends they were aiming towards, and not liking that. I didn't read the relationship with John as having a huge change on Rodney's worldview.

So, hearing those author's notes changes how I see "Freedom" but without them - my reading was yours - the same old "the only close relationship that really matters is sexual love" that dominates most slash, which is why all the other aspects of the story affected me more than the relationship with John did - Rodney's relationships with academia, with the military, with dealing with his past actions and his determination to move on and leave a legacy are what I took away from the story.

As for categorization - it is odd how fanfic chooses to categorize. Why is our main level of categorization divided into gen/het/slash rather than, say, AU/non-AU or Angst/humor/drama/action/romance or...all sorts of other ways you could choose to categorize? I think that's a big question I've come across this week, and I'm not sure of the answer.

[sholio]

And, reading her explanation was great because it answered my question of why put Rodney in this relationship with John - but I'm not convinced the story did what it was supposed to, and, actually, I'm not convinced the relationship would have necessarily had that effect. Atlantis is a small, enclosed community and is going to be a different environment from Earth. From Rodney's "widow" comment and other story hints, I got the impression that the relationship was common knowledge on Atlantis. I also got no impression that anybody reacted poorly to the relationship and I'd be very willing to believe that the culture of Atlantis would not have reacted the same as the culture on Earth - that nothing would have directly happened to make Rodney learn about this "privilege" thing.

EXACTLY. (I love it when people are more articulate than I am.) I can't really reply in depth because I have to go to work, but I think this is perhaps *the* big thing about that explanation that doesn't make sense to me -- the reason why, for me, the story fails on that level. I really don't think that a kind of abstract "hey, now I'm a member of an oppressed group, and wow, now I have sympathy for all these other historically oppressed groups" thing would work for Rodney AT ALL ... especially since Atlantis doesn't really seem to have the kind of "oppression" that would clout Rodney upside his "privileged" head. Seeing a bunch of local people killed by US/Atlantis policies wouldn't be enough to change his worldview, but falling in love with a teammate in a social environment that doesn't appear to discourage that sort of relationship *would* be? And making the jump from gay rights to colonialism is such a huge leap that I just don't buy it ... and I don't really perceive that subtext in the story. But after reading her explanation, I do actually buy the idea that you *can* have a relationship that would be traditionally categorized as slash without the story itself being slash, per se ... though I'm not necessarily convinced this story is an example of it.

[with-apostrophe.livejournal.com]

Why is our main level of categorization divided into gen/het/slash rather than, say, AU/non-AU or Angst/humor/drama/action/romance or...all sorts of other ways you could choose to categorize?

Perhaps because fanfic (or at least, SGA fanfic) is dominated by ships, of whatever nature? It had been stated somewhere above this that fanfic is a result of fans wanting to see factor X expounded upon in the context of the universe of their chosen TV show/film/book/pop band or whatever. Factor X is usually a ship in SGA.

"AU" is a problematic label in itself. What is considered AU? There are hundreds of fics out there which I consider to be AU because they disagree with my interpretation of what happened in the source material. The author considers their story to be consistent with canon, I do not, but I like the story and believe it could happen that way in an AU, just not in this universe. How then do we decide that it's AU? I really have no idea.

I honestly don't know what the answer is to categorising fic. Maybe we do need to get into the nitty gritty and be super-specific? Therefore, my crack!fic AU 'The Boys From Atlantis' might be -
"Gen, crack!fic, total AU, with SG-1 crossover, brief mentions of het relationships - some pairings being canonically contradictory - but nothing more heated than an alcohol fueled kiss is described. Could be read as slash, (but then nearly everything can)."
Then again, maybe not. Maybe every labelling system is as broken as the nest one and we just have to make the most of the bad job that came with the fandom?

[iamrighthere.livejournal.com]

Because we can find so much information about a particular work of original fiction from reading, say, the back cover or what's posted on amazon.com and elsewhere, narrowly characterizing it isn't really necessary. With fanfic, the opportunity to adequately explain what a story is about is rather limited, unless the author chooses to include a detailed preface. Thus, readers have come to depend on the common categories to determine if a story might interest them. The genre listings provide precious little info and are limiting, but between them and the summary, the writer tries to "sell" their story and the reader tries to "buy" it. What other choice do we have?

That said, I actually do have larger themes that I'm trying to convey in my stories. That doesn't prevent me from enjoying other stories because most writers, bless their hearts, just want to write for the sheer joy of doing it. Most readers want to read wonderful stories about characters that they love.

Still, I try to be true to the genre, which is usually gen. That is where canon lives. The challenge is exploring weirder ideas without punching out the canon walls too much.

As far as "Freedom" is concerned, I never placed the Rodney/John homosexual relationship against any backdrop other than it intensifying McKay's sense of loss--loss of his lover and loss of Atlantis--and his eventually honoring John and trying to forgive himself by "turning off" the city and through his post-Atlantis work. I didn't "get" the deeper things that she discusses in her meta the several times that I read the story and I wonder how many readers did.

There's too much in all of these metas to discuss fully. I have to stop here because of the overwhelming volume of "discussable" material and my limited ability to type long enough to express myself adequately (I've been unwell lately).

[sholio]

Ouch; I hope that you are not *too* unwell and will be feeling better soon...

One of the reasons why I like your stories is because they push the boundaries of where SGA gen fic normally goes, if that makes any sense -- and while I don't always like where they go e.g. "Monster", having read that one right before I read "Known World" meant that there was a special angst and ultimately satisfaction to that story that I wouldn't have gotten if I'd known for sure that you were a writer who always puts the characters' pieces back together at the end.

It's unfortunate but true: if you want your readers to really feel what you write, you have to hurt them every once in a while. Or shake up their expectations. Too much of a good thing is not better. The book series I'm reading right now (Dresden Files) had a pretty good character death fake-out in one of the books, which wouldn't really have worked if they hadn't just killed off a character that I liked in the previous book. My initial reaction when they "killed" (x) was "AAAUGH! NO!" and not "Oh, well, they'll fix it..." and so it made me extra happy when the "out" was given.

Like I mentioned above, canon to me is the basic place where the stories spring from, and it's both as malleable and as immutable as history itself. There is a lot of "spin" that you can put on history, but only so far: in one of my other replies, I used the example of Abraham Lincoln as a can-can dancer. Damn it, you just can't work that into a historical novel no matter how much you might want to, at least not without the reader going, "Hey, what the ..." And you can work around the edges of canon in all sorts of interesting ways, but eventually there comes a point where it just *doesn't* work in light of canon anymore, and as a reader, I would like to know if that's going to be the case.

The challenge is exploring weirder ideas without punching out the canon walls too much.

Yes indeed. That's a challenge and a fine line to walk -- and so much more challenging, IMHO, than simply saying "Well, anything's possible" and inserting any sort of subtext no matter how far-fetched.

I didn't "get" the deeper things that she discusses in her meta the several times that I read the story and I wonder how many readers did.

I'm thinking not very many. See above for more discussion of why I feel that her premise is fundamentally flawed. It comes down to a few basic points, though:

- The John/Rodney pairing is probably the most "safe" and "mainstream" choice in SGA fanfic, moreso even than gen, and this makes it a terrible narrative choice for something that is supposed to shake the foundations of Rodney's worldview, because it doesn't shake up the reader's viewpoint in a similar way.

- Expecting the readers to interpret a slash relationship, by itself, as fundamentally life-changing totally ignores the deep history of slash in fanfiction, and the way that it is most commonly interpreted as *not* life-changing. Not that it can't be written differently, but since social mores in fandom tend to run a certain way, the writer needs to do more work to point out why THIS particular slash relationship is different from all the others.

- Rodney's nature, and the nature of his life on Atlantis, is not such that a gay relationship would have affected his life in such a deep and fundamental way.

It's a pretty classic case of showing, but not telling.

[susnn.livejournal.com]

I should probably preface this tangentially by saying that *my* definition of Gen is that canon characters retain most of the character traits, including sexual preference, that we see in canon. And given that it is statistically more likely in RL that a person is straight, I ascribe that orientation to a character until it is canonically changed in an episode or until there are sufficient indications from off screen sources such as the actors themselves, producers or writers that the orientation is different.) Will/Grace is as much slash for me as McShep. But that's not what I'm here to comment on. :-)


Discussion of the McKay/Sheppard dynamic and its acceptability in fanon is interesting. What I say next has probably been said elsewhere and has even been touched upon tangentially in this discussion when it was noted that the Sheppard/McKay dynamic usually takes place in stories where it is largely accepted, not only by the readers but by the other characters. On the face of it, this might be simply because fandom has a more open and accepting disposition toward sexual preferences. And going by the relative numbers of McShep stories and gen stories, that is a fairly safe conclusion to reach. (Don't scare me by writing slash, Sholio, you're one of the not-too-many Gen writers I can count on to provide me with that particular genre with consistent excellence! I can get slash manywheres; gen, not so much. :-) But I think another reason might be because if the story is set in a universe where such relationships do pose substantial problems, then it changes something fundamental about the canon characters when they choose to act upon their emotions. Take John Sheppard; here's a man willing to sacrifice his career and his life to save others. Put him in a relationship with McKay in a world where such a relationship WILL cause problems with command and control and community comity and you ask me, as a reader, to believe that a man who will sacrifice everything, including his life, to keep others safe will be willing to undercut his ability to carry out his duty in order to be with the man he loves. Sacrifice his life, okay; sacrifice his sex life, he can't do it. Ummmm, don't think so. As mentioned above, this really does play into the "one tru wuv" rationale but that is really a very selfish rationale at its heart and Sheppard doesn't seem to be that selfish. You as a writer would have to convince me that circumstances and his experiences have been such that he no longer cares that the wraith are still a threat and his lessened ability to perform his duties aren't issues before I could even begin to see canon Sheppard in the story. I can see that such a story could be powerful and moving and even convincing ... but it's not exactly what I'm looking for in SGA fanfic. Original fiction, yes.

[sholio]

Don't scare me by writing slash, Sholio, you're one of the not-too-many Gen writers I can count on to provide me with that particular genre with consistent excellence!

LOL! Thanks, although ... seriously, I make no promises about what I may do in the future. But I find it very unlikely that I'd write slash for the SGA bunch. The way I write a character has to grow out of the way I see a character -- I can't do it any other way, and I already have a very established way that I see the SGA characters.

Still, I can't say what I'm going to try; I did a couple of slash stories with my original characters and liked one of them enough that I worked it into canon. *grin* But I can basically guarantee that in order to do a non-canon relationship between ANY of the SGA characters, I would need to be able to justify, to myself and to my readers, the possibility that what I'm writing could happen on the show. Which, in some cases, would take so much hoop-jumping that it's hardly worth it to me to try.

Put him in a relationship with McKay in a world where such a relationship WILL cause problems with command and control and community comity and you ask me, as a reader, to believe that a man who will sacrifice everything, including his life, to keep others safe will be willing to undercut his ability to carry out his duty in order to be with the man he loves. Sacrifice his life, okay; sacrifice his sex life, he can't do it. Ummmm, don't think so. As mentioned above, this really does play into the "one tru wuv" rationale but that is really a very selfish rationale at its heart and Sheppard doesn't seem to be that selfish. You as a writer would have to convince me that circumstances and his experiences have been such that he no longer cares that the wraith are still a threat and his lessened ability to perform his duties aren't issues before I could even begin to see canon Sheppard in the story.

Hmm! You know, this is something I hadn't even thought about -- and maybe that one reason why, thinking strictly in terms of what might happen in canon, so many of the Sheppard pairings seem so unlikely to me.

I'm still not sure if I'm 100% on board with this because Sheppard's also so impulsive and juvenile in certain ways; I could see him jumping into something with both feet without really thinking through the ramifications of what he was doing. Still, it does smack of "one true love" syndrome.

I can see that such a story could be powerful and moving and even convincing ... but it's not exactly what I'm looking for in SGA fanfic. Original fiction, yes.

I need another story besides "Freedom" to dissect that's got the same issues, because I'm starting to feel a bit weird about tearing up Synecdochic's story without her being here to defend herself. It's actually a brilliant story; I wrote her a long gushing email after reading it (last year sometime) because it really did hit with a much harder punch than most of the fanfic I've seen, and it makes you think about real life issues like loss and growing up in a way that fanfic tends not to. I ended up being a little bit torn about how to relate to the story, though, because it had that resonance with the characters that original fiction would have lacked (i.e. where you jump right in knowing who the characters are) but it wasn't quite "my" Sheppard and McKay.

(comment re-posted to fix lousy HTML)

[(Anonymous)]

I'm having issues with LJ and passwords so this is Susn here.


Fiendshipper wrote: I'm still not sure if I'm 100% on board with this because Sheppard's also so impulsive and juvenile in certain ways; I could see him jumping into something with both feet without really thinking through the ramifications of what he was doing. Still, it does smack of "one true love" syndrome.

Well, he does seem to have some control issues but I don't think they are related to his duty. No wait, that's not quite what I mean. Okay, let's try this: Sheppard has a definite concept of where his duty lies and what his responsibilities are to his position and his people. His "chain of command issues" have been used to justify portraying him as someone who is rebellious by nature but I'm not sure that a real case can be made for that take. He did make it to major in what seems to be a relatively short time which probably would not be the case if he could not work within the chain of command as a general rule. He seems to me to have trouble with the chain of command when his superiors issue an order which contradicts that which he sees as his duty and his responsibilities as in Hot Zone. It could also explain why he wound up in Antarctica and not in CIVLANT when he disobeyed orders in Afghanistan. His actions were in accord with what were his normal responsibilities as a SAR pilot. He seems to have a handle on what it takes to carry out his duties and I can't see him deliberately doing something that would affect his ability to do his job just because it is something that he wants. I could see, and have read a story or two, that makes use of his impulsiveness to have him jump into sex with McKay but then has him waking up to the potential fallout of that liaison and backing away which led to good character studies of both men. I guess I'm saying that to work for me a McShep story almost has to take place in a universe where such liaisons are accepted to work unless the story itself takes on and addresses the issues above.

[sholio]

Ahhh, I can see what you're saying here. And it's along similar lines as pairing up Elizabeth with anybody in Atlantis now that it's been established that she has very strong boundaries about fraternizing with people under her command. At this point, an Elizabeth/anybody pairing is going to be a *very* hard sell to me as a reader, from a strictly canon standpoint; I imagine it can be done, but it's going to have to be a whole lot better thought out than "OMG they're so in love".

I think this is one of the areas where slash/ship runs into problems with me, because you can't just change one thing in the character dynamic without expecting it to have fallout and affect a bunch of other things. Possibly, this is why when I do read slash, I lean more towards the stuff that's totally goofball fluff, because most of the ones that address the actual issues involved, don't do a very good job of convincing me; they do more to call attention to the implausibility than they actually manage to overcome that implausibility. It's kind of like the way that certain fics attempt to address the "everybody speaks the same language in Stargate" issue, but all that usually does is call attention to the implausibility of it and the inconsistencies of any theory that attempts to explain it.

[caladria.livejournal.com]

Here via metafandom

I appreciate genre and categorization in published fiction from a reader's standpoint because it *does* help me find the sorts of thing I like to read

The difference between original fic and fanfic, at least the way I read it, is that with fanfic I have a preconceived idea of the characters, and unlike original fic, I have opportunuity to disagree with the author. Personally, I don't read slash, because my stumbling block is "but... he likes *girls*. And they don't *react* to each other like gay men would." Its my "but you don't get Orcs in Central Park". So from the very start, my take on the character and the author's is at odds. And frankly, I can't be bothered to struggle through it (plus the fact that my reaction to Rodney/John is more wtf? than teh HOT!!). And having got into this mindset with established-straight I tend to stick with it for not-established-either-way-or-both.

And as far as categorisation goes, I don't like the deathfic label. Cos, well, there goes my suspense. I can't spend the entire fic wondering whether character X is going to make it or not.

Broader terms don't really work in fanfic, either. Because, well, every SGA fic is sci fi. They're in a different galaxy.

But gen, as far as I'm concerned, deals with canon doings. This includes canon-established relationships (e.g. if two characters are married in show X then having them not behave like they're married is OOC.). But not dealing with them exclusively. If Rodney gets caught by Carson leaving Katie Brown's quarters at 7am, that's fine. If it turns into porn, its not gen. If the (sexual) relationship is the motivating factor, its not gen. I know this gets hazy around the Sam/Jack line for SG-1 because its not really, truly, established canon. Kind of. Its semi-canon, and some people don't see it. A meaningful look can have many meanings etc. So for the sake of my sanity, an SG-1 gen fic has only the friendship (and can focus exclusively on the friendship rather than the plot if it so desires) between the team. And also, I realise from my definition, that no slash can be gen. Except if you're wandering down the Torchwood road.

[sholio]

Personally, I don't read slash, because my stumbling block is "but... he likes *girls*. And they don't *react* to each other like gay men would." Its my "but you don't get Orcs in Central Park". So from the very start, my take on the character and the author's is at odds.

BINGO. My problem exactly. And I *do* read slash on occasion, but in order to do so, I need to suspend disbelief to a rather large degree, because that is absolutely NOT how the characters behave on the show, or how they've been shown in canon to *be*.

But gen, as far as I'm concerned, deals with canon doings. This includes canon-established relationships (e.g. if two characters are married in show X then having them not behave like they're married is OOC.). But not dealing with them exclusively.

I agree with you all the way. As you say, a canon couple are *going* to behave as a couple in canon and you basically can't write a story about the cast without referencing their couple-ness; regardless of whether they're gay or straight, that doesn't make it not gen. (Willow/Tara is one of the only canon gay couples that can be used as a reference here -- but according to some of the stricter definitions I've been seeing, nearly every season 5/6 Buffy fic would be slash, and that's just silly.)

I'd say that your example of having Rodney leaving Katie's quarters would kinda take us outside canon territory, though -- we know he's attracted to her, but at this point in canon, there's no real indication that anything has happened beyond a couple of very aborted dates. Carson leaving Cadman's room might be a better example. Anyway, though, I agree with you in principle.

[rydra_wong]

But the caveat is that if you do that, you have a lot of work to "sell" the story to the other audience -- if I put ghosts and goblins in Manhattan, I'm going to have a hard uphill road to convince a mainstream, non-fantasy audience that they need to be there and aren't the reason for the story. This isn't because my readers are being jerks about it; it's just that it *will* take a little more convincing for them than for people who already read and like fantasy and are likely to say, "Oh look, an orc chasing a jogger through Central Park, cool!" and move on, as opposed to a non-fantasy reader who gets stuck on the "But there ARE no orcs in Central Park!" aspect of it.

Except ... um.

Okay, here's where I'm coming from on this.

For me, if a story (fanfic or original fiction) postulates that a character who we've seen be attracted to women might also be attracted to men - that doesn't hit me as any kind of genre switch away from the "mainstream" of fanfic.

I'm not going "But there ARE no orcs in Central Park!" because - there ARE gay and bisexual people in reality. There are even gay and bisexual people in the US military; quite a lot of them, in fact.

And I'm not going, "But we've seen this character date women - how can this possibly beeee???" because - well, for example, my cousin dated women for years. Before he came out.

Which is one of the many reasons why I have trouble buying the idea of particular characters as "canonically straight" (and penknife wrote a truly fantastic post about this here).

I understand if someone just doesn't want to read about same-sex relationships (or any relationships at all), if they're looking for stories focused on individual character study, platonic friendship or team interaction instead (which, plenty of the time, I am) or if their sense is that a particular character is utterly straight and they can't buy them any other way, or if they just feel that stuff labelled "gen" shouldn't contain any pairings. Or whatever. What you want to read is what you want to read.

And as I've said elsewhere, I tend to be ultra-cautious when it comes to labelling (if in doubt, I often go for the "mostly gen with reference to x/y" option).

But I don't get seeing the inclusion of bisexuality as a human possibility as being a genre shift - let alone as inherently making something "AU" or "OOC", which I saw some people suggest in some of the related discussions.

If asked, I would say that "het" contains heterosexual relationships, "slash" contains homosexual relationships, and I tend to think "gen" contains no relationships or minimal reference to relationships, but I don't really see those categories as being different genres (unlike, say, a character study as opposed to an action-adventure story, or a romance story - of whatever orientation - as opposed to a non-romance).

There are most certainly various fannish traditions, cliches and expectations about all of those categories, but then, what I think of as the "slashiest" (in that sense) story I've ever written is het - and if we're going on the basis of fannish expectations about story type instead of pairing, then I can see why some people have said that "Freedom" is "gen"; it refers to a m/m relationship, but it isn't remotely a romance narrative focused on getting the couple together sexually. But obviously, in practice, this is a problematic basis for labelling.

In other words, it's kind of like using Nazis or Muslims or rape victims or anything else that people have strong reactions to

I'm not sure about the analogies you're drawing here. Yes, people can and do have strong reactions to all of these, but ...

Okay, IRL I live in a neighbourhood with a large Muslim population. If I write about that, do I have to be making a statement about Islam? Do I have to "justify" having Muslim characters in my story/essay/whatever? Does mentioning the halal restaurant down the street mean I'm writing in a particular "genre"? Or is that just part of my reality?

(TBC, damn the torpedoes and the character limit ...)

[rydra_wong]

I admit I may be hopelessly biased here, because I seem to slop about all over the place in my limited experience as a writer and be incapable of sticking within one category. My gen has brief references to canon relationships and UST, my slash gets me reviews saying it "reads like gen", my het is focused on developing an AU and has hardly any sex in - or alternately is full of sex and thoroughly "slashy". And the one major story I've written that contains no references at all to relationships (canon or not) is, in my head, clearly pre-slash.

At the moment I'm working on something that is probably going to be gen, although it may at one point briefly reference a canon relationship - right now, what I put in the headers is a long, long way down my list of worries compared to the fact that it's apparently trying to be a novella and the POV alone is going to kill me.

I get what you're saying about the branding of fanfic, and I think to some extent we all have the same response re: labels - I want the labels on fanfic to enable me to find the stuff I want to read, and avoid the stuff I don't want to read, dammit! *g*

But.

I'd hate to think that fanfic can only be "branded goods". My credo probably works out as something like: life is messy, people are complicated, and both sexual and non-sexual relationships can be part of life and reveal interesting things about who people are, porn is good (at least when it's good porn), and so is non-porn (also when it's good), and putting the chocolate in the peanut butter, the black pepper on the strawberries, and the brown bread crumbs in the icecream can all be good things and valid narrative strategies *g*.

If we end up taking a story like "Freedom's Just Another Word" - which, as everyone seems to agree, is at the very least very good - and treating it as a problem because it doesn't neatly conform to our fannish category expectations, I think that's a loss.

[derry667.livejournal.com]

Dude! You got a mention in Metafandom?

Well, things could now get very interesting ;-)

I'm at work, but will defintely have to find time take a look at the fireworks new comments later.

Keep the homefire burning! LOL!

[sholio]

So far, things have been quite polite, as far as I can tell. Of course, maybe my post up at the top scared them away. ;)

[kriadydragon.livejournal.com]

Hiya! I stumbled across this during another of my hunts for fics, and found it fascinating. I normally don't become involved in such discussions as most tend to be overly complicated (made long winded by the use of too many big vocaubulary words, as though the writer is just trying to prove how smart they sound) or the topic wasn't what I initially thought it was going to be.

I agree with you about the categorization of published works, as I have books that I have no idea how to catagorize - whether to label them for young adults or for adults - because they are suitable for both. But I also kind of rely on categorization. I don't like sexually explicit material, plain and simple. I also don't like graphically grotesque whumping (people being gutted in great detail). Images like that have a way of getting glue to your brain, even though you don't want them there, and can pop in for no reason, without provocation. So I do what I can to avoid it. I know this means missing out on some really great books, but when it comes to keeping unwanted images out of my head versus being intelectually stimulated, I'll take keeping unwanted images out of my head any day. Yeah, I'm probably missing out on some great fictional/nofictional work, but I'll live.

So I rely on categorization to that extent. A lot of times, when hitting the bookstores or libraries, I'll haunt the young adult sections as I'm more likely to avoid sexually explicit content with those books than books in the adult fantasy section (doens't mean I avoid the adult fantasy section, beause I don't, I just stick with authors I already know.)

So in fanfiction, maybe the heavy categorization isn't needed, but some people feel it unecessary to put warnings. Yes, even published works don't do this, but there are sites you can go to now that not only give you the synopsis of a book, but warnings as well. Nothing explicit, just whether or not there's anything sexual or graphic. Hey, movies do that, there's no reason it shouldn't be the same for books.

Not categorizing, keep in mind, "warnings". Warnings don't necessarily give anything away, they just tell you what to watch out for. And when it comes to books and fanfiction, it doesn't mean I'm not going to read the work just because it's in there (unlike movies. I don't watch R-rated stuff). If I know it's there, I'll just skip it. The Dresden Files, for example, had a few raunchy scenes that I knew were their because a friend warned me (even covered up one rather extensive scene in one book with post-its, which was very helpful). "Your Cowboy Days are Over" had that scene with a OFC that I just skipped (Then accidentally ran into on a second reading but that's not the point).

So when there are no warnings, I rely on categorization. If I see parings, slash, UST, or Het, I usually won't read. If its' "Pre-slash with your goggles on" I sometimes will. If this means missing out on a really good story, then I miss out.

So maybe labels like Slash, het, gen and so on shouldn't be seen as categorization but as simplified warnings (and used as thus), because sometimes ratings are not enough (since I've come across so many mis-rated stories). Especially since you have stories where the author allows a fic to be seen two ways (the "pre-slash with your goggles on" fics) with nothing direct, just hinted at to be intrepreted how you will. Yes, categories tend to be complicated, but warnings aren't. But that's just my opinion.

Anyways, that's kind of my two-cents. I probably misspelled some words, but it happens. Hope what I said makes sense.