This work of fanfiction (though I mean that in the loosest sense, because it’s AU and the characters it’s based on serve more as purely physical models than they do personality templates), and it’s massive and epic and has taken nearly a year to be completely posted.

But as of a couple weeks ago, completely posted it was.

I am not going to name it here, but some readers may know or figure out what I’m talking about, and how do you warn for spoilers when you’re not even naming a particular fanwork?

Oh well… weird pseudo-spoiler warning provided… sort of.

Still with me?

Right, so this story, which is basically an evocative, sexy, glorious historical novel in its own right, is beautifully written and made me love and care about these characters and—sometimes rather obsessively—check to see if new chapters were up.

And then the ending came along and soured my enjoyment to a painful degree.

Now, I can be as satisfyingly heart-wrenched by an unhappy ending as anyone else. I’ve written a few unhappily ever afters myself, and the story in question is the tale of a gay male couple in love at a time and place where gay male couples couldn’t really be openly in love, so the makings of tragedy were there from the get-go. But this ending tragedy (in which… here are the spoilers… our heroes never get to live their lives together and one of them dies unexpectedly, leaving the other old and alone without a chance to say goodbye) was the worst kind of disappointment, and is making me think about how tragic endings (or perhaps even Tragick Endings) are a knife-edge type deal.

Just the right amount of tragedy or a set of convincing and well-thought-out reasons why things come out badly in the end, and you’ve got a story that sticks in the reader’s mind and tugs just right at the heartstrings. But too much and/or needless tragedy, and you leave a bad taste in the reader’s mouth.

The kicker with this story is that it seemed to be leading to a satisfying happy end. It had plot devices cleverly in place that were foreshadowing a happier eventuality (the one I really honestly thought was going to happen) and it’s written in the style of novels like Georgette Heyer’s or Jane Austen’s, in which, to borrow an apt quote from Becoming Jane, the ‘characters will have, after a little bit of trouble, all that they desire’. And instead, in the very last chapters posted, in one fell swoop, the story turned into a bald, cruel look at how people in similar situations were indeed forced to live and die without happiness, or with only snatched bits of happiness amid lives of subterfuge and deceit.

I know at least one other fannish friend gave up on this story a good long while back out of sadness at this state of affairs. I, caught up in the romance and the beautiful writing and the obvious labor of love that this story was, blithely read on, convinced that I was reading toward a happy (or, at least, a happy-as-is-possible) ending. And some may see the ending as it is as just that.

I, however, cried. Not in a stoic, Single Perfect Tear kind of way. And not in a hyperbolic OMG YR STORY MADE ME CRYYYYYY!!!!!!1 kind of way. No, like tears pouring down my cheeks in shock and sorrow for the death of one fictional character and the loneliness of the other.

And now, whenever I think about the story, despite the 150,000 + words of delightfully twisting plot and nuanced emotional scenes and juicy encounters, I will think about the horrible sadness of the ending and be unable to enjoy earlier bits without remembering what is to come.

In the end, though I freely admit this is one of the more impressive, amazing fanworks I’ve ever seen, I won’t read this story again. And that, to me, is the mark of an Unsuccessful Tragick Ending.

Anyone want to come to the defence of Tragedy? Or of this particular tragedy? Or join in on what I’m hoping will be a sort of catharsis to dispel my blues? As always, feel free.

First up: an article from AfterElton

This was posted back in August and was supposed to be the first of two parts.  I kept waiting for the second before I posted this, but so far I haven’t seen it, so I’m linking you to Part 1/?.  Brent Hartinger does a pretty interesting job discussing the rise of slash fandom and its effect on the LGBT community.  Includes some interesting issues raised, like whether the gender roles in slashfic are potentially harmful to mainstream acceptance of gay male culture, the increased awareness of and demand for gay plotlines and characters in popular culture.  Also, Adam Lambert.

Numero dos: an Out.com article

 

 

Another summer-time post about slashfans that, frankly, pisses me off.  It’s condescending and way behind the times and treats ‘the renegade slash fiction phenomenon’ (yes, that’s a direct quote) like some little afterthought of a freak occurrence as opposed to a major fannish culture. 

Also a direct quote?  This gem: What has been a relatively recent and surprising revelation is that the majority of slash creators (known as “slashers”) and fans are heterosexual, college-educated women — and that for a rather large number of them, gay erotica is the pornography of choice. Observe the “slashers”, dear reader, in their natural habitat.  See them stalk their prey across the e-plains.  And behold their surprising demographics!  What?  What’s that you say, dear reader?  Slash fans have nearly always been primarily heterosexual, college-educated women who prefer gay porn to other types?  But that can’t be, for it disproves this author’s belief in the importance of her own discovery of what we’ve all known for years. 

Anyway, the article still has interesting content, mostly in the bits about how slash fandom has more recently prompted commercially-available m/m romance novels, often written by fen who’ve made names for themselves as slashers.  Also in the bits from the authors themselves (Alex Beecroft and Erastes, whose work many of you may be familiar with), where they talk quite candidly about their own identities and sexualities. 

So, please to be disregarding Cintra Wilson’s narrow-mindedness (seriously… you still don’t believe there’s anything to all this m/m fiction apart from the sex?), which she attempts to explain away with that most white-washing of last lines, who are we to judge?, and focus on the fact that there are some good meaty issues raised here.  Is it misogynistic to write significant female characters completely out of the sexual realm (as many slashers do)?  Does the slasher’s excitement about m/m relationships include (or even strictly rely on) identification with one or both characters in the pairing?  Are m/m romance novels a sell-out betrayal of the slash subculture?  Good stuff, despite my ranting.

Item number three: Fandom comes to Bigthink.com

Bigthink.com is a site that’s full of musings and interesting articles and videos about all kinds of topics.  Matthew Nisbet is one of their contributors who looks at communication’s influence on various fields, and here he shares some of Alice Bell’s (academic lecturer and blogger extraordinaire) thoughts about the intersection of fan culture and the science communication world.  Basically, she’s suggesting cool things about how slash fandom can positively influence and spread dialogue about science and scientists.  She cites a few specific examples: in particular, general_theory (Einstein/Eddington slash based on the BBC drama and generally very thoroughly historically researched), one of those Tiny Fandoms of Awesome types that I have mentioned previously as being so addictively engrossing to a select few.  Personally, I’m tickled by the idea that through fandom and self-professed nerdiness/geekery, information about history and science can be disseminated and… dare I say it…. even given a cool, counter-cultural sheen.

And finally: The Boston Phoenix’s currently-running politislash contest

Yep, it’s your turn to submit 400 words or less OR 300 dpi fanart of your fave political slash pairing to letters@phx.com by 22 October to spice up the dreary mid-term elections in the USA.  My favorite thing about this?  Not, actually, its existence overall, but the note from editor Sarah Rosenbaum that, “We’ve put out the above call to our readers here in Boston — but we really want submissions from slash fandom, too. This isn’t a make-fun-of-slashers deal; it’s more in the spirit of a crack prompt. So please, help us out.”

So, on that cheery note of the mainstream soliciting fandom for help, I will close this edition of FitN and wish you all fannish dreams until I return.

]]> http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/10/08/fitn-time-slash-fans-go-public/feed/ 0 fandomfan Early Kirk/Spock image m/m romance book covers Klingon TJI_Contest http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/10/03/my-investment-in-dudes-who-are-invested-in-each-other/ http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/10/03/my-investment-in-dudes-who-are-invested-in-each-other/#comments Sun, 03 Oct 2010 17:15:23 +0000 fandomfan http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/?p=105 ]]> (via sexisnottheenemy)

Do I have your attention now?

Ah, there you are.  Thanks for coming back as I return to my musings.

To do that, I’m going to jump off the back of what is maybe the most overemphasised question when it comes to slash fandom: ‘Why are the fen predominantly women and the characters predominantly men?’

It’s overemphasised enough and has been written about enough (notably here… go read… it’s an interesting article from early days of acafandom) that I’m not going into it here.

My piggy-backing goes from there into some of the issues surrounding female and feminine identities and slash fandom.

Me, I’m someone who identifies as female and fairly feminine, so I’m serving as my own case study here.  Hardly the most impartial or objective, and hardly scientific, but highly observable, and if anyone of you want to chime in with other perspectives, by all means do it, and increase the findings.

I find that my slash fandom consumption goes up in direct proportion to how emotionally un/fulfilling the rest of my life is.

When I’m happy and busy and generally emotionally satisfied, slash gets put on the backburner.  If I’m in a romantic relationship, my slash fic reading is really only an occasional dalliance.  I don’t write at all.  I am fully capable of consuming canon without slash goggles on, and if I do watch a movie featuring a fey, swishy swashbuckling pirate or a tv show about co-dependent brothers who fight ghosts and repeatedly die for each other, well then those are just engaging characters, aren’t they?

When I’m not getting my emotional jollies from a rich personal life (be it work, romance, environment, socialising, etc), then damn if Jack Sparrow isn’t the gayest gay pirate that ever nanced his way down the pike, and shit, how can those Winchester boys NOT be screwing each other silly?!

What this highlights for me, really, is one of the important things I get out of fandom.  I rely on it not just to provide fantasy fodder of attractive dudes going at it, but also for the emotional resonance that comes from writing done primarily by and for women.  Sure, a good PWP can get the blood racing, but my favourite stories are always the ones with a hefty dose of feelings.  Give me some drawn-out UST finally culminating in a couple coming together (pun very much intended) or a slowly-growing, quiet, deep kind of love, or hell, even some schmooptastic curtain!fic, but oh god, give me the emo porn!

And yes, I connect this to the female/feminine identity thing, because, on the whole I am indeed convinced that those of the girlier persuasions are the ones who want more emotional depth out of their fannish materials.  If you’re a male/masculine type and feel this same way, by all means jump on in and tell me I’m being narrow-minded.

It’s come to the point that I can gauge my overall life wellbeing by the amount of slash I’m reading.  NOT (very VERY much NOT) that I find anything wrong with my periods of devouring every last byte a given fandom has to offer.  I’m perfectly at peace with my fannishness.  But it does serve as a pretty accurate indicator of how the rest of my life is going.  It’s a comforting and much-beloved escapist source of happiness when I’m not at my best.  And it’s a patient old friend waiting in the wings for our next bonding moment when I’ve things going on for me.

Do you feel this way?  How much do you think your fannishness is connected to your gender identity in this way?  Share your thoughts.  You know I always want to hear them.

]]> http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/10/03/my-investment-in-dudes-who-are-invested-in-each-other/feed/ 5 fandomfan tumblr_l1c2hlDwFi1qany6lo1_500 http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/05/20/pro-writers-and-anonymity-or-the-lack-thereof/ http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/05/20/pro-writers-and-anonymity-or-the-lack-thereof/#comments Thu, 20 May 2010 14:03:10 +0000 fandomfan http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/?p=95 ]]> Unless you’ve been living under an internet-less rock for the past couple weeks, you’re probably aware that a couple popular professional writers have made some rather… ahem… pointed statements regarding their dislike of fanfiction involving their characters.  Check the metafandom archives if you want more on this.  It’s not actually the main point of my post.

(Aside, though.  There was a kind of awesomely brilliant Livejournal post that someone wrote in the past couple days about how Diana Gabaldon, one of the above-mentioned pro-writers [George R R Martin being the other], after ranting about fanfic for several now-deleted posts on her blog, then went on to post about how she’d written to an actor from Dr Who about how he’d inspired her own writing… which involves putting her beloved and to-be-protected-at-all-costs characters into some notably sexually and violently abusive situations.  If any of you can find that post again for me, I’ll love you dearly.  It was clever and well-argued, and I thought it was great, but I can’t for the life of me remember who wrote it.)

I mean, I’m obviously in favor of fanfiction.  This is no surprise, and it’s not really a debate I’m going to weigh in on right now.

Instead what I’ve found myself thinking about is anonymity and what a slippery role it plays in our online fannish world.

I mean, these pro-writers are hardly anonymous.  They’re putting their own opinions out there, signed with their own names, on their own blogs and connected to their professional reputations.

That’s more than many of us (myself included) do.

Keeping our real names and our usernames separate is a high priority for a lot of us out here in the vast blogosphere/intarwebs/online universe.  My online activities and my real life ones aren’t necessarily things I’d like to see blended or things I’d like everyone and their dog to know about, either.  I’d rather keep some of my online haunts away from my real life friends, and my real life activities from my online circle.

When pro-writers jump into the fanfiction debate (or when fanfic is discussed by canon-creators at convention panels or when fans mention fic in correspondence or conversation with actors from canon sources), they do so with a face and a name attached to their opinions, and I can’t help but think that’s brave.

OK, so no, I’m still not peachy-keen on hearing comments about how anyone who likes fanfiction is doing disgusting, immoral, illegal things, because that’s not at all what I’m doing when I like fanfiction.  But compared to viciously attacking someone’s morality and character in an anonmeme (which, yes, has also been happening recently) or spewing out vitriol with nothing but a screenname attached, I have to say I have some respect for people who aren’t afraid to voice their opinions and stick their own damn names on them.

Admittedly, deleting posts and/or freezing/deleting comments after the fact, which both Gabaldon and Martin have done, lessens my respect.  If you’re going to say it, say it.  If it’s going to cause an uproar, well then a) that should come as no surprise to anyone who’s spent 15 seconds in fandom, and b) let it.  If you’re convinced by arguments against you, then offer up a mea culpa later on.  If you’re not, then respond or don’t respond as you see fit.  Retracting seems like a wuss move.

But if you’re going to cower behind a screenname (as I do; as many of us do), then the least I think you can do is respect the courage of those who don’t to stand up and say what they think with names fully attached.

]]> http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/05/20/pro-writers-and-anonymity-or-the-lack-thereof/feed/ 6 fandomfan http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/04/14/fannish-monopolygamy/ http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/04/14/fannish-monopolygamy/#comments Wed, 14 Apr 2010 10:58:06 +0000 fandomfan http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/?p=92 ]]> I return!

My goodness, it has been a long time.

Doesn’t real life get pesky like that?

But never fear, I am here again and still, and I return with musings.

Musings on fannish behavior, as is my wont.

This time around, I’ve been thinking about fannish mono- and/or polygamy.

Now, me, I’m a very monogamous fan.  If I’m reading Buffy fic, I’m not also reading Harry Potter.  I can spend a really long and involved time in a given fandom; wallow and rejoice and squee and hang on its every move with baited breath… and then move on to another one and never return to the first.

I know some fen are able to happily read anything that comes along in any number of fandoms, even ones they may not be so active in anymore.  And some fen are easily able to be simultaneously active in lots of fandoms.

Me?  Not so much.

This wouldn’t give me pause at all, except that I’m now in a sort of uniquely odd place with this whole fandom mono/polygamy thing.

See, there’s this fandom.  This tiny crossover random fandom of AWESOME, and it is the fandom of my heart, and my fannish experience with it was and is BY FAR the best fannish experience I have ever had in my history of fannishness.  It brought me no end of glee and joy and education and amusement.

But I did eventually move on from it, for it is a tiny thing, and based on canon sources that are over and done, and I wanted more fanworks to consume than this one little (albeit amazing) place on the internet could provide.

And what I moved on to is a behemoth of a fandom.  It is based on a currently-active canon, and it’s a trendy spot for lots of fen these days, which means I get pretty much all the fanworks I could want, and I can pick and choose among them to the delight of my picky fangirl heart.

But much as New Fandom (NF) is full of the pretty and keeping me nicely entertained, Tiny Fandom of Awesome (TFA) still perks up and offers something new once in a while.

And here is where my guilt sets in.

Because despite all the massive amounts of love and warmth I still have in my heart for TFA, I find myself putting those stories on the back burner for reading and feedbacking, while I plow ahead with NF stories.  I am now several stories behind on TFA, and I can’t help but feel like I’m somehow letting down the community of TFA-fen (which is a small group, who offer and deserve beautifully detailed and erudite feedback).  Like I’m cheating on TFA.  Like, if I love it so much, then what am I doing running all around town with NF.

Do you find yourselves getting emotionally wrapped up in your fannish experiences like this?

For those of you who are fannishly polygamous, how does that work for you?  Do you find yourself focusing more on one fandom at a time or are you equal opportunity?

For you fandom monogamists out there, have you run into this before?  How do you feel about once-loved fandoms you’re not active in anymore?

Help me assuage my guilt, oh wise fellow fen.

]]> http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/04/14/fannish-monopolygamy/feed/ 7 fandomfan http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/03/11/fitn-at-fitm/ http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/03/11/fitn-at-fitm/#comments Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:06:22 +0000 fandomfan http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/?p=79 ]]> It’s that time again, folks.

Fandom news hour here at Fangirls in the Mist.

I’ve got a varied and (I hope) interesting set of links this time around, so here you go.

• First up, it’s the OTW’s March Drive.  If you’re not familiar with the OTW (that’s Organization for Transformative Works), they’re the fabulous people who, among many other things, took one fan’s cry, ‘I want us to own the goddamn servers‘ (that would be Cesperanza, btw) and turned it into a reality with the dedicated, fan-owned, not-for-profit Archive of Our Own stash for stories.  The OTW, whose mission statement is as follows:

The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a nonprofit organization established by fans to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms. We believe that fanworks are transformative and that transformative works are legitimate.

also runs a number of other fannish projects, all dedicated to preserving and promoting fanwork.  They do Transformative Works and Cultures, an academic, peer-reviewed journal all about fandom (stay tuned to that channel if you’re a Supernatural fan… they’ve got a special issue dedicated to the show and its fannish participation coming out this Spring.  ETA: Here’s the link to it).  They do Open Doors, which attempts to give an online home to all those pre-online or dead-link bits of fannish history that we don’t want to lose.  They do all kinds of cool stuff, basically, and they’re very much a ‘by the fen, for the fen’ organization.  So I hereby encourage anyone reading this to check out all the work they do for fandom, and think about donating time or skills or money to their effort in some way.

Right… moving on from the OTW into other FitN bits and bobs.

• The University of South Carolina’s student newspaper, the Daily Gamecock, has a feature online about fanfiction.  They highlight fanfiction.net, which honestly isn’t a place I choose to spend much (if any) of my fannish time, but they give fair shakes to fanfiction as a genre and there are some interesting historical facts in there, too.
• Also in scholastic fic coverage, University College Dublin’s University Observer has a good, fan-friendly article about fanfiction that gets at some of the reasons why we love it so.
• 1up.com has a long, in-depth piece about fanfiction as the first in a series they’re running about game fan culture.  It is also hysterically headed by this high class manip:

I chuckled.  And the article itself starts off thusly:

When the gaming community talks fanfiction, it always seems to revolve around anecdotes of petty rages between nutty authors, atrocious grammar, substandard characterization, and any number of kinky tales that mate Pokémon trainers with seemingly every species of Pokémon available.

But fanfiction, often abbreviated as “fanfic,” isn’t exclusively the pastime of drama-loving hacks. Though fanfic garners enough bad press to fill a library basement, it can also encourage young writers to find their voice, re-ignite an old fan’s love for a fandom — never a bad thing to happen for the creators — and help established writers wind down after toiling over their own characters and worlds.

I was amused and pleased to read through the rest and suggest you might want to do the same.

Finally, I’ve got two fannish discussions to link to that I think are worthy of note.

• First is the really interesting and very multifaceted one at podficmeta that came out of my last post about podfic.  I linked to it in the comments to that entry, but it went on from there, and I found it very enlightening, so here it is for you again.
• Second is fannish musings about what draws us in to new fandoms.  It’s over here at the journal of Gloria Mundi, a longtime fan who I’ve followed through a number of fandoms over the years, and who always has some interesting insights and questions.

And that’s what I’ve got for you in this edition of Fandom in the News.  More to come in future as I find interesting tidbits.  Feel free to send things my way if you run across something you think is worth featuring.

]]> http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/03/11/fitn-at-fitm/feed/ 0 fandomfan 1upmanip http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/please-to-be-explaining-podfic/ http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/please-to-be-explaining-podfic/#comments Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:06:49 +0000 fandomfan http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/?p=52 ]]> Wow, it’s been a while.  Real life gets pesky like that, don’t it?

I return with a topic for debate with all of you out there.

Podfic.

Do you listen to it?  Do you like it?  And most importantly… why?

See I get the concept.  In theory.  Lets you consume fan goodies while you’re not at the computer.  Listen to porn while commuting.  Whee!  And having a story you like brought to ‘life’?  Reading fanfic is good, so why not listening to someone else read it?

Thing is, to me that’s not actually appealing.  I read fic and it plays out in my head with certain emphasis and intonation and rhythm.  I don’t want to hear someone else’s version of all that.  I want to hear my own.

If I think some character’s sex noise sounds like ng, I don’t want to hear that someone else thinks it sounds like unf.

And I certainly don’t want to hear a fannish voice coming out of the speakers at me.

No offense to all the talented fen out there who can pull off fabulous vocal acting, but it hits my embarrassment squick like woah to have my 4th wall breached with a live voice.  It completely destroys the images I create in my head when some random voice reads dialogue and internal monologues from characters I’m invested in.

I don’t care if you’re a professional audiobook recorder and voiceover artist, if you’re a 30-something American woman, there is no way you’re going to sound like Buffy‘s Spike or Captain Jack Sparrow.

So please chime in here and tell me what it is about podfic that does do it for you.  Or, you know, tell me I’m right and you agree with me.  I have no problem with that, either.

But I really am interested in hearing from people who like this podfic stuff.  What’s so great about it?  Are there certain people or stories that you’d recommend to convince me to change my mind?

Bring it on.

]]> http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/please-to-be-explaining-podfic/feed/ 13 fandomfan http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/02/13/fandom-in-the-news-fitn-avatards-and-the-zombie-apocalypse/ http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/02/13/fandom-in-the-news-fitn-avatards-and-the-zombie-apocalypse/#comments Sat, 13 Feb 2010 15:36:57 +0000 fandomfan http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/?p=66 ]]> I’ve made passing reference before to fanfiction referenced in mainstream news sources, and I’ve collected a few more recent examples of that over the past few weeks.

So I thought, what the hell, I’ll make a semi-regular column out of it for the blog.

So, not to be confused with FitM (Fangirls in the Mist, the title of this here online endeavour), here is the first installment of FitN (Fandom in the News).

• First up, we have CNN.com’s article about Avatar fandom (Avatards as a term makes me scratch my head a little, but what can you do) and how–surprise, surprise–internet access allows for much wider and larger-scale fan participation in pop culture.  The author also goes on to discuss the Twihard phenomenon, pointing out that there are over 128,000 Twilight stories listed at Fanfiction.net (personally I don’t go in for Twilight and I like to think that the much smaller 67 entries in that fandom at the AO3 indicate a more discerning crew of fen than FF.net’s legions of followers and hit-or-miss quality… I’m a snob like that) and the ways fandom is becoming more public and perhaps more acceptable.

• Next is a BoingBoing article that’ll amuse anyone who’s ever listened to NPR’s fabulous news quiz comedy show Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me.  It links to a hysterical story at the AO3 called Wait Wait Don’t Eat Me that answers the question I’m sure you’ve all been asking right along with me: what would Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me sound like in the event of a zombie apocalypse?  The story’s funny, and I’m sure BoingBoing picking it up had quite a bit to do with the fact that the story’s got over 19,000 hits at this point.

• And finally, there’s a Mental Floss article that gives a pretty good general primer on fandom overall, with nods to the history and origins of fan communities, various authors’ opinions about fanworks based on their original material, fan films, pro fic, as well as the excellent fan-friendly passage:

For the record, fanfic isn’t just pale teenagers whiling away their waking hours hunched over the computer and tapping out torrid Harry/Draco romance stories or unauthorized future installments of the Twilight saga … Nowadays, it’s kind of cool to admit you write fan fiction.

So there you have it.  I’ll keep posting Fandom in the News stories periodically, so if you come across one, feel free to send the link my way or leave a comment on the blog.

]]> http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/02/13/fandom-in-the-news-fitn-avatards-and-the-zombie-apocalypse/feed/ 0 fandomfan http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/incest-underage-and-watersports-or-the-lure-of-the-taboo/ http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/incest-underage-and-watersports-or-the-lure-of-the-taboo/#comments Sat, 06 Feb 2010 01:35:14 +0000 fandomfan http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/?p=26 ]]> Some fandoms focus on the intensity of the canon relationships (think Lord of the Rings).

Some are centered on the range of imaginative possibilities that come out of things like alternate universes (Quantum Leap, Dr. Who/Torchwood).

And some—the ones I’m talking about here—make it big because they let fly with the taboos.

We all like taboos.  Fandom is about fantasy, and fantasy is a space where pretty much anything goes.  It’s where things like breathplay or sounding that might not be a fan’s cup of tea in real life get to be explored in the non-threatening context of a story or piece of artwork.  Whether or not a fan likes watersports for hirself, writing or reading a story about it is a way to appreciate the sexy little thrill of something that “shouldn’t” be done.

And boy, do fen like those “shouldn’t”s.

Space-set canons (Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate) open the door for all kinds of potential dubious consent scenarios like sex pollen and aliens made us do it and soul bonding.

Horror based canons like Buffy the Vampire Slayer open up kink possibilities like woah (bloodplay, D/s, bondage).

The whole genre of RPF comes with the inherent taboos of making stuff up about real people, without even getting into the times where those people are related to each other (Jonas Brothers fandom, I’m looking at you).

And then there are individual cases that hit multiple taboo buttons.  Supernatural is a show with room for all those horror canon kinks, plus it’s based on the intense, co-dependent partnership between two brothers.  They deal with demons and angels and blood and violence and… well… the supernatural.  Horror taboos + incest = fandom gold.

The mother of all taboo-inclusive fandoms, though, has got to be Harry Potter.  Harry Potter, where you’ve got a whole cast full of characters with magical powers that, in the hands of creative fen, can make pretty much anything happen.  HP fandom can and does easily provide you with your underage, your dub/non-con, your bestiality, your incest, your kink, your powerplay, and pretty much any other taboo you can think of.

HP is the perfect place for fen to invent that key ‘lubricatio’ spell or pair teachers illicitly with their students or hook characters up while they looking like someone (in the case of Polyjuice Potion) or something (animagi, anyone?) else.  If you can imagine it, it’s probably out there somewhere in the vast realms of Harry Potter fandom.

It’s no coincidence, given all that, that HP is not only the top book fandom (in terms of number of works created) at the AO3, but the top fandom there, period.  It took the fannish world by storm and gave us all the room we could possibly want to run as far as we could manage with our taboo fantasies.

I’d like to see something else come along and sweep fandom off its feet so completely and utterly and all-encompassingly the way Harry Potter did.  It was a perfect storm of fantasy-building.  So wizard hats off to JK Rowling (though she might not appreciate it in this particular context) for creating a canon that so tickled fandom’s fancy, and to all the fen who took that canon to places all over the taboo map.

]]> http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/incest-underage-and-watersports-or-the-lure-of-the-taboo/feed/ 0 fandomfan http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/01/31/everyone-likes-to-fill-holes-heh/ http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/01/31/everyone-likes-to-fill-holes-heh/#comments Sun, 31 Jan 2010 21:47:12 +0000 fandomfan http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/?p=20 ]]> Despite the crude pun of the title, this isn’t actually a post (directly) about sex.

What I really mean is the way that fanworks are created out of a desire to fill in the holes in a narrative.

Sure, there are lots of things in canon sources that can inspire fen to create their own stories and art and vids and more.  Things that trigger the imagination.  Things that suck fen in and prompt them want to make more than canon can provide.  I may, in fact, be back to talk about some of them in future posts.

For now, though, it’s holes in the narrative.

Ever stop to think why so many fanworks are future!fic and pre-canon and missing scene pieces?  Because people like to fill in the holes, and those are some of the major places to find ‘em.  Come on, who hasn’t wondered about what happens to a favorite character 20 years from now?  Who doesn’t want to see a moment from that character’s childhood?  Who doesn’t want to tell hir version of what happened after that confrontation that faded to black?

Fill that hole, baby.  Fill it.  You know you want to.

Conversely, of course, canons that don’t have (m)any holes to fill tend not to make the same mega-sized splash in terms of fannish following.  I mentioned Velvet Goldmine and its relatively small fan following in this post.  Partly, as I said there, that comes from the fact that the subtlety of the subtext is missing.

Right.  Not so much with the subtlety or the subtext.

But also, there aren’t all that many holes to fill in the Velvet Goldmine narrative.  Most of the stories in that fandom are future ones.

Major case in point: Lord of the Rings.

All due respect to LOTR book-verse fen, but it was the movies that exploded LOTR fandom into being.  After Fellowship of the Ring came out, there were a few months of intense fan participation (reinvigorated, of course, after the release of the next two movies), and then things petered out as the beast that was Lotrips (LOTR RPS, that is) fandom came into its own.

A bunch of men bonding during an extended, isolated period of filming in New Zealand—compounded, expanded, made massive by stories and rumors of hijinks, pranks, secret camping trips, and photography sessions, not to mention public touchy-feely antics—offered one hundred and eleventy billion holes for fen to fill.  Whereas book-verse LOTR fans are presented with a wonderfully complete world crafted lovingly and in extreme detail by JRR Tolkien.  It’s a fantastic place to read about and to see on screen.  But what it doesn’t have a lot of is… you guessed it.  Holes.

So Lotrips exploded with stories (sexual and non, but yes, mostly sexual) about what happened with all those men out there in the wilderness for all those months, and fully-fleshed-out LOTR became a smaller, quieter presence on the fan scene.

You get my point with this, I take it.  Fans like to fill holes.  Where there are more holes to fill, I can almost guarantee you you’ll find more fans filling them.

And now I’ll stop before this goes from crude pun title to bad tongue-twister ending.

]]> http://fangirlsinthemist.wordpress.com/2010/01/31/everyone-likes-to-fill-holes-heh/feed/ 0 fandomfan