Incest, Underage, and Watersports; or the Lure of the Taboo

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.

Everyone Likes to Fill Holes (heh)

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.