My Investment in Dudes Who Are Invested in Each Other

(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.

FitN at FitM

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.

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.

Meet the Fangirls

I am historically quite nervous about meeting people in real life that I first encounter online, especially fen.  For all that online fandom is a fantastic way to bring people together around canon sources, internet communities have a marked tendency to be, without mincing words, full of weirdos.

I’ve witnessed it a whole bunch of times myself, most especially with a former friend who used to habitually have real-life meet-ups with other fen, almost all of whom were really unable to a) carry on much of a conversation at all and b) include anything non-fandom related in their conversational attempts.

I’m always reminded of a conversation from Metafandom a few years back (I’m not linking to the discussion specifically, so I don’t end up pointing fingers at specific fen) that began with the following:

Why does everyone call life away from the computer “real” life? (as in this)

What exactly do you think life is? Any time where you’re not dead? Is real life. What do you think the internet is, a big fantasy? Because if you don’t consider this “real”, then what is? All of the “fakeness” that people complain about online? You can find in a bar, in your house, with your friends, in a classroom, whatever. There is no difference. There never has been a difference. If you have life that’s not “real” life, then what are you doing with it?

Discuss.

Personally, I don’t completely agree or disagree here, and there were a lot of interesting responses that covered the spectrum.  But there was one theme that showed up pretty commonly, and I will summarise it by quoting from one of the replies.

Oh, definitely! I was talking in chat with some folks one day and they were like, well, how do you interact with people offline, and I’m like uh, I don’t. And it’s not because I work at home. When I was at school or when I had an office job, I just didn’t talk to people any more than necessary. I read a book or did my own thing or whatever. My mom and me are complete opposites in that regard, as she is the type who will talk to anyone. Like she’ll be in line at the store or in the elevator and just start talking to people and I’m like omg don’t! I just…gah! Just thinking about it makes me uncomfortable.

And the best, best, best thing about online interaction? No one telling you you should look people in the eye!

Here is where online communities make me sad, because to my mind, that reply is a sign of social anxiety issues that should be addressed in the non-computer-based world, not enabled by impersonal online interaction.

But I’m digressing from the point of this post.

The point of the post is that yesterday, I sucked up my own anxiety over meeting ‘internet people’ and went to a meet-up of a bunch of Supernatural fangirls.

And if you’re still reading through all this boring old text, here, I’ll give you a wee giftie of an image to enliven things and to give you a hint at one reason why we’re fannish over this show.

That would be the stars, Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, and I’ll say no more about how they look at each other.

Aaaaanyway, despite my nervousness beforehand, I was enormously ENORMOUSLY pleased to spend the afternoon with this group of 20 fangirls who were delightful and clever and shameless in the best sort of way (vocal public discussion of gay porn was actually one of the tamer activities).  And fully socially functional, which might not sound like much of a compliment, but I swear it is.  There was talk about fandom and real-life (which, yes, I do mostly think of as being the non-computer activities) and the show on both giggly, squeeful and serious, thoughtful levels.  We had drinks and ate and played games and exchanged little gifts, and it was a wonderful afternoon in wonderful company.

So thanks to those ladies for letting me mark a check into the Cool column of the ‘Online People I Have Met’ tally I keep in my head.  It does me good to see that there are fun, engaging people out there behind the usernames.  People who aren’t the stereotypical maladjusted internet addicts, who, let’s face it, do exist.  Just not at our little gathering yesterday, for which I am grateful and happy.