rather incoherent soapboxing

[frith_in_thorns]

Note: the general 'you' is in use throughout this post.

I want to link to this post by phaetonschariot today.  Go read it now, because the rest of this post is going to assume that you have.  It's meta, although it's headed like a fic, but the header is what's being discussed in the meta.

I lurk around quite a few meta places on LJ, and this topic's been flying around lately, particularly on fanficrants , and side-by-side with numerous ship wars, where it usually takes the form of (as illustrated by this post) "X IS NOT GAY! YOU'RE BREAKING CANON! STOP MAKING THEM GAY" - and while that was written in that post as an over-the-top example, some people were actually agreeing with it.  (Because of course your personal opinions that everyone is straight until proven otherwise, and never ever bisexual, should dictate what everyone else is allowed to write and read.  ::eyeroll::)

From that you may be able to work out that I fully agree with phaetonschariot 's post.  Because however much to try to colour it as a 'squick', it really is offensive to demand that non-straight relationships should be warned for by others, and especially if you're then surprised that people do get offended by your reaction.  Maybe I've been reading too much SGA fic, but it does seem that this fandom has pretty bitter feelings between those who write slash and those who write het.  I recently dipped into the Criminal Minds fandom and was very surprised by the sheer amount of multishipping there - I'm honestly not sure which pairing has the majority.  Possibly Aaron/Emily or Emily/Jennifer.  (Seriously, I was quite amazed by the amount of femslash - in most fandoms those pairings tend to be shoved up on a metaphorical dusty shelf and barely ever looked at.)

Yeah, that's about all I have to say.  I know that I mostly stick to gen myself because I'm not really a romance fan in general, but when I do read pairings, I'm pretty indiscriminante about them.  I've just been stumbling across this homo- and bi-phobic attitude a lot online lately, and it's really pissing me off.

In the interests of TMI disclosure, I write this as someone who's still not entirely sure whether I identify as bisexual or asexual.  Which doesn't make much sense, I know, but yeah :P

Comments

[x-varda-x.livejournal.com]

Oh! You changed your layout! Nice birdie :)

Totally agree with you here. Orientation is not a warning, it's a genre/style as in: something to put in the summary like you would insert 'gen' or 'hurt/comfort'

I gave up on fanfic rants after I found that one about me and then this one. I'm not homophobic in the slightest and if anything I say ever comes across like that, I apologise. It's just I only like canon and only see what canon shows and tells us outright. I can't ever see any hidden subtext in stuff I watch or read. Much in the same way that I don't read uber AU fic.

I hope you don't mind I had to go look up asexual. But then I found this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Involuntary_celibacy)
and it made me cry. They make it sound like an illness! I... I... oh

[frith_in_thorns]

I like this layout :) Nice and simple.

Yeah - warnings for things like that are really annoying. But I confess that I was a little annoyed at your comment on that post, and to people who didn't know you it could easily have sounded like you were deliberately trolling.

Also, I thought you shipped Rodney/Teyla? And Rodney/Cadman? They aren't canon... ;)

And aww... ::hugs::

[x-varda-x.livejournal.com]

But I confess that I was a little annoyed at your comment on that post,
Yeah, sorry about that. I backed away from it and stopped replying.

and to people who didn't know you it could easily have sounded like you were deliberately trolling.
You know me and my opinion sharing! I'm trying not to anymore. I don't look at that comm anymore or any of the 'rant' comms because of the temptation.

Also, I thought you shipped Rodney/Teyla? And Rodney/Cadman? They aren't canon... ;)
OMG LOL! I wrote Rodney/Cadman in Rodney's fantasy. But I've only done UST for Rodney/Teyla... so far...

There was that McShep story too, which I'll just skip over here... la la la ;)

[frith_in_thorns]

And there are also the Rodney/Cadman icons, banners, ship thread on GW... ;)

I think that the motto of the internet should be 'think before you post'! I know I'm guilty of this too - everyone is. Illustrated motto: http://xkcd.com/438/

Also, you should read friendshipper's comment below, she's managed to be much more eloquent than I did!

[x-varda-x.livejournal.com]

Oopsy, yes... I forgot about them. Although the threads are rather quiet these days :P I do make McShep icons sometimes too

Love that cartoon, would be lovely to be flown over a mountain in the middle of an Internet induced rage :)
EDIT: *facepalm* I didn't really get it at first, but I just had another look. And you're right, I can't argue with anyone outloud/face to face (which is sometimes required in my job, well by phone anyway!) but I can send a wordy letter (not mean/nasty, but just going through all the facts logically) which has saved my company a lot of money over the years while I've been working for them :)

I read friendshipper's comment earlier and saw you just posted an equally long reply for me to nose through too! :D

[sholio]

*nods* I hate warnings for slash (and I'm also frustrated by warnings for het, though I realize it's a completely different problem -- in those cases I get an "eww, icky girl bits in my slash!" feeling rather than an "eww, icky gay people!" feeling). It really feels like a holdover from an older time; it's like when you're just going along having a conversation with an older person who's intelligent and well-educated and seemingly open-minded, and then suddenly run smack into some wackadoodle belief they have about gay people or women or minorities that you thought all reasonable people stopped believing decades ago.

I do think that my own feelings on canonicity and pairing have evolved a lot, over time -- I'm not really pointing this out to derail, but more to sort of, I guess, apologize if you ever run into any of my older writings on the topic. *winces* A few years ago (my god, I think it was 2006 or so -- time really flies) there was a round of heavy-duty meta on slash vs. gen -- it came about because a story with a McKay/Sheppard pairing won the big SGA fan award for gen, and upset a lot of gen people. Which led to a lot of meta-ing about where the "lines" are for gen stories. I said a lot of stupid things regarding canonicity in those debates that I later regretted, and I think that the whole thing was really a turning point in my own total-canon-whore tendencies. Up until then I'd had these very fixed boxes -- canon is here, non-canon is here -- and it wasn't until a number of people pointed out to me (far more politely and reasonably than I deserved, I think XD) that my ideas on what constitutes "canon" were absolutely steeped in heteronormativity that I realized just how thoroughly my canon/not-canon boxes were bounded by heterosexual privilege and bisexual erasure -- assuming that characters in canon are het until proven otherwise, for example. I didn't have a problem with the existence of slash/femslash -- I read it, sometimes wrote it, mostly co-existed peacefully with it -- but the fact that I would have categorized a story differently if it introduced an OFC relationship or an OMC relationship for the het-in-practice main character (and considered the OFC relationship closer to canon) is a problem, and it's something that I hadn't even realized was a problem 'til it was pointed out to me. Which is the very textbook definition of privilege right there ...

I do want to know what pairings are going to be in a story. I'm not really into romance; I much prefer to read gen, and some pairings I just ... can't ... do. (John/Teyla comes to mind here. I don't know why; it's just a gigantic do-not-want for me!) And yes, I'm still largely a canon whore. But it's kind of startling to me to notice how much more open-minded I am about different pairings and different takes on the characters' canonical sexual behavior I am than I used to be four or five years ago. I don't think I've exactly wandered all the way into the-author-is-dead territory; I still find myself taking into account the author's likely intentions when I'm writing. But there have been enough times that I've been dead wrong about the author's intentions (Ray Bradbury claims that Fahrenheit 451 is not about censorship, though he might just be saying that to mess with people ...) that I've become wary of reading too much into what I think the writers and actors probably intend, beyond the blatantly textual level. Maybe Joe Flanigan does play John Sheppard as a closeted gay man with a crush on Rodney; the only person who knows that is JF.

[frith_in_thorns]

See, it took until I got into LJ fandom to even start noticing these things properly for the first time. (Before that I was on FFN for a while, but as I'm sure you've noticed, that place is... special.) So no, I've not run into any old posts by you from way back when. And if I ever do, I'll bear what you say in mind. I'm trying to remember what sort of opinions 16-year-old me held in 2006... I remember a fascination with WWI poetry and sky pirates, but can't think of anything specific. I don't think I thought about relationships much, being at a girls' boarding school. But I'd never really realised that there was a problem with some peoples' perceptions of gay relationships in such contexts as fandoms until quite recently. I think also, if you'll bear with me generalising based on probably skewed perspectives, I came across far less anti-gay prejudice growing up in the UK than I think I would have in the US, where there also seem to be far more objections with the excuse of religion. The only really religious person I encountered was my RE and Drama teacher, who was a very liberal ordained vicar who was highly in favour of gay marriage. And now here at university everyone is incredibly tolerant of everyone, as far as I've seen. So I guess I'm lucky, because the prejudice I've run across has nearly all been on the internet and so was largely theoretical until not long ago when I came onto LJ. I'm not convinced that this paragraph makes sense - hopefully you got the gist of what I'm trying to say!

I think you're right about the different intentions between warning for slash and warning for het - I find the het warnings annoying because of the connections to me of bashing the female characters; for example I've come across people who have the very strong opinion that the presence of Keller in fic (even gen fic) should be warned for, but while that's annoying, it isn't portraying a large group of people as something to which exposure to 'ought' to be avoided.

On a side note, my do-not-want pairing is Ronon/Keller; this is because I could only feel that this 'love triangle' thing wasn't actually genuine. To me it looked as if Ronon had had no interest in her, and then took an interest purely to spite Rodney, not actually for any reason to do with Keller. Sort of reducing her to being a prize who would submit to the man who won her, and that concept to me is quite squicky.

As to your last paragraph, I'm not entirely convinced that the writers for SGA knew themselves what they were writing sometimes! Certainly not when the implications of episodes like 'Irrisistable' apparently just flew over their heads. And then there's Mallozzi who went on about how there was one gay character on Atlantis, without ever naming them, which is frankly pathetic imo and doesn't really make me believe him (or endear him to me, but that's another rant).

[sholio]

You were 16 in 2006? Um. *hides walker and cane* *g*

I don't think I really started thinking about this sort of thing -- the fannishly specific situation, I mean, not gay issues in general -- prior to LJ, either. I just didn't really know other fans (fanfic-reading fans, I mean, as opposed to comics/book/SFF fans, which is what most of my fannish friends were). I knew what I liked to read, but I wasn't particularly analytic about it, and most of what I was reading was gen anyway, so shipping didn't enter into it very much.

I guess I could ramble a lot more, but I think in general, I ended up getting overly hung up on the concept of canonicity -- and was very much unaware of how my own heteronormativity blind spot influenced my concept of what constitutes canon-compliant fic.

My reading tastes are what they are, and I'll probably always prefer to read fic that's in line with my own view of the characters, but I do try hard not to imply that my own take on them is the "right" one, and to be open to other interpretations. Especially in those cases where, as you pointed out, it's the existence of real-life people that's being marginalized and ignored.

And that's an interesting view of Ronon/Keller. My own take on canon!Ronon is that he dislikes Rodney and is irritated by him, but I'm not sure if I could quite see him going that far to take him down a peg ... hmm. It'd be intriguing to write it that way. (hee! now my brain wants to do it as a bad Regency romance, where Ronon thinks he's only faking but the facade becomes real, and Keller thinks she wants Rodney but she's swept off her feet unexpectedly by Ronon's too-effective "fake" courting.)

And yeah, the show itself is pretty inconsistent! It's kind of fun to fanwank explanations for some of the more inexplicable stuff ... and it's funny how much of the accidental stuff in the show can be made to support some of the more obviously non-canonical theories -- like my pet fanwank that the Athosians are matriarchal, which is almost certainly not what the writers intended (I seriously doubt if they even know what "matriarchal" means) and yet, it's a disturbingly tight fit for most of the available evidence!

[frith_in_thorns]

Yup, I'm going to finally stop being a teenager this weekend *g* I still feel a bit intimidated in this fandom, with all you gen people being older and much more experienced at writing and life than me...

The thing with Ronon/Keller - in that slightly odd scene at the end of 'Tracker', Rodney asks him if he's interested in Keller, and Ronon to me basically says no, and then when Rodney's walking out the door he suddenly says 'What if I am?' and I saw that as him changing his mind on the spot to spite Rodney. But then, I didn't like season 5 Ronon all that much, especially since the writers suddenly seemed to decide to write him as being really thick, which annoyed me no end.

With canon - I'm still not entirely sure where I stand. Although I usually say that I keep to canon... well, fanfic isn't canonical anyway. And I really like reading AUs which either deal with something changing the course of events, or outright whole different universes.

I also have adopted the Athosians being matriarchal - I like that idea, although again I doubt that's what the writers intended (and I'm jaded enough to think that they might actually be surprised at the idea of a matriarchal society...).

Interestingly for the timing, there is at this moment a rather vocal argument going on on one of my friend's Facebook pages about whether it's more acceptable for homosexuals to be heterophobic than for heterosexuals to be homophobic...

[michelel72.livejournal.com]

I got into SGA fandom too late for most of the taking of sides, fortunately. Even so, I remember that one of the first stories I read was "Freedom's Just Another Word", and at that time I considered it slash even though the author considered it gen. I've changed my mind on that, quite probably because of the discussion around that classification; that said, if the story is gen but assumes any pairings, I prefer to know what they are. (I've tried to follow that convention in my own writing, though I can't certify I always have or will.)

As for the main post: Yes, so much.

I have a good friend who used to be into fanfiction. I was pretty sure she was a level-headed, open-minded person as well. I shared with her a story I'd quite enjoyed, but she found it weird; a few minutes later, she added that back in her day, preslash stories required warnings.

Warnings. For preslash. One-sided M/M UST, in this particular case.

I tried to convey the message that, no, it's not like that anymore. I wasn't convinced she just accepted that, but I kind of thought she at least had a sense of where I was. Then she recently asked me if the term "slash" still applied to any fic pairing (to label a het story) or "had gone dark side". And when she wanted to read fic for a much smaller fandom, after exploring the comm I tracked down for her, she complained about all the slash and gen, making an "icky" face about the former (and protesting she could see that by watching the show for the latter).

It bugs me. And I don't know what to do about it. I don't encourage the commentary, certainly, but I know that many people react to direct criticism by digging in their heels. Old-school isn't a defense, to me; if you're getting back in the game, get into it honestly and be open to changes. She seems to be into fic for only a very narrow purpose, though, rather than approaching it via fandom; that said, if she just said that she's seeking fic for het fantasies, rather than persistently putting down everything else, I'd be fine with it.

One of the reccers over at stargateficrec used to warn for slash, for slash and M3 rec categories, at least before the recent header change. Infuriating.

[frith_in_thorns]

I haven't read that story, although I think I've heard it being mentioned before. Until recently I assumed that gen stories never had any pairings in - now I'm not so surprised when I find background pairings in them. And my sky pirate AU how long will it take before people get sick of me talking about sky pirates, I wonder? will have some background pairings in, but I'm intending to keep them low-profile enough for it to be classified as gen.

Warnings for preslash? Ok, I've never come across that viewpoint before. Especially as 'preslash' seems to basically be something that's in the eye of the beholder...

I hate that defence. "This is the way we've always done it, and I don't care if it's wrong and offensive - it's tradition." Because why should anyone take responsibilty themselves to stop discrimination against gays etc? And this is one of my rant buttons, so I'm going to shut up before I start insulting people/society/religion left right and centre :P