*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.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2010-03-02 08:27 pm (UTC)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.