~~ reading for parallel vs. AU slash
Nov. 10th, 2003 12:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
reenkaI have to remember that there -is- another world sometimes (not "real", just-- "other"), with people in it who're not obsessed with Harry Potter stuff. I feel so deeply wrong saying that, because well-- I'm not obsessed with the -books-, per se. The idea that so many people know me as a person obsessed with this boggles me. It really does. I've spent most of my life a) not caring about slash & Harry Potter; b) disliking HP and anyone who contributes to the hype (that went on for about 3 years). So it's just -really- strange to realize-- hey. I've become one of "them". The people with the funny hats. Those people. Yeah. I see people mention `Sandman' and Tori Amos and photography and fairy tales and the zillion-and-one things I'm into, and well-- no one knows. All that's very clear is that I think about Harry & Draco sittin' in a tree, f-u-c-k-i-n-g, like, 99% of the time, right. (Although it's funny, the sorts of things people would use to define "having a life", alternatively.)
I guess the thing is-- with `The Sandman' (and all other comics), Tori (and all other music), Buffy (and TV shows in general), all the fantasy authors I can think of (and I can think of a lot)-- I'm not a "fan". I'm not a fan of JK Rowling, either (I still wouldn't say she's anywhere near an author I admire). I actively dislike talking about my love of say, `The Sandman' with other people, because it's -my- comic. It's mine. You may love it too, but don't tell me about it-- I have a very personal relationship with it. I'm possessive about the things I love-- I like having my little personal world I can escape to. Sharing it makes it less special, less intense. The way I feel singing along to Tori isn't something I want to know is duplicated by many people. Even being at that one concert, I was both an observer and alone with her-- but not part of the crowd.
I do like talking about HP with other people, obviously-- but then, I've never had a normal personal relationship with the Potterverse-- and my way of escaping to it is markedly different. My most personal area of escape is my fiction-- I write it, and it's mine. I've co-created it. That's a feeling I just can't get anywhere else-- I can't seem to write in other fandoms, nor do I want to. I read HP fanon first, so in a way it was always a shared world, to me, a whole different experience because it's not that you guys are other fans, part of the crowd-- you create it with me, just by talking about it. The Potterverse is always changing for me, based on what I say and read about it. So it's weird to say that I'm a fan, that I'm part of a fandom-- because I suppose I am, but really it goes against the heart of how I actually interact with art/literature/etc. I may be being fannish, but I am not a fan.
I've always had identity issues. I hate being "the smart one"; but it's hard fitting it because it's not like I can -do- something about having the brain thing. I certainly waste it anyway. In school, I'm not studious enough or serious and disciplined enough or ambitious enough. In casual conversation, I feel too serious, too studious, too obsessed. I can't imagine having a "normal" career anymore: all I can imagine is being a writer, 'cause that's what I do already. If only I can get away with being a dork for a living. They would pay me for being too lazy half the time and too rigorous the other half. It would be a grand existence. I could finally forget about Harry Potter.
Has anyone imagined being 92 years old, sitting in your rocking chair and thinking, those were the days. I used to think of two boys fucking day after day back then, and I didn't do my classwork more than half the time to write gay porn. I was such a pervert, back then. And now I have 3 grandchildren and a dog as old as I am. I can only shudder imagining the kind of long-term mental effects this'll all have. But anyway. This isn't what I meant to talk about.
~~
I was thinking about why I slash (again), especially reading![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bonibaru's response to Ivy's post about her slashy novel-in-progress, saying that without "het combined with lots of homoerotic subtext, you don't have slash."
I've often thought that I don't "slash", if slashing were defined as focus on subverting the text; gaining satisfaction from an undercurrent, some parallel narrative to the main one I see played being out. I really wonder how that's supposed to work-- if you're supposed to be able to enjoy the story on two levels at once or whether this means you priviledge the "slashy" level (which is a type of meta-level) over the actuality of the events. It seems deeply frustrating to me to be so invested in an aspect of the story that's never going to materialize. It seems to go counter to the source of my joy as the audience-- the sensation of getting lost in this world, identifying with these characters, allowing the author to tell me the tale (rather than the more active process of writing in that universe).
I suppose this is where the separation of reader-as-slasher and writer-as-slasher comes in. As a writer, I'm definitely a slasher, but not so much as a reader/viewer. But bybonibaru's definition, I would say you can't really "slash" as a writer, because whatever you write is what's -there-. The readers can slash or not slash (you never know what people will see in your work), but to you, hopefully you're telling the One True Story. It might be ambiguous and it might be contradictory, but that's how it is, and if you change it, it's not Your Story anymore. So it would seem to be a contradiction in terms to then write a "slashy" original story yourself, even though both Ivy and Maya are apparently doing just that.
I like to think that the story I see being told is complete and valid as being what it is. I'd like to think that it doesn't -need- to be split apart into "text" and "subtext", that everything is part of some organic whole. The idea of separating out the subtext from the text and then calling it "slashy"-- and more than that, -meaning- this subtext to be removable-- bothers me on an ideological level, as a writer. I would never write a slashy novel-- I would only ever write a novel. Maybe the characters would be two boys and maybe they would be in love or just love each other, but I would be saying exactly what I'd want to be saying about them, no more and no less. My goal would be not to write a slashable novel with two boys in ambiguously gay love, but to write a novel with two boys who love each other to which slash would be extraneous.
I've always said I "trust the text". Perhaps that can't be true because there's no such thing as the "One True Text". Every reader/viewer is going to have their own individual "reading", but I suppose I'm just not post-modern enough to have my goal be the subtext. I find I tend to stubbornly cling to the notion of gestalt.
I realize that re-imagining as one reads/watches is a more interactive endeavor, more like communal or what have you-- but it just doesn't work for me on some instinctive level. I wonder how many slashers -do- watch with one eye always seeing in "slash-vision" and one eye seeing in "het-vision". It seems rather disorienting and distracting when I imagine it. I've had flashes of "oh, they -so- want each other", of course, but it's no more than flashes. A general commitment to a book series or a TV show seems to have a different quality.
There's a sentiment where if the show is "good enough" that it doesn't "need" slash. This sort of implies slashing characters is what happens when their relationships in text are unsatisfactory, are incomplete. I do know that's not the only reason people slash-- there's slashing just because two boys are pretty, and slashing because you don't -like- the character the boy is paired up with, slashing because you -do- like these particular two characters, and so on. So perhaps (from a creator's pov), a "slashy" source-text is really many things, rather than a simple formula of UST.
Which is not even getting into -why- the tension is unresolved. In American TV shows, especially older ones, one assumes it's because it -can't- be because of the prejudice. What reason would a modern story-writer have to avoid same-sex relationships unless they're trying to appeal to this prejudiced segment of the population?
When I write slash based on a work in which these characters are clearly not having a relationship of this sort, I'm not really re-working the text-- I'm branching off entirely. During the process as a writer (and a slash fanfic reader), this relationship becomes text.
I see it as an AU approach as a reader and writer vs. the parallel approach one can take while reading/viewing the source material. The more you continuously tie the slashfic vision to canon, the more confusing it gets, I think. In the Althernate Universe in my head, some key things operate differently-- and it's not a question of sexual orientation so much as any large change of this sort having to be a fork in the continuity.
Generally, my own limited forays into fandoms have been based on a gen background rather than a het background (which is probably why I have so few fandoms I'd read much of anything in). There's more of a continuity there, more of a sense that my little AU is a semi-plausible fork rather than a rewriting of some basic things shown me in canon. Subtext isn't really the same thing as a -contradiction- of text, so making it evolve into such parallel to one's reading/viewing/writing seems a destructive response.
So I guess I don't know if it's constructive to think of one's own original writing as "slashy". I see my own slash as a reworking into a new whole, and I see the original as being simply a -different- whole. Good subtext has a vital role to play in its relationship with the text-- there's a balance there. I really kind of dislike being aware that the balance of relationship dynamics is -wrong-, unsatisfactory somehow. But I am willing to concede that for some other people, it is the resolving of this state of dissatisfaction that is actually the challenge and attraction of slash.
I guess the thing is-- with `The Sandman' (and all other comics), Tori (and all other music), Buffy (and TV shows in general), all the fantasy authors I can think of (and I can think of a lot)-- I'm not a "fan". I'm not a fan of JK Rowling, either (I still wouldn't say she's anywhere near an author I admire). I actively dislike talking about my love of say, `The Sandman' with other people, because it's -my- comic. It's mine. You may love it too, but don't tell me about it-- I have a very personal relationship with it. I'm possessive about the things I love-- I like having my little personal world I can escape to. Sharing it makes it less special, less intense. The way I feel singing along to Tori isn't something I want to know is duplicated by many people. Even being at that one concert, I was both an observer and alone with her-- but not part of the crowd.
I do like talking about HP with other people, obviously-- but then, I've never had a normal personal relationship with the Potterverse-- and my way of escaping to it is markedly different. My most personal area of escape is my fiction-- I write it, and it's mine. I've co-created it. That's a feeling I just can't get anywhere else-- I can't seem to write in other fandoms, nor do I want to. I read HP fanon first, so in a way it was always a shared world, to me, a whole different experience because it's not that you guys are other fans, part of the crowd-- you create it with me, just by talking about it. The Potterverse is always changing for me, based on what I say and read about it. So it's weird to say that I'm a fan, that I'm part of a fandom-- because I suppose I am, but really it goes against the heart of how I actually interact with art/literature/etc. I may be being fannish, but I am not a fan.
I've always had identity issues. I hate being "the smart one"; but it's hard fitting it because it's not like I can -do- something about having the brain thing. I certainly waste it anyway. In school, I'm not studious enough or serious and disciplined enough or ambitious enough. In casual conversation, I feel too serious, too studious, too obsessed. I can't imagine having a "normal" career anymore: all I can imagine is being a writer, 'cause that's what I do already. If only I can get away with being a dork for a living. They would pay me for being too lazy half the time and too rigorous the other half. It would be a grand existence. I could finally forget about Harry Potter.
Has anyone imagined being 92 years old, sitting in your rocking chair and thinking, those were the days. I used to think of two boys fucking day after day back then, and I didn't do my classwork more than half the time to write gay porn. I was such a pervert, back then. And now I have 3 grandchildren and a dog as old as I am. I can only shudder imagining the kind of long-term mental effects this'll all have. But anyway. This isn't what I meant to talk about.
~~
I was thinking about why I slash (again), especially reading
bonibaru's response to Ivy's post about her slashy novel-in-progress, saying that without "het combined with lots of homoerotic subtext, you don't have slash."I've often thought that I don't "slash", if slashing were defined as focus on subverting the text; gaining satisfaction from an undercurrent, some parallel narrative to the main one I see played being out. I really wonder how that's supposed to work-- if you're supposed to be able to enjoy the story on two levels at once or whether this means you priviledge the "slashy" level (which is a type of meta-level) over the actuality of the events. It seems deeply frustrating to me to be so invested in an aspect of the story that's never going to materialize. It seems to go counter to the source of my joy as the audience-- the sensation of getting lost in this world, identifying with these characters, allowing the author to tell me the tale (rather than the more active process of writing in that universe).
I suppose this is where the separation of reader-as-slasher and writer-as-slasher comes in. As a writer, I'm definitely a slasher, but not so much as a reader/viewer. But by
bonibaru's definition, I would say you can't really "slash" as a writer, because whatever you write is what's -there-. The readers can slash or not slash (you never know what people will see in your work), but to you, hopefully you're telling the One True Story. It might be ambiguous and it might be contradictory, but that's how it is, and if you change it, it's not Your Story anymore. So it would seem to be a contradiction in terms to then write a "slashy" original story yourself, even though both Ivy and Maya are apparently doing just that.I like to think that the story I see being told is complete and valid as being what it is. I'd like to think that it doesn't -need- to be split apart into "text" and "subtext", that everything is part of some organic whole. The idea of separating out the subtext from the text and then calling it "slashy"-- and more than that, -meaning- this subtext to be removable-- bothers me on an ideological level, as a writer. I would never write a slashy novel-- I would only ever write a novel. Maybe the characters would be two boys and maybe they would be in love or just love each other, but I would be saying exactly what I'd want to be saying about them, no more and no less. My goal would be not to write a slashable novel with two boys in ambiguously gay love, but to write a novel with two boys who love each other to which slash would be extraneous.
I've always said I "trust the text". Perhaps that can't be true because there's no such thing as the "One True Text". Every reader/viewer is going to have their own individual "reading", but I suppose I'm just not post-modern enough to have my goal be the subtext. I find I tend to stubbornly cling to the notion of gestalt.
I realize that re-imagining as one reads/watches is a more interactive endeavor, more like communal or what have you-- but it just doesn't work for me on some instinctive level. I wonder how many slashers -do- watch with one eye always seeing in "slash-vision" and one eye seeing in "het-vision". It seems rather disorienting and distracting when I imagine it. I've had flashes of "oh, they -so- want each other", of course, but it's no more than flashes. A general commitment to a book series or a TV show seems to have a different quality.
There's a sentiment where if the show is "good enough" that it doesn't "need" slash. This sort of implies slashing characters is what happens when their relationships in text are unsatisfactory, are incomplete. I do know that's not the only reason people slash-- there's slashing just because two boys are pretty, and slashing because you don't -like- the character the boy is paired up with, slashing because you -do- like these particular two characters, and so on. So perhaps (from a creator's pov), a "slashy" source-text is really many things, rather than a simple formula of UST.
Which is not even getting into -why- the tension is unresolved. In American TV shows, especially older ones, one assumes it's because it -can't- be because of the prejudice. What reason would a modern story-writer have to avoid same-sex relationships unless they're trying to appeal to this prejudiced segment of the population?
When I write slash based on a work in which these characters are clearly not having a relationship of this sort, I'm not really re-working the text-- I'm branching off entirely. During the process as a writer (and a slash fanfic reader), this relationship becomes text.
I see it as an AU approach as a reader and writer vs. the parallel approach one can take while reading/viewing the source material. The more you continuously tie the slashfic vision to canon, the more confusing it gets, I think. In the Althernate Universe in my head, some key things operate differently-- and it's not a question of sexual orientation so much as any large change of this sort having to be a fork in the continuity.
Generally, my own limited forays into fandoms have been based on a gen background rather than a het background (which is probably why I have so few fandoms I'd read much of anything in). There's more of a continuity there, more of a sense that my little AU is a semi-plausible fork rather than a rewriting of some basic things shown me in canon. Subtext isn't really the same thing as a -contradiction- of text, so making it evolve into such parallel to one's reading/viewing/writing seems a destructive response.
So I guess I don't know if it's constructive to think of one's own original writing as "slashy". I see my own slash as a reworking into a new whole, and I see the original as being simply a -different- whole. Good subtext has a vital role to play in its relationship with the text-- there's a balance there. I really kind of dislike being aware that the balance of relationship dynamics is -wrong-, unsatisfactory somehow. But I am willing to concede that for some other people, it is the resolving of this state of dissatisfaction that is actually the challenge and attraction of slash.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-11-10 10:18 am (UTC)Re: not sharing certain things--I am totally with you on that. I think any fandom that I've actually gotten involved in has had to be something that I had problems with as well. Like HP, I, too, went through a long period of just being annoyed by the hype and I still don't think of them as favorite books of mine. If I do feel that way, like you, I usually don't want to talk about them. I'll dip into the fandom and run away because I don't want to hear the stupid things other people are saying. When I worked in the kids' bookstore I was in charge of the sci-fi fantasy section and I rarely recommended The Dark Is Rising unless I felt the person would appreciate it. I just couldn't take the idea of somebody coming in and dismissing it or something. Or maybe it was just that it was mine. I was used to going into bookstores just to make sure it was on the shelf and leaving it there, since I already owned it. Sometimes I've given the impression I'm totally unfamiliar with something I actually love when people start talking about it because of that.
The things I get involved in communally are more things I'm ready to pick apart. I really don't feel like I can say I'm a "fan" of HP, though I'm in the fandom, because I'm just not attached to the books the way I am to other books and things. LOTR is sort of the same way--I found something I do love in them and enjoy analyzing that with other people who've identified the same thing. It's very different than finding a book that's "your book," that you hide behind the other books in the library as a kid.:-)
The slash question is even more interesting. I think slash is a natural by-product of an intense m/m relationship, either in the text or potentially in the text (like if these two characters actually met it would be intense). I'm not sure how much it has to be in the text for it to stop being slash to me. Like, I don't think of QaF as slashy because the relationships are already nailed down in that area. I see how they interact sexually. It's no longer a language totally owned by fanfic.
So I guess I do think it's possible to write something as slashy, if you're writing an intense relationship between two men or women because as long as you write in such a way that there are spaces for readers to project, you can be writing slashy. Perhaps somebody like Ivy, for instance, is just aware of how she reads things as a slasher so when she writes a scene she can also look at how she would read that scene. I do think it's possible as a writer to see different possible interpretations in your own work, and even to slash your own work in your head without putting it in the text. Because slash, to me, is a way of playing out the character dynamics sexually. You can learn something about the characters in slash and use it in gen. It's kind of about just reducing the relationship to the most primal form, which can then be translated into slash or poetry or humor or whatever.
no subject
Date: 2003-11-10 04:37 pm (UTC)I get possessive about a lot of things like that, though :D :D
But especially Sandman, Patricia McKillip, Tori, Peter Beagle, Books of Magic, Diana Wynne Jones, AS Byatt, Emma Bull, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, The Borderlands. Heh.
I guess what I was saying about the slash was--
It seems like a cop-out if your most intense relationship isn't going to get "fulfilled" or isn't "fulfilling" within the text. I don't consider that good writing. That's why I don't really ship K/S in Star Trek-- I think their relationship written as gen (in commercial fic & in the show/movies) is perfectly fulfilling and intense. Slash implies a -lack-, somehow. I dunno. It's like... I don't want there to be this sense of hanging possibility. It's not fun for me to read, I guess.
So yeah, I don't know if I was saying it's not possible to write slashy original fics (obviously)....
"Spaces for readers to project"-- I like that. Hmm. But this "slashing in your head" business bothers me. -Why- isn't the writer putting this relationship out there? Is it -more- intense than the actual relationship? If it is, why? I'm an OTP-type person, too, so I get really attached to the characters and I would never really see a same-sex friendship "that way", no matter how intense, if there was a central (opposite-sex) romance in the fic. You're talking about gen-fic, but I'm talking about het-fic, which is what both Maya and Ivy are writing. They're writing slashy het fic.
I think slashy gen-fic is a different beast, because you can kind of read it as pre-slash, I guess, and it doesn't really -contradict-, which is what bothers me. It's that sense of double-vision, of self-contradiction. The emotional balance would be wonky if there's always this intense shadow behind things. That's what I was thinking about.
Did I not explain it right? I never explain anything well enough :T
Yeah, so I guess I don't like slashing-as-subverting-the-text. I just see two characters in love, and it doesn't matter to be whether it's officially subtext or officially text-- what I care about is the character dynamics making sense to me. This is why I've often thought of myself as a romantic rather than a slasher.
I question the purpose of slashing it in your head, I guess. Why would one do that? What does one gain? If one is really in love with these characters and their love, why doesn't one just write it that way? -Are- they in love? I mean, there's a sense of "what's real" that's gut-level to me when I write something. Like, when I read something or write something or perceive something, I tend to be pretty certain about my emotional response to it, and I'm pretty monogamous in that. So maybe this is just me and my issues. Like... um. I don't tend to slash a text, actually, so I don't know. I've read slash and shipped characters from that fic, and I've read/watched het, and shipped -that-.
I -have- slashed, say... Warren/Andrew. They are MFEO, totally. Nothing in the text contradicts that. I'm not really projecting so much as extrapolating. Projecting is forcing something onto an image, something to obscure or change the image. All I'm doing is interpreting what's already there and taking it to another level. Projecting is the parallel-type reading and what I do is an AU-type reading. In my little universe, Warren/Andrew are In Lurve. In Buffy, they -may- be and I can watch it without being pained because I'm watching the HEY LOOK WARREN AND ANDREW ARE SO STRAIGHT show, like with Smallville. Sigh.
Does anything make more sense now? Or did I just muddle it more? :/
no subject
Date: 2003-11-10 06:02 pm (UTC)Maybe my saying I had problems with it was badly phrased...it's more like I looked to fanfic because there was something I wanted to see in the text that wasn't there. I found fanfic by actively looking for H/D slash because I was thinking how the one character and dynamic I found exceptionally interesting was those two and that made me wonder if there was slash. In X-files, by contrast, I did want someone to talk about the show with and was never really interested in fanfic whether I saw subtext there or not.
It seems like a cop-out if your most intense relationship isn't going to get "fulfilled" or isn't "fulfilling" within the text. I don't consider that good writing. That's why I don't really ship K/S in Star Trek-- I think their relationship written as gen (in commercial fic & in the show/movies) is perfectly fulfilling and intense.
Ah! Now I get it. Yes, I do agree, I think. Since I mostly deal with children's fic I guess I probably assume it's pre-slash or pre-anything. I like Frodo/Sam slash a lot, but there I feel like it's fulfilling something that's not in the text on purpose. Like, they end up separated in canon and that's important. So much of the text is about loss that to have it end like a romance (with a marriage instead of a death) is wrong for the story. What I doubt I'd do is, as you said, write het that was slashy because then it seems like you're maybe shooting yourself in the foot. Like Tolkien gives Sam a wife at the end of the story and you're like, "Who is this person. GO AWAY!!" You wonder why the most intense relationship ends up getting thrown over for one of the least interesting, generic relationship just because it's het. Sam/Rosie has nothing to do with these two characters, it's just sort of a symbol of family life.
I question the purpose of slashing it in your head, I guess. Why would one do that? What does one gain? If one is really in love with these characters and their love, why doesn't one just write it that way? -Are- they in love?
Good question! As I said I tend to deal more in kid's lit so it's always more a possibility than a reality. I just started something now where there's a main character who's male, and I suspect as I get into it he will have a girl and a boy who are both very important to him. Maybe as I write one relationship will seem the one that would lead to being in love more than the other, but I could potentially explore the future possibility with both of them in my mind without being able to fixate on one as being the OTP. If I decided that the two boys were my OTP and not a boy and a girl, then I think that would become real to me and I wouldn't write it otherwise. Like, I'd know in my mind that these two boys were going to be in love. If I felt that way, judging by the way I usually am about OTPs, I would find it too painful to imagine writing them as in love with someone else, you know?
But then, it's also true that circumstances sometimes bring people to the wrong person. I might imagine that characters X and Y would end up married because X would never realize or admit he was in love with Z. On one hand I would "know" as the author that they were in love, but I'd also "know" whether or not fate would allow them to be together. So I might imagine what would happen if the two realized their feelings for each other (feelings they might not ever recognize really). That would maybe be slash because I think in real life the two boys would never realize the way they felt.
That wouldn't necessarily mean that I wasn't writing the most intense relationship in the story, though, because maybe part of what's intense about it is that there's this unresolved tension. If you really think the characters are in love I can see why you'd want to imagine how happy it would be if they'd get together, but then turn around and keep them apart in the text because that happy ending isn't for them. Like the way you might imagine how one would feel if the other one died to get a handle of how much they meant to each other without actually killing one in the text. Did that make sense? This is really interesting to try to figure out...
no subject
Date: 2003-11-10 08:16 pm (UTC)Like. It's so nice to not have the other person be like, "whuh?" I feel actually sane or something. Whoa. -.-
I'd love to get Ivy and/or Maya's takes on this, but! This is also good, 'cause yes.
See, that's the thing, exactly. It's this sense that the het relationship is some sort of "unhappy ending", some way of things not working out like they ideally should. I can see that, yes, but! In the case of Ivy and Maya both, I think (not sure about Ivy), the het relationship is -supposed- to be "valid"-- that is... it's not supposed to be unhappy. It's supposed to work on both levels, that's what bothers me. Like, on the level where this is a normal fic with a het "surface" or even a het center (I'm not sure, having not read either work-in-progress in their entirety), and as a slash-friendly work.
It makes sense to me to have it be a departure from ideal-- of course! Nothing says you have to have happy endings or romances working out or any of that, of course not. But if the book attempts to front itself as both the "real deal" het-wise and also sneak in a slashy subtext as a wink-wink-nudge-nudge to the readers-in-the-know... that's when it becomes unpalatable to me.
I'm more familiar with snippets of Maya's fic, so I'll talk a bit about that. I know Maya loves them and sometimes she sees them "that way", but I do think that she doesn't really think they're "in love". It's like, in a way, being a slasher, of course any two boys who're really close are "in love", but in her mind, I don't think they are. It's like, a weird addition to still be aware that this is "slashy", but okay. To -try- to make it slashy on purpose-- slash-without-resolution-into-text, that is-- seems like a painful endeavor to me.
Slash shouldn't be painful, should it? And yet it is! It would be painful to me to watch Smallville if I seriously shipped Clex, or any similar show. I don't know why people all subject themselves to this. I read fanfic because there it is text, and I've never been one for always running canon through my mind. I like some believability, yes, but I don't need to be always saying, "oh, but in page 234 of book 3, Snape said...", you know? Heh. I appreciate it, but mostly I just want things to -feel- right. I'm reading it for the dynamic, not its validity as an insight and expansion of canon-- which is a motivation that'd actually make me stay away from fanfic.
So I guess I read slash (and write it) as just "gay romance", or rather just romance. I enjoy boys-in-love romance as a type much the same way I enjoyed medieval romance as a type back when I was 13. Slash though, is different because of this doubling up on the text. And I understand it as a media participation phenomenon (I do go "oh, they'd be so hot together!!" myself, of course), but as a writer it seems facetious and false in a way, if you're trying to seriously push the other side (the het side) without reservation like they do on TV.
If you assume that the "main" relationship is valid (as it usually is in texts people slash currently), then slashing your own novel is a farce, I guess. That's what I'm trying to get at. I think.
no subject
Date: 2003-11-10 10:16 pm (UTC)Exactly. I would never want slash to have to depend on fanfic. If you see the potential, you can make it so in fanfic. As
as a writer it seems facetious and false in a way, if you're trying to seriously push the other side (the het side) without reservation like they do on TV.
I think I know what you mean--because it's like how could you write a love story while also suggesting the love story is a lie? It's almost like hedging your bets, giving the backup love story just in case. For me--and I realize not everyone is like this--this makes me upset. I don't like the idea of a person just trying out the one relationship where they might just as easily have chosen the other one. It makes me feel like one character is possibly being made a fool of, like she or he doesn't know about the looks his/her boy/girlfriend is throwing across the room.
This also reminds me of this play I saw a few years ago, Design for Living, by Noel Coward. The basic story is there's this woman who has an affair with one guy, then his best friend. They switch back and forth, then she runs off and the two friends are left together. In the end she's about to marry some other guy and the two friends show up and explain they've figured out their problem. They're just not as happy when one of them is missing. The logistics of how they worked it out was left up to the imagination. Did she just sleep with one, then the other while the two guys were platonic friends? Did the two guys ever have sex with each other? Did they all three go to bed together? We didn't know.
The problem with this revival was that they made the slash text. When the two guys were left alone, they started snogging. For a moment this was great because it was two cute guys snogging but...then it didn't work. The threesome became really hard to buy because the two guys both seemed completely gay. Alan Cummings played one of the guys and he was very cute but also seemed very gay so it was immediately hard to buy that this woman had had an affair with him. The other guy was less so, at first, but then when he showed up at the end he also seemed flamboyantly gay. So it seemed like this happy gay couple showed up to collect their nanny so she could take care of them. The happy ending seemed to be, imo, when the two men found each other. I ended up feeling sorry for the woman, even though I didn't like her character much, because she was stuck with two husbands who were in love with each other and not her. I can be happy with a good Ot3, but this didn't seem like a threesome.
Romantic love, especially in romantic fiction, has a real possessive quality to it. I think that's one of the reasons people read them--you want that idea of personal desire and possession. Definitely I think a lot of H/D centers on that. Draco, in particular, seems like a character who desperately wants to be possessed while Harry is one that wants to possess, so they make a fabulous couple. Draco never wants to be free and Harry never wants to let go. So when you dilute that with one character seemingly always looking over the other one's shoulder to wink at somebody else maybe it seems like less a romance and more about something else...?
no subject
Date: 2003-11-10 10:40 pm (UTC)I seem to speak a lot more easily in comments. I think it just degenerates from posts to comments to instant-messenging. Heh. The only place I ever combine all my modes of speech and feel like I attain any semblance of saying what I really mean is in fiction. :>
But yeah-- you pretty much described it (and much more vividly than I conceived of it, too). That's what disturbs me about writing slashy het-- it's like, if you're -aware- of the slash part as you're writing it, then in a way it becomes text in your mind, and all these problems arise. I'm really interested in how DV deals with this, btw, since it has a similar sort of dynamic to work out. I don't think Cassie will just go for any easy tied-up-at-the-end answers, and I doubt it'll go pure slash, so it should be interesting. Hermione does feel like a go-between even now, though a bit of a necessary go-between, and you can tell they love her. Even so, a threesome definitely wouldn't work. I guess I generally think threesomes don't work in any long-term way 'cause of that whole love-possessiveness thing.
You totally hit the heart of it for me, with that possessiveness comment. By slashing you're getting into that whole romantic-attraction kettle of fish, and that involves possessiveness. If it's just non-romantic love, then they could withstand sharing and being apart and whatever. If you're having romantic subtext, then there are all these issues of betrayal and need that are incongruous, I guess. Love isn't just brotherly affection and just add sex. Maybe that's what bothers me, too. It's not just about adding the sex. It's a whole different set of priorities and needs. *beats naive people over the head with newspaper*
I don't know what that "something else" it would be about. It gets all muddled and uncertain-- I guess that's what the subversion of the text is all about, but to me it's just unsettling and not good storytelling. But as I'd said in my post, maybe some people just like/don't mind being unsettled like that :-?
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Date: 2003-11-11 09:10 am (UTC)Oh yeah. I'm just a little slow on the uptake.:-)
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Date: 2003-11-11 06:13 am (UTC)Yeah, me too. I had problems especially with GoF, which was when I got into the fandom. I was also curious about fandoms and fanfiction in general, because I'd never really been in one, and HP was perfect for it - I liked it enough to read more, but not enough to be fanatical about the canon.
I also have the personal feeling about things I love, but in a different way, I think. My love for Trek, for example, does not manifest itself in fannish behavior, but just in great and t00by love - an emotion and a happiness within me. I don't know half as much about the Trek universe, even, as I know about HP, I've never tried to learned Trek technobabble or keep the plotlines coherent in my head. I deliberate forget things so that I can have the delight of rediscovering them when I watch reruns. As far as my crazy mind is concerned, Star Trek is perfect just the way it is - it doesn't need anything more, and nothing fan-created could live up to the original, for me. Totally biased, of course, because I've never been active in that fandom, but, you see, that's the way I think.
But I think I'm getting over this, a little, now, because I've come to realize how much fun it is, simply to discuss things. Even if with the things I really love it might only be at a basic level of "Hey, this is wonderful!" "Yes, you think so too? YAY!" I couldn't stand reading nitpicking of Trek, you know, the kind that I enjoy doing to the HP books.
So it's weird, and sometimes I feel like a kind of imposter because I'm not a true fan or somesuch - I'm here because I like the fics, and I like you people, and I like the discussion that goes on and the way of thinking and interpretation. Sometimes I wish that all this was focused on some original source that I had more affection for - but then, if it was, I don't think I could handle it or be involved in it with as much detachment, tolerance, and general use of sense. So it *is* really strange to consider myself one of the HP-obsessed. Hmmmmm.
no subject
Date: 2003-11-11 11:12 am (UTC)Also, I'd noticed you archive/link to DV fanfic on your site, so here (http://reenka.expecto-patronum.net)-- there are two there for DV under `tribute fic'. Heh :>
no subject
Date: 2003-11-12 02:04 am (UTC)