~~ 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 11:08 am (UTC)And!
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 posssessive 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.
Someone else feels this way! *pumps fist* Tori Amos is so personal, I think. Some artists I love love love but I can share with others and the love love love doesn't diminish. Tori... well... yeah. And maybe a few others. Just some random songs, really, are personal for me. A few Dar Williams songs, and maybe some Joni Mitchel. The Griffin and Sabine books. Some of my manga. *reflective* His Dark Materials, very much. Did this have a point? :D!