alias_sqbr | What annoys me about fanfic meta about itself

(separated out as a tangent from Old school fandom: Can we fix it?)

There's a difference between "here are some flaws in X group"/"Here are some awesome things about my group" (both of which are valid) and "Let's think about the differences between X and my group. Well.. X has all these flaws. And my group is awesome. Because we are awesome people, and they are flawed people (apart from the ones who eventually realise how awesome we are and change sides)."

There is a jump from "there is an undertone of misogyny to some slash"/"There is an undertone of homophobia to some non-slashers behaviour" to "slashers are misogynistic"/"non-slashers are homophobic" to "If you really cared you'd write (fem)slash"(*).

One of things which made me feel excluded from fanfic fandom for years was this attitude that "A lot of fanfic works this way"->"This is What Fanfic Is"->"Everything that is not This sucks and is probably written and enjoyed by misogynistic and/or dull men". Yes, a lot of fanfic takes canon characters and puts them into a romance, but that doesn't mean that I'm Missing The Point of fanfic if I take the setting and write gen about some original characters. And the fact that male dominated fandom tends to be sexist and dismissive of fanfic doesn't mean there's a direct correlation between having tastes in line with conventional fandom and being sexist/narrowminded. Acting this way means female fans with "male" tastes get treated badly in both fandoms.

I'm not sure I've ever seen any "Let's compare stuff from fanfic fandom to equivalent stuff made by people outside" meta that didn't spend every second paragraph talking about how much more awesome and creative and feminist and postmodern "our" stuff is.

One of the things about online fandom (especially on lj) is it's much bigger and more finely delineated which makes it easier to avoid really obnoxious people and create your own space but also makes it easy forget that your like-minded friendslist is not all there is to fandom. When I see a comment like Ursula LeGuin fans could demonstrate a little of the progressive social values of Stargate:Atlantis fans I have to wonder if they count all the fans in mainstream male dominated fandom who think Teyla is hot and enjoy the explosions or whatever. And if they don't count, why don't I get to redefine "Ursula LeGuin" fans the same way? (And here I start shading into my next post :))

nb: I realise one of things fanfic meta does is tend to focus exclusively on fanfic (and specifically, boyslash) to the exclusion of other sorts of fannish creativity and I've kind of done that here. I guess I can't break out of the very mindset I'm criticising!

(*)These arguments annoyed me a lot less once I wrote some femslash, since now I'm one irrational-smug-moral-superiority level above the smug m/m slash writers :)

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From:

hlbr.livejournal.com

Eh, I've come back to this, probably too late, but I wanted to engage, because honestly, reducing the reactions to only strong male characters in mainstream media of 'women'/'fanficcers'/'fans' to slash/Mary Sue, is really freaking reductionist. Pardon the redundancy.

There are fandoms which are predominantly slash, there are also those who are not, and have gen and het, either along with slash or predominantly. Yes, Virginia, there are. They're not in lj, which is probably why most lj meta doesn't take them into account (though lj meta tends to ignore the parts they should know about, like the fact that HP fandom has the same amount of het than of slash--or near enough of the same amount that we would've to do a study to discover which one predominates.)

Mary Sues are kind of... I don't want to be insulting to the writers, but story telling wise, kinda immature. Which is why you find so many young people writing them. And they are only immature because they piss people off, for different in and out story reasons. But they're not, I think, most of any fandom I know. (Perhaps there's a fandom out there with a majority of Mary Sue fic, what do I know? But I haven't met any.)

So the dichotomy is false, I think.

Slash is not what fanfic is about, necessarily.

I think that fanfic is about retaking the narrative, not for any particularly revolutionary reasons, but because narrating is fun and educative, and entertaining, and a awesome way to create and strengthen communities.

From:

aquaeri.livejournal.com

I want to say I feel terribly misunderstood, but instead I'll apologise for writing so poorly as to be so misunderstood about a subject that's clearly so problematic. I need to take much more care when expressing my ideas around fanfic.

From:

hlbr.livejournal.com

Heh. And now I feel all guilty. I don't think talking about ff is so fraught. I mean, perhaps it is, but it's not really an offence/hurt thing, exactly, so it's not so terrible if you screw it up.

I do get nervous because the analysis will be way off base if people don't take into account the whole of fandom, or they will have to reduce their conclusions to apply to a tiny tiny minority of the real thing.

I just... it really depends on the fandom. There are ones where the one to introduce the concept of Mary Sueism was me (or any of the two or three openly multi-fandom people), so it def wasn't applied to any fic--in a fandom with predominantly feminine povs. Just as an example. (And there isn't any accusation similar, either, just so you know I'm not being intellectually dishonest about it.)

I don't claim to know about all fandoms. There are ones, even, though I very well know they exist and I know nothing about them. So I'm hesitant to generalize, specially when already in the few I know, the rules aren't really working.

But I don't want to terribly misunderstand anyone. I promise that if you explain again, I will make more of an effort, (after I come back tomorrow from my final).

I am interested in having this discussion, too, as you have more theoretical tools than I have, I think, and thus I want to get it.

From:

hlbr.livejournal.com

The is one fandom where I introduced the concept, I should say. Austen. And, you know, just used when I was a lol!newby and didn't know that vocabulary wasn't used. It's now used a little more, but not broadly. I don't really know if I was directly responsible, or any of those people I refer to, but it seems a reasonable conclusion.

From:

alias_sqbr

I'm in that weird position where I agree with what both of you have said yet you appear to be disagreeing :)

So: what I took aquaeri to be saying is that she would be perceived as writing a Mary Sue if she wrote the sort of fic she'd be drawn to, and that female centered fic is often accused of being a Mary Sue.

Of course it's possible you wouldn't agree with this either, and I don't feel I have a broad enough feel for the way the various fanfic fandoms behave to argue in favour of it very strongly (and I don't know what fandom(s) she would hypothetically be writing in)

Sidenote: based on your and other people's comments in this latest round of meta I've started to realise that I do tend to think of sff based fanfic fandom as the "main" fanfic fandom, which is clearly untrue and unfair. I need to poke at my assumptions some more, I think. EDIT: And thus me passing uncritically past "slash is at the core of fandom". I think that statement is true if you take "fandom" to mean "the particular part of fanfic fandom which writes the sort of meta the post is complaining about", but one of the main issues is that that does NOT go without saying.

From:

hlbr.livejournal.com

lol! Perhaps that is our fate--to agree by disagreeing.

I do have a lot of troubles with considering any fandom 'main' fandom (even for me personally!) so I confess I'm taking an issue, perhaps, where context should have made it clear to me it was a more particular definition.

that female centered fic is often accused of being a Mary Sue.

I had a discussion about this before in another lj--where there was people who argued that. I don't think so, but of course there are no statistics. I think there are less male OC Mary Sues, simply because there are less male writers, and thus, yes, female OC Mary Sues are reported more, but that doesn't mean anything about female centred texts, as canon female characters povs don't get called Mary Sues, except in extreme cases, as male ones do (I'm talking about the fandoms I'm most in, which would be HP, and Austen).

It could be true for other fandoms, though.

Now I leave it here and I apologize if it's completely gibberish, because it's 1:30 am and I have to go sleep. Damn final.

From:

aquaeri.livejournal.com

I think we're actually in agreement. I guess to me the elephants in the room are: more women than men write fanfic in general (I think this is true across every kind of fandom?); not everything gets its own fanfic; at least to my knowledge, the meta about fanfic being feminist or not tends to be about the fandoms that are based on male character dominated canon; slash is the type of fanfic that is most often discussed (as far as I can tell) in feminist meta about fanfic.

Some of that may be because the feminists in fandom are going to be attracted to meta-ing male-dominated books and shows that have fandoms (?) and meta-ing fanfic is just a corner of that.

Oh and if there's a whole feminist meta about Jane Austen fanfic, I'd be really interested in seeing what it's about. Or another female character dominated canon that has a lot of fanfic.

From:

hlbr.livejournal.com

more women than men write fanfic in general (I think this is true across every kind of fandom?)

Uhm, I actually don't know. I know that in sci-fi, and HP the percentage is actually more even than in Jane Austen fandom, for example, but

I wouldn't dare to say actual numbers about any fandom but JA

I don't really know about other fandoms I'm not in contact with

I don't know if it's the elephant in the room, in the sense that I everyone is quite aware of that fact, in all fandoms I'm in. It's not clear why that is, of course, that's the thing everyone discusses. Why fanfic? Why slash? Why het? Why UST? Why, why, why? There are no easy answers, and my feeling is that I've far too little information to say anything about it.

JA fandom has a lot of feminist meta about the books themselves, but not all online. (Some of it quite... wacky.) JA fandom in particular has a very strong (and old!) canon discussion only branches.

If you are interested, I will ask a friend that always has the links on hand and pass them along. :D

From:

alias_sqbr

I do have a lot of troubles with considering any fandom 'main' fandom (even for me personally!) so I confess I'm taking an issue, perhaps, where context should have made it clear to me it was a more particular definition.

One of the things meta writers from the part of sff fanfic fandom that THINKS it's the main fandom do is make all these unstated assumptions and then when called on it go "Oh, yeah, I was just talking about slash/scifi/tv/america etc, I thought that was clear from context". And this irritates the heck out of me, so you're totally justified in calling me out on it for doing so myself, it's even on topic for this post :)