Posts by Andre Alessi
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Tui Head,
But I don’t get why you’re surprised that women are embracing Dean/Castiel, since fic-writing and manip-making fandom is pretty heavily dominated by women, particularly slash (although not, IMO, to the extent that some have presented it). Or do you mean you’re surprised by women being into slash generally? We don’t need to rehash that, I hope.
Well, yeah, I am surprised by the involvement (or rather predominance?) of straight cis women who enjoy writing about/drawing nominally heterosexual fictional cis male characters having sexual relationships with each other. I’m not surprised in a judge-y way, it’s just one of those things (like watersports or foot porn) that I personally can’t get my head around, which I acknowledge is a failure in imagination on my part.
I do think there are some interesting gender/sexuality issues involving the relationship of straight cis women with “queering” overtly heterosexual cis male characters and the possible fetishisation of male queerness, but I also don’t think I’m the right person to talk about these issues for a whole host of reasons.
I don’t believe you about Tim/Damian though. Jason/Tim, Dick/Tim (the greatest scan on my dash today: work safe, if you don’t understand puns), sure. But Damian’s ten and, more to the point, everyone hates him.
Everyone* likes angry sex too though! I follow some people who are jaded with the typical ships you mention, so I probably see more Damian-related stuff than I should, because they go out of their way to post things that are counter the prevailing opinions of the fandoms. And yet another thing I’m not going to touch with a batarang is the way in which paedophilia is fairly casually portrayed in a lot of these ships.
* ETA - By "everyone" here, I don't mean to imply that people who don't like angry sex are not actually people, it just seemed like a pithy thing to say.
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Then there’s the writers who “permit” it but try to set rules about it, which is…also kind of missing the point, but I guess a little more well-adjusted. As long as they realise the rules are mostly unenforceable and some people will be moved to break them by the mere fact of their existence.
I think (and this is just a guess based on what I've seen from the outside of all this) it can be really intimidating for many writers to engage with fan communities in anything but the most formal, structured ways, and reading fanfic (let alone commenting on it) is a kind of engagement. When someone self-identifies as a fan, and starts writing fanfic, or creating fan art, they're signalling that they are really passionate about what they're doing, and sometimes that passion gets in the way of good manners.
Someone who I think has probably done best at it has been Gail Simone, who writes comics for DC, and who tried to be really active in the comics fandom on Tumblr (although like you say, she's also been quite explicit about drawing a line around fan fiction and generally not commenting on it.) If ever there was a positive role-model for conscious engagement with a fanbase, it's Gail. But what she found was that many fans take that engagement as an excuse to let rip with all their individual concerns, often in pretty confrontational, nasty ways. I'd like to think that this was just because "the Internet makes people mean" but it's hard to miss the ways in which fan fic/fan art alters some fans' perceptions of their own place in the creative process of the work which inspires them.
Which is not to say that writing or reading slash (for example) leads to being an arsehole in general. If anything, that playing around with the internal assumptions in an artwork works to reclaim parts of the world that were previously off-limits for many people (I mean, personally I find Rule 63 a source of constant joy.) But I can certainly understand why many writers would have emotional difficulty in commenting coherently on fan fiction because of the context of the culture that fan fiction generally arises in.
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Andre Alessi,
Roping in James Marsters was genius
Totally OT: I really liked James Marsters' admission during a chat at Phoenix Comic Con last year that the best on-screen kiss he ever had was with John Barrowman, because he trusted and respected him completely.
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Josh Addison,
I once incurred the ire of a Snapes/Hagrid slash fiction community on Livejournal. Just saying.
I follow three people on Tumblr, none of whom know each other, who each have developed their own Bellatrix/Draco Sims mods.
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There's plenty of Jane Austen erotic fan fiction out there, by the way (link SFW.)
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
but to mis-quote Gaiman, fandom is not his bitch. Fanfic happens. The question is whether to be gracious or not about its inevitable existence. Graciousness gets you far more points with the people who buy your work than petulance.
I think that's one thing that finally won me over to liking Supernatural again, after originally having given up on it in the middle ("muddle"?) of Season 2. The writers have obviously made an effort to understand and appreciate what their fan base likes, and the constant in-jokes on the show and at fan conventions really are that much funnier. (There's even one excellent episode in season 4 where Sam and Dean come face to face with their in-universe fanclub and Dean learns what "slash" means.
It can't be easy knowing other people are picking up the stories and characters you worked so hard on and morphing them in ways you would never have thought of, so any writer that makes their peace with that process strikes me as being pretty cool doodz.
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
I really have to credit internet fandom for teaching me that sometimes other people like different things from me, even wildly opposing things, and that is OK. I can just try very hard to forget about it.
I'm constantly surprised at how inventive some of these kinks are. I mean, Aragorn/Frodo is pretty tame in the grand scheme of things.
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Now, it’s possible that a taste for written pornography is more common in women than in men, while more men might prefer visual pornography, and that such a difference might be biological rather than socialised.
I think even that distinction (if it's there at all) is disappearing. The amount of erotic art on Deviantart is staggering, and subjectively I'd say the declared gender identity of artists tends quite strongly towards "female".
I try really hard not to sneer at other people's kinks, but I do get a little bit surprised by how excitedly the fan communities on Tumblr (which again, skew strongly towards young straight cis women) embrace, for example, Destiel fan art, or superhero slash art (no linking, but there isn't a day goes by that I don't see Damian/Tim slash art so it's easy to find if you really want to.)
Yaoi also has a primarily female fanbase, and that is an explicitly (heh) visual medium.
The only difference I see is that live action/animated porn still tends towards traditionally heterosexual male subject matter, but that seems to be more a matter of the higher production costs making that an issue of economics, not something "inherent" to the gender of its consumers.
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Hard News: Still sounds good, in reply to dyan campbell,
Respect. I could never understand the appeal of "Down in Splendor" either - to me it always seemed to drag down the energy when they played it live. I always thought Andrew's song "Fabulous Things" was a better showcase for his style in the context of SJF, but they never played that live.
I like "Down In Splendour", at least when I'm alone in my room and want to hear something of that nature (plus I've always thought the avoidance of the use of first person in the lyrics was a really interesting experiment.) But then I caught myself thoroughly enjoying Bike's stuff too, so my opinion is probably suspect.
Melt remains one of my all-time favourite albums from start to finish, anyway.
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Completely off topic, but...Cry havoc and let slip the cats of war!