Quick thought: I'm really bothered by how slash gets treated in fandom these days:
look, slash fanfic is always going to be around, and that's not the real problem:
what I have a problem with is people who says its *why* they like the "story", and in fact it's just a show that exists only in their mind.
Take Frodo/Sam or Kirk/Spock. It's not that I mind LGBT pairings....because I'm ALSO upset by shipper pairings that have no basis in reality: Kirk/Uhura is "educated speculation", that doesn't count, but I mean like Picard/Troi or something.
What I mean is like the crazed fangirls who say "Slash is PART of fandom! THat's what Lord of the Rings is ABOUT Frodo/Sam"
and its.....no, it is not. I understand that that is amusing to them, but there comes a point when its "you aren't even watching this show"
***As I said, I have no problem with canonical LGBT pairings, but that's not as fun, apparently.
You see....I'm actaully quite jaded: I see nothing wrong with having LGBT characters, and its to the point that I *expect* good LGBT characters on a show, and criticized Battlestar Galactica for not having any. I don't think we had this viewpoint even 20 years ago, when they say TNG was too afraid to deal with homosexuality directly. (my criticisms of BSG and LGBT characters is shared by the writers themselves; they said they threw in Cain and Gaeta being LGBT retroactively, at the last minute, and are still pretty unsatisfied with how they handled it...that's why RDM's aborted new TV pilot "Virtuality" was going to have a married gay couple from the outset)
So the point is, the only "real meaning" I saw in slash fiction is that "it's culture jamming"....that is, to a society that is intolerant of LGBT stuff, the er, "Surprise Buttsecks" (so they call it) was shocking and liberating to write about.
but now, in 2009, my feelings are "I wouldn't be upset to have a Gaeta/Hoshi love scene anymore than a Helo/Athena one" in that Helo and Athena are a stable couple and a stable homosexual romantic pairing wouldn't be a problem.
But I ask you; if a heterosexual couple were having "crazy vapid slash fiction sex"....I'd think it was just trash.
So there was a time when the homosexual slash was "liberating" and "challenging our perceptions".....but at least for *me*, I see homosexual slash fiction as no different from heterosexual slash fiction.......het slash, of the "Chekotay has sex with Seven of Nine" variety.
It is not mature or witty to write sexually charged fantasy stories about your favorite TV show characters in LGBT (or even heterosexual) sexual pairings.
And what of "good slash with an actual plot"? "Good slash with an actual plot" turns into actual "fan fiction", and great "fan fiction" turns into "expanded universe stories" (Star Wars) or even "fanscripts that got handed in and turned into actual episodes" (the lucky few)....so the lines blurr, but the destinctions ARE there, and that doesn't mean they don't matter.
So my point is...."Ammonite", "The Female Man", or any of the works of Tiptree, are classics of science fiction challenging our perceptions of the human condition (i.e. how many of our engrained assumptions about the nature of our very lives, is based on our 20th-century-specific western concepts of "Gender"? What about a race with three genders?)
Slash fiction is not "good writing" because it features "daring homosexual pairings". that may have been fun for a while when it was "daring", but I think in the 21st century, we should have more maturity. I mean "Captain Jack Harkness" is "omnisexual" on Torchwood, but there's an actualy *plot*
Slash fiction is just crazed wish fulfillment, no better than Leia's Metal Bikini for the heterosexual fanboys.
Will slash fiction be around forever? Yes...in the same sense that we're never getting rid of Leia's Metal Bikini. Yeah, LMB is kind of fun, but I don't confuse it with "actual Hugo Award worthy writing"
And this kind of affects anime fandom more because frankly....most anime shows are aimed at younger audiences and really don't have any higher meaning. And that's well and good, but in same areas the slash fiction peope have kind of taken over; I mean what if I were to walk into a room and say "Cowboy Bebop is ABOUT Spike/Vicious!".......that's simply not the story. So why feel the need to appropriate characters from existing stories into situations they'd never be in? That's not "storytelling" that's "fantasy fulfillment"
My thing is.....remember "Brave New World"? Everyone just has soma-fueled orgies all the time, and have forgotten all of the art/music/literature/religion/philosophy that once made humanity great. Then The Savage comes along and says "wow, you guys don't have Shakespeare?" And he even tries to explain to them what Shakespeare is like, and they just don't understand it. Which raises the problem of: what if people are happy for the wrong reasons?
Sure, the old mantra, bleated out like "Four legs good, two legs bad!" is going to be "but slash fiction is fun!".....well, so is soma in Brave New World.
And if you're going to argue about "well written slash fiction"; that's not "slash" that's "fanfiction", which is a step above that.
We need to stop having people who think "I write my own slash fiction, that makes me an accomplished quality author!"
But slash fiction makes us happy! No more than masturbation. It's nothing more, and nothing less. And if it WERE something more, we'd call it just normal "fanfiction". By *definition* I'm talking about the sex ones, here.
"But slash makes us happy!"
Well,
look, slash fanfic is always going to be around, and that's not the real problem:
what I have a problem with is people who says its *why* they like the "story", and in fact it's just a show that exists only in their mind.
Take Frodo/Sam or Kirk/Spock. It's not that I mind LGBT pairings....because I'm ALSO upset by shipper pairings that have no basis in reality: Kirk/Uhura is "educated speculation", that doesn't count, but I mean like Picard/Troi or something.
What I mean is like the crazed fangirls who say "Slash is PART of fandom! THat's what Lord of the Rings is ABOUT Frodo/Sam"
and its.....no, it is not. I understand that that is amusing to them, but there comes a point when its "you aren't even watching this show"
***As I said, I have no problem with canonical LGBT pairings, but that's not as fun, apparently.
You see....I'm actaully quite jaded: I see nothing wrong with having LGBT characters, and its to the point that I *expect* good LGBT characters on a show, and criticized Battlestar Galactica for not having any. I don't think we had this viewpoint even 20 years ago, when they say TNG was too afraid to deal with homosexuality directly. (my criticisms of BSG and LGBT characters is shared by the writers themselves; they said they threw in Cain and Gaeta being LGBT retroactively, at the last minute, and are still pretty unsatisfied with how they handled it...that's why RDM's aborted new TV pilot "Virtuality" was going to have a married gay couple from the outset)
So the point is, the only "real meaning" I saw in slash fiction is that "it's culture jamming"....that is, to a society that is intolerant of LGBT stuff, the er, "Surprise Buttsecks" (so they call it) was shocking and liberating to write about.
but now, in 2009, my feelings are "I wouldn't be upset to have a Gaeta/Hoshi love scene anymore than a Helo/Athena one" in that Helo and Athena are a stable couple and a stable homosexual romantic pairing wouldn't be a problem.
But I ask you; if a heterosexual couple were having "crazy vapid slash fiction sex"....I'd think it was just trash.
So there was a time when the homosexual slash was "liberating" and "challenging our perceptions".....but at least for *me*, I see homosexual slash fiction as no different from heterosexual slash fiction.......het slash, of the "Chekotay has sex with Seven of Nine" variety.
It is not mature or witty to write sexually charged fantasy stories about your favorite TV show characters in LGBT (or even heterosexual) sexual pairings.
And what of "good slash with an actual plot"? "Good slash with an actual plot" turns into actual "fan fiction", and great "fan fiction" turns into "expanded universe stories" (Star Wars) or even "fanscripts that got handed in and turned into actual episodes" (the lucky few)....so the lines blurr, but the destinctions ARE there, and that doesn't mean they don't matter.
So my point is...."Ammonite", "The Female Man", or any of the works of Tiptree, are classics of science fiction challenging our perceptions of the human condition (i.e. how many of our engrained assumptions about the nature of our very lives, is based on our 20th-century-specific western concepts of "Gender"? What about a race with three genders?)
Slash fiction is not "good writing" because it features "daring homosexual pairings". that may have been fun for a while when it was "daring", but I think in the 21st century, we should have more maturity. I mean "Captain Jack Harkness" is "omnisexual" on Torchwood, but there's an actualy *plot*
Slash fiction is just crazed wish fulfillment, no better than Leia's Metal Bikini for the heterosexual fanboys.
Will slash fiction be around forever? Yes...in the same sense that we're never getting rid of Leia's Metal Bikini. Yeah, LMB is kind of fun, but I don't confuse it with "actual Hugo Award worthy writing"
And this kind of affects anime fandom more because frankly....most anime shows are aimed at younger audiences and really don't have any higher meaning. And that's well and good, but in same areas the slash fiction peope have kind of taken over; I mean what if I were to walk into a room and say "Cowboy Bebop is ABOUT Spike/Vicious!".......that's simply not the story. So why feel the need to appropriate characters from existing stories into situations they'd never be in? That's not "storytelling" that's "fantasy fulfillment"
My thing is.....remember "Brave New World"? Everyone just has soma-fueled orgies all the time, and have forgotten all of the art/music/literature/religion/philosophy that once made humanity great. Then The Savage comes along and says "wow, you guys don't have Shakespeare?" And he even tries to explain to them what Shakespeare is like, and they just don't understand it. Which raises the problem of: what if people are happy for the wrong reasons?
Sure, the old mantra, bleated out like "Four legs good, two legs bad!" is going to be "but slash fiction is fun!".....well, so is soma in Brave New World.
And if you're going to argue about "well written slash fiction"; that's not "slash" that's "fanfiction", which is a step above that.
We need to stop having people who think "I write my own slash fiction, that makes me an accomplished quality author!"
But slash fiction makes us happy! No more than masturbation. It's nothing more, and nothing less. And if it WERE something more, we'd call it just normal "fanfiction". By *definition* I'm talking about the sex ones, here.
"But slash makes us happy!"
Well,
well in the sense of "could Sarah Michelle Gellar play Wonder Woman?" "Well, lets try to visualize what that would look like" etc.
