Blogs: December 2006

[wombat]

I learned from the last page of posts:

1. Fanfic often involves a proxy for the author having sex with the main character
2. There is Scooby Doo fanfic.

I don't want to know more, OK? Please?

[innes]

I am really sorry.

Pshaw! Internet is Trivial Business. I could see where you were coming from.
For what it's worth Yank-bashing really gets my goat as well. It's so lazy, hypocritical, and... annoying.
Another form of bigotry that for some reason, people seem to think they can indulge in while retaining the moral high ground.

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[jaydub]

My experience with fanfic is colored by my membership - or participation, or whatever - in a BBS that followed X-files.  Most of the members of that board were female, and they were prolific fanfic writers.  There was a major component of Mulder/Scully consummation, but as I recall there was a lot of my-version-of-Monster-of-the-Week plots as well.  The point being, I guess, that not all fanfic is diverted sexual frustration.  I didn't contribute to that, as I'm not much of a storyteller.  I'm more of a creative person's foil - a critic, as it were.

[Victoria Waterfield]

Yeah, I always thought that was a girly kind of thing to do.

I don't understand why people write fan fiction. If you think it is fun to write something, why wouldn't you want to make up your own characters? I guess it is more work, but it's the most interesting part.  But I imagine that my confusion is due to missing the point entirely.

Fanfic is nothing new. Le Morte D'Arthur, Idylls of the King, The Once and Future King, Taliessin Through Logres... all Geoffrey of Monmouth fanfic. The difference is that now, only the shitty, laughable fanfics get written, because trying to publish a good one will get you sued for copyright violation faster than Harry Potter fellating Dumbledore to climax.

[V-Adore]

It's still bizarre desperation, though.  There are plenty of adolescent girls who are ostracized and rejected, who fail to grasp the basic principles of socializing, who have surreal sets of obscure interests, who have hopelessly tangled interior monologues, who wander alone in the intricacies of their fantasies, and who are weirder than they are hot (at least for the time being).  The isolation they feel may be more isolation from community and romance than isolation from sex -- hence the preference for shipping over slash -- but I doubt that makes their desperation much less consuming. 

This pretty much nails it. Speaking as a former awkward adolescent girl (I'm still awkward, but at 23 you can't really call yourself "adolescent" anymore), I can say with some confidence that what you're really fantasizing about at that point is belonging: being in love (possibly with Maximum Cuddles as an option, but these are less important than the True Love) and loved, ideally by one Significant Other and as many adoring friends as possible. This obviously lends itself to shipper fanfiction -- but, I think, particularly shipping of awkward couples, people who really shouldn't get together (because they have nothing in common, or because cruel society keeps them apart, or perhaps because one of them is Harry Potter and the other is Legolas), because what good is it for twisted desperate wish fulfillment writing about the love lives of serene, happy, confident people? You know you're not a serene, happy, confident person. But you might be Harry Potter, and Legolas just might show up.

Possibly the best example of this I ever read was by a middle-school friend of mine, quite possibly the most awkward adolescent girl I've ever met, who wrote fanfiction about the Disney version of Hercules. The first such fanfic (in what turned out to be a series of 3, plus bonus installments) was about a girl who was the secret, abandoned daughter of Aeneas and the muse Erato, living as a beggar despite her incredible beauty and prodigious musical talent. She meets Hercules, they fall in love, she turns out to have psychic powers, Hercules has a crisis because he has a pre-existing love interest, it turns out the beggar girl is the love interest's childhood best friend, and so on... until, inevitably, there is a conflict with an Evil Guy in which the beggar girl dies tragically so that Hercules can be with his love interest, and everyone mourns. Seriously, everyone. All the Olympian gods and stuff. It is such an archetypal Work Of Fanfiction By An Awkward Adolescent Girl that I almost can't believe I really did encounter it in the wild, from an author who apparently had no awareness of fandom as a phenomenon. (Later on her work got more self-aware, right down to inserting characters "inspired by" her friends as bizarre, frequently antagonistic supporting cast, which is less archetypal but also symptomatic of adolescent desperation in strange ways. Honestly, she as a person was a psychology thesis waiting to happen...)

[littlefallsmets]

The first such fanfic (in what turned out to be a series of 3, plus bonus installments) was about a girl who was the secret, abandoned daughter of Aeneas and the muse Erato, living as a beggar despite her incredible beauty and prodigious musical talent. She meets Hercules, they fall in love, she turns out to have psychic powers, Hercules has a crisis because he has a pre-existing love interest, it turns out the beggar girl is the love interest's childhood best friend, and so on... until, inevitably, there is a conflict with an Evil Guy in which the beggar girl dies tragically so that Hercules can be with his love interest, and everyone mourns. Seriously, everyone. All the Olympian gods and stuff.

So... wow, yeah. Her desire for Maximum Cuddles with a cartoon version of Hercules spun down the spiral from... cartoon Hercules falling in love with her authorial proxy into her proxy's full-on Christ complex swansong death. It appears safe to say that there was more going on there, in that particular case, than mere desire for romance or sex.

I still say that the person who writes the full-on-by-name self-insert Star Trek twelve-novel cycle partly based on continuity from SOMEONE ELSE'S fan-fiction is probably less healthy than the writer mentioned above but... yeah... definitely more warped than your run-of-the-mill twisted story where, like, Sam Beckett leaps into David Bowie while he's blowing Mick Jagger and he's all like:

"Muuum buh!"

[Ben-San]

Heavy female fanfiction involvement is nothing new. Female authors were driving forces in Star Trek fandom pre-Internet, and continued to be very dominant in highly slashable/shippable fandoms such as Starsky & Hutch, the aforementioned X-Files, and (I'm told) Blake's 7 and Man From UNCLE. Much of this was continuing to go on in fanzines, of course, so as far as The Internet is concerned there are no records of it and it therefore does not exist.

The reason that Internet fanfiction was massively male-dominated for years is because the Internet fanfiction subculture grew out of USENET, which was very male-dominated, and from there shifted onto a relatively few massive mailing lists and archives that preserved the USENET-developed culture. Now the visibility is shifting to livejournals, small mailing lists, and web MBs while at the same time more girls and women are online than Back In The Day, so you're seeing much more prominence from female authors and readership; the boys' clubs are still there, but they're not in the spotlight.

[wombat]

Oh God, please please PLEASE make me stop reading this thread.

No wait - I will keep reading this thread. Nothing has ever made me feel more normal and well adjusted in comparison.

[CortJstr]

Or am I basically still right except that it's largely toned down to "relationship porn" instead of "sex porn" for the purposes of wider acceptability... and the stuff where a transporter accident turns Weslie Crusher into a girl and then Lt. Totally-The-Author has sex with her because he wants to have sex with Weslie Crusher but can't admit he's gay is just... pushed deeper into the hidden parts of the internet?

What I find most disturbing about this is that I've read interviews which claimed that Wesley Crusher was actually Gene Roddenbury inserting a younger version of himself into the story. Weird. Eerie.

[littlefallsmets]

Starsky & Hutch

Really?

I guess I'd also hoped that fan-fiction... especially relationship/sex fan-fiction... was almost solely a genre thing. But there's a significant slash cultuire for... crappy old cop shows with no scifi/fantasy elements whatsoever?

Somehow, this is weirder. I can't put my finger on why.