Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[littlefallsmets]

Here is the reaction that my 15-year-old self had to the Harry-Cho story from inside me:

"Girls... make fan-fiction? This blows all my perceptions of everything. Are you sure she is a girl? Have you consulted her doctors to make sure? Surgery can do amazing things these days, simply checking is not enough. Get some blood, there has to be Y-chromosomes in there. Science allows us to check now."

My fifteen year old self did not... and from inside me, does not... accept that women could be warped in that kind of way. Intellectually, as technically an adult, I understand that there are genetic female who do that sort of thing. But... man.

Early-Teens Mike will just not accept it.

Only boys could be twisted and lonely like that. I think this is why I didn't date much until the end of high school, I thought there was something particularly male about being that turned up inside of yourself. I totally didn't get that it was a human condition, that all kinds of people could feel like that.

I mean, I dunno. I probably could've identified with the girls I had affections for if I understood that they could possibly been in the bad weird place that... I thought was the provence of boys, generally, and myself specifically.

I mean, I didn't do fan-fiction but I had reams of embarrassing semi-autobiographical plays and short stories that I didn't share with anyone. I thought that I was a rare kind of broken, improbable amoungst men, impossible amoungst women. I guess because even the weirdest or least attractive girls were persued romantically occasionally.

I thought that somehow that was the tonic against the kind of teenage loneliness I was feeling.

I guess that realizing that everyone is broken inside is when you start becoming an adult and... really full accepting that everyone is broken inside, really integrating that into your life and dealing with the high and the mighty and the low and the crazy are all broken, deserving of pity and undeserving of being feared... that's when you actually ARE an adult.

If I'm still debating these things, maybe I'm not yet, I dunno.

Anyway: wow.

On some deep level, I had to triplecheck that post, to make sure that you said a "her" made fan-fiction about Harry Potter. Some little part of me, my old teenage self, could not accept that as a part of reality at first blush.

I dunno what this says about me. I dunno what that says about the world.

[theinevitable]

wait, what? Every person I know who writes fanfic is a She. And they are all about Harry Potter. (I think the count is Three.)

[Drygioni]

Yes, what InEv says is very true. There was this lass who would write a new chapter in her Harry Potter fanfiction every week. Being an obedient, spineless sort, I would pretend to read it every day it was updated and post glowing reviews on the way she really GOT Harry's little mannerisms.

I'm not going to pretend that I'm not a complete lying bastard, but I have a crippling inability to tell anybody that what they do is wrong. Is this why people write fan fiction? Because people encourage them? Christ.

[wombat]

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.

[Drygioni]

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.

Without meaning to get too crude, there is the very real thrill some people experience from having two characters or people they adore doing things the artist or author never wanted. I'm pretty sure it's only a matter of time before we get Ray and Roast Beef fan fiction. Wait, I'm sure at least someone here has done that.

[littlefallsmets]

I dunno, man.

I went through a phase where I spent weeks looking at MST3K-ings of terrible fanfiction and I think there were only two or three female names in the whole bunch. And one or two of those were, just, clearly not women because of the "new" character being an obvious male self-insert character getting it on with... Tasha Yar or... A-Ko or... Public Defender Christine or... whatever the kink was.

Maybe Harry Potter fanfiction is a different subset than the... Star Trek/Star Wars/Highlander/anime/wants-to-have-sex-with-the-ladybear-from Talespin crowd? Maybe women write better/less-twisted fanfiction that never comes onto my radar for reading ironically?

I've never looked into fanfiction as... actual... reading? Never really even considered it, I guess. Fanfiction's only positive aspect in my experience has always been that... big German word I always misspell... shaudenfreude (?). Overwhelming yourself with joy at the outlandish failings of others. Making yourself feel smarter and better by looking at things that seem to be a product of idiocy, madness or laziness.

As it stands, fanfiction has always been to me as... like... sort of how my brother and I play "Family Guy Chicken"... who can suffer more of it before someone can no longer take it, gets up and turns the channel.

"Whoop! The baby's gonna say something droll again! Try and not laugh until you die!"

"THE FATHER. LIKES. EATING. So funny!"

Etc.

[V-Adore]

Somewhere there's a great master's thesis in the shifting demographics of fandom: how a cultural phenomenon that was associated entirely with men (the classic "fanboy") has gradually shifted towards a majority, to the point that fandom is now frequently considered to be stereotypically female. My personal theory on the matter is that it has to do with what kinds of fan behavior are dominant. Classical "fanboyism" seems to apply to a sort of fanatical obsession with canonical material in great detail, behavior that seems to be waning, while use of fandom as a jumping-off point for community and creative activity (in my experience, a much more stereotypically female mode) seems to be growing.

To play devil's advocate for a moment, as someone who has in the past considered writing fanfiction (and wrote a fair number of MST3Kifications back in The Day), the pull of fanfiction is that it offers a chance to explore characters and situations people are already familiar with in greater detail. Some of this is to attract a greater reading audience; after all, nobody really wants to read your original story about Todd The Wizard Boy And His Make-Out Adventures, but there's a huge audience hooked into reading a story about Harry Potter making out with more or less any other character in the books. Some people also think of it as "practice" for original writing -- you get to hone your skills working with characters you already know well -- and some people just do it as a lark. There's also the pull of "What if...?", which, while you could file the serial numbers off and claim it as your own, lacks a lot of the appeal if the plot is relatively specific.

[theinevitable]

my grandparents told me over dinner about a Chilean girl who wrote a huge, 500-page alternate ending to the most recent Potter adventure. it became really popular in Chile.

she is now under contract to write a full-length novel for a Chilean publisher.

also: goddamn how did I end up at a school that doesn't have a sociology department.

[AugustWest]

also: goddamn how did I end up at a school that doesn't have a sociology department.

They had one when I was there.  If they don't anymore you should be so grateful.

[littlefallsmets]

I guess I always associated fan-fiction as being sexual on some level... whether about having the characters make Maximum Cuddles directly or about subtler more repressed sexual fixations expressed in slavish devotion to characters or... the entire story being about the slow progression TOWARD Maximum Cuddles.

Often, the author's fictional proxy making Maximum Cuddles with the character(s).

I guess I think of baroquely-twisted manifestations of sexual repression/disfunction/desperation as a primarily male thing. Maybe left over from teenage pedestialization of the girls I dug in high school, not sure.

The point is well taken, though... my mental image of "fan fiction" is almost exclusively of a fan fiction... read five or six years ago and probably written years before that. Highlander showin' up on the Enterprise, six novel cycles about self-insert characters evolving to the point where the original work's influence is nearly entirely discarded for the adventures of the author/author proxy.

Is there a flood of fanfiction out there, now, that isn't... at its core... driven by the desire to see two fictional characters have sex or to have sex with a fictional character?

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?

Is it just that Draco turns Harry Potter into a girl as a prank and then the young wizard Totally-The-Author "eventually forms a relationship with her and they date" now... because that's the code today?

Is shipping just softcore slash at the end of the day?

Perhaps things have changed as I slide closer to thirty and with it senility.

[littlefox]

Is there a flood of fanfiction out there, now, that isn't... at its core... driven by the desire to see two fictional characters have sex or to have sex with a fictional character?

Yes. But from what I understand, such fanfiction is much, much, MUCH more boring.

A friend of mine wrote a Scooby-Doo fanfiction with intent to piss people off (and so yes, apparently there's Scooby-Doo fic out there, AUGHHGHG). It was some elaborate thing about Scooby getting a terminal disease and dying. This friend of mine was horrified when it was met with praise. It's funny because he was stupid enough to think that silly fanfiction fans wouldn't eat it up.
But anyway, not all fanfic is "slash."

[Drygioni]

also: goddamn how did I end up at a school that doesn't have a sociology department.

They had one when I was there.  If they don't anymore you should be so grateful.

August is right. Sociology is the worst fuck*ng subject I've had the misfortune to take this year.

[Alternate]

Is shipping just softcore slash at the end of the day?

Absolutely. 

And, to your question about the baroquely twisted fantasies of teenage girls, it's my understanding that girls are typically not at/near their sexual peak in high school, which may explain why the bizarre desperation that leaks into their stories is less explicitly sexual, in general.  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. 

[Choop]

lfm you're on a fucki*g roll.
CANNED

[KeithHernandez]

Hmm, whether it's maybe per 10,000 people or something? The relative ratios are meaningful I guess - i.e: about 3 times more deadly in the USA than the UK. I will re-google.

I am really sorry.  I was pretty drunk, and for some reason I took offense to what you were saying.  Basically I thought you were putting down the USA which really bugs me, not because I really like the USA, but because it implies that people here are dumber than elsewhere.  Lazier?  Probably, as we adapt to the fact we have more conveniences than we could possibly need.  Basically, I have no pride in the USA, as MY country, but I do think that countries an antique idea, and that it is dumb to separate people into countries, etc., etc.  You weren't saying this at all, sorry.     

Oh, I guess the point I was trying to make was you aren't perfect or something, by doing something that didn't make since.  Sorry, but the ooh in your post made me mad for some reason, now I see I was an ass.  On to Achewood.