HSU IT Department

Thanks to squibstress for the link to a quite good and thought-provoking article by Foz Meadows on sex, desire and fanfiction.

Meadows' article is in rebuttal to this piece in The Guardian, which attempts to be a sort of primer for the fanfic novice by defining some common terms. It gets some of them right but some of them laughably wrong, such as attributing the origins of Mary Sue to someone named, of all things, Paula (???), alleging that the Futurians had fascist tendencies, and defining slash as "a sub-genre in which buddies from classic TV become gay lovers." Er, huh? Also his punctuation is atrocious (yes, Ewan, it's a blog but that doesn't excuse you from knowing how to use commas and remembering to pair your parentheses). Several of the comments, notably the several by EllaLeigh, are far more scholarly and intelligent than the article itself.

Meadows' article, on the other hand, though equally casual in tone, makes some singularly cogent points about the role fanfic plays for women in particular, and why it's an important one:

...while an undeniably massive proportion of fan fic deals with romance, relationships, non-canonical or otherwise impossible pairings and -- yes -- spectacularly detailed pornography, the titillating novelty of this fact is such that few people often bother to stop and ask why this is...Culturally, we've spent thousands of years either denying, curbing or vilifying the female sex drive, to the point that even now, the idea of pornography geared towards a female audience is still fundamentally radical...[and] the rest of the world still tends to find [it] ridiculous: Romance novels have always been sneered at, while the new vogue for disparaging various sexy, successful books as 'mommy porn' always makes me want to stab things -- not necessarily in defense of the books themselves, but in outrage at the need to establish adult female desire, and particularly the desires of mothers, as being somehow comic, diminutive, novel. It's a species of sexual condescension -- oh, you're 40, female and fond of orgasms? how quaint! (or how disgusting, depending on the level of misogyny involved)...

One of her most interesting points, and one I haven't seen made elsewhere, is that fanfic works for women because women want emotional investment and desire, not just the mechanics of inserting tab A into slot B. With fanfic the characters are already drawn and the emotional investment is already present -- you know who they are, you've been through adventures with them, you care about them -- which means as a writer/reader you can skip straight to the smut without the pages of buildup that a romance novel requires. I'd never thought of it that way but it makes sense:

These aren't just strangers we're perving on purely because we like their bodies (although that can certainly still be part of it); they're characters to whom we feel a strong emotional connection and in whose relationships we're invested, such that watching them have sex, regardless of the quality of the prose, is guaranteed to be about a thousand times more arousing than the sight of yet another anonymous blonde get screwed by some faceless, grunting goon on the internet.

...then here are a few things you might be wondering about, so pull up a chair here in the Common Room (pay no attention to that head in the fireplace) and let's chat.

For your reference:
Fic prompts
Art prompts (with wants/anti-wants)

First, I'm pretty easy to please as far as taking the prompt and running with it; it's meant to plant a seed that you water and tend and shape as you see fit; whether it grows into a radish or a rose -- or a redwood for that matter -- makes no never mind to me. The Muse is a shy creature and I know better than to try to corral her too tightly. Second, I'm pretty easy to please in terms of rating: I don't require smut by any means, but if the Muse takes you that way and it suits the plot, go ahead and have them get nekkid and get busy. Third, I'm pretty easy to please in terms of genre: I don't care if you go with madcap humor or angsty darkness so long as the tale hangs together and makes sense. That's really the main thing I enjoy: a good solid story, and my tastes are pretty catholic (with a small 'c').

I don't like out-of-character: no affectionate, gooey, emotional Snape; no damsel-in-distress clothing-obsessed Hermione. This is not to say, of course, that Snape can't be (or fall) in love, or that Hermione can't get herself into trouble or enjoy dressing to the nines (for the proper occasion), if that's the way the Muse takes you, but within the parameters of who they are in canon. People do grow and change, and if the story is set years after the books then I'd expect them to have changed somewhat...but as Prof. Grubbly-Plank says, a leopard never changes all his (or her) spots, yes? (One small particular request: please no pregnancy/babies/children.)

I'm big on eyes and shoulders. I like witty banter. UST that finally gets resolved is particularly fine. I like magic to play a role in the story (these are witches and wizards, after all, not Muggles). I enjoy descriptions that employ more senses than just the visual. Bonus points for inclusion of any of the following: food porn (tasty meals, good wine), because I love to eat; a library or archive, even in passing, because I'm a total library slut; McGonagall, even if it's just a cameo, because I love her; brand new spells/magic of your own invention.

Art-wise, I'm partial to William Morris, Arthur Rackham, Maurice Sendak, Tim Burton, Edward Gorey and Salvador Dali. The only color I really can't stand is orange, so you're wide open there :)

Most important of all: I know the effort it takes to carve out time from one's other commitments to write or draw or create, and the mere fact that you're creating something for me is enormously generous. Never for a moment think that I don't appreciate it. If you have fun with it, I'm sure I will too :)

This is an interesting survey by the Organization for Transformative Works -- thanks to shyfoxling for alerting me to it via her post.

The Organization for Transformative Works, for those who don't know, is a nonprofit organization run by and for fans to provide access to and preserve the history of fan works and fan cultures. They're the outfit behind Archive Of Our Own (AO3) and also the scholarly academic journal Transformative Works and Cultures. TWC has included papers on fan aspects of everything from Wizard rock to World of Warcraft to Willa Cather. They've even done a piece on silent-era movie fandoms (which operated via magazines) back in the 1920s!

They are also, which I did not know until I took the survey, the brains behind FanLore, a wiki designed to document the phenomenon of fan/fandom (making it a sort of meta-fandom of its own, I suppose?), as well as several other projects.

So yeah, I took a survey and actually learned something. How cool is that??

On another note, a lot of people are taking on the 100 Things challenge to encourage themselves to write more, and more in-depth, posts. I'm all for it (I mean, if I wanted tiny little posts I'd go to Twitter, right?). For a long time I've cross-posted my book reviews from Goodreads to LJ, so choosing 100 books (while easy) would have felt like cheating since I already do that. There's music or movies or poems, all of which are great, but none of them spoke to me. Finally I decided on 100 Surprises: the people, places, events, stories, things, ideas, etc. that have surprised me over the years. I just hope I can come up with 100 of them...

Just ran across this piece by Lev Grossman (The Magicians) about fanfic, which he calls "the cultural equivalent of dark matter" LOL! The full article is worth a read -- it's long, detailed, and on the whole pretty accurate (and non-derogatory) about fan culture. As a bonus, it specifically identifies the first K/S fic, which I hadn't known before ("A Fragment Out of Time," 1974, in a Star Trek zine called Grup).

Most of all I'm hugely amused by this:

Fan fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don't do it for money. That's not what it's about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They're fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.

Yesss! I always knew we were saviors of literature, guardians of the cultural flame!!

When Spouse started playing World of Warcraft, I wasn't so much interested in the game itself as I was in how he and other people interacted with it. How did players set rules, enforce them when there's nobody "in charge"? How do guilds evolve norms for their members? And so on and so forth. Yes, it's all very anthropological, and he's been very patient about answering my questions, as long as I allow him to vanish for hours into the Feast of Wintervale, appreciate his reindeer mount and laugh when he sheeps someone.

My involvement with fanfic has been much more, shall we say, "hands on" since I enjoy writing it and reading it, but I've also had a long-standing curiosity about why we write it. Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers does a good job describing the world of fandom but doesn't really explain the motivations. (It's a great book though and I highly recommend it -- I'm not remotely any kind of media scholar so I can't speak to the accuracy of his theories or analysis, but it was great fun to read.)

So what's the appeal? Why do some fandoms spawn literally thousands of fics and others only a few hundred? Why is slash mostly written by women? More fundamentally, why does this stuff exist at all?? It can't be just that we're bored, or that we're frustrated novelists, or that we're sekrit sex addicts (pr0n evidence to the contrary). And obviously it has NOTHING to do with the fact that I find two particular Death Eaters impossibly sexy *ahem* *ahem*

Turns out it all goes back to the Middle Ages.

( long post of longness behind the cut, possibly not of interest except to other nerdy people like me )

Hmm. Sensing a "heroic gap" and filling it by drawing on existing material, well mixed with your own imagination. Well, if that doesn't sound like fanfic, I don't know what does. So there you go: none of this is new: it's positively medieval. What a nice feeling, to be part of such a long and noble tradition :)

This week I got to do the following:

* Spend several many hours with my six-year-old nephew (he can spot a police car six blocks away and says very firmly that we are not allowed to manipulate (!) his words -- such the vocab!)

* Play "I spy with my little eye" with nursedarry's six-year-old twins (Me: "I spy with my little eye something yellow." Twin 1: "Is it [twin 2]'s bogeys?")

* Hang out with my supremely smart/talented/interesting brother and introduce him to the movie District 9 (in exchange he introduced me to Dead Silence, which cements my belief that clowns and ventriloquist's dummies are CREEPY AS HELL)

* Go to my half-sister's wedding (she's six months pregnant, so when the minister got to the part about "Will you accept any children God sends you?" somebody shouted, "It's a bit late for that, isn't it?" and we all fell about laughing)

* Have lunch with a friend from high school whom I have not laid eyes on in about 30 years (we're, um, wider and grayer than we used to be, but still had lots to talk about)

* Spend a couple of hours with my 92-year-old grandmother (who still goes to her French Club and walks every single day, I should be so lucky when I'm 92)

* Do happy hour with a guy who was my boss at Domino's Pizza about 25 years ago (the day I walked in to apply he and one of the cooks were quoting Monty Python; I dropped the next line of dialog and he said, "Excellent, you're hired!)

and finally...

* Take to lunch and get to know cassie_black12 and alovelycupoftea, brought here by nursedarry from across the pond, who are delightful and interesting women, just as nice in person as they are here on LJ

* Adventure to the house of lijahlover, who was kind enough (THANK YOU!!!) to have nursedarry and the rest of us all over along with veritas03 who is not from across the pond but who adventured from the wilds of the American South to be there and who is also lovely in person :) We were highly amused because as we drove up we could see the males fleeing the premises ("Aaaaaagh! Mum's crazy online smut-writing friends are here -- run, run, run!!!")

(Alas, I did have to miss out on Sunday lunch at ladyoneill's house, where I'm sure A Good Time Was Had By All!)

So yeah, week made of awesome :) I could not have crammed in more excellence if I'd bribed the aliens who run the universe personally.

OK, I caved. Deserted Dante and Virgil for Elizabeth, Georgiana and Pemberley in Presumption. I have to say I was diverted but not swept away, as I hoped. It wasn't bad but rather clumsily done. The language is close, but there are frequent lapses where it's clear this is a contrived, not a natural, way of speaking. The characters are watered down, too -- thin, tenuous versions of Austen's robust ones. I simple don't believe Caroline Bingley would have run off with an officer -- she was far too conscious of her own superiority. I don't give credence to this invented thwarted romance of Charlotte Lucas' nor do I believe she would have been as unhappy as Barrett makes her (after all, she knew she was marrying a fool in Mr Collins and didn't care). Worst of all, FitzWilliam is absent for most of the book -- he, the best part of the original, relegated to a bit part!! Shocking. I give it at best six or seven out of ten. Adequate, but not masterful.

On the other hand, I was hugely amused to realize that in the end it's nothing but a novel-length fanfic!! As are, for example, Scarlett (the sequel to GWTW) or Mrs. de Winter (the prequel to Rebecca). Heee.

Moral of the story: If you're going to write fanfic, choose a canon that's out of copyright so you can have a shot at publication. I wonder if anyone has written Morris Townsend's story...