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kinetic-elaboration · 3 years

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March 15: Thoughts on Fandom

Not feeling too well this evening but hopefully a good night's sleep will make me feel better and tomorrow will be low key and chill. And my hot water will be fixed successfully.

I was thinking today about how I've felt for a long time that I'm 'between fandoms' even though technically, literally, I'm not. I continue to write and read for The 100 but I don't entirely feel like I'm in the fandom. Sometimes I think I should just leave officially, but then I think--but to go where? And "Star Trek" seems both an obvious and an incorrect answer. It's like I'm not truly invested anywhere, but in a sort of limbo-like space.

Anyway, so I broke it down like this.

I want 3 three things from "fandom," broadly speaking:

1. To engage with media that I really love.

Examples: waiting for new installments (for ongoing media); rewatching or rereading; obsessing over how great the characters or stories are, dissecting plot lines and themes.

2. To engage with a fan community that also loves the media I love.

Examples: reading fanfiction; reading meta; engaging in online discussions; reading other people's excited posts; following blogs relating to the media in question; reblogging gifsets/graphics/fan art

3. To engage creatively with the source material through transformative works.

Example: writing fanfiction.

Ideally, I'd have one piece of media that fulfills all of these purposes. That was T100 for me for a while. But then I stopped watching the show in late S4, and got farther and farther away from the 'current' fandom. And then the show ended, and on such a sour note, so that the fandom itself, the fan community, started changing. And at the same time, I started getting seriously back into Star Trek again.

So now I'm in this place, where I'm still at least kind of engaged in all three aspects of the fandom experience, but not in a unified way.

Star Trek is fulfilling the first purpose of fandom for me, right now. I'm loving rewatching TOS, and the AOS movies too, and I just have a lot of Emotions about the characters and universe. It's that good kinda excitement that a show (or book or movie or whatever) that you really love always gives. Like--ahh!!! I cannot feel anything else but just happiness because I love this so much!

BUT I'm not engaging with ST in either the second or third sense of fandom. I follow a couple ST blogs but there aren't many truly active TOS/AOS centric blogs out there right now. I don't read any ST fanfic because, well, first of all I never really did, and second, I'm far enough behind on my T100 fic! And I have rl people like my mom and B to talk about it with, but not really anyone on tumblr or wherever who's into it like I am.

And though I've vaguely plotted and poked at some fic ideas, I haven't done any real ST writing in a long time--again because I have ideas for T100 that I need/want to get to first, and I'm not writing so much anyway now in general.

On the other hand, T100 is definitely NOT fulfilling function (1) for me and hasn't in a long time. When I stopped watching the show, I still engaged with the canon a little. I watched other people get excited or debate or discuss. I noticed the patterns of fandom as the show went into and out of hiatus. Plus, I still enjoyed the early seasons and liked early-canon and canon-divergent fics (reading and planning/writing). But even that is largely fading for me. I've been trying to rewatch the show but it's not really doing anything for me... I have a hard time getting into it. The canon-divergent fics I'm writing for the collab are not interesting me in the least, either.

I realized today that most of my fic ideas, or at least most of the fic ideas I really care about in any way, are so far removed from the canon they might as well be original fiction with some familiar names thrown in. The one exception is the Ark AU, but everything else is some form of extreme AU, modern or otherwise. I don't even know that the characters make me feel much of anything anymore. I've been toying with how to explain this for a while but... I feel like both for me personally and the fandom as I perceive it, the characters are more like a shared vocabulary, rather than actual characters from a source material we all love. I think this is partially because the fandom is old enough now to have some very long standing shared headcanons, and either small enough or bifurcated enough for fanwork creators to influence each other more than the canon influences them, and partly because the show ending on a sour note for most viewers has left the people who remain in the fandom with a sense that these characters are OURS and that the value of them is in how we collectively decide to use them now, rather than in how they are tied to the universally derided source material.

I'm not saying any of this is BAD, I'm just saying, that's how it is now, from my perspective.

I'm sort of engaging with the fan community (2) through T100, but... it's a little weird. I have people I legitimately like and enjoy talking to on tumblr who I know through T100 and of course there are events like Troped that I really love. I have a ton of cool fic bookmarked too and I'm getting back into reading it. But my dash has a lot less T100 content than it used to and sometimes I'll find myself j-ing very fast through it because I'm just not in the mood. I know a lot of people are either semi-disengaging, like I am, or wholesale moving on to other things. So it's like... the community straggles on, but it's uncertain at best.

And as far as engaging creatively (3)--to the extent that I write or plan fic it's almost all T100. But I haven't... I haven't been finding it easy to write. In general. This is a little hard to explain but.. when I think "I need to leave T100 fandom and really force myself to go somewhere else" it's usually because I feel like I'm not really getting what I need creatively out of the fandom. I like a lot of my wips and unstarted ideas, in theory at least, but the closer I look at some of them the more... herculean the task of actually writing them starts to seem. And tbh I rarely just... tell myself little stories about these characters or within these potential-fic scenarios. Like in all my idle, free thought time--when I'm washing dishes or taking a walk or a shower or going to sleep, when I want to think about something nice and fictional and not let the worries in... when I'm really engaged with a fandom, I'll imagine little scenes and tell myself little stories during these times. Sometimes they're scenes I want to eventually make into or include in a fic. Other times they're not. But they're still an extension of my creative life.

And I haven't really done that for T100 in a while. Sometimes I imagine Star Trek scenarios. Sometimes I retreat into highly silly comfort scenarios with original characters. But I only think about T100 when I specifically need to brainstorm for a fic. And that makes the fic feel more like work. And that makes me want to do it less.

So... I'm not sure what that will mean for me getting back into my projects when I finally (FINALLY) finish the last of my obligations. Maybe when I feel like I can actually make progress on old wips or ideas I care about, I'll get more invested in them. I was pretty damn invested in Mountain Lion Mean and that wasn't that long ago, so it is still possible. But overall, T100 definitely doesn't have, and probably never will have again, a total monopoly on my brain the way it did c.2016.

Which is fine. Like... it's more than fine. I've been here a while. What I'm trying to articulate to myself with all this is that the dissatisfaction I feel with my fandom life is probably stemming from the lack of one, coherent obsession. I have stuff to read, stuff to write, stuff to think about, stuff to talk about, and even a small fandom community of people I like--so what's the problem, right?? It's because it's not all coming from the same piece of media and that's not as clear and coherent and nice for me.

Plus, it makes writing more difficult when I do want to write these particular ideas, but I'm only motivated by own desire to see the ideas realized, not my genuine love for the characters and the material from which they derive. There's a certain energy that fannish activity has... but T100 fic barely feels like a fannish activity to me rn. Just another type of work. It's a work I'm invested in...but I just so often don't have it in me to WORK at all, is the thing.

So that's the biggest annoyance about it. I haven't really experienced this before so even though this situation has been forming for a while, I still don't really know what to do with it.

#the year 2021 #2021: fandom thoughts #honestly i'm really proud of myself for articulating all of this #fandom

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phoenixrisesoncemore · 4 years

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🌺💘🌷 get to know your mutuals ! when you get this, it 🌺🌺💘🌷means someone wants to know more about you, so list 5 things about yourself you want your followers to know. they can be as simple as your age or as complex as your deepest fear, as long as it’s something you’re comfortable with sharing. when you’re done, send this to 10 people you want to get to know better ! 🌷💘🌺

Thank you for the ask @lurkingscientist 😊. Hmmm, let’s see. I have no idea if my followers want to know any of this, but these are the 5 most interesting things off the top of my head.

1. My favorite color is red—a very specific red. It’s the red that is the color of the amulet in Don Bluth’s Secret of NIMH. Prior to that (as in like, before I was 5 years old) my favorite color was sapphire blue or the blue color of deep cobolt glass when you hold it up to the light. I’m also quite the lover of true emerald green. If you’re noticing a gemstone theme here you’re not wrong.

2. The first thing I wanted to be when I grew up was a veterinarian, but at some point I realized that veterinarians have to endure repeated exposure to animals who were suffering, and that ended that dream very quickly. Then the dinosaur craze hit and I wanted to be a paleontologist. Then it was geneticist—I was fascinated by Gregor Mendel and his peas. Then I spent a summer reading a bunch of popular science texts about physics, astronomy, and cosmology and decided I was going to be a cosmologist. But no, I needed something creative, something where I could use art to change the world (ah, the sweet, idealistic naïveté of the tweens and teens). So I switched tracks completely and decided fantasy novelist was my calling. When I eventually realized words weren’t the tools I was best with, but that I still wanted to tell stories, I switched to wanting to be a film director. I had plans to either go to UCLA or Northwestern and study film, but I somehow fell into the theatre arts and art and design department at an in-state uni after taking some classes there while in HS. I was an actor for a while, and then a sculptor, then a costume designer, then a set designer. I even spent some time learning about databases and information systems and tried to design my own content management system for the web using ASP.NET back before such things were common (I did not succeed). But, as it turns out, life is funny, and I am, currently, none of those things in a professional capacity.

3. I was 11 when Batman Returns came out; I saw it that summer and Michelle Pfieffer’s Catwoman instantly became my whole fannish world. Naturally I wanted to be her for Halloween (I’ll get back to Halloween below), and that meant I had to be able to use a whip. You know, for authenticity’s sake. The plan to have and know how to use a real whip didn’t work out in time for Halloween that year, but the next summer—while browsing around the gift shop at the horse riding paddock at a state nature preserve—my eyes fell on one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen: a real, 8 ft long, rawhide bullwhip. I spent the next 3 years teaching myself to crack that whip in the alleyway beside our house in small town Midwestern America. Cue pearl-clutching, lots of nasty rumors about me and my family, and neighborhood kids being told they could no longer associate with me. There was no internet and it wasn’t like videos on how to crack a whip were easy to find. So I just watched her scenes in the film over and over, trying to copy her movements and understand how the whip was working. I eventually moved up to a new 10 ft whip with a longer, lighter handle. With the exception of the crack in the GIF above, I eventually taught myself how to do all of them.

4. I’ve always had very odd and vivid dreams that are very unlike the dreams described to me by most people. They tend to be extremely abstract and fantastical, occurring in illogical spaces that have more in common with Escher than the real world. The most common element in them is the labyrinth, often seeming something like a house with endless rooms opening in strange patterns off of each other and stairways winding everywhere, or vast shopping malls with odd architecture. I usually spend the dream traversing these labyrinths, sometimes with an actual goal, but more often simply out of curiosity. Occasionally these dreams are nightmares, but more often than not they are somehow deeply comforting. The use of SSRIs to control my depression has, alas, made them less frequent and less vivid (if there’s any downside to these medications for me, it’s that). In real life, this fascination and adoration of spaces expresses itself in a love for museums (museums themselves often even more than the pieces in them), gardens, installation sculpture, and architecture in general. My undergrad thesis involved creating a labyrinth out of copper pipe and muslin (see model and full scale sculpture above) that expressed something of the spaces that haunted my dreams.

5. When I was a kid and teen, my mom (who at one time had dreamed about being a film art director) and I used to go to great lengths to decorate our home for Halloween. What started as a few figures stuffed with newspaper set on the old Victorian porch turned into an entire cast of classic movie monsters, witches, a glass coffin, a creepy undead traveling salesman, a faux pipe organ, and cemetery. Keep in mind, this was both in the 90s in a small town in the midwestern US where the celebration of Halloween was still often believed to be a Satanic act and also well before the heavy commercialization of Halloween decorations via big box stores and online vendors, so most of this was stuff we made ourselves. Despite the whispers and accusations it lead to, these remain some of the best days in my life.

#asks #personal #Halloween #dreams #labyrinths #Catwoman #Batman returns #bull whips

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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How Winter’s Orbit Went From AO3 to Published Space Opera

https://ift.tt/3r0YY7S

There have been some very public examples of works that began life as fanfiction (i.e. not-for-profit stories written in the already existing fictional worlds or pop culture, often by and for writers from communities underrepresented in commercial storytelling) only to later become published books— the most famous examples probably being E.L. James’ 50 Shades of Grey, Cassandra Clare’s City of Bones, or Anna Todd’s After. But not all works published on fanfiction websites are fanfiction. Fanfiction platforms, such as Archive of Our Own or Wattpad, also play host to “original” (not based on an existing canon) non-commercial fiction. While these original works are, by and large, less common than fic, they often have much in common with their transformative fandom neighbors.

Winter’s Orbit, a healing and action-packed queer romance space opera that hits bookshelves next week, began life as an original work on Archive of Our Own (AO3), where it gained an enthusiastic following. Now, British author Everina Maxwell, is hoping to find a broader, commercial audience for her story about two space princes in an arranged marriage on which the political stability of their solar system rests. The story of Winter’s Orbit path from original work on AO3 to published book is a fascinating one, and one that is emblematic of the increasingly candid impact the world of transformative fandom is having on the book industry and other spheres of the commercial entertainment world. We talked to Maxwell about her debut novel, what it was like to bring Winter’s Orbit from AO3 to Tor Books, and how the transformative fannish experience has impacted her writing.

Den of Geek: Where did the kernel for the story of Winter’s Orbit begin? Was it a character? A relationship? A setting? A theme?

Everina Maxwell: It all grew out of the first scenes: a good-natured prince is told to marry the widower of his cousin. It’s a political emergency. But his cousin and this diplomat had the perfect marriage, while the prince himself is a talkative disaster; how can he ever match up to the previous marriage? Was it as perfect as it looked? So I guess that’s a character, a relationship and a setting! I like to start from something that has an inbuilt tension. It means I’m anticipating scenes before I even properly plot them out.

Winter’s Orbit is told through the dual perspectives of the two main characters. Did you find it easier to write from Jainan or Kiem’s point-of-view?

Jainan—the diplomat—makes more sense to me; he’s introverted, anxious, and his thought processes flow logically from his basic assumptions about the world. On the other hand Prince Kiem is an absolute delight to write. It’s just fun to be in the head of someone who’s happy by nature and genuinely delighted to talk to anyone who crosses his path.

Winter’s Orbit is such a comforting book, but it also deals with some heavy issues, including domestic abuse. How did you go about balancing the hurt and the comfort of this story?

When it comes to fiction, I think the dark and the light are two sides of the same coin. Healing is possible; danger and trouble can pass. Though Winter’s Orbit is a “light” book, it’s definitely true that it contains heavy topics. To me, it’s reassuring on a very deep level that it’s possible to find happiness and joy even if life hasn’t been easy.

I do believe in content warnings to let people know if it’s a story will deal with specific upsetting topics, and I encourage anyone who wants details to check out the content warnings page (https://everinamaxwell.com/content-warnings).

Do you think romance and science fiction make good bedfellows?

They always have! I grew up reading writers like Bujold, who built up a universe where love stories were essential to the action plots and vice versa. I strongly believe books in every genre benefit from two people having unreasonably strong feelings about each other, and romance is just one subset of that.

Winter’s Orbit began life as an original work on Archive of Our Own. When and why did you start considering publishing it commercially and what did that process look like?

It was very long and meandering, since when I was writing it I didn’t have a long-term plan. At first I was just trading Kiem and Jainan snippets with a friend; later I posted them for more people to read, then when I had a whole story to share I put it on AO3. I still don’t know if that was technically the right place to put it, but it was the only writing website I was familiar with, I knew my way around it, and I’d read origfic on there before. The first draft was online for a couple of years. People very kindly read it and told their friends. I still have no idea how Tamara (my now-agent) found it, but she contacted me out of the blue and rewrote it with me, and then Ali Fisher at Tor picked it up and really helped me with the final rewrite. I wrote it five years ago now—I don’t know if that seems too long or too short, but it certainly doesn’t seem accurate.

How different is The Course of Honour from Winter’s Orbit?

The Course of Honour was laser-focused on Kiem and Jainan’s relationship. And don’t get me wrong, Winter’s Orbit very much is too, but working with a professional editor encouraged me to consider the implications of worldbuilding and plot events, and to build them out into a bigger picture. I knew some of this stuff from the beginning—I remember answering a comment years ago with some of the galaxy link explanations—but it wasn’t until the third major draft that it became part of the plot.

How did the decision to change the title come about and how did you settle on Winter’s Orbit?

It turns out The Course of Honour is already the title of a book! I’m bad at titles and my editor was really helpful on this one. I liked how it made the winter imagery more central.

What role has fanfiction played in your life as a reader and a writer, if it has?

I’ve both read and written fanfiction but as a very small fish in a very large pond—if you’re reading this and wondering what my AO3 handle is, you’ve almost certainly never come across it! Casual writing and shared-world creation with friends have brought me huge amounts of joy over the years, whether connected to a canon or not.

Fanfiction is such a broad category, loosely defined as non-commercial works based on existing stories, but I am super interested in some of the common narrative and stylistic traits that much of fic shares. How would you define Winter’s Orbit’s narrative and prose style and interests, and how much of that, if any, comes from the world of transformative fandom?

Winter’s Orbit’s primary concern is its two main characters. Where there was a choice between a revealing conversation about the characters and an action scene, the character work often won out. I think one thing that fannish experience gave me was a strong appreciation for character arcs and permission to unabashedly put them at the centre of a story.

Books

How Do You Approach Worldbuilding?

By Kayti Burt

Culture

Ngozi Ukazu Interview: Check, Please and Beyond

By Kayti Burt

Do you think there are story things the world of fanfiction (generally) does better than the world of commercially published fiction (generally)?

This is a complicated question, since “fandom” includes so many people who are interested in so many different things! I will say that my experience has been based around stories with a laser focus on character development (including relationships) above everything else, and this focus produces some amazing works—though my narrow description there leaves out worldbuilding fans and so many others. Ultimately it’s a rich and creative community that has both its own tropes and room to experiment.

Do you have any plans to continue writing in this world and with these characters? (I would read so many more!) Either way, can you tell us what you are working on next?

I’m not totally ruling out revisiting these characters, though they’ve earned a bit of a rest for now! I definitely plan to continue in the Resolution universe. I’m currently working on a book set on a planet outside the Iskat Empire, starring two even bigger disasters than Kiem and Jainan (and an expansion of Remnant powers). I’m very excited for that.

And, finally, what stories, of any kind, have been bringing you joy recently?

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There are so many good books coming up this year, which is lucky because generally it’s very hard to concentrate. On the queer SFF side, I’m very excited about The Unbroken by C. L. Clark, which is North African post-colonial fantasy, and She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan, which deals with the rise of a genderqueer emperor in fantasy China. I’ve read these two and they’re excellent. I’m waiting impatiently for Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard and The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri. Oh, and on the romance side, I really loved Division Bells, by Iona Datt Sharma, a beautiful queer workplace romance which is almost elegiac about public service. I’ll stop now—but it’s a good year for books!

Winter’s Orbit is available to buy and read on February 2nd. You can preorder here. Find out more about Everina Maxwell on Twitter or at her official website.

The post How Winter’s Orbit Went From AO3 to Published Space Opera appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/2M81tql

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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femslashrevolution · 7 years

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Towards A Darker Femslash by holyfant

This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.

Hello everyone! I hope your Femslash February is going great so far. I was stoked to be asked to write a little something for I Am Femslash, particularly because while I’ve written bits and pieces about my experience as a young, queer, multishipping and writing young woman in fandom, I’ve never really tried to put any of my thoughts together in a truly coherent way. So, here I go, attempting to write about a topic that is dear to me. Feel free to engage me on any of the points I make in this little essay!

So, hi. I’m holyfant, a 26-year-old ESL fanfic and (aspiring) original fiction writer. I’ve been active in fandom for nearly fifteen years, and have written fic for a lot of that time, picking up English and fannishness along the way. Writing fic gave me a way to connect with other people who had to same interests I did – and only later did I realise it also paved the way to more self-knowledge. At some point during my teens, the question of my own sexual and romantic identity became pressing; maybe paradoxically this first drew me to male slash, and only later to femslash – perhaps because the former was and is more visibly present in fandom than the latter, and perhaps also because reading and writing femslash was still too direct a way to engage with my own identity at that point. I still don’t fully understand this; I remember that when I was first playing with the idea that I might not be straight, it felt safer to read about men in love than women in love. Maybe seeing male characters discover their non-straightness was close enough to my own experience to stir up emotion and feeling, but far enough removed from it that it didn’t stir up panic. Who knows?

Either way, when I was more comfortable with who I was, I returned to f/f and found it infinitely rewarding. I read a metric ton of femslash fic and wrote lots myself – for a fairly long stretch of time I enjoyed deep obscurity in the Harry Potter and Greek mythology fandoms as a niche femslash writer with two or three loyal readers, and it was truly a lovely time. I engaged with femslash in a curious, non-discriminatory way – I shipped everyone. I’d take two minor female characters who perhaps had never even interacted in canon and found a way to put them together. I took prompts for characters that were only featured in throw-away lines, and wrote a lot of fic for the now sadly defunct LJ community hp_rarestpairest, which encouraged the nichest of pairings. Basically I was honing my writing skills, while also representing my questions, hopes and fears about my own sexuality at the same time. In my fics I dealt with women falling in love, being rejected, having sex with each other, coming out to their families and friends, dealing with heartbreak – all of these were things that I was thinking about, was experiencing or wanted to experience, or was scared of. I think it will surprise few queer femslash writers to hear that reading and writing femslash taught me a lot about my own identity and sexuality and gave me a community of queer women that I would otherwise never have found.

Despite the fact that I was mostly a femslash writer in my early times in fandom and the fact that I write f/f in my current fandoms today, it remains a curious truth that my growth as a writer from someone who wrote 1,000-word oneshots in one go to someone who wrote novel-length fanfic over several months coincided with going into a different fandom where my main focus was a m/m ship (BBC Sherlock, where I was sucked into the black hole that was Sherlock/John). I said I “shipped everyone” earlier – it would be just as correct to say I shipped no one, because I had no deep emotional investment in the ships I wrote about, and often wrote only one fic per ship. (Perhaps the only exception was Lavender/Parvati, which I wrote often and regularly gave me the warm fuzzies to think about.) It wasn’t until Sherlock happened that I started to understand what people meant when they said a ship was their OTP, or how people could get so intense about their reading of a relationship. As a result of this increased feeling of investment I read and wrote so much fic that I became a much better writer for it, by pushing myself to write more and more complex stories. This was all fine in itself, but even as it happened I was aware that it was curious that this sudden spur of feeling and craft was because of a juggernaut white dude ship, something that had never held much interest for me before. I felt – even at that heady time when you’re in a new fandom and it’s like being in love – like I wanted to continue to write smaller pairings and explore female characters, too. And I did, but the point remains that when I look at my story stats now, it’s clear that my f/f stories are shorter in word count and are less varied in their plot and execution than my m/m stories.

All this to show that I am 100% part of what I am about to describe: not a problem, per se, but an observation that I think is useful to be aware of and think about. The fact is that femslash, across fandoms, remains a niche category, and that while there are great amounts of people who read and write almost exclusively m/m this is barely ever the case for f/f. A lot of the f/f writers I know have talked at some point about the realisation that f/f in general seems to lack novel-length stories and stories that have the diversity of plotting and thematic exploration that we easily find for m/m ships. Most f/f stories are shorter stories or oneshots that focus on meet-cutes, sex and domestic bliss. Longer fics are rare. Darker themes, such as character death and grief, trauma, relationship issues, adultery, abuse and so on are also rare. I am not the first to notice this and not the first to theorise on it, but I would still like to identify why I think f/f fandom has developed in this direction, and to formulate some ideas as how to diversify our creative experiences a little.

I think there are a lot of possible reasons that f/f writers are in general less motivated to write long stories that explore complex themes, and these will surely differ for everyone. For me, I’ve identified three causes, in increasing order of importance: 1. a small audience, and therefore a smaller possibility of extensive feedback, 2. a lack of variation and complexity in female characters and their relationships in a lot of canon materials, and 3. the awareness that f/f is often rooted in a deeply lived experience for many of its readers and writers, and that it’s therefore necessary to be wary of representing “bad” female characters or negative tropes about lesbian and bisexual relationships. The most complex of these is certainly no. 3, which is why that’s the one I will be writing about a bit more.

Statistically f/f is most likely to be written and read by cis queer women, which of course influences our relationship with the characters we portray, because they refer to our own lived existence. This makes f/f different from m/m – m/m is also mostly written by cis women (straight and otherwise), which creates a certain leeway for “true” realism. Anecdotally I can share what happened when my housemate and my best friend, both cis gay men, delved into the world of m/m fanfic on some of my recommendations. While they enjoyed a lot of the stories I told them I’d liked, they also talked about many of the things they felt were inaccurate about gay sex and romance – for instance, they could name several often-described sexual acts that they said didn’t quite “work that way”, and they were generally uncomfortable with the fannish (certainly often problematic) tendency to label characters as strictly tops or bottoms, especially if this was based on stereotypical characteristics outside of the bedroom. If gay men were to write these stories (which they do, of course, only in much smaller numbers), they might look different – they might be less fictionalised, less genre-specific; the language developed to talk about men in love might be different, there might be different focuses. It’s hard to definitively say what it would be like. Either way, it would seem logical that it follows, from the fact that lesbian and bisexual women overwhelmingly write the fannish stories that we have about lesbian and bisexual women, that we should find it easy to access their spaces and write about many different aspects of their lives. In reality this doesn’t necessarily seem to be so. Perhaps the scrutiny, both internal and external, is larger – perhaps because we are writing about ourselves we put more pressure on ourselves to “get it right”, and perhaps our audience, who is looking to see itself represented, does the same at times. Or maybe we simply perceive our audience as being more critical than it truly is.

What is a “bad” female character? Most people will agree that women often get the short stick of characterisation in most media – to such an extent that there are tropey names for them, like the Girl Next Door, the Femme Fatale, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and so on. Women are still often used as crutches for men; their stories are supporting stories, their pain is used to further a male character’s pain. Writing about women in fanfic is often already a rebellious act in itself, one that reverses harsh or flippant treatment by canon writers. While this is fine in se, and sometimes even lends a pleasant sheen of fannish disobedience to writing female-centric fic, I do believe it has the unintended and unsavoury result of effectively also policing the sort of woman that can be written about. This may seem like a paradox, but in reacting to the one-dimensional representations of women in fiction it can become important to “fix” those wrongs, and this makes it hard to write about women who don’t overtly challenge assumptions about womanhood: unsympathetic women, women who are perhaps weak-willed, petty, bigoted, jealous, aggressive, criminal, highly sexual, or abusive. Considering that, at least in a Western vision on literature, stories derive meaning at their base from conflict, removing the option to write “bad” women removes a lot of possibility for thematic conflict. This might be part of the reason why there are significantly less plot-driven f/f stories than there plot-driven m/m stories; plot usually requires conflict, and conflict often requires flawed characters and flawed relationships.

I know that when I write about women I’m conscious of the fact that I have internalised societal ideas about what it “should” mean to be a woman, but I’m also aware that in trying to combat those ideas it’s easy to get mired in different ones. I know that I sometimes interrogate myself about what it is that I’m saying about women when I write about this particular woman cheating on her partner or being generally secretive and untruthful – doesn’t that reproduce a societal prejudice that women are untrustworthy? It’s very hard to separate a single performance of fictional womanhood from the general performance of womanhood – this is not usually a problem with (white) men, who are allowed to represent only themselves, and not their entire gender.

The above paragraphs talk about “women” – clearly the problem of treatment that I write about becomes many times more pressing when dealing with women who are on other intersections of oppression. Women who love women are more vulnerable to prejudice and abuse than straight women, and wlw of colour are again many times more vulnerable than their white sisters. And when these wlw or woc are not cisgender, again their situation becomes many times more dire. These societal realities are often reproduced in media – 2016 was the year in which no lesbian or bisexual woman on tv seemed to be safe, and their pain and deaths hurt all the more because we are confronted with this pain in real life, too. I remember my tumblr dash around the time that The 100’s Lexa died; the pain there for many queer women who watched the show was very real, because – I think – it echoed a feeling of being unsafe, of being cruelly treated in society. I remember fans writing about how hurtful it was to see a brave female character who loved another woman killed off like this; in their pain many people stated that it was unacceptable that lesbian or bisexual female characters should be killed in fiction at all. Of course, this was understandable considering how hurt fans were, and how often they had been disappointed – still, the typical fannish tendency towards lack of nuance frustrated me. In capable writers’ hands, tragedy can be performed very meaningfully. I wrote a little about this on my blog at the time, because I was starting to feel insecure about my own tendency to prefer darker thematic material – was I complicit in my own oppression, and was I hurting other queer women by writing what I enjoyed? Clearly my own privilege was also part of this question: I am a wlw, but I’m white and cisgender, and I hail from a country where legal equality has been realised for the entirety of my adult life. Obviously homophobia is still a problem, but my close environment has been nothing but supportive and accepting from the moment I first came out as lesbian at 16, and again as bisexual at 24. So I haven’t experienced much of the tension and fear that other wlw might have experienced. Does this make me a part of the oppressive machine that performs queer women’s pain for shock value? I seriously thought about this question before tentatively concluding that I had to have faith that I was a thoughtful enough writer to avoid these pitfalls.

It might seem from this essay that I find writing femslash to be an exhausting trial of constantly having to think about what prejudices I’m reproducing – this is not the case. I love writing femslash and I love my femslash-writing friends. I’ve learned heaps about myself and others by reading some of the stellar f/f stories out there, and with every f/f story I write I become more aware of how much I love to write about queer women – and I remind myself that I should certainly do it more often, and more ambitiously. As I stated above, this is something that I’ve noticed in my own writing practice, so it’s not an accusation leveled at anyone else. It’s simply something that I find worthwhile to examine. Judging by some of the conversation that periodically does the rounds in my f/f-loving circles, I’m definitely not alone in that.

Now how to deal with this in our f/f-writing community? There’s no singular answer to that, and whatever we can do is both blindingly obvious and hard to actually do. One of the possible answers is, as it is with so many complex questions that have complex roots, to simply push through and do it anyway, to try to ignore some of the fear and uncomfortable associations we might feel in writing unsympathetic f/f narratives and write them anyway. Diversifying the stories we write will automatically diversify the stories we feel we’re allowed to write. Audience response is probably important too; I think that there must be plenty of people who feel, like me, that it’s a shame that so much of femslash is short and that a lot of it focuses on narrative happiness rather than also exploring narrative unhappiness and conflict, which (in my opinion, at least) yields more fertile literature. And if we feel that way, then we have to try to reward people who write the things we like to read, through our attention, our comments, our kudos, our podcasts, our recs, et cetera.

I write this mere days before the beginning of Femslash February, and I’m certainly planning to walk the walk that I’ve talked in this talk; I’m absolutely sure that the strong core of people who love to read about women loving women will continue to keep this community vibrant and alive and that there are plenty of new directions our stories can go in. I’m looking forward to seeing what the other voices who are participating in I Am Femslash have to say, and I’m looking forward to all of the new content that will be produced. I’m grateful that as a young teen I stumbled upon fandom and that I found my way towards femslash a few years later; I’m pretty sure my own journey of discovery and creativity would have been very different, and probably more difficult, if I hadn’t found this community. So, to all of us: We Are Femslash! <3

About the author

holyfant is a 26-year-old bisexual woman from Belgium, who’s been writing about women and their relationships since she was a budding young wlw. She loves to think about literature and how it relates to the core of our human experiences: the only thing she really wants to be, in the end, is a storyteller.

Tumblr: http://holyant.tumblr.com

AO3: http://archiveofourown.org/users/holyfant

#holyfant #I Am Femslash #Type: Meta #Femslash February #Femslash February 2017 #submission

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