[unfic] in place of thought, questions

[glossing]

Some random questions that have been sloshing around in my brainpan lately:
1. Does the proliferation of fandom-specific newsletters mean there's less need for fic-communities? (I'm thinking of comms as fic-posting platforms here, rather than niche outlets for 'ship cliques and the like.)

2. If an ensemble has a canon queer character - or a couple

Comments

[executrix]

1. I can easily imagine someone who is not a strict OTP'er but who does like some ships a lot more than others. (All pairing names guaranteed made up). Let's say zir favorite ship is Julie/Maureen, and she really, really hates Andrea. Ze wouldn't join an Everything Andrea! comm, but she might write a story by one of her favorite writers if she sees it in the newsletter (especially if the summary is "Andrea is Eaten By Bears." Ze probably wouldn't spend a lot of time on a Maureen Gen comm, and once again the newsletter could be a tool for leading her to a "Maureen; maybe pre-Julie/Maureen if you squint" story that she wouldn't see otherwise.

2. You really can't go by me, because essentially I think of canon the way I think of the furniture that people throw out. Sometimes it just needs a dust and a polish, sometimes one of the legs is hanging off loose, and sometimes I'm going to saw it in half and train tomatoes over it.

But then I simultaneously think of same-sex relationships as both less and more of a big deal than just about anybody else I've encountered in fandom. So whether I ship two people (I haven't done any really shippy triofic) uses exactly the same standards for a same-sex as a mixed-sex couple: Do I think they would be attracted to each other? Would they act on the attraction? Are they good for each other? Do I actually care? So, in your hypo, I easily might say that I just don't believe Zack/Wash for a minute, or I completely believe it, but big fucking deal, I like Zack/Jayne, or Mal/Simon, or Book/OCM.

But when I say "more of a big deal," then yeah, I do think of m/m or f/f couples as gay couples who exist in the context of a society where there are a lot more straight people than gay people, and one kind of story I wanted to write more of was an ensemble story, either where the same character has both a male and a female partner simultaneously or sequentially, or where there are same-sex couples and mixed-sex couples.