On the difficulty of classifying stories as het or gen
This is not particularly well thought-out or anything, but it's been on my mind ever since I started writing fanfic, and most particularly since I posted a couple stories this month that are not easily classified as het or gen. One of them, Shamash, is 95% about Spock and Amanda, but it has one Spock/Uhura scene at the end. The other, The Place Where They Have to Take You In, is about two characters who intended to hook up but have a long, intimate, and platonic conversation instead. Neither one of these stories can be neatly classified into "het" or "gen." Nor are these the first two fics to pose challenges for me. Just Like a Waving Flag is almost all Sulu's back story, but it's bracketed by two small Gaila/Sulu scenes. Others, like Invictus, reference a relationship but are not about a relationship.
This bugs me for a couple reasons. One, sometimes I write stories that contain prominent relationships, but to me, they're really about only one of the characters. I dislike the idea that I'm sticking a "het" label on that when it implies that the story is about the relationship. It makes me feel like I'm taking the story away from the character whose life it is intended to celebrate. This bothers me particularly when I write female characters (which, let's be honest, is almost all the time) because I feel like women get reduced to their relationships so often. I can't find all the links now, but I know I have a lot of stories like this where I want to label them as gen, but I know it will confuse people if I do. But, whatever, if it's my journal, I can label and tag things how I want, so it's not that big a problem.
The second problem is posting stories to comms. Honestly, labeling stories as het is probably an advantage in attracting readers, so I should probably be happy that a story with a single Spock/Uhura scene can be posted to the big Spock/Uhura comm without complaint from its readership. On the other hand, I feel guilty about posting something like "The Place Where They Have to Take You In" or "Just Like a Waving Flag" to trek_het just so they can find an audience, but then I also feel that they don't belong a genfic comm either. That relegates them to the really big comms like st_reboot, which I know a lot of people have removed from their watch lists in favor of smaller, interest-specific communities. If the story in question is about a lady, then I still have lots of options; where_no_woman includes a lot of gen, and so do the character-specific comms like teamwinona. On the other hand, in the event that I have written not-quite-genfic about a male character, it feels orphaned. There is not an active Sulu comm on LJ that I know of (there is on DW, but I am over there so rarely), nor am I aware of one for any of the other guys. That makes me sad because I don't know where to find any audience for stories that I might have worked rather hard on.
I'm not really sure where I intended this post to go. It's not a criticism of how anyone else organizes their fics or their comms, just a statement that it's not working all that well for me personally. Any thoughts about how you have handled this dilemma with your own stories, especially with regard to where to post your work, are quite welcome!
This bugs me for a couple reasons. One, sometimes I write stories that contain prominent relationships, but to me, they're really about only one of the characters. I dislike the idea that I'm sticking a "het" label on that when it implies that the story is about the relationship. It makes me feel like I'm taking the story away from the character whose life it is intended to celebrate. This bothers me particularly when I write female characters (which, let's be honest, is almost all the time) because I feel like women get reduced to their relationships so often. I can't find all the links now, but I know I have a lot of stories like this where I want to label them as gen, but I know it will confuse people if I do. But, whatever, if it's my journal, I can label and tag things how I want, so it's not that big a problem.
The second problem is posting stories to comms. Honestly, labeling stories as het is probably an advantage in attracting readers, so I should probably be happy that a story with a single Spock/Uhura scene can be posted to the big Spock/Uhura comm without complaint from its readership. On the other hand, I feel guilty about posting something like "The Place Where They Have to Take You In" or "Just Like a Waving Flag" to trek_het just so they can find an audience, but then I also feel that they don't belong a genfic comm either. That relegates them to the really big comms like st_reboot, which I know a lot of people have removed from their watch lists in favor of smaller, interest-specific communities. If the story in question is about a lady, then I still have lots of options; where_no_woman includes a lot of gen, and so do the character-specific comms like teamwinona. On the other hand, in the event that I have written not-quite-genfic about a male character, it feels orphaned. There is not an active Sulu comm on LJ that I know of (there is on DW, but I am over there so rarely), nor am I aware of one for any of the other guys. That makes me sad because I don't know where to find any audience for stories that I might have worked rather hard on.
I'm not really sure where I intended this post to go. It's not a criticism of how anyone else organizes their fics or their comms, just a statement that it's not working all that well for me personally. Any thoughts about how you have handled this dilemma with your own stories, especially with regard to where to post your work, are quite welcome!