Fandoms
jenniferlupin posted a poll about whether you like or dislike slash, and why (found via daily_snitch), and it sparked this introspective little rant/ramble from yours truly...
I don't like slash. Here's why...
I have a degree in English literature, and in the process of earning it I did literary criticism and analysis until it came out my ears. As a student I couldn't get away with randomly hypothesizing that Character X and Character Y were gettin' it on, regardless of their genders, without some sort of evidence from the text to support my argument. Reader-response analysis is one thing, but suddenly trying to argue that Mr. Darcy is an alien, or secretly the king of Obscureastan, or boffing the stable boy...well, unless you had some basis in the text the professor wasn't going to take you at all seriously. So my experience in college made me a bit of a canon purist. And until an author specifically says, "These two characters are in love," it's all speculation. That's certainly not to say that some fans get their kicks exploring "What-ifs," and they're welcome to do so. It just doesn't interest me personally.
I'm also a writer of original fiction and wanna-be novelist myself, so I perhaps place more weight on author intent than some do. I think about how I'd feel if someone took two characters out of my "universe" and threw them together in a relationship that I didn't intend, especially across lines of established sexual preference. I'd be displeased. JK Rowling has never said, to my knowledge, that she minds hundreds of fangirls pairing Sirius/Remus or Harry/Draco, but I can't imagine her being too thrilled by it.
Third, in the aforementioned college years, I spent a lot of time doing feminist literary criticism, and ended up writing my senior thesis with it. As a pseudo-feminist I'm naturally more interested in the female characters. (It's awful that we don't know more about Lily, but know a fair amount about James. It sounds like JKR is planning to rectify this imbalance in books six and seven, thank goodness.)
My aversion to slash does not stem from homophobia. I won't trot out the cliche "I have gay friends, really!" argument because it's shallow and older than dirt, but...it's true. ;) I guess it all comes back to canon, for me. If a character is gay in canon, I have absolutely no problem with them. That's who they are. (I happen to think Sailor Moon's Haruka/Michiru are a great couple.) And slash ships that don't stretch canon very far, like Frodo/Sam, don't bother me too much. That's why Sirius/Remus is the only HP-verse slash ship that I can stomach, because it's the only one that seems plausible in the books. Do I think JKR wrote it that way on purpose? Darned if I know. But it cracks canon far less than, say, Remus/Hagrid. ;)
So I dislike 95% of all slash, yes. But I also find ships like Ginny/Goyle, Minerva/Bill, Percy/Cho or Draco/Luna to be absurd and boring, too. There's just no basis for such things. There's absolutely no reason other fans can't entertain themselves with such things. It's just not something I want to invest my time and creative energies in.
It's also very troubling when a fandom is so saturated by noncanonical slash that it becomes the default instead of a subset of the fandom. This phenomenon was responsible for my departure from the Pirates of the Caribbean fandom. Everywhere I looked it was Will/Jack slash. It was inescapable. I found myself constantly reminding people that the pairing was NOT in the movie. It seemed like everywhere I went in the fandom, everyone assumed they were a couple. I found this absurd and frustrating. Yes, there was some het, and even a few Mary Sues, but it was hard to come by and was vastly outnumbered by slash. As someone who isn't interested in slash, it was disheartening and eventually made me pull out of the fandom altogether.
One last note...call me a Midwestern prude, but the overemphasis on sex in our culture in general and fandoms in particular gets old quickly. There's so much more to think about! Perhaps that's my English major bias showing again, since very little classtime was devoted to discussing the sex lives of the characters. ;) But I find characterization, plot, etc so much more interesting. Yes, I know there's plenty of slash out there that emphasizes those things over OMG TEH SEXX0RZ, but sex is still an issue just by virtue of the fact that, well, it's slash, i.e. the story exists to place two characters of like gender in a relationship. I have the same objection to raunchy Mary Sues or other PWP het. It has its place, but it's not something that holds my interest.
In short, to each his or her own! Nothing wrong with slash, het, or whatever floats your boat. Just don't get so caught up in throwing characters into bed together that you forget the plot, characters and elements that made you fall in love with the source material in the first place. It is, after all, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, not Harry Potter and the School Full of Sex-Starved Perverts. ;)
I don't like slash. Here's why...
I have a degree in English literature, and in the process of earning it I did literary criticism and analysis until it came out my ears. As a student I couldn't get away with randomly hypothesizing that Character X and Character Y were gettin' it on, regardless of their genders, without some sort of evidence from the text to support my argument. Reader-response analysis is one thing, but suddenly trying to argue that Mr. Darcy is an alien, or secretly the king of Obscureastan, or boffing the stable boy...well, unless you had some basis in the text the professor wasn't going to take you at all seriously. So my experience in college made me a bit of a canon purist. And until an author specifically says, "These two characters are in love," it's all speculation. That's certainly not to say that some fans get their kicks exploring "What-ifs," and they're welcome to do so. It just doesn't interest me personally.
I'm also a writer of original fiction and wanna-be novelist myself, so I perhaps place more weight on author intent than some do. I think about how I'd feel if someone took two characters out of my "universe" and threw them together in a relationship that I didn't intend, especially across lines of established sexual preference. I'd be displeased. JK Rowling has never said, to my knowledge, that she minds hundreds of fangirls pairing Sirius/Remus or Harry/Draco, but I can't imagine her being too thrilled by it.
Third, in the aforementioned college years, I spent a lot of time doing feminist literary criticism, and ended up writing my senior thesis with it. As a pseudo-feminist I'm naturally more interested in the female characters. (It's awful that we don't know more about Lily, but know a fair amount about James. It sounds like JKR is planning to rectify this imbalance in books six and seven, thank goodness.)
My aversion to slash does not stem from homophobia. I won't trot out the cliche "I have gay friends, really!" argument because it's shallow and older than dirt, but...it's true. ;) I guess it all comes back to canon, for me. If a character is gay in canon, I have absolutely no problem with them. That's who they are. (I happen to think Sailor Moon's Haruka/Michiru are a great couple.) And slash ships that don't stretch canon very far, like Frodo/Sam, don't bother me too much. That's why Sirius/Remus is the only HP-verse slash ship that I can stomach, because it's the only one that seems plausible in the books. Do I think JKR wrote it that way on purpose? Darned if I know. But it cracks canon far less than, say, Remus/Hagrid. ;)
So I dislike 95% of all slash, yes. But I also find ships like Ginny/Goyle, Minerva/Bill, Percy/Cho or Draco/Luna to be absurd and boring, too. There's just no basis for such things. There's absolutely no reason other fans can't entertain themselves with such things. It's just not something I want to invest my time and creative energies in.
It's also very troubling when a fandom is so saturated by noncanonical slash that it becomes the default instead of a subset of the fandom. This phenomenon was responsible for my departure from the Pirates of the Caribbean fandom. Everywhere I looked it was Will/Jack slash. It was inescapable. I found myself constantly reminding people that the pairing was NOT in the movie. It seemed like everywhere I went in the fandom, everyone assumed they were a couple. I found this absurd and frustrating. Yes, there was some het, and even a few Mary Sues, but it was hard to come by and was vastly outnumbered by slash. As someone who isn't interested in slash, it was disheartening and eventually made me pull out of the fandom altogether.
One last note...call me a Midwestern prude, but the overemphasis on sex in our culture in general and fandoms in particular gets old quickly. There's so much more to think about! Perhaps that's my English major bias showing again, since very little classtime was devoted to discussing the sex lives of the characters. ;) But I find characterization, plot, etc so much more interesting. Yes, I know there's plenty of slash out there that emphasizes those things over OMG TEH SEXX0RZ, but sex is still an issue just by virtue of the fact that, well, it's slash, i.e. the story exists to place two characters of like gender in a relationship. I have the same objection to raunchy Mary Sues or other PWP het. It has its place, but it's not something that holds my interest.
In short, to each his or her own! Nothing wrong with slash, het, or whatever floats your boat. Just don't get so caught up in throwing characters into bed together that you forget the plot, characters and elements that made you fall in love with the source material in the first place. It is, after all, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, not Harry Potter and the School Full of Sex-Starved Perverts. ;)