Thinky Post about fanfiction and homophobia. (Also: Students being weird.)
Huh. Apparently being stressed out about exams is good for my posting schedule, considering it's not been a year since I did my last post. I could still do without the exam looming before me, though. T minus 27 days, folks! >.<"
A few days ago one of my students unleashed some kind of pandemonium on us, when he took offense to ...something (which was just the tip of the ice-berg, he'd been antsy and moody for more than a week) and completely exploded, attacking other students, throwing chairs, shoes, pencils, scissors, demolishing doors, bathrooms... you name it, he probably did it that day. There was a point during it all when I had to abandon trying to teach the other students and had to block the door, because he was outside and trying to throw building blocks at the other students.
And the other students? Well, obviously they were a little bit bored, with all of our energy focused on that student, so they started to literally bounce around the classroom.
And say the word "bounce" as they bounced.
And then they started bouncing in a circle.
So there I was, standing at the door, with the sound of building-blocks-mortar and enraged howls of a furious student at my back, watching my other students going "Bounce! - Bounce! - Bounce!" while bouncing around in a circle.
...Welcome to my life.
Speaking of ...well, not exactly my life? But more stuff I've been thinking about (to distract myself from my exam): I recently read this meta-discussion post on homophobia in slash fandom, which I found very interesting, especially the stuff in the comments. The post argues that at least some of us slash fans (it's geared towards hockey fandom, but I think it's easily appliable to every other fandom as well) tend to think of ourselves as gay allies, because we read slash fanfiction, which can somewhat blind us to our own privilege and occasionally homophobic assumptions.
The best example of that kind of thing I ever encountered was back in 2004 at a German yaoi (anime/manga) site, when one other fan wrote that she loved imagining/reading about two beautiful anime/manga boys getting it on, but thought the idea of two middle aged "real-life" gay guys being intimate (or even slow dancing together in public!) was "disgusting" - and there were other fans on that site who agreed with her, all the while proclaiming that they weren't homophobic.
This is a blindingly obvious example of homophobia in slash fandom, but I've seen other, much more subtle, examples in various fandoms ever since. The comments to that post mention the whole "Derek/Stiles" thing on Teen Wolf, and while I'm not in the fandom itself, I've seen the show (I like werewolves! They're cool!) and I've read some fics - and even I noticed that there was a surprising dearth of the one canonically gay character on the show in a lot of those fics, even though there's also canonical evidence that Stiles has asked this character questions about "gay stuff" before and would almost certainly do the same if he were to engage in a gay relationship.
Granted, Danny (the character) is woefully under-developed - but really, a character not being fleshed-out has never really stopped fans from including them. But in a lot of fanfiction, Danny keeps being absent, because... well, why? Is it because he's not white, as one person on the other post suggested? While that might be a contributing factor, I think it might also be because he doesn't fit any of the "supporting roles" in a Derek/Stiles story (best friend, confidante, ex-lover, parent...) and because he isn't "sexy" to slash fans, not like Derek, Stiles and even Isaac and Jackson are. (Which, now that I think about it, might actually be a pretty strong indicator of the whole non-white thing, because all of those written characters are white...) Omitting him doesn't tell us readers that an author is homophobic - but I do think that it might indicate that, perhaps, the author hasn't given all that much thought to the issue of homosexuality and its erasure throughout a lot of history.
And... well, as the original post said, fanfiction itself is not (and doesn't have to be) supportive of real-life homosexuality. There are some truly amazing fanfictions out there that are, there are also a lot of fanfiction authors and readers out there who are homosexual/queer/trans/etc themselves, or who are true allies; but a lot of fanfiction is basically either the m/m for straight girls variant of lesbian porn for straight men, or an equivalent to a harlequin romance novel. And honestly, normally I'm totally OK with that, because as long as fanfiction readers and authors own up to that fact, I don't think that fanfiction needs a validation beyond being written/read for the pleasure of those things.
But, sometimes... there's stuff that's kind of noticeable and stuff that I feel strongly about and, even though fanfiction is written for pleasure and it should stay that way, I wish some authors would think about the implications of stuff, be it homophobia or other issues.
Take BBC's Sherlock, for example. Sherlock is semi-canonically portrayed as asexual. (Word-of-actor and Sherlock's in-universe explanation of being "married to his work" / "not interested".) He and John have a very intense friendship, a friendship that reads very slashy - and which is actually a really good portrayal of what an asexual romantic love story would look like.
Yet 90% of Sherlock-slash completely ignores the whole asexual thing in favour of making Sherlock and John have lots and lots of sex.
And on the one hand I get it - hey, it's two near-canonically romantically linked good looking guys, and fanfiction is all about the love and the sex! And it's written for fun and for getting fantasies out there! ...But on the other hand, I can't help but feel that this is also a form of erasing asexuality, which as a sexual orientation already has problems with being erased/not taken seriously; and I really wish that more authors were conscious of that.
A few days ago one of my students unleashed some kind of pandemonium on us, when he took offense to ...something (which was just the tip of the ice-berg, he'd been antsy and moody for more than a week) and completely exploded, attacking other students, throwing chairs, shoes, pencils, scissors, demolishing doors, bathrooms... you name it, he probably did it that day. There was a point during it all when I had to abandon trying to teach the other students and had to block the door, because he was outside and trying to throw building blocks at the other students.
And the other students? Well, obviously they were a little bit bored, with all of our energy focused on that student, so they started to literally bounce around the classroom.
And say the word "bounce" as they bounced.
And then they started bouncing in a circle.
So there I was, standing at the door, with the sound of building-blocks-mortar and enraged howls of a furious student at my back, watching my other students going "Bounce! - Bounce! - Bounce!" while bouncing around in a circle.
...Welcome to my life.
Speaking of ...well, not exactly my life? But more stuff I've been thinking about (to distract myself from my exam): I recently read this meta-discussion post on homophobia in slash fandom, which I found very interesting, especially the stuff in the comments. The post argues that at least some of us slash fans (it's geared towards hockey fandom, but I think it's easily appliable to every other fandom as well) tend to think of ourselves as gay allies, because we read slash fanfiction, which can somewhat blind us to our own privilege and occasionally homophobic assumptions.
The best example of that kind of thing I ever encountered was back in 2004 at a German yaoi (anime/manga) site, when one other fan wrote that she loved imagining/reading about two beautiful anime/manga boys getting it on, but thought the idea of two middle aged "real-life" gay guys being intimate (or even slow dancing together in public!) was "disgusting" - and there were other fans on that site who agreed with her, all the while proclaiming that they weren't homophobic.
This is a blindingly obvious example of homophobia in slash fandom, but I've seen other, much more subtle, examples in various fandoms ever since. The comments to that post mention the whole "Derek/Stiles" thing on Teen Wolf, and while I'm not in the fandom itself, I've seen the show (I like werewolves! They're cool!) and I've read some fics - and even I noticed that there was a surprising dearth of the one canonically gay character on the show in a lot of those fics, even though there's also canonical evidence that Stiles has asked this character questions about "gay stuff" before and would almost certainly do the same if he were to engage in a gay relationship.
Granted, Danny (the character) is woefully under-developed - but really, a character not being fleshed-out has never really stopped fans from including them. But in a lot of fanfiction, Danny keeps being absent, because... well, why? Is it because he's not white, as one person on the other post suggested? While that might be a contributing factor, I think it might also be because he doesn't fit any of the "supporting roles" in a Derek/Stiles story (best friend, confidante, ex-lover, parent...) and because he isn't "sexy" to slash fans, not like Derek, Stiles and even Isaac and Jackson are. (Which, now that I think about it, might actually be a pretty strong indicator of the whole non-white thing, because all of those written characters are white...) Omitting him doesn't tell us readers that an author is homophobic - but I do think that it might indicate that, perhaps, the author hasn't given all that much thought to the issue of homosexuality and its erasure throughout a lot of history.
And... well, as the original post said, fanfiction itself is not (and doesn't have to be) supportive of real-life homosexuality. There are some truly amazing fanfictions out there that are, there are also a lot of fanfiction authors and readers out there who are homosexual/queer/trans/etc themselves, or who are true allies; but a lot of fanfiction is basically either the m/m for straight girls variant of lesbian porn for straight men, or an equivalent to a harlequin romance novel. And honestly, normally I'm totally OK with that, because as long as fanfiction readers and authors own up to that fact, I don't think that fanfiction needs a validation beyond being written/read for the pleasure of those things.
But, sometimes... there's stuff that's kind of noticeable and stuff that I feel strongly about and, even though fanfiction is written for pleasure and it should stay that way, I wish some authors would think about the implications of stuff, be it homophobia or other issues.
Take BBC's Sherlock, for example. Sherlock is semi-canonically portrayed as asexual. (Word-of-actor and Sherlock's in-universe explanation of being "married to his work" / "not interested".) He and John have a very intense friendship, a friendship that reads very slashy - and which is actually a really good portrayal of what an asexual romantic love story would look like.
Yet 90% of Sherlock-slash completely ignores the whole asexual thing in favour of making Sherlock and John have lots and lots of sex.
And on the one hand I get it - hey, it's two near-canonically romantically linked good looking guys, and fanfiction is all about the love and the sex! And it's written for fun and for getting fantasies out there! ...But on the other hand, I can't help but feel that this is also a form of erasing asexuality, which as a sexual orientation already has problems with being erased/not taken seriously; and I really wish that more authors were conscious of that.