rantish, introspective crap, and BSG fandom
My lj is for writing fic in, and that's getting few and far between lately. I don't really know why, because the story ideas are all there, and unless I've had something go enormously cerebrally wrong (and haven't noticed) in the last few months, I have no reason NOT to be able to write them. But I can't. And every time I read about BSG fandom and the way people view it (which is all the time, because I'm an addict) I feel like there isn't much point to trying.
I used to write under different names in the HP fandom. I wrote a few nice short stories for a small community, and they were pretty well received. But overall, there wasn't many writers as - well, can I say this without sounding like a fucking elitist bitch? probably not, but meh - professional as me. I don't mean that the stories weren't good ideas, but that they weren't thought through, they had little structure, next to no detail. Plot development was usually a tool to advance the characters towards sex. Not that these things are always bad, and that I haven't been guilty of them myself, but there's somehow a defining line between good 'fan' fic, and good FIC. And I thought I was on the 'fic' side of things, whereas, if you're a fan in the general definition, it was more the 'fan'ishness that was important, and not so much the 'fic'.
My stories were good, but they tended to be either ultra-short or very long. I wrote a two-hundred-seventy-two page version of 'Half-blood Prince' before we even knew what the title was to be, and of course, it was utterly unlike what Rowling produced, but that didn't matter to me, because for my purposes it grew out of what we already knew. (And that my friends is what I eventually hated about the real HBP because there was no real continuity, but that's a whole 'nother story.) I wasn't well-known in HP, never joined any big comms or wrote any wildly appreciated stuff, but I guess I mentally compared my crap to the vast run of fanfic, and found it good.
Cut to present day, and I'm really only in one fandom now: BSG. I make no secret of my love for pilots, I 'ship relatively unashamedly, and I'll write and read PWP and/or smut with sincere appreciation. I can still find that dividing line between BSG 'fic' and BSG 'fanfic' but for some reason, I'm not sure which side of that line I'm on.
Case in point: I'm not part of any minority in BSG fandom. I don't slash just to slash, because despite its fashionability and its occasional hotness (and I do mean occasional, because despite fashion, I find the vast majority of slash and femmeslash to be just as blandly written, and/or 'fannish' rather than 'ficcish' as the majority of het) I really don't see any difference between the genders in this show that requires us to draw gender-associative lines.
It all hooks up with my quirking a brow and saying 'wtf?' every time someone calls Starbuck 'butch', or Dee 'a lady', or people complain that Lee is too 'effeminate' or made weak by Kara. If I'd seen anything in the show itself to suggest that current western sexual or genderal (is that a word?) mores apply to BSG, then I could understand (though not sympathise) with those kind of statements. But how do you define a woman as 'butch' in a universe where it is apparently just as likely to find female fighter-pilots and battlestar commanders and mechanics as it is to find male ones? Where it is so far just as likely to be a woman who's the ultimate antagonist as it is a man? where a woman's brain and capabilities seem just as important as a man's? How do we know what's 'feminine' and what isn't? Why is the stigma applied to appearance and attitude, like it would be here, rather than to a woman's preferences and actions, like it is to a man's?
It irks me. I'm a tomboy and a relatively unashamed geek. I also was a model for six months before I gave it up to concentrate on law school. That didn't stop me climbing trees, despising shopping, spending more money on books and computer software than my wardrobe. I am as vain as all get-out, but my favorite methods of killing time include computer games, pinball machines, and kicking my male friends on the old arcade games of Soul Calibur and Time Crisis and shooting 98% at the range. I see nothing unfeminine in that. I see nothing unfeminine in Starbuck, either, because I don't apply outmoded standards of what a 'woman should be like' to her, or to myself. She does what she wants, and in her world, that's NOT just a male prerogative. I envy her. I think women who call her 'butch' are envious, too, because they wouldn't feel comfortable exercising the same freedoms. The same goes for Lee and Dee, and even for our cylon girls; hell, the only earth-type stereotypical gender figure in BSG is Ellen Tigh, who is seductive and intended to be seductive, but in BSG that actually has more to do with her characterisation than her sex.
To wander back to the point: I don't write genderbent or slash stuff much, because for me (and I hope, one day, for everyone) the gender orientation of ships is not the important part. I don't care if Lee and Kara are actually biologically hermaphrodites: I 'ship them simply because the characters interest me in that facet of their relationship. I don't 'ship genders, I 'ship PEOPLE. (Well, fictional people. Characters, personalities.) And in BSG, gender doesn't define who you are or what you can do with your life - and hopefully not who you can fuck.
And back more to the point: it seems that such puts me (at least in some minds) down firmly in the 'fanfic' rather than the 'fic' camp. Why? If I were to enjoy - or see sexual tension in - the interplay between Lee and Helo, I'd pair them like woah. I'd read all I can find, but I doubt I'd write it simply because I have no understanding of what having a penis is like, and how to use one or what that feels like escapes me, and whatever I wrote would just be derivative of a female-male pairing. If I were to see UST in Roslin/Kara, I'd probably try to write that, and do a fair job of it (after all, I know what vaginas are, from personal experience). But I don't - and the fact that I don't somehow defines me as a less 'cerebral' or less discerning viewer of television?
And back on point at last: I write bits and pieces lately and they're not bad, but the downside of being in such a small and damned GOOD fandom is that there are quite a few writers who produce good fic. I see rec posts all the time, and discover new gems of stories in them; I've had one or two recs myself. But when I look at the discussion going down about what's good fic and what isn't, or about L/K being predominant and therefore dull, or how PWP (and yes, there's a lot of it in BSG, which I think is because of the amazing intricasy of the canon plot, which both invites and discourages exploration in fic) is omg dumb, I really wonder if anything I write - because my tastes are evidently mainstream - is going to be read according to its merits by anyone who doesn't 'ship the same as me.
I'm not looking for critical acclaim, but there's lots of writers like me, who find a simple human focus, in a show that questions what love is - what humanity is - on a regular basis, to be damn near addictive. I'm tired of the implication that what *personX* writes is better than what *personY* writes simply because of genderal (well, it's a word NOW) or thematic choices. Doesn't each story - each author - deserve to be judged on its own merits? On the quality and standard of the writing rather than the author's apparent fictional-sexual preference? Why does smut or pwp (which isn't a factual designator anyhow, as GOOD pwp generally has a plot) somehow fall beneath a quality marker in some scale simply because the plot is simple and generally sexual? Does that make the writing bad?
Anyone who's read Kate Andrews' fics will beg to differ, won't they?
I am disheartened; mostly, I think, because in general, the response of the fannish audience these days seems to have more to do with *what* you write, rather than how it is written. People are fracturing into seperate little mini-fandoms, writing mostly for people who are predisposed to like what they produce, and newcomers are indoctrinated with fannish history and the various minorities taunt the mainstream in multisyllabic orgies of comparatives and paradigms, and no matter how good a non-conforming story might be, it's never quite good enough.
I suppose it's all carry-over from other fandoms. I suppose I was never really in a fandom before, because despite having written fanfic as far back as early X-Files, more for my own amusement than anyone else's, I never really tried to understand what 'fandom' is about. I thought quality was more important than politics. I still do. I want people to read my fic and tell me they enjoyed it - if they enjoyed it - regardless of the 'ship, or the 'style', or the community they find it in. And if they don't enjoy it, I hope it's because they think it sucks, rather than because it's got a guy fucking a girl and not a guy fucking a guy.
And if they think it sucks BECAUSE it's got Lee and Kara, and not Lee/Helo or Lee/Laura or Kara/Laura or whatthefuckever pairing, then that's a cop-out. I don't like Orwell's writing, I find his books disturbing, but I've never denied that they are good books. I try to give every author the same starting point; if they can sell me on the subject matter despite my own preference, then it's a good story. But to see a lot of good fic dismissed unread because of a reader's personal bias? Sucks.
If that's just how fandom is, then I'm not in a fandom. I'm just a fan.
I used to write under different names in the HP fandom. I wrote a few nice short stories for a small community, and they were pretty well received. But overall, there wasn't many writers as - well, can I say this without sounding like a fucking elitist bitch? probably not, but meh - professional as me. I don't mean that the stories weren't good ideas, but that they weren't thought through, they had little structure, next to no detail. Plot development was usually a tool to advance the characters towards sex. Not that these things are always bad, and that I haven't been guilty of them myself, but there's somehow a defining line between good 'fan' fic, and good FIC. And I thought I was on the 'fic' side of things, whereas, if you're a fan in the general definition, it was more the 'fan'ishness that was important, and not so much the 'fic'.
My stories were good, but they tended to be either ultra-short or very long. I wrote a two-hundred-seventy-two page version of 'Half-blood Prince' before we even knew what the title was to be, and of course, it was utterly unlike what Rowling produced, but that didn't matter to me, because for my purposes it grew out of what we already knew. (And that my friends is what I eventually hated about the real HBP because there was no real continuity, but that's a whole 'nother story.) I wasn't well-known in HP, never joined any big comms or wrote any wildly appreciated stuff, but I guess I mentally compared my crap to the vast run of fanfic, and found it good.
Cut to present day, and I'm really only in one fandom now: BSG. I make no secret of my love for pilots, I 'ship relatively unashamedly, and I'll write and read PWP and/or smut with sincere appreciation. I can still find that dividing line between BSG 'fic' and BSG 'fanfic' but for some reason, I'm not sure which side of that line I'm on.
Case in point: I'm not part of any minority in BSG fandom. I don't slash just to slash, because despite its fashionability and its occasional hotness (and I do mean occasional, because despite fashion, I find the vast majority of slash and femmeslash to be just as blandly written, and/or 'fannish' rather than 'ficcish' as the majority of het) I really don't see any difference between the genders in this show that requires us to draw gender-associative lines.
It all hooks up with my quirking a brow and saying 'wtf?' every time someone calls Starbuck 'butch', or Dee 'a lady', or people complain that Lee is too 'effeminate' or made weak by Kara. If I'd seen anything in the show itself to suggest that current western sexual or genderal (is that a word?) mores apply to BSG, then I could understand (though not sympathise) with those kind of statements. But how do you define a woman as 'butch' in a universe where it is apparently just as likely to find female fighter-pilots and battlestar commanders and mechanics as it is to find male ones? Where it is so far just as likely to be a woman who's the ultimate antagonist as it is a man? where a woman's brain and capabilities seem just as important as a man's? How do we know what's 'feminine' and what isn't? Why is the stigma applied to appearance and attitude, like it would be here, rather than to a woman's preferences and actions, like it is to a man's?
It irks me. I'm a tomboy and a relatively unashamed geek. I also was a model for six months before I gave it up to concentrate on law school. That didn't stop me climbing trees, despising shopping, spending more money on books and computer software than my wardrobe. I am as vain as all get-out, but my favorite methods of killing time include computer games, pinball machines, and kicking my male friends on the old arcade games of Soul Calibur and Time Crisis and shooting 98% at the range. I see nothing unfeminine in that. I see nothing unfeminine in Starbuck, either, because I don't apply outmoded standards of what a 'woman should be like' to her, or to myself. She does what she wants, and in her world, that's NOT just a male prerogative. I envy her. I think women who call her 'butch' are envious, too, because they wouldn't feel comfortable exercising the same freedoms. The same goes for Lee and Dee, and even for our cylon girls; hell, the only earth-type stereotypical gender figure in BSG is Ellen Tigh, who is seductive and intended to be seductive, but in BSG that actually has more to do with her characterisation than her sex.
To wander back to the point: I don't write genderbent or slash stuff much, because for me (and I hope, one day, for everyone) the gender orientation of ships is not the important part. I don't care if Lee and Kara are actually biologically hermaphrodites: I 'ship them simply because the characters interest me in that facet of their relationship. I don't 'ship genders, I 'ship PEOPLE. (Well, fictional people. Characters, personalities.) And in BSG, gender doesn't define who you are or what you can do with your life - and hopefully not who you can fuck.
And back more to the point: it seems that such puts me (at least in some minds) down firmly in the 'fanfic' rather than the 'fic' camp. Why? If I were to enjoy - or see sexual tension in - the interplay between Lee and Helo, I'd pair them like woah. I'd read all I can find, but I doubt I'd write it simply because I have no understanding of what having a penis is like, and how to use one or what that feels like escapes me, and whatever I wrote would just be derivative of a female-male pairing. If I were to see UST in Roslin/Kara, I'd probably try to write that, and do a fair job of it (after all, I know what vaginas are, from personal experience). But I don't - and the fact that I don't somehow defines me as a less 'cerebral' or less discerning viewer of television?
And back on point at last: I write bits and pieces lately and they're not bad, but the downside of being in such a small and damned GOOD fandom is that there are quite a few writers who produce good fic. I see rec posts all the time, and discover new gems of stories in them; I've had one or two recs myself. But when I look at the discussion going down about what's good fic and what isn't, or about L/K being predominant and therefore dull, or how PWP (and yes, there's a lot of it in BSG, which I think is because of the amazing intricasy of the canon plot, which both invites and discourages exploration in fic) is omg dumb, I really wonder if anything I write - because my tastes are evidently mainstream - is going to be read according to its merits by anyone who doesn't 'ship the same as me.
I'm not looking for critical acclaim, but there's lots of writers like me, who find a simple human focus, in a show that questions what love is - what humanity is - on a regular basis, to be damn near addictive. I'm tired of the implication that what *personX* writes is better than what *personY* writes simply because of genderal (well, it's a word NOW) or thematic choices. Doesn't each story - each author - deserve to be judged on its own merits? On the quality and standard of the writing rather than the author's apparent fictional-sexual preference? Why does smut or pwp (which isn't a factual designator anyhow, as GOOD pwp generally has a plot) somehow fall beneath a quality marker in some scale simply because the plot is simple and generally sexual? Does that make the writing bad?
Anyone who's read Kate Andrews' fics will beg to differ, won't they?
I am disheartened; mostly, I think, because in general, the response of the fannish audience these days seems to have more to do with *what* you write, rather than how it is written. People are fracturing into seperate little mini-fandoms, writing mostly for people who are predisposed to like what they produce, and newcomers are indoctrinated with fannish history and the various minorities taunt the mainstream in multisyllabic orgies of comparatives and paradigms, and no matter how good a non-conforming story might be, it's never quite good enough.
I suppose it's all carry-over from other fandoms. I suppose I was never really in a fandom before, because despite having written fanfic as far back as early X-Files, more for my own amusement than anyone else's, I never really tried to understand what 'fandom' is about. I thought quality was more important than politics. I still do. I want people to read my fic and tell me they enjoyed it - if they enjoyed it - regardless of the 'ship, or the 'style', or the community they find it in. And if they don't enjoy it, I hope it's because they think it sucks, rather than because it's got a guy fucking a girl and not a guy fucking a guy.
And if they think it sucks BECAUSE it's got Lee and Kara, and not Lee/Helo or Lee/Laura or Kara/Laura or whatthefuckever pairing, then that's a cop-out. I don't like Orwell's writing, I find his books disturbing, but I've never denied that they are good books. I try to give every author the same starting point; if they can sell me on the subject matter despite my own preference, then it's a good story. But to see a lot of good fic dismissed unread because of a reader's personal bias? Sucks.
If that's just how fandom is, then I'm not in a fandom. I'm just a fan.