Comments | melannen: Help! My slash goggles are stuck!

melannen

Help! My slash goggles are stuck!

Feb 24, 2007 12:27

(Meta for Notcapade)
(And many, many thanks to siegeofangels and stellar_dust for readover and reassurance that I am not completely mad. I have learned why people rarely get meta betas: because they are smarter than you are, and won't stop thinking long enough to let you post!)

( Or, 'My Thoughts on Yaoi.' Don't read if you don't want to know, guys. )

meta, fandom, tl;dr, slash

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elspethdixon February 24 2007, 21:57:44 UTC

more often, it means canon that's already got the idea built in that no, it's not safe to walk outside alone at night just because you're a man. Because there's something out there that's watching, and it might get you if you do.

I'm pretty sure I'm attracted to those fandoms because the potential for action/violence/hurt-comfort/seeing-people-get-beat-up-real-good is so much higher, but I also think there might be something to your theory that placing male characters in peril/making them vulnerable to some outside threat makes it easier for viewers to see them as sexual objects. I'm making this up as I go along here, but putting the male lead in physical danger might encourage female viewer identification (the way having the "last girl" in a slasher flick fight back against the monster apparently encourages male identification), which might make it easier for fans to transfer that female sense of being a potential sex object onto him.

Whew! Long essay. And I made it all the way to the end without ever using the terms 'patriarchy ( ... )

elspethdixon February 24 2007, 21:59:07 UTC

Those are important concepts, I've found that those words have a way of dragging the topic of discussion away from fanfic texts and into the realm of RL politics.

And I'm pretty sure I meant that sentence to have a "but" or "however" in it somewhere.

melannen February 25 2007, 01:49:45 UTC

I'm very proud of myself for that! especially since I basically just wrote an essay about how slash subverts the patriarchy by turning male privilege into objectification

melannen February 25 2007, 01:23:21 UTC

>>I'm pretty sure I'm attracted to those fandoms because the potential for action/violence/hurt-comfort/seeing-people-get-beat-up-real-good is so much higher,

I think that what I'm looking at here is very much more about some sort of fannish gestalt than it is about what we, as individual fangirls like - I mean, you and I both have lots of 'ships which, by any rights, should have huge slash-writing contingents - everybody has their own reasons for liking what they like, and nearly everybody 'ships in bunches of small fandoms, for their own reasons, and 'pretty men getting hurt' is a *very* good one. (PS: Lawrence of Arabia was just on, and OH MY GOD.) But then there are these ships and these stories that seem to gather *huge* fandoms - a bunch of writers who each have their own reasons for liking what they like, but they gather around the same story - and I think that's what I was trying to get at here: why those huge gatherings of people in those particular places, when we could all get our individual kinds elsewhere ( ... )

melannen February 25 2007, 01:38:35 UTC

Okay, having thought some more:

"Pretty men getting hurt" is always going to be a draw for fangirls.
But it makes it much easier when the text *invites* us to see them as pretty.

elspethdixon February 25 2007, 23:32:11 UTC

I think some of what factors into the creation of really huge slash fandoms is timing (like SGA coming on just as slashers in Smallville fandom were getting sick of SV's writers and looking for something new to slash), but yeah, I've seen huge followings grow around shows that have only middling amounts of subtext (like SGA), while series that drown in their own slashiness (I expect Denny Crane and Alan to get married any episode now) generate minimal amounts of fic. And the stalked-from-the-shadows-by-a-vaguely-sexual-external-threat element seems to be common to all the recent mega fandoms. The Wraith in SGA, demons in SPN, vampires and various other things that go bump in the night in BtVS. It's not quite as strong an element in HP (the Death Eaters & Voldemort don't have the sexual predator vibe that vampires or blue space vampires Wraith do), but I think the fact that HP fandom is so massive in general encourages proportionately massive levels of slash ( ... )

melannen March 10 2007, 08:11:53 UTC

YES to most of this, but on Marvel vs. DC comics (and I realize this is probably a sore point for you at this point, because what DC and Marvel will always have in common is Stupid Editorial Descisions, so feel free to ignore) : I think that part of the reason DC has such a bigger slash fandom is that the characters are much more about being heroes, which is to say that their *image* is at least as important as them-as-people, so we have the idea of being looked-at at fundamentally important built into the whole concept. (Yeah, Spider-Man has J. Jonah, but with Spider-man it seems to be generally played for comedy, which is a pretty effective way of marginalizing the slash gaze.) I don't think it's a coincidence that the Marvel that does have a significant slash fandom is X-Men ( ... )

elspethdixon March 12 2007, 19:54:24 UTC

Of course, Batman&Robin doesn't help.

I'm inclined to lay most of DC's larger slash fandom at the doorstep of Batman&Robin, since Creepy, Pseudo-incestuous Batslash (tm) seems to comprise a significant part of DC slashfic. DC fandom at large seems to have a kink for pseudo-incest.

Even in toonverse fic, where Batman/Robin slash is less prevalent, Batman will get slashed with the Flash (maintaining the generation-gap kink) instead of with, say, Harvey Dent/Two-Face or someone else of the same generation that Bats has chemistry with.

Well, I'm exaggerating a bit because it's so very much Not My Kink--there's also a substantial set of Batman/Superman, probably thanks to Loeb's Batman/Superman: Preslashed in the Title for Your Convenience comics ( ... )

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