Where I Stand, by Teeny Buffalo aged 25 and 3/4
A trifle late here, I know, but I've been away at a re-enactment. (It was wonderful. Proper post on that to follow later.)
First off, a PSA: if anybody on my f'list is moving to a different journal service, for fandom, plain blogging, or whatever, please comment here and let me know where you'll be. I plan to stay right here for the meantime, but if a better option than LJ attracts a lot of my friends, then I may move too. Or if this post should get me banned, I'll move. I don't think it will, but you never know these days. We'll see.
I've been watching the latest fandom bannings with deep annoyance. For everyone who isn't into fandom, it goes like this: the people who run LJ deleted the journals of two Harry Potter fans. The reason given was that the fans' drawings amounted to child pornography. I never saw the art of one fan, but the other fan drew a lot of Snape/Harry. The picture which seems to have upset the management was a blush-inducingly explicit picture of the two of them engaged in consensual sex.
Now, I hate underage smut. If I could wave a magic wand and make people stop writing certain kinds of fanfic, chan and incest would be two of the first to go. To my mind, they make romantic/erotic mileage out of situations that would be miserable, exploitative and evil in real life. I hate that.
But... but... Snape/Harry! I LOVE SNAPE/HARRY! What little fic I've read in HP fandom has mostly been Snarry. Damn you, LJ, how dare you pick on my favorite HP ship! They're the perfect union of minds! *deep breath* More to the point, skidillions of people write it. My own theory, for what it's worth, is that Snarry fulfills the old wish in a lot of fans' minds to really, truly get together with the hot science teacher in high school. (Or the charming and sinister theatre professor in college. Oh, wait, that one's unique to me.) There's a lot of teacher/student in the HP fic world, and, yes, I'll admit, a lot of it sets off my exploitation alarms. But Snarry has always been special to me. And that's the thing about fandom. I kept silent in the last journal-bannings because the people being banned were banned for writing incest, and I've said above how I feel about that. But this has made me realize that I can't just stand up for the parts of fandom I love and let the others go hang, because sooner or later the parts I love will come under attack.
Now that I've typed the remark about getting together with the hot science teacher, it brings another objection to mind. Teacher/student happens all the time in real life. Usually it's forty-year-old male teacher/fifteen-year-old girl, and it's sick and exploitative and wrong. But. Here's the thing. Grow that student up a few years--say, she's eighteen years old, which is what Harry is supposed to be in the picture in question--and she can marry that teacher, and society accepts that. Happens all over the place. I used to know a girl whose dad was seventy and whose mom was thirty-five--same situation. I don't like relationships like that much, but I don't think people would hold up the Snarry drawing for censure if Harry was replaced by an eighteen-year-old Luna Lovegood. The opinion of the LJ management seems like a situation where Everybody Knows that olderman/youngerman is always going to be exploitative, but olderman/youngerwoman is how the world works.
I have to grit my teeth and admit that I can see how the management might have been alarmed by Snarry. True, Harry is drawn to look physically mature, but to them Harry Potter=little boy, and they can't see him any other way. However... they banned the artist for good, they didn't give her a chance to explain any of this, they didn't even tell her "Take down the offending picture or we're banning you." The artist is getting picked on because one picture is worth a thousand words--the management don't want to go through reams of fic to find the bits that would shock them, but it's easy to point to a picture and say "This is the corruption in our kids' minds!" But if one artist is getting penalized for drawing my favorite ship, then I have to take a stand and declare myself publicly a Snarry. I just wish there were something more I could do to show solidarity.
Last time this happened, Naotalba had the best response--she wrote a fic of the genre that had been attacked, and invited everyone to read it. I want to follow her lead here, but in this case I can't bring myself to write adult/underaged character. The one time I did that, it was only technical--Pintel/Ragetti, where Pintel is twenty-five or thereabouts and Ragetti is seventeen. Not much shock value in that.
So I'm letting tradition speak for me. Sovay, your latest post helped give me the nudge I needed.
*ahem*
Title: The Elfin Knight
Author: Anon
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Sexual tension between an underage girl (underage like whoa, I MEAN IT) and a grown man of a different species. Has literary merit in the same way as Lolita has literary merit.
Genre: Songfic
Click this link only if you want to read about an eleven-year-old girl asking the Elfin Knight to go to bed with her.
First off, a PSA: if anybody on my f'list is moving to a different journal service, for fandom, plain blogging, or whatever, please comment here and let me know where you'll be. I plan to stay right here for the meantime, but if a better option than LJ attracts a lot of my friends, then I may move too. Or if this post should get me banned, I'll move. I don't think it will, but you never know these days. We'll see.
I've been watching the latest fandom bannings with deep annoyance. For everyone who isn't into fandom, it goes like this: the people who run LJ deleted the journals of two Harry Potter fans. The reason given was that the fans' drawings amounted to child pornography. I never saw the art of one fan, but the other fan drew a lot of Snape/Harry. The picture which seems to have upset the management was a blush-inducingly explicit picture of the two of them engaged in consensual sex.
Now, I hate underage smut. If I could wave a magic wand and make people stop writing certain kinds of fanfic, chan and incest would be two of the first to go. To my mind, they make romantic/erotic mileage out of situations that would be miserable, exploitative and evil in real life. I hate that.
But... but... Snape/Harry! I LOVE SNAPE/HARRY! What little fic I've read in HP fandom has mostly been Snarry. Damn you, LJ, how dare you pick on my favorite HP ship! They're the perfect union of minds! *deep breath* More to the point, skidillions of people write it. My own theory, for what it's worth, is that Snarry fulfills the old wish in a lot of fans' minds to really, truly get together with the hot science teacher in high school. (Or the charming and sinister theatre professor in college. Oh, wait, that one's unique to me.) There's a lot of teacher/student in the HP fic world, and, yes, I'll admit, a lot of it sets off my exploitation alarms. But Snarry has always been special to me. And that's the thing about fandom. I kept silent in the last journal-bannings because the people being banned were banned for writing incest, and I've said above how I feel about that. But this has made me realize that I can't just stand up for the parts of fandom I love and let the others go hang, because sooner or later the parts I love will come under attack.
Now that I've typed the remark about getting together with the hot science teacher, it brings another objection to mind. Teacher/student happens all the time in real life. Usually it's forty-year-old male teacher/fifteen-year-old girl, and it's sick and exploitative and wrong. But. Here's the thing. Grow that student up a few years--say, she's eighteen years old, which is what Harry is supposed to be in the picture in question--and she can marry that teacher, and society accepts that. Happens all over the place. I used to know a girl whose dad was seventy and whose mom was thirty-five--same situation. I don't like relationships like that much, but I don't think people would hold up the Snarry drawing for censure if Harry was replaced by an eighteen-year-old Luna Lovegood. The opinion of the LJ management seems like a situation where Everybody Knows that olderman/youngerman is always going to be exploitative, but olderman/youngerwoman is how the world works.
I have to grit my teeth and admit that I can see how the management might have been alarmed by Snarry. True, Harry is drawn to look physically mature, but to them Harry Potter=little boy, and they can't see him any other way. However... they banned the artist for good, they didn't give her a chance to explain any of this, they didn't even tell her "Take down the offending picture or we're banning you." The artist is getting picked on because one picture is worth a thousand words--the management don't want to go through reams of fic to find the bits that would shock them, but it's easy to point to a picture and say "This is the corruption in our kids' minds!" But if one artist is getting penalized for drawing my favorite ship, then I have to take a stand and declare myself publicly a Snarry. I just wish there were something more I could do to show solidarity.
Last time this happened, Naotalba had the best response--she wrote a fic of the genre that had been attacked, and invited everyone to read it. I want to follow her lead here, but in this case I can't bring myself to write adult/underaged character. The one time I did that, it was only technical--Pintel/Ragetti, where Pintel is twenty-five or thereabouts and Ragetti is seventeen. Not much shock value in that.
So I'm letting tradition speak for me. Sovay, your latest post helped give me the nudge I needed.
*ahem*
Title: The Elfin Knight
Author: Anon
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Sexual tension between an underage girl (underage like whoa, I MEAN IT) and a grown man of a different species. Has literary merit in the same way as Lolita has literary merit.
Genre: Songfic
Click this link only if you want to read about an eleven-year-old girl asking the Elfin Knight to go to bed with her.