Comments | brown_betty: Betty solicits your opinions!

brown_betty

Betty solicits your opinions!

Nov 05, 2005 23:11

I like subtext. It's fun! I like ambiguous situations, which lend themselves to multiple readings. I like to think my writing works without me telling people *how* to read it, and if people sometimes get less from my writing than I hoped, sometimes they get more than I intended, and that rocks pretty hard ( Read more... )

meta: writing

Comments 25

unlovablehands November 6 2005, 05:10:23 UTC

I read for characters and authors, not for who they're fucking, so I think this is totally sensible, but this might be a DCU fandom specific opinion, because we're so omnivorous on the whole.

thefourthvine November 6 2005, 05:32:31 UTC

It's working for me, but I was already familiar with your writing and had a reasonable amount of trust in you; if I was just now finding your stories for the first time, I'm not sure what my reaction would be. I might come to the conclusion - see, if there's no pairing, I tend to consider that that means the story is gen, and if I read a story that obviously wasn't, I'd probably think of you as an author who is oblivious to fandom conventions. (You're not, of course, and choosing not to do something is different than not knowing about it. But that's what I'd think, because in most of my fandoms, that's what a failure to label a story with pairing or at least genre - slash, het, gen - means ( ... )

cyanei November 6 2005, 05:53:44 UTC

In DC fandom, I'm totally cool with writers not labeling pairings and genres. In other fandoms I'm not so cool with it, because in other fandoms there are characters I'm completely uninterested in, and often in other fandoms there's so much crap that you have to limit your crap to crap with pairings you enjoy.

So I say, go for it.

The only problem with that is that if I'm looking for a story of yours whose title I can't remember, it's easier to find if I can go by the pairing or characters. I know that if I'm looking for a story by Te I usually have to read about six before I find the one I'm looking for. Well, not that I really mind. But if for some reason I needed to find some R-rated-Dick/Tim-involving-a-couch and had only five minutes to do it, there'd be problems.

*babbles*

brown_betty November 6 2005, 16:56:23 UTC

Well, actually, my fic is tagged by characters too, for the most part. Does that help at all?

cyanei November 6 2005, 19:34:08 UTC

Helps a lot. ( :

chevauchee November 7 2005, 08:31:30 UTC

http://teland.com/pairings.html

For the above mentioned involving-a-couch situation.

Thread 10

maelithil November 6 2005, 06:23:42 UTC

I like it when a story gives me the pairing, simply because it makes it easier to find ( ... )

Re: Soliciting Opinions kkglinka November 6 2005, 07:43:49 UTC

Well, I'm the wrong person to ask because all I ever do is tag mine "fic". It's probably because I started out in wee x-men fandom back in the day. There was no "gen", "het", "slash" or whatnot. There were commas which were used to list main characters and slash marks which indicated pairings. Commas meant gen fic where there might be some shippiness of indeterminate orientation in the background but it was mostly irrelevant. Slash marks applied to all pairings, groupings and crossovers. Basically, I come from a rather harsh mentality that dictates, if a person can't see ( ... )

Re: Soliciting Opinions elynross November 6 2005, 18:36:14 UTC

I think that's really a fannish standard, though -- a simple listing of characters implies gen, the use of the virgule implies a romantic and/or sexual relationship. For me, I like to have an author tell me a bit more, give me the equivalent of a jacket blurb, but if I have fandom and characters, with that simple identification of relationship, that's enough to tell me whether I might want to take a look, or not.

Re: Soliciting Opinions kkglinka November 7 2005, 03:38:15 UTC

Then I think we agree: basic content matters more than which way a character is being paired, if at all. Mind you, I understand the hows and whys behind things like "slash" being lumped in with "rape" or "incest" as a warning tag, I just never understood how it really equated. It's like saying gay is somehow worse than straight and it's not the default in most fandoms to mark for "het". Why mark either? Sorry, went off on a tangent. Yes again for the key content and character tags rather than stuff I can figure out on my own just by looking at the header. Because I think we're discussing lj tags, not headers (which are applicable to archives).

Re: Soliciting Opinions elynross November 7 2005, 19:13:58 UTC

Well, we kind of agree -- I personally want to know pairings, since I tend to be more pairing-oriented in my fan reading.

As for slash being lumped in, I suspect it's a holdover from years back, when slash wasn't quite as open and omni-present, and not "warning" for slash could have ugly consequences, if you were posting in primarily gen/het areas. I still remember the very first slash-friendly HL list, which was started after a number of ugly fights on the major HL list.

For me, it's not a "warning" anymore, it's a helpful label, if pairings aren't indicated, but it's not so much use anymore. In fact, in some of the places I hang out, people warn for het, because it's fairly rare and there are some oddly rabid anti-het people, which is equally unfortunate ( ... )