Some Data and Analysis on Genre Identity/Preference in Tolkien Fandom

[dawn_felagund]

Over on the post about my paper presentation this weekend, the issue of genre was brought up because I didn't address it in the paper but I definitely asked about it in the survey. I decided not to include it in the paper because it involved defining and explaining terminology (genfic, het, slash) that I just didn't have time for, and I wasn't sure

Comments

[heartofoshun]

I think it is hilarious that Gen fic writers keep identifying themselves as a sad little group in the Tolkien fandom. Nice to have your figures.

Every now and then, I'll come across a genfic writer or two kvetching that they aren't popular or don't get read because they write genfic. It has always been my feeling that this was not true, but of course, I had no way of backing up that assertion with anything other than anecdote

[dawn_felagund]

I have to admit that the genfic persecution complex makes me roll my eyes. I mean, come on. Most Tolkienfic is genfic. There are two large genfic archives. Writers of genfic stories never had to worry about their work being ineligible for the MEFAs. Writers of genfic don't get flamed on ff.net for writing genfic.

I think part of it is that slash and het writers kind of took their toys to other corners of the Internet and had a lot of fun there. Maybe the genfic writers felt left out? I don't know. We're all left out from something is this fandom. Perhaps it is also a form of rationalization: "Many of us don't want you (the writers of erotica) to share our spaces, but at the end of the day, you have more readers than we do." Like they are making a sacrifice by not being kewl and writing erotica

[heartofoshun]

My femslash "The Sailing Forth" was almost 11,000 words ... not a novel but longish.,

That is long in the world of femslash.

I don't know how last year's production for me would change my figures, because I wrote a lot of slash and not a lot of short-short stories, but at the end of 2013 I did an analysis of my lifetime fanfic production and found I was a majority Gen fic writer! OMG! I thought I was slash writer with one big het novel under my belt. Serious world-building will do that to a writer. People say sex and death are the big issues/problems/mysteries of life but it takes a lot of Gen fic to set that up!! Even adventure or plotty/plotty things like mystery novels are dull as dirt with the world in which they are set being well-developed. News: that is Gen fic!

[dawn_felagund]

When I wrote BtLoR, I think people were getting ready to tar and feather me because it took so long to get any sex in the story. The same is true of The Sovereign and the Priest; people were like, "You wrote a novel for SinS!" and I replied, "I had to build a world in which the request made sense to me!" I can't just throw two characters in bed, and the more unlikely the pairing seems to me (Feanor/Erestor, Finrod/Celegorm ... although apparently the latter is more popular than I knew!), the more work it will take to get there.

I have written all four of the genres here: slash, femslash, straight-up het erotica. But I am also primarily a genfic writer. Funny how a few stories in the other genres can skew that perception (but a few genfic stories in the portfolio of a writer who wrote primarily non-genfic probably would not have the same effect).

[brookeoflorien]

I think I answered No Opinion to all the genre questions. :P Primarily for the reason you suggested - I don't identify as a writer of any particular genre, though I write all of them

[heartofoshun]

I wonder if some of it is a fear of being labeled as exploitative or pandering to male readers/buying into the patriarchy?

I think that is highly unlikely. The audience is known to be largely women. I don't think anyone envisions men crawling around the Silmarillion fandom, for example, looking to read hot sex between women.

[brookeoflorien]

My main accusations about buying into the patriarchy have come from other women, actually, with the reasoning that such things are 'unnatural' and that the only reason a woman would _____ is because she's bought into it and can't separate her own desires from what she's been taught.

I could get fearing being labeled as having bought into the patriarchy as a reason because of that personal experience, because it doesn't matter if men are reading or not, only that somebody somewhere probably sees it as "well you're only writing that because the patriarchy tells you it's hot". To me, I would fear it more knowing that the audience was primarily female, if I didn't also know that there's a large portion of fans that are LGBT - but then you can get accused of trampling over them if you're a straight woman writing it and you mention that in the wrong space (though I see that more on tumblr, and the buying into the patriarchy more in real life).

I need to move away from campus and that brand of thought.

[heartofoshun]

This is one of those weeks where Tumblr looks like a tiny, tiny world getting cross-eyed gazing at its navel.

[indy1776]

What I find interesting is that compared to the AO3 numbers, there is a slight bias against genfic on that archive, at least compared to slash. It seems strange that het, femslash, and gen are all about equal; I hadn't expected that. (I crunched some AO3 numbers about a year ago: at that point, half the fics in the archive were slash. The other half was the combination of all the other categories.) So people complaining about that may have a point. But in Tolkien fandom, that people think there's a bias against that, well, SOA in some respects and more recently MPTT have shown that there's a dedicated audience for them.

What saddens me is that even though there's apparently an audience for femslash stories, the lack of reviews and hits on femslash fics make it seem the opposite.

[dawn_felagund]

Were the AO3 numbers for Tolkien fandom only or in general?

One thing I'd like to look at is age differences between writers who identify strongly with one genre or another. Tallulah linked me to The Journal of Slash Research, which showed slash writers to be much younger than the writers who participated in my survey. (JSR was compiled years ago, of course, which might be part of the reason.) The writers who participated in my survey were 2.4 years older, on average, than those who took the AO3 Census

[heartofoshun]

showed slash writers to be much younger than the writers who participated in my survey

That's because some of them are the same people growing older!

[dawn_felagund]

It could be! But lots of young writers have entered the fandom too. (I am on the computer in the teacher resource room that lets me go on LJ, so I don't have my data handy, but I do know that you and I, as not-under-30s, are definitely a minority! ;) If younger writers are writing slash (tbd) and younger writers are generally posting to AO3 and not fandom-specific archives (which was shown by my survey), then this could explain why AO3 shows "fanfic" to be mostly slash, while Tolkien-specific archives show it to be mostly gen.

[pandemonium_213]

When I first crunched the data for writers, the femslash data jumped out at me immediately and honestly made me wince a bit.

That made me wince. A lot.

Coincidentally, I directed a couple of mutual LJ-pals to the Heretic Loremaster and the "Open Thread for Slash Discussion." Remember that? One hundred-twenty-one comments? Buried in there is some discussion about the preponderance of m/m slash vs femslash.

[dawn_felagund]

I do wish I'd know what provoked the "oh HAIL no!!" response in 25% of writers when asked about femslash. I need to look more closely at other information about people who answered each but don't have time right now and also don't want to dig too deep now when I'm just going to have to run the same data again in a year's time, when the survey is over.

I do remember that! :D I'll have to look back at it sometime soon.

[ladyelleth]

Still feeling punched in the gut by the femslash numbers, though looking at the table makes it seem like writers are much more likely to be conservative in their identification than their readers are - I do find it notable that the readers' agree/strongly agree scale tips in a positive direction in every single genre

[heartofoshun]

akin to a virtual coming-out, something that a lot of people may not be willing to do for a variety of reasons

I can see how that might have been an issue for a lot of people. The Tolkien fandom as a whole was certainly not open or accepting when I encountered it! Much less so than the world I had been living in for quite some time. I had not heard such reactionary BS in literally decades as what I stumbled upon in the Tolkien fandom. I found it hard to be polite about it and it did me lasting damage. It used up all my patience

[oloriel]

I think also my interest in slash was initially very particular--Maedhros/Fingon--I was new to The Silmarillion when I came to fanfiction and actually thought their relationship might be implied or construed as canon. Reading Tolkien's letters and his biography cleared that up for me pretty fast.

I continue to wonder. (I do not consider the biography reliable, since Carpenter clearly wrote what he thought Tolkien's readers desperately wanted to read. From the letters, we know that Tolkien was a fan of Mary Renault, too, so that suggests he at the very least wasn't stopped from enjoying a story if it had homosexual characters in it.) There are some pretty strong parallels between the Thangorodrim rescue and the Prometheus myth, along with some Ganymedes thrown in. Depending on how far you're willing to take those hints...

(After all, Tolkien was classically trained before he turned to Old English. He also played Mrs. Malaprop in a school performance of The Rivals. OMG TOLKIEN CROSS-DRESSED!I don't think Tolkien thought that out, of

[heartofoshun]

It is interesting also that Mary Renault until quite late in her life had only implied love scenes also. The Persian Boy goes a great deal further than her previous books in the direction of being explicit.

My main impulse when I first read Maedhros/Fingon in the texts is that it was obviously implied--that this would be less clear to me than it would have to Tolkien with his classical education and all. Hey, but what do I know? People still argue about the nature of the implied relationship between Achilles and Patroclus--which was obvious to me as an innocent Catholic schoolgirl. And so romantic.

Meanwhile, we have Tolkien's life-long belief in the fundamental and most satisfying friendships in life were among men (which could weigh the scale in either direction). Nothing sexual in his case onee presumes, but intense and limited to the same sex; which by my youth was strange indeed.