[unfic] genre labels

[glossing]

So there's this large gray interzone I'm beginning to discern between 'shipfic and plain gen. Romance isn't the beall and endall, but nor is playing with lifeless action figures. People have sex and do *other* stuff, too. I've been calling it porny gen; dS fic does it pretty well, and I can see Firefly being especially suited to it, but Buffyverse

Comments

[zyre]

naw dude i feel you. well i haven't read btvs fic in a long time but i know it is a lot like that in the fandom i'm following now. honestly it's probably 95% porn and then the other 5% is crappy angst fic. and yeah, like sex is hot, but i like it when it's woven in with actual story, you know? when something (i dunno, say willow is possessed by a dancing demon of death) happens that is outside of the realm of relationships. yeah, if willow got possessed, whoever she happened to be with would be upset and hey, maybe someone could write weird dancing sex! but you know the story would be about how to solve the problem at hand, not to fuck the daylights out of everybody.

i dunno. it's early and i'm rambly today haha.

[glossing]

Totally with you - though I'm more than a little freaked out by the image of Willow and the nymphomaniacal dancing demon. ;)

in the fandom i'm following now
What is it? *needs to escape*

[zyre]

haha well it's rps good charlotte blahness. (yes i regressed fandomwise, i'm now back down around the twelve year old level.) but in all honesty i haven't really read anything in probably a couple months. i'm just not feelin' it in general, and i think a big part of it is exactly this - i'm tired of smut. i don't feel like investing any kind of energy into anything unless it's got a good story, and that is sorely lacking over there. but i could link you to a good story if you want something? i mean, it's got le smut but you know that's not the whole story.

haha dancing willow was totally off the top of my head - that is pretty scary! haha

[glossing]

Ahh, I thought you'd left Good Charlotte, so I was all excited. (Seriously, escape? GOOD.)

Smut is fun, but...yeah. It can get almost too easy, and then I read gen, and I'm fucking bored out of my skull by the wooden prose and cardboard characters, so nothing makes me happy.

Not that that is NEWS, of course. *mwah*

[kindkit]

Justified consternation, I'd say.

If I read very charitably, I might think the person who wrote that meant to say, "As a lesbian, Willow knows about being in a relationship that freaks some people out, so she should be sympathetic to other relationships that transgress social conventions."

Buuuuuuuut less charitably and more literally read, what I see is, "Willow's a big gross lesbian, what right does she have to object to a mere age difference?" Which is consternating indeed.

Hey, come take my poll, you!

[glossing]

I just looked at your poll! And I can't take it.

I'd love to *talk* about the questions? But I've been having horrible times about identity and sexuality and all that lately and the poll pings every single one.

[kindkit]

Sorry, babe. *hugs you*

Talking about this stuff would be cool, though. Either on LJ or via e-mail. (I wish we could chat, but I have to go and teach in about five seconds and then I have to grade all the damn papers I didn't grade yesterday.)

[glossing]

I'll try and craft a comment - basically, *people* can do anything/everything and I'm okay. But when it gets to the level of discourse/media/wtfever, where Gays Are Being Portrayed or Women Are Portrayed, then I change my mind.

[chrisjournal]

Okay, right there with you on the eta...it's always bugged me when _any_ of them get judgemental about relationships, though. None of them has what I'd call a 'normal' relationship history

[glossing]

it's always bugged me when _any_ of them get judgemental about relationships, though
Oh, absolutely. I just love the breezy condemnation in that quotation, because being a lesbian is clearly more problematic than Giles and Buffy getting together. *explodeyhead*

But my head hurts when I think too hard about that concept -- is it a genre, is it a style, is it a medium?
I get all kinds of confused, too, when it comes to thinking about fic vs. fiction...the noncommercial aspect of it is clearly important, but then there are internal questions, as well, concerning structure and conventions and stuff, and that's where I wonder if fic is one genre or several - like, is S/X its own genre versus B/G, say? Or maybe the emotional categories like schmoop, h/c, angst etc. are the genre divisors?

Very loopy stuff.

[executrix]

I don't know what to call it either, but it's what I want to read and try to write (although, well, lots of times it's easier to just do a PGP).

Your question gets to a deeper question, about how different fanfic is from litfic anyway (I think it's just litfic about characters we're already predisposed to be interested in, and in many cases to like and/or lust after), and the extent to which "the rules of the game" are that fanfic characters will be treated as if they were real.

Because, after all, we don't have "ship months" when we get to not go to work or take care of whatever kids, cats, etc. we have because we're in love, or falling out of love, or falling back in love because our partners have been kidnapped by aliens...

Or, to paraphrase Don Juan
Gen's love is of gen's life a thing apart,
'Tis shipfic's whole existence.

Believe me, I'm not saying it's easy, but I think fic, like life, should place ships'n'smut in a context that includes work, friendships, and family-other-than-life partner.

[glossing]

I think fic, like life, should place ships'n'smut in a context that includes work, friendships, and family-other-than-life partner.
Yes. Oh, yes. I like vignettes, I love peeks into a ship's daily life, or highlights from their life together? But there doesn't seem to be much room for the kind of stuff we're talking about, where, say, Giles shows up with amnesia just as Connor's about to pop out of QuorToth and Gunn and Fred are falling in love...*all* that stuff could go together and be really interesting.

I think. Maybe. Heh.

[executrix]

ALL that stuff could go together and be really interesting

Sure could be. Although I suspect it would be in one of those semi-mythical "long, plotty fics" whose absence I have seen lamented elsewhere.

[alixtii]

the kind of stuff we're talking about, where, say, Giles shows up with amnesia just as Connor's about to pop out of QuorToth and Gunn and Fred are falling in love...*all* that stuff could go together and be really interesting.

In other words, the kind of stuff we find in canon, where one episode we get "Conversations with Dead People" and another we get "Touched" and it's all part of the same tapestry.

Hmm. I wonder if my canon whoredom in anyway influences my own desire to read and write "porny gen."

[dorrie6]

I call it "shipless." It's a term I started using when I created hp_shipless, and I define it in the user info as such:

...any piece of fanfiction that does not have a romantic/sexual relationship as its focus. This does *not* mean that there may not be any relationships of that kind present in the fic, only that those relationships must not be the focus of the work.

I have definitely had a problem with people not quite getting the distinction between "shipless" and "gen" but I tried.

[glossing]

OOOH. I *love* shipless. Oh, my.

*adopts it forthwith* Your brain is a happy, shiny place. Thank you!

[alixtii]

I like that terminology, but don't think I could use it myself. To me 'ship is just a shortening of relationship, without the priveleged ontological status some fen seem to give it--making it a "focus," if you will. I usually preserve that usage for "OTP." It's more of a synonym for "pairing"--i.e. the long list of names and slashes one puts in the header regardless of whether one is writing romance.