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

Comments 76

siegeofangels February 24 2007, 19:40:47 UTC

1. STILL AWESOME AND SENSE-MAKING. As I was reading this I was going, "Yes! I can think of so many examples off the top of my head!" like:

- astolat's Loves Me Not, where one of the main turning points in the story is Rodney seeing John *looking at him*

- Anatomically Correct by cesperanza, Fraser as the recipient of the male gaze, and also Interrogation, which taken together are extra cool, because they invert the gaze and also keeps the power in Fraser's corner because he's the one that chooses what to do about it ( ... )

melannen February 25 2007, 02:20:36 UTC

1. Of course, now I'm reading a bunch of slash stories where it *doesn't* show up so obviously! But yes, those are very good examples ( ... )

siegeofangels February 25 2007, 15:03:42 UTC

1. I think it's not necessarily present in all slash fics--if I ask ten people why they slash I'm going to get ten different answers, and different types of stories fulfill different reasons for slash. If I'm looking for a coming-of-age/coming-out story, I'm more likely to find it in HP fic than in SGA. So while inverted male gaze is in a lot of slash stories, it might not be in the forefront ( ... )

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 ( ... )

Thread 8

(comment mostly recycled from the beta!) stellar_dust February 24 2007, 22:17:23 UTC

(Still missing ')'s at the beginning! You forgot them after the link-tags ( ... )

Re: (comment mostly recycled from the beta!) melannen March 10 2007, 09:40:37 UTC

Okay, first, the enemyslash thing is completely irrelevant here. Some people happen to think that some people flirt by pulling pigtails, and/or get lust confused with anger, and like that dynamic, and that's all, and it's no more relevant in slash than in het except as a preference, except that it might be more intense sometimes because a lot of things get more intense in slash, the buddyslash too, and all the early big 'ship were friends 4ever types. Also don't underestimate my tendency to rattle off whatever list of 'ships I think my audience would be most flummoxed by. :P ( ... )

Part II! stellar_dust February 24 2007, 22:18:25 UTC

I'm still gonna put my original comments here, though it's not *exactly* relevant, because I think it's an interesting discussion. I think the separation you mentioned, between finding a guy attractive in himself, and finding him attractive only in terms of slash potential, may be less widespread than you think. I find that I'm really only interested in slashing guys that I personally think are pretty damn hot. Which is, I guess, maybe, why the only guys I've ever slashed immediately as soon as I saw them were Alan and Denny, whose chemistry is basically canon. Most guys it'll take me awhile to get to know them before I decide they're hotties, because my "hot guy" goggles *always* include personality .. so it would take more than one or two tender scenes between Jack and the Doctor for me to see them as an epic love affair, especially since over two seasons I already adore Rose. As an example. My slash goggles are .. kind of inextricable from my "hot guy" goggles, at least at this point. This viewpoint might be more widespread among ( ... )

Re: Part II! melannen March 10 2007, 09:55:53 UTC

Okay, here I think you're kind of blurring individual preferences into what I was looking at, which was more the slash gestalt. I don't know any multifandom slasher who doesn't have at least a couple fandoms or OTPs that nobody else gets ( ... )

yay, comment! stellar_dust March 11 2007, 16:14:24 UTC

you like stories about two people who love each other, and find all the gender role stuff irrelevant,

Ah! This is why I'm not a "slasher." You people think too much. d-:

I don't think I talked myself out of it! I was saying that I very, very rarely find someone "attractive as someone to slash" without first finding them "attractive as someone to lust over." It takes either a practically-canon romance (Denny Crane is not hot) or a really, really good fic (I'm not really personally attracted to either John or Rodney) to skip the "he's hot" step and go straight to the "yay slash!" step. Which explains why I'm not big into House/Wilson - I don't think either of them are sexy (mostly because they both have too many issues), and their relationship isn't canonical enough to push me over.

Did I make that more clear?

(The comment has been removed)

melannen February 25 2007, 01:33:55 UTC

Hmmm. I think there are factors in SPN other than the demons looking on, but I'm not sure that just the assumed gayness will do it. Because they've never run into that in a situation where it will cause them any danger, or even inconvenience, have they? (And I follow several fandoms that have had at least as much of the 'you guys are gay, right?' stuff, and they don't even *approach* SPN's level of slash-following. (Boston Legal, anyone?) In fact, those throwaway lines (while they do, oh they do, make the fangirls happy) can almost work in the *opposite* direction, by acknowledging the possibility of gay, and then textually dismissing it as being anythnig of importance or threat. Does that make sense ( ... )