And then Seanan talked about fanfic some more.

[seanan_mcguire]

It's no secret that I spend a lot of time thinking about fanfic. (And those links are just "fanfic as a general concept"; they don't touch on my frequent crankiness about the concept of the Mary Sue, or connect to any of my actual fanfic.) I think fanfic is a hugely important part of the way we interact with stories as a society, and that it's

Comments

[fadedbluejeans]

Okay, but the important question here is: is the Harry/Draco coffeeshop Little Mermaid AU an actual thing you have actually read, and do you have a link?

Wonderful post, thank you from the bottom of my fangirl heart.

[seanan_mcguire]

It is not, but it probably will be very soon.

[cerulean_sky]

The corollary to rule 34 is usually, "Someone has written that fanfic." Harry/Draco coffeeshope Little Mermaid AU might already exist...

[maladaptive]

That was my exact question. I'm not into Harry/Draco or coffeeshop AUs, but there's a hook for everybody.

[ankewehner]

Here's why having a whole lot of fanfic that focuses on sex puts me off fanfic... OK, so you have best friends, which is an important relationship, so they have sex. You have people on the same team, so they have sex. You have a mentor and student, which is an important relationship, so they have sex. You have siblings, which is an important relationship, so they have sex. You have a parent and their child, hey, let's write a romance starting with the parent raping the child, because relationships must involve sex.

It feels like it devalues any relationship that does not involve sex, and considering I had my first crush worth mentioning when I was 25, and 6 years later still am not convinced sex is something I want, for me personally it's the opposite of better representation, but telling me "you can never be close to anyone, because a that must involve sex".

[seanan_mcguire]

And that is 100% fair and legitimate and valid, and I do not feel that relationships which do not include sex are in any way less important than those that do. Vixy would beat me with a brick if I said that.

But at the same time, much of my point was that a lot of fanfic is not about sex. You can find enormous amounts of non-sexual fanfic. The existence of fanfic that includes sex does not invalidate or wipe away that fic, and any good archive will have good tags that tell you when it's safe to read.

[griffen]

I think one of the best fics I ever read was a Sports Night fic novel. The story centered on Casey/Dan, so M/M, and for some people it was automatic squick.

The story rarely if ever talked about their actual sexual experiences, because within the third chapter of this very, very long fic, Casey had been diagnosed with aplastic anemia, which is a lovely little often-fatal disease involving chemotherapy just like cancer does, and Dan was left to a) support his partner through this crap, b) deal with homophobia both at work and outside of work, and c) deal with the very real possibility that he would lose his partner through an early, ugly death.

The fact that they were in a male-male relationship did not mean that every scene was about sex. Far from it. It was about relationship. And it broke my heart, as a good tragedy ought to do.

[graycardinal]

[!!]

I've been writing fanfic now for almost a decade (sixty-odd works on AO3 to date), and very little of my material is focused on sex. (Okay, there's one mildly explicit ficlet, but that was a response to a challenge, and I did tag it as such.] I write partly to flex my creative muscles, occasionally as an outlet for my frustrations when the creators get something wrong (see Seanan above), and not least because I'm attempting to satisfy someone's "Oliver Twist" impulse ("Please, Sir, may I have some more?"). Sometimes the someone is me; often, though, it's someone on the other end of a fic exchange. One of my entry points into fanfic was via Yuletide, which has generated a lot of extremely good stories since its inception. And yes, a few really weird ones, too, but those are usually pretty well labeled. "Slave Bear of Care-A-Lot" is pretty much exactly what the title advertises (definitely NSFW), and if you click through to read it (note that it's only visible to signed-in AO3 members nowadays), you deserve what you get

[_dante_sparda_]

I love you for this. (And many, many other things, of course, but this is the newest.)

[seanan_mcguire]

Aw.

<3

[_dante_sparda_]

Oh, bother! I tried to link you a thing I remembered that reminded me of you, but that didn't work so well, so, uh -- take a gander this-a-way and please don't kill me. reallifecomics(dot)com(slash)comic(dot)php(?)comic(=)title-2276

[missyjack]

Yes to all of this! The other thing i think is oft overlooked is that fanfic is about writing and reading as part of a community.Fanfic arises (mostly) out of a shared experience of viewing and loving a text. The relationship between author and reader is emeshed and immediate and iterative in a way thats very different from other writing.

[seanan_mcguire]

Oh, absolutely. I've written about that before, actually! I just wanted to focus on the two things I see most frequently used to shut "fanfic is real writing" down.

[museclio]

And it's not just a community it's a very woman-friendly, with a ton of women community...

[branna]

I really appreciated this post. Some of the best fic I've read has done things like convert Bechdel-test-failing episodes to passes, no sex involved.

Also, color me most unhappy with that aspect of the Warehouse-13 finale.

[fiveforsilver]

I yelled and cringed a lot through the last few episodes. I choose to believe that they were under the influence of an artifact and Helena and Kelly show up and snap them out of it.

[seanan_mcguire]

Seriously.

You're already going off the air. If you didn't want to make your female lead a lesbian (despite her clearly having been played as bisexual, at minimum), and you can't lock down H.G. because her actress is on Defiance now, what better time to have them have the first lesbian wedding in a SyFy show? YOU HAD NOTHING TO LOSE.