first a slasher, fourth a fan

[lobelia321]

I have frequently debated this with one or another of you but I have yet again realised that I am first and foremost a slasher and only incidentally a fan.

I know this works the other way round for some people. They like the fandom thing. They value canon. They will read het and gen and all sorts in their fandom.

I will read good writing anywhere, of course. But the reason I'm online and in slash is because of the man/man action. First and foremost. And I've discovered I get just as much pleasure and swoony kicks out of reading good orig man/man as I do in reading good fanfic man/man. (Specifically, I came to this discovery through reading resonant8's Exog and Annie Proulx's heartbreakingly gorgeous Brokeback Mountain.)

Which brings me to the vexed question of: What is slash? Technically, slash is a type of fanfic. It pairs two men (or more) from some canon, fp or rp, and indicates via the / that they are in some kind of sex relationship.

For me, it's the 'two men' and the 'sex relationship' that is operative here. I don't care as much about the 'some canon' part of the equation. And in that sense, I would like to extend slash to origfic, also. Origfic can be slashy. Or it can be something that pushes my slash buttons as much as fanfic slash does -- maybe this something deserves a different name but I don't know what name to give it. I'll stick to slashy.

Because the reason I like Annie Proulx's story and the things I like about Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, both published works of fiction, is not simply the man/man'ness. Otherwise I would be happy with gay novels and gay porn. Which I'm not. Although I do read them. But the buttons are different! No, what I find in Proulx and Barker which is also what I find in online slashfic is the 'slashiness'. It's the woman-writing-about-men thing. It may take another post and a few more days (weeks?) of musing to pinpoint exactly what this consists of. But it is a something that, to me, is immediately identifiable and different from men writing about men/men.

So does it boil down to the gender of the author? In my experience, it does. There was a test case: when I first read Lian Hearn's Across the Nightingale Floor, I assumed the author to be a man. The novel is about boys with swords, after all. But then, in the very first chapter, the main boy has sex with some other boys in passing, and in the last chapter there's a full-on sex scene and a kiss between main boy and other boy, and this latter scene seemed so phenomenally slashy to me that I googled 'Lian Hearn' and discovered that it's the pen name of an Australian woman children's writer.

Hah, I say. Hah!

And now I'm going to backtrack a little bit on my earlier position. Because yes, I am certain that I am first and foremost a slasher; I will read any good man/man and not give a hoot about fandom, canon, orig, whatever. In fact, what I loved about the Proulx story is that the men are not handsome, and that is something that gets writ too large in fandom sometimes for me. Every boy is pretty; every man is ruggedly sexy -- fat people, ugly people, short people, deformed people, old people, ethnically non-mainstream people: in the world of fanon, these people apparently have no sex lives. So I find that aspect of origfic liberating. (Still, Proulx is so slashy in that she contrives for her protagonists to appear as both boys and manly men, and they are oh-so-manly... but that's by the by.)

Anyway, to get back to the backtracking: Because it's not that I'm not a fan. I'm just sort of incidentally a fan, not primarily. I'm not here for the fandom; I'm here for the man/man and the good!writing. But I can see the point of fandom. And this is how I came to se the point (for me):

Because the next question I asked myself was, well, if this is the case, why am I not writing origfic? (That ever-surfacing question!) Is it perhaps because I associate origifc with het and gen and not with slash? Would I be more fired with lust for origfic if I wrote slashy origfic? I think I would. So perhaps I will try that next. One of these days. Which gets me to the point about origifc seeming to be more hemming-in. As if there are rules for origfic that don't exist for fanfic. Intellectually, I know this is not so but emotionally I believe it.

So, finally, fandom: what's in it for me? It boils down to the community. I think it's not so much not being able or wanting to create new characters. I think I could do that. But using shared characters and only creating the characterisation, not the character, connects the writer to the readers on a much more equal and interactive and intimate level. Because Harry is not my Harry, and Karl is not my Karl: they are everyone's. This forges a bond between writer and readers that's not replicable in origfic where the writer owns the characters tooth and nail.

Anyway, these are just some post-Portugal musings. :-)

Comments

[sparktastic.livejournal.com]

Amen, hon.

I agree totally.

I have never been able to pinpoint exactly what it is I like about fandom, but it's totally the shared sense of community. It's like we've got these toys and there's no problem sharing them in our enormous internet sandbox, cos there's enough versions of them for all.

In the vein of slashy-but-not-written-by-a-woman, I'd recommend Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye. Philip Marlowe, detective, goes out on a limb, over and over, lies to the police, drives to Mexico, even gives pyjamas to a man he picks up out of an expensive car outside an expensive restaurant. Not once do you ever get a reason, but OMG with the slashy.

That being said, I'm with you. I enjoy how women interpret the boy on boy action. I had the misfortune to read a young-boy-discovering-his-sexuality novel written by a man. It had more watersports than sex and at the end, I felt extremely unfulfilled, emotionally as well as *ahem* physically. Never again, I think.

Anyway, to sum up... you rock, I agree, Brokeback Mountain rocks, and I can't wait for the film. :)

(ps-came to you via sophrosyne's flist!)

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Ooh, Sophrosyne!!! Long time no hear from her.

And Philip Marlowe: intriguing pointer.

Thanks for the tig, dudette. Wish I felt more eloquent but right now my brain is filled with wool.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

A couple things: first, have you read Storm Constantine's "Wraeththu" stories? These are primarily about pretty boys with lots of powers who go after each other in love, lust, rage, war, and everything else. I don't think there's but a few girls in sight.

Second, I hadn't read any gay porn until a gay friend who was trying to break out of porn into mainstream began corresponding with me. He wanted to workshop a novel, and needed critiquing with an eye to breaking into mainstream publishing, though the characters were gay. (It was a kind of gay Canterbury Tales, immensely cool, but in retrospect about fifteen years ahead of its time). Anyhow, he gave me examples of gay porn so I could see his original context. Minimalism with emotional engagement seemed to be the keynote, and a strange sort of isolation about the sex, which could be extremely rough, lengthily described, but totally detached emotionally. Startlingly different from the slash I'd read when my fan friend introduced me to it.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the Storm Constantine rec but that sounds like some sort of genre fic (sci-fantasy?) and I'm not really all that fond of genre fic except for slash and some very selected crime. But it sounds cool.

Minimalism with emotional engagement seemed to be the keynote, and a strange sort of isolation about the sex, which could be extremely rough, lengthily described, but totally detached emotionally.
Absolutely! You've hit the nail on the head! I've just posted a post about slash vs gay and I wish I'd read your tig before I did because you have summed it up in a nutshell. That is also what I find when I read gay porn, and which is why I stopped reading it. Once I'd discovered slash I realised that I'd been reading gay porn only as a poor substitute for slash and to feed my slash-hunger which I hadn't even identified as such yet.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Wraeththu is slash, slash, and little else but slash--pretty boys with powers all slashing all over one another for pages and pages and pages.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

*giggles*

[msilverstar]

Community is fantastic, smut is wonderful, fabulous writing and a chance to be creative in a safe sandbox, Lotrips because the guys are so bloody interesting and unpredictable. So I'm with you with everything but the mansex-only bit: I'll read femme, het, gen, whatevah, as long as it touches me somehow.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Hey, celebrate the all-inclusive.

*hugs you and makes peace sign*

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

Hee. I think I'm the reverse. I'm in it for the Potterverse world. Hot sex is just a bonus. (A very nice one!)

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

See, I *know* people like you exist in droves in fandom but it mystifies me. No, that is not true. I've been hanging out here for 2 1/2 years now so it no longer mystifies me but it's not me. *shrugs and lets a thousand flowers bloom*

I note, however, that your icon depicts the man/boy lust *not* gen, *not* het. *chortles to herself*

[princessofg.livejournal.com]

Don't underestimate the economy of being able to use an fps or rps character....it saves so much time! We already love them so we can proceed with the plot or the fucking or whatever. That's why I love well-plotted stories that go against fanon. I like it when people can make my beloved characters do unusual plausible things: What a challenge! Two novels I have read that have that definite slash vibe of which you speak were Rimrunners, and old SF book by CJ Cherryh, which is het, actually, but it feels like slash to me, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon (at the other end of the literary spectrum), probably because it's acutally a comic fan's paean to the art form he loves, turned into a novel. It has slash in it, too....

I have been reading nothing BUT fan fic for months, so I have kind of lost my understanding of the difference between orig fic and fanfic.....I love OC's in fanfic, myself, if they're well done. I'm like you though: I'm here for the slash. I'll read well done het if it's by an author I admire, but I found I have totally lost interest in any kind of gen or adventure gapfilling fic in my fandom, which is LOTR. I ignored it before discovering slash and I'm still ignoring it. Go figure.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

You know, I completely agree. I think this is precisely the reason why I love fanon. Because it's *fanon* (not canon, as people sometimes mistakenly believe) that allows you to go against the grain and have that built-in wink at fellow fans who *get* it. Because the expectations are so firm, it's all the more fun to play around with them.