Two things for today.
First, and shortest, we turned in completed surveys for Methods of Social Research today. Everyone was supposed to bring 15, but I think the average was probably closer to 12. This isn’t all that bad, we’ve still got a sample size approaching 300.
The point of all this is that I had to spend a couple of hours today doing data entry into a spreadsheet. That, and cursing myself for being an idiot when I put this survey together. There’s a massive 70-question matrix on the first page that really should have been reduced to about 5 questions. Stupid, stupid, stupid of me. That won’t ever happen again.
I’ve also got an appointment to meet up with the prof to do some coding work on the qualitative questions at the end of the survey. I snuck three of them in, hoping that the open-ended nature would provide some interesting emergent stuff for my questions about fandom participation. And they’ve got to be coded for responses and then I’ve got to evaluate them. I don’t really look forward to it, but I do think it’ll be a valuable experience for me. We’ll see.
Second, and only tangentially related (at best), is a question that has been bothering me for weeks now about fan-fiction. Why is it dominated by slash fiction? Seriously, what’s up with that? I suppose that I could just be getting tainted samples and that it turns out that while slash is really only a tiny minority of fan-fiction, it’s all I can find, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on.
So, what is it about fandom or fan-fiction that makes slash so common?
If you don’t know what slash fiction is, well, I recommend you not really try to find out. But if you must know, drop a comment.
Now, I’ve got an idea, but I’m not sure how valid it is. Basically, I think that people who do fan-fiction do so in order to generate emotionally resonant fiction. The short-form nature of the vast majority of fan-fiction means that there’s not all that much time to build up context to make every day choices seem meaningful. So, fan-fic writers rely on interactions that are inherently emotionally powerful in order to evoke emotions.
Now, it’s likely that there’s something more at work here, but at the moment I’m suspecting that the combination of brevity with an intent to write emotionally resonant material is the primary thing going on here.
Thomas
I didn’t know that most fanfic was homosexually themed. Sex, yeah, but is it really mostly homo-erotic?
And I remember my undergrad course in social science methods. Good times.
Actually, ‘slash’ is not technically homo-erotic, or even erotic at all (though it’s awfully hard to tell). The term itself refers to romantic pairings. It’s drawn from the fact that the standard way of categorizing the pieces by character pairings (or triplings, or whatever). So you might see ‘Batman/Robin’ or ‘Luke/Leia’ or whatever.
Now, as I said, it’s not technically erotic, but I’d guess that well over 80% of all slash is erotic in nature, often explicitly so. And it’s also not technically homo-erotic, but I’d guess that well over 50% of it is.
Part of this is likely a result of the fact that slash fiction rarely deals with canonical pairings, and in many canons the only interesting female characters (if there are any) are love interests.
But the propensity for homo-eroticism does seem odd to me. As does the propensity for eroticism in general. It just seems that this is a type of story that is disproportionately represented in fan-fiction. Especially considering the canon-consumption habits of fandom and the proportion of general reading that is primarily erotic in nature.
Thomas
I learned the term as homo-erotic, and wikipedia seems to agree, but I guess people use it in different ways.
I find it especially fascinating that there’s so much M/M action going on when the vast majority of slash writers are women.
There are pretty frequent discussions of this on fanthropology (which I see you have on your friends list). The “interesting male characters are much more common” theory is pretty well respected, as is the “het women find men sexy, so male-male sex is doubly sexy” theory and the “male-male sex removes the squicky under-currents of sexist concepts of sexuality and pornography for women readers/writers.” Those seem like the big three theories to me, although I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting or don’t know.
On the “Why is fanfic all romance or porn rather than gen?” question, I am reminded of the song “The internet is for porn,” from the musical Avenue Q. Fanfic is the dominant media for woman-targetted (and woman created) porn on the net. For the non-porn forms of slash/het/fem-slash, I’d agree that romance is a quick and easy form of emotional intensification (although the long forms of fanfic also seem pretty heavy on romance, from what little I’ve read and the somewhat more I’ve heard).
And, although I also prefer the slash = anything focused on pairings, romantic or sexual, I agree with Christian that slash = male-male pairings is the strongly dominant definition (het = heterosexual pairings, femslash = female-female pairings, gen = fanfic not focused on pairings).
Hey, thanks for dropping by.
Yeah, it’s sort of odd to be jumping into fandom. I’ve got tons of questions that I know have to have been answered hundreds (if not thousands) of times. Is there a nice central location where I can go to get some good answers without bothering everyone? (Also, the third potential reason you cited is fascinating to me, and not one that I was likely to have come up with on my own, being male and all.)
I don’t think it’s even a problem with romance, though that does seem over-represented, but rather with the extremely erotic nature of so much of fanfic. I guess I’ve always thought of fanfic as being, among other things, a celebration of the canon fiction. But it seems that this is not really the case, at least not based on my reading of most of it.
I think I see it as being something like: while there’s nothing wrong with fanfiction being the primary form of female-targetted pornography (or even erotic writing in general), but it seems like fanfiction could be so much more. It’s almost as if I feel that fanfiction is being under-utilized in fandom culture. But maybe I’m crazy.
The use of slash I’ll probably have to concede. Though it does bring up the fact that fandom has more opaque jargon that anything else I’ve worked with yet except geology (which totally makes up crazy words all the time). I mean, ‘het’ and ‘femslash’ I can parse with enough effort, but stuff like ‘gen’ and ‘rec’ and ‘RPS’ have been giving me fits trying to figure out what they mean. (Though I did finally figure out ‘rec’ earlier this week, and ‘RPS’ last night.)
Anyway, thanks again for stopping by. I’m kind of stupid when it comes to this stuff, so any answers are helpful.
Thomas
rec = recommend? or is rec a term I’m unfamiliar with. gen = generic (I think)
And then you get the entire animae derived terminology: bishi, yaoi, chan, etc.
It is definitely an evolved terminology rather than a developed one (and evolved within lots of sub-populations that have then shared back to general fandom, so things like the meaning of slash remain disputed).
I think that the porn quality of fanfic may be hiding the fact that fanfic does do so much more (although I only read fanfic very occaisionally, I have two friends who are fanfic writers, both writing erotic fic). Although there are vast quantities of PWP (plot, what plot?), which is often little more than “I found these characters sexy, so I’m going to write sex scenes for them,” I think a lot of fanfic that is romantic or erotically focused is still doing lots of other stuff with the cannon as well. It is sort of like the constant use of female nudity to sell mainstream movies. A movie with a sex scene (or a skinny dipping scene, as seems to have been popular in 50s and 60s European film) can still be about a lot more than the sex scene.
I think your entry into fandom culture is very cool. I ran across a story-games thread in which you referenced Milliways and it just made me grin (and run off and tell Sarah that she’d corrupted you ;) ).
I’m Sarah’s spouse and an inveterate lurker in rpg theory discussions, in case you are wondering who on earth I am. I usually go by Charles S when not in LJ.
Ha, I knew I should have recognized you from somewhere! :)
Your suggestion that the porn stuff is just a packaging is a pretty interesting one, and not one that I had considered. It actually strikes me as pretty believable. Perhaps it’s just that I’m not jaded enough to overlook the jarring porn and get at the actually interesting (to me) stuff? What an interesting thought…
Yeah, Sarah’s a huge trouble-maker. Though, in the interests of accuracy (not to mention making me sound cooler than I am), I’d actually run into Milliways about a month or two before Sarah and my discussion. I’m pretty sure Jessica Hammer (kleenestar) turned me onto it when she was complaining about how hard it is to properly cite certain types of internet sources.
Also, interestingly (perhaps), I’ve been aware of fandom for probably a decade or so now. I was pretty involved in the (almost non-existent) Star Wars fandom in Indonesia when I still lived there, but we didn’t have any real ties to the outside. And my sister has been doing anime conventions for years. I guess fandom’s been on my radar for a while, but I never took a good enough look at it to see just how interesting it really is when you get close to it.
So I guess I’m glad to be here :)
Thomas
Hey, Thomas.
Probably a bit late on this but “slash” refers to homo-erotic romantic pairings. ‘Waaaaaaay back in the 1970s, there was indeed a kind of movement to try to make the term mean “any non-canonical romantic pairing” instead, but it didn’t take, and it is not how the term is used today.
It’s possible that you might be confusing the term with “shipping,” which just refers to the focus on romantic pairings in general.