Strange Bedfellows (APA)/Issue 017

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Strange Bedfellows 17 was published in May 1997 and contains about 60 pages.

cover of issue #17

There were 30 members sharing 22 subscriptions. There were 11 tribs to this issue.

From the OE, and a Scolding Fan (Interest is Waning)

Many fans' tribs are getting shorter, fans are opening their tribs with apologies for missing previous deadlines and for how short their replies are.

The central mailer, Shoshanna, addressed this apathy:

Some serious business. Interest in this apa has been declining precipitously among the membership over the last year or more. The apa is consistently very thin, and there's a high proportion of last-minute or "next time better, I promise" tribs. To be honest, my own interest has been waning, partly because the apa has been less interesting and partly — I admit it — due to the availability of the Internet. While I'm still interested in participating in the apa, I am beginning to wonder if I might be happier not OEing it.

I'm not making any official announcements of resignation yet. But I would like to test the waters. Would anyone else be interested in taking over the job? (You'd get custody of the power stapler, too, since that was bought with apa funds.) If my resigning would mean that the apa died, that might affect my decision. But I've been doing this for over four years, and I'd like to know if anyone would like to take over. Please let me know, in your next trib or (preferably) earlier.

A fan's trib (The Magic May Return) contained this scold for her fellow tribbers:

Tell you frankly, I don't really feel like doing this: read everybody's trib, think of something to say, pick it out with my three typing fingers, go get 24 copies made, pay to send 240 pages of stuff to the States— and next month find half the issue consists of variations on 'The dog ate my APA' or 'I've been too busy with other things to bother answering you guys so I'll just tell you what I've been reading and what I've been watching and good-bye.' Hell, I can do that. I haven't seen any films in over a year, I don't watch TV, and most of what I read is in Japanese and hence of limited interest. That's all. See you all next time.

And it's no surprise that the longest tribs come from people without access to the instant gratification of the Net. Yakking on the net is like spending the evening on the phone or schmoozing with friends in a pub. It's fun, I'm not denying it, but also pretty ephemeral. There's no deep thought required and no time for deep thought even if you're tempted to it. Type and send is the rule.

Where then will you get the theoretical arguments and formulations that used to fill this APA two or three years ago? I doubt if anyone will ever form a well-thought out theory of anything, or even a systemic analysis, as a result of Net gabbing.

Some Topics Discussed in "Strange Tongues"

Excerpts from "Strange Tongues"

On Fairies and Gays and Slash: There's a story in PMS #4 with Ray, and eventually Benny, as gauzy-winged fairies, which has excited a certain amount of horrified fascination. I'm not sure I defend the story itself, exactly, which grafts fantasy elements into a TV universe that has different, and much more subtle, fantasy elements already. The story goes far further out of court than making Doyle an elf to point up his air of steely fragility and pretty green eyes. But it's not entirely wrong-headed, either. There's a connection, even if it's very faint, between fairies-as-magic and fairies-as-gay that is a bit more than a pun, no matter how debased it's been made at times. The lowest common denominator reduces it to "gays aren't real men, just as fairies aren't human," but there's more to it than that. Fairies have nonhuman powers, aren't bound by human rules; gays don't follow normal social rules (by conservative reckoning) and in being demonized, were treated as though they had potent, super-normal power. The reality might be only that gays and other queers managed to break a taboo that the conservative mind considered absolute, with an addendum that they were having too much fun — if they're enjoying themselves, they must have some kind of strange power. (I leave as an exercise for the reader the question of why a conventional-minded observer would assume homosexual relations are intrinsically more fun than his or her own.) Slash has exploited the connection overtly, sometimes very badly, with the Doyle-as-an-elf vein of stories, and the vampires, telepaths and assorted other creatures (I thought Cowley as a Scots wizard made a lot of sense, actually); but all but the most gay-ghetto-realistic style of slash takes energy from exactly this correspondence of the transgressor-of-rules with someone who is naturally above or beyond the rules.

[...]

Slash is a way of having one's mortality and eating it too. It expresses physical, mortal lust and an unavoidable emotional connection between the characters — but as gay sex,it's not tied to racial survival or even, by tradition, to the usual social round. In real life, gays are desperate to be recognized as part of the usual social round for good reason, being quite as human as anybody, but the association of nontraditional sex with the supernatural world has a recognizable basis: it hints that there's more connection between bodies than the mundane life of the flesh — and so, in its way, does slash. Elves and fairies merely make this more obvious, except to the literal-minded.

I've seen Stargate for the first time (I can be slow about things at times) and it more or less fulfilled my expectations, being extremely pretty and not otherwise worth the celluloid it's printed on in terms of (a) SFnal plot, which went out the window almost before the story blithely ignored the speed-of-light limitation, and (b) uncliched storytelling, of which there was none. The only surprise was the cute hero who managed to project innocent erudition with even more charm than it deserves. (Er, that was the protagonist; the action hero was a stock military guy with blue eyes, but I didn't watch those parts.) (Blue eyes are a valuable action-hero characteristic because they show he's white no matter how heavy a tan he may have. Hollywood, racist? Yes.) The stock Girl was a plot device but deserved better - among other things, the script never explained how she could read when the whole concept of literacy was a monolithic taboo in her culture. Just like a woman, I say happily, to learn something on her own without consulting the cultural monoliths. But nobody really noticed this, any more than they noticed how strange it was to find biological humans on another planet. (That was later explained, in an expositional lump, but nobody questioned it when it first happened.) But it was extremely pretty, the beauty evenly divided between the special effects and Jaye Davidson, who made me believe in Doro for the duration. Are we sure he's not a hermaphrodite?

What you say about using f/f as an "easy out" for strong female characters isn't really surprising. It comes down to female slash-or-slashy characters being no more socially lesbian than male slash characters have to fulfill gay stereotypes, but neither are they "ladylike" in the bad old sense that can be expected of straight women. A character who's a vivid, sexual, three-dimensional person isn't always a lesbian, just an adult. Or maybe a well-crafted character.

... the whiff of manga/anime-ish feel about B5: the perpetual adolescence of the military, the quite unconvincing (i.e., lacking adult complexity) end of the Great War, and all that. Maybe it's just JMS' perpetual adolescence, too. That's a depressing thought, but let's take the glass as half-full: it'll leave the end of B5 feeling incomplete and crying for fannish development, no matter what Gauda Prime situation it ends with.

If I had any guts, or all the time in the world, I'd put in my complete opinion of "Balance of Power," since I've now read it courtesy of [J] and, I gather, a fair lot of tedious downloading, for which I thank her publicly. Being short on the time to assemble a critical analysis, I'll just say that your original recommendation of it wasn't wrong, much though I feared otherwise. Sheridan knows he's being an ass and tries to correct for it; Sinclair is moderately human; Delenn is a person more than an object; and while it's no better than it should be, it's distinctly no worse - better than average in fandom. I'll leave further comments up to [J], who's had more time to absorb it.

Slash, the shared enterprise .... I have indeed heard writers, good ones, say they do it because somebody else's story wasn't right, or wasn't complete. Can't say this is usually my impetus, though I'm starting to wonder if I wouldn't do more good (or at least finish more writing) if I took up some badly-done premises and redid them, than now when I'm in a slough of desperately mangled creativity.

Second the motion: Resolved, that Scully and/or Gillian Anderson has an honorary penis to go with her balls. But is this a suitable consolation for brain cancer? Considering that the non-honorary male penis has to serve as consolation for runaway aggression, a shorter lifespan and emotional instability (and we let these people take elective offices?!), maybe so.

Sheridan looks like a horse's ass at regular intervals, but in between he gets to do useful and indispensable things about being captain of a new city-state in politically troubled times. On the other hand, Delenn doesn't come off much better objectively; it's just that I often give her character credit for what she should have looked like, or said, instead of the hideous cliches she is forced to enact to be "in love" with Sheridan. Sheridan is more or less shown as running the station and the war, from time to time; Delenn is said to be a major Minbari political figure and a functional warleader, but seldom gets to show it except in supporting Sheridan. I'd hope for more self-knowledge and more original thinking from the kind of leaders, the kind of people who write their own book instead of following others' when they're going into new territory, that Delenn and Sheridan are both supposed to be. A's far as actual interpersonal attraction goes, Ivanova and Talia Winters had a more convincing time of it, veiled single-episode consummation, tragic ending, and all.

Okay, B5 is better than the SF average and much better than SW at showing women as part of society, but still... Among female human guest characters, very few don't show up groomed-to-the-hilt-glamorous and/or provide family or romance interests for male characters. It's true that romantic-interest and career women are generally 30 and up rather than panting teenagers, which puts B5 ahead of Classic ST right there. This is probably an effect of Our Times rather than real thinking, but it's progress. I've seen one single Minbari female other than Delenn with any authority, an officer on a rogue ship, presumably of the warrior caste. Maybe some of those shapeless robes cover female clan elders, members of Gray Council, and so on, but the speaking roles are all male. If Strazyncki means to change the assumption that sapient people are male-by-default, he's not carrying it through. Too many one-time and background characters, particularly in nonhuman races where the concept of sexual differentiation and social roles should be different from ours, are played by men and typed as male in whatever race they represent. Centauri culture has been given an outline for sex roles — not very liberated, but shown as consistent with the culture - but there's really no excuse for this among the Narn and Minbari.

I'd hope to see some good Ivanova stories, but she's peripheral in the fanfic I've seen so far except one early zine from Australia. Is there a place to find the stories you're talking about? I'm trying to write with Ivanova myself, in a somewhat complicated slash scenario. Due to some intelligent suggestions, the sort that make one grind one's teeth for not having thought enough about it all before, I am trying to figure out the nonsexual aspects of the story, such as Ivanova's loyalty to EarthForce or Babylon 5 (check whichever applies) governing her actions quite as much as love/lust/comfort/friendship. That's in the show already and can't be abandoned in mid-story for the sake of good sex. Hence the tragedy, and very possibly the plot.

Some Topics Discussed in "Cat's Darkling Zone"

  • nothing fannish

Some Topics Discussed in "Love Without Mercy"

Excerpts from "Love Without Mercy"

My major fandom is B7 (surprise), and that's what I've written in. I'll write both A/B and A/T (and there's A/T/V and A/T/B in progress - someone seems to have persuaded me that everything's better with Tarrant on it) and read anything that, in the eternal fannish cry, uses "the actual characters" (funny how no one ever says, "I've written another story in which I've made complete travesties of the characters because I hate the real ones," but we read stories like that all the time.) I've watched MUNCLE, read Eroica, longed for readable Due South slash - some of which, I hear, is published now, and I'll be seizing it with cries of "Mine, mine!" at Mediawest. I've read some dazzling Mulder/Krycek and some stunning oddities and crossovers (and I have to admit a deranged obsession with dropping pretty young annoying things in Avon's lap - I want to inflict the Highlander Cory Raines on him, for example. (Immortality may be a necessary condition for someone who wants to tease Avon; and think how much better OP will look to Avon once he's discovered what it's like when they *don't* die!) I don't suppose Cat could be persuaded to *write* "the obvious" that she mentions in her November trib: Krycek seduces Tarrant, Mulder cozies up to Blake (tempted by a True Believer? And yet Blake has distinctly cynical moments), and Avon finds this annoying and takes action.) I like hero/villain slash, and I'm looking for Xena/Callisto slash - even Gabrielle/Callisto. Yes, Xena/Gabrielle is all but spelled out (as no doubt lots of people mentioned in the February issue) but that makes it less tempting to me than the others. Not that there's anything wrong with "writing in the slippery bits."

Some Topics Discussed in "Untitled by E R"

flyer for "What did you do in the War Invasion, Daddy?" -- page 1
flyer for "What did you do in the War Invasion, Daddy?" -- page 2

Excerpts from "Untitled by E R"

Barbara Hambly, "Traveling with the Dead", fantasy. I have a friend who refuses to read Barbara Hambly; she says her world-view is morally indefensible, consisting of a war between powerful, beautiful, seductive Evil and well-meaning, entirely ineffectual Good. Well, yes. However, if you don't mind that, this is a perfectly pretty book, with lots of irresistibly evil vampires and intelligent, courageous and noble people fighting against and for them in pre-WWI Europe. It also contains a really scathing and rather unfair denunciation of the standard romantic heroine. Romance novels celebrate the nobility of sacrificing ones' status, security and lifestyle for a cause, a hero, or Love itself. Yes, it is important to verify that the object of worship is actually worthy — but that does not negate the value of the sacrifice. The book is quite pretty, and has plot.

Kevin Anderson, Ruins (an X:File novel). Woodenly written and with no insight into the characters. There is a plot that hangs together, but I really only recommend it for people who like jungle settings. Not me. Shudder.

Firebird, by Mercedes Lackey, is a retelling of (I assume) the Russian folktales of the original Illya. M.L. is paying attention, for once, almost all the way through; a solid B, which is more than Lackey's earned from me in a while.

Jed the Dead, by Alan Dean Foster. A mildly amusing story about a good-ole texas boy finding an alien corpse with mysterious powers. Interesting chiefly for the appearance of two military UFO experts who act exactly like Mulder and Scully.

[...]

Exchange of Hostages, by Susan Mathews. This is not an review; I only skimmed the first few chapters in the bookstore. However, I was later reliably informed that this is a revamping of SWARS fan work, and the protagonist is based on Illya Kuryakin. Now, I didn't see it at all, but my conception of the character has shifted away from meek and mild over the years. If you really like stories about torturers and torture, get this book. I don't. I didn't.

Once more, down to the deadline with a zine -- the pre-Quantum Leap bondage/slash novel [1] -- and a sewing project, a baby's quilt for my [redacted].... Oh, I enclose a flyer for the next project, an ID4/mixed media/slash zine. Come one, come all. One note: as a disaster zine, and in keeping with the dictates of the genre, cities and people may die but the dogs will be saved.

TV has been really very good recently. I love both Sabrina and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Both star 16-year old girls trying to sort out who and what they are, grow up different in a world that does not like differences and subvert the powers of entrenched and brutal authority (cheerleaders.) Buffy is also trying to save the world from the forces of ultimate darkness, which happen to be located directly under her high school. (But then, aren't they always?) Both shows are cute, clever and funny. Sabrina is a witch, while Buffy is a baby goddess avatar (Artemis, I think -- virgin (despite her best efforts) huntress of the night), with a middle-aged (though still hunky) librarian as side-kick (Anthony Head, the guy from the coffee commercials, doing a great white rabbit imitation.) Sabrina's a bit too kid-friendly to be slashed, I think, but Anthony Head would be perfectly lovely gay, and Willow/Buffy (er, a incubus posing as Buffy) might also work.

Some Topics Discussed in "Ghost Speaker"

  • speculation about some crossover fiction possibilities
  • comments on The X-Files
  • a long story excerpt by this fan, "Immortal and Afraid" (a Forever Knight/Highlander/Quantum Leap crossover) with much analysis by the author: "Notes: I don't normally do this. I mean, show stories around before they're finished, to anyone except my core. And even then, usually on screen. But this story doesn't work, and isn't going to work. (If anyone can get it to work, they're welcome.)."
  • comments about Samuel R. Delany
  • a long, long description and analysis of a Picard/Q Star Trek: TNG story (unnamed here, but is His Beloved Pet); this essay was later posted on line as Q Who?

Excerpts from "Ghost Speaker"

[Samuel R.] Delany's been writing more stuff on the politics of paraliterature? I want to read it. Will pay photocopying, postage, even a subscription to The New York Review of Science Fiction if necessary. It sounds like what he did for the Intersection GOH speech a couple of years ago. I've never been able to get those ideas out of my head, so I want to read them some more and get them even more firmly stuck in my head. Please. Help. Please.

Ah, but while I am of course your Master, and you my fledgling, you are an Alpha, and I (except when actually writing) am definitely a Beta. How does this complicate our relationship? Of course. Betas can bite. One of my other fledglings is my Fate, as well.

The X-File episodes I find tedious or stupid tend to be those which are purely about weird stuff and aliens. And if I want conspiracy theories I have my own, thank you. But I can watch Mulder explore the darkness that lurks in the depth of every human soul but especially his own all night, if necessary.

Actually my original idea for using Forever Knight and Highlander involved crossing them both with Quantum Leap. I may include the scribble which ensued here, for party frolic purposes. But I can see possibilities crossing Fraser with Nick; the only problem is that either he'd have to kill him in the morning, or Fraser would have to forget everything in the morning, or Fraser would have to start an anti-vampire crusade in the morning (actually, knowing Fraser, probably in the middle of the night ~ "Fraser, have I got this right? You come over to my house, at three in the morning, you wake me up, and you want to know if I have any wooden stakes in the house?" — "Well, I knew you'd have garlic, Ray."). There is no alternative. Meanwhile, what are Ray Vecchio and Schanke doing? And would anyone care? (What is this sudden influx into fandom of slash partners named Ray? It's just too confusing.) I'd like to read the XF/FKn crossover (particularly if Natalie and Dana leave together) if it ever gets written. Julie Kramer sent me what is probably a lovely Highlander/FKn story, but (thanks to Nancy) I realised halfway down the first page that it was a post-end-of-FKn episode, and therefore unreadable. I set it aside for later.

I've just finished one lengthy and challenging story; my spiritual needs would undoubtedly be fulfilled by writing a DS/H story, but I think I'll probably settle for the Hulk/Daredevil project... or even try to make Hestia happy by writing a Bodie/Illya. If I could only think of a reason besides irredeemable cuteness to get those two together. Possibly this is the moment for lesbian terrorists in clinging black uniforms to intervene.

Some Topics Discussed in "Mardi Gras Favors"

  • comments on Winter's End, see that page
  • a black and white photocopy of Scully holding Mulder in a dress, reprinted from "Us Magazine" (May 1997 issue)

Excerpts from "Mardi Gras Favors"

At RevelCon here in March, Lezlie Shell discoursed on her latest obsession - XFiles and Walter Skinner or as she titled her panel "XFiles Slash - the SPG (Surly Pectoral God aka Walter Skinner).

  • the photocopy that's in this APA, an example of the almost always poor quality of things fans could share with each other when dependent on the technology of the time

  • the original photo (NOT IN THIS APA)

Some Topics Discussed in "The Magic May Return"

  • this fan (relatively new to the APA) scolds the other fans on their short, boring, and lazy recent tribs [2]
  • this fan insults fan interaction on the internet: there's no deep thought there, conversations are ephemeral and shallow, then precedes to dangle a net-published story (a Babylon 5 story called "Scavenger Hunt") in front of her fellow tribbers, calling it "brilliant and funny" and "one of the most satisfying B5 stories I've read yet"
  • more on mixed messages: the "feather-headed fluff" she sees has made her intrigued enough to go to archives where the stories become "decently written"
  • much about female characters, sexuality, Babylon 5
  • comments on the story, Balance of Power, see that page

Excerpts from "The Magic May Return"

Tell you frankly, I don't really feel like doing this: read everybody's trib, think of something to say, pick it out with my three typing fingers, go get 24 copies made, pay to send 240 pages of stuff to the States — and next month find half the issue consists of variations on 'The dog ate my APA' or 'I've been too busy with other things to bother answering you guys so I'll just tell you what I've been reading and what I've been watching and good-bye.' Hell, I can do that. I haven't seen any films in over a year, I don't watch TV, and most of what I read is in Japanese and hence of limited interest. That's all. See you all next time.

And it's no surprise that the longest tribs come from people without access to the instant gratification of the Net. Yakking on the net is like spending the evening on the phone or schmoozing with friends in a pub. It's fun, I'm not denying it, but also pretty ephemeral. There's no deep thought required and no time for deep thought even if you're tempted to it. Type and send is the rule.

Where then will you get the theoretical arguments and formulations that used to fill this APA two or three years ago? I doubt if anyone will ever form a well-thought out theory of anything, or even a systemic analysis, as a result of Net gabbing.

Now is the time to put in a plug for another net story - gen this time, alas - but brilliant and funny and with everyone as themselves in the most unlikely situation possible. It's 'Scavenger Hunt' by Julia Hugo-Vidal, in the B5 story archive. (Those with net-access probably know where it is by now, and if not you can get to it through Yahoo. I haven't a clue what the address is myself. Those without - it's on my hard drive if you want it.) It's one of the most satisfying B5 stories I've read yet. Word is she's writing a story with sex - but not necessarily slash. My modem won't allow me access to the requisite ML where it will be posted - do you have anything new on that?

Have discovered I'm not the only seriously twisted person on the planet. There's now a slash/yaoi mailing list on the net - much more yaoi than slash - which I was weirded away from since it consists of hundreds of feather-headed posts as to which of the five pilots in Gundam Wing is most likely to be a virgin, who has the cutest hair in RG Veda, and 'isn't (insert anime character of choice) cute/ oh yes he's cute/ yeah he's way cute/ yeah I think he's cute too.'

Periodically the posters dash off a piece of porn and send it on. The pieces of porn which actually have pretensions to a setting and a plot, however minimal, get stuck in a story archive which has provided me with hours of fascinated reading. I'm not going to make claims for it- it's yaoi in English 90% of the time, which is mindless causeless sex. The surprise is that it's decently written mindless causeless sex. The authors have definite literary models in mind: on the evidence, the average gay male porn story, down to the vocabulary and settings. To see the likes of Yuyu Hakusho's demons or the aforementioned young pilots from GW engaging in a little bondage and fist-fucking (Kurama in a cockring, anyone?) provides one of those potentially enlightening moments of cultural dislocation. My favorite probably is the Ranma 1/2 story (no, I can't teU you about Ranma; I don't know it; but I believe it's on the level of seriousness of Dragon Ball, which is to say, not very) that was modeled on a story in a Preston anthology, and reads like it. It's a good one-liner, so to speak— like a t-shirt with Minnie Mouse in black leather and a hood.

Enlightening too is that written yaoi with anime chararacters has some of the conviction of its visual original. "These guys can't **do** that—" but there they, are, doing it. In the end though, and unlike the Japanese mangas, it becomes as tedious as pornography. The absence of any attempt at characterization kills even good erotic writing unless the writing precisely presses the right buttons. For that matter, even the stories where the characters are recognizably themselves miss the mark for someone who doesn't know the series well. However there are a few exceptions to this pornographic dead level, from writers interested in developing a style of their own or in exploring psychological corners of the characters involved. One of them has even succeeded in the fiendishly difficult task of making her sex an intrinsic factor in the plot- the sex scene actually accomplishes something in the series as a whole. (Allows the two participants- twin brothers- to be taken over by the evil spirit that had its eyes on them from the first, so that they can later become the series' arch-Badnasties. There's an advantage to the fantasy genre of anime.)

Given the response of the ml members, it seems there's a large segment of the population out there (in university, largely) [3] that's completely new to erotic writing and will take as much of it as they can get, however bad, so long as it involves an anime character.

I put one of my own stories, based on a virtually unknown series, in the archive and was immediately besieged by requests for more. (Including- I have to say this- a message from the twin brothers author that read in its entirety "How about sending me everything you've ever written?"). Of course, now that I've complied, I'm getting 'When are you going to write a rape story?' type posts, proof that it is indeed not the series but the genre that does it. Or maybe that, as yaoi fans, the members think that sex and rape bear some intrinsic and necessary relation to each other, so that one almost inevitably involves the other. A pity Ozaki Minami or CLAMP or any of the other (fingers of one hand) well-known in the west yaoi artists wasn't into water sports or something seriously kinky like that. It would give an interesting spin to the whole thing.

Yaoi and June are exactly parallel to fanfic and original in content. The visual form- once again- is what makes the difference. It's easier to set the scene of who and what and where the original Japanese characters are. 'What is, is'- you see these two guys doing a and b and c, and the minimal details of their background come out in the story. You don't have to spend time convincing your reader that these people are real and solid. That's a given of the pictorial form. They're a teacher and his student- they're two football players- a loves b but b isn't sure about a: it's aU there in a panel or two. You can't have the same brevity in prose. 'A was a high school teacher. He couldn't stop thinking about B his student. One day in the gay section of town he met B in the bar.' Too flat- it has to be dressed up in all the psychological/emotional bells and whistles or it reads like basic pornography. It's why I maintain the visual is a superior mode of narration 90% of the time.

If I understand you, you want your slash females to be straight. Or rather you want your numinous females to be straight which means they can't be gay which means they can't be slashed. Quite the bind. The simplest solution is to dispense with the labels entirely- and if the female is sufficiently numinous that shouldn't be impossible. I want to say 'They're not lesbian, they just love each other,' but I won't. They're not lesbian, they're beyond that small-minded classification. If I see Servalan in a f/f slash story I'm not going to think- 'Oh the writer's made Servalan gay.' The idea is absurd. Gay, bi, straight— the words simply don't apply to someone that large and- extrahuman, let's call it. A Servalan sleeps with whomever she wants regardless of sex. Now, in her case I'll entertain arguments that she doesn't have a sexual nature like us mere mortals- that sex for her must almost of necessity be a function of power which removes it from the realm of orientation entirely. (Who is power oriented to? Everybody.) But the same boundarylessness applies to Ivanova in my opinion. The fact that she slept with Talia doesn't make her 'gay' in my books, any more than the fact that she had a dweeby boyfriend in the past makes her 'straight.' She's Ivanova and she sleeps with whom she wants. 'Bi' if you must- but in the best possible circumstances 'bi' is a term with no meaning except, possibly, 'is not bound by terminology.'

I want stories that describe the society we want to live in as if it was already here. (That's how it's done, I believe. Pretend it exists already and the reality will follow. Just as I couldn't envision a competent fully-realized female officer in a space series until JMS put one up on the screen. We didn't have to have gradual Star Trek moves, through an endless series of series, in the direction of fully autonomous and fully realized women soldiers: we got the quantum leap to it.)

Some Topics Discussed in "With Friends Like These ..."

  • darker fandoms, sweetness and domestic bliss
  • the violent punk that is Mulder
  • comments on pixel manipulation and fan art
  • a reprint off the internet (with permission) of the X-Files story, A Kiss Is Just A Kiss by Jane Symons (Krycek/Mulder)
  • an early use of !

Excerpts from "With Friends Like These ..."

You have a point about M/K being similar to B7 in its dark edginess. Guess I'm something of a Johnny One-Flavor when it comes to slash. However...watching the burgeoning of M/K fandom had made it clear that there's no fandom so dark that if s immune to a certain amount of K/S-iness. You'd think if any fandom was safe from sweet romance, it would be M/K, but already there are stories where they seem headed for domestic bliss. I'm expecting Scully to bear their child any day now...

I agree with you about police-brutality Mulder. Ecchh. I'd hate to see Scully romantically linked with a punk like him. I can put up with a lot when it's two men rather than a man and a woman, but in "Tunguska," I couldn't help thinking that not even Krycek deserves this Mulder.

Now, many M/Kers are clinging to the "he only hits Alex because he loves him" scenario. Repressed lust expressed as violence... (There's no way I could accept this if it were Scully or any other woman Mulder was beating up on, but with Krycek...okay, fine.) However, as you point out, it isn't just Krycek, Mulder's closest enemy, who gets smacked around. He did it to the militia guy, too, and to other prisoners in custody, in "Paper Hearts," "Grotesque," and "Duane Barry." (He also seems inordinately fond of the threat of homosexual rape.)

If I thought they were intentionally showing us a Mulder who's getting dangerously close to losing it, I could accept that. It would be great, in fact. Unfortunately, it appears to be merely the usual testosterone poisoning. Action!Mulder™ is what David Duchovny wants, and what Chris Carter thinks the audience want to see. Blecchh.

Interesting comments on pixel manipulation vs. art. I've noticed the very phenomenon myself (with the very photos you mention). I think the problem is when the manipulated photos are presented as truth, not art. I do some pixel manipulation myself, only I make it clear that they are digitally manipulated. And the reaction has been of the "Oh! Nice Job!" persuasion.

MediaWest: The annual Tea For Tarrant will be held in the Party Suite on Saturday, 1:15 pm to 3:00 pm. All are welcome! And on Sunday afternoon there will be a music video showing, sponsored by the Mulder/Krycek Mailing List. Exact time and place to be determined; look for flyers at the con.

Some Topics Discussed in "Tales From the Obsessed"

  • tension and angst in slash stories
  • description of a Blake's 7 story written for a friend
  • being a fan of Xena

Excerpts from "Tales From the Obsessed"

I think you have it on the subject of angst in slash: stories by definition (at least the Western definition) involve conflict, and conflict often involves angst, though that's not an absolute necessity. The stories most fans tend to remember have the most conflict, the most dramatic tension, therefore the most angst. However, I must admit that since I'm now writing three stories/novels simultaneously that have lots of hurt-angst-torture-conflicts, I am longing for some thing light to sort of break the pervasive doom-and-gloom in Casa Jacquerie these days. And though stories need conflict, the conflict can be something relatively light-hearted...a friend of mine just wrote a lovely Vila/Tarrant where the conflict was whether Vila would manage to distract Tarrant from some tinkering he was doing on Scorpio, so that they could have some hot sex. He did. :)

Speaking of manners A/B-ish, I will admit that I can make it work, after a fashion...I have actually written an A/B, which may or may not make it into print soon, depending on the editor I sent it to. Yes, really, and A/B...but it doesn't count, since it was a birthday present for Dawn. Well, maybe it does count <g>, but it was rather bittersweet. There may be a sequel, though, since Dawn and I are considering turning it into an A/T/B universe, a pairing (tripling?), we've been thinking of doing for awhile now.

...I was recently introduced to Xena and really got into it. Not that it's that well-written, but it really does have the kind of intense relationship between the two female leads that one generally finds in slash (especially that ep where Gabrielle gets married!...gosh, just like similar episodes of shows with two guys), and that's enough to make it rather remarkable, at least, in my book.

Some Topics Discussed in "For the World is Hollow..."

Excerpts from "For the World is Hollow..."

I recently reread al the Barbara Hambly books I own (except for the B&tB novelizations), in an orgiastic splurge, and I was struck by the parallel between historical fiction and fan fiction.

The particular trigger for this thought was Hambly's Sun Cross novels — "The Rainbow Abyss" and "The Magicians of Night" — which mostly follow the pov of someone from a medieval-magic-fantasy universe who finds himself, knowing nothing about our universe, in Germany in 1940. So there are all sorts of tidbits that he does not understand, but which a reader is expected to recognize, starting of course with the "sun cross" or swastika and continuing through many others.

[...]

It's like fan fiction, then, in which readers are expected to understand the context in which events take on significance outside their obvious meaning.

In the same way, I had McQueen warn Hawkes, in [my story] Chains of Being, that in-vitros have a genetic tendency toward addictions. An episode established that in-vitros are especially vulnerable to being addicted to a particular stimulant, and I was incorporating that episode, and making sense of it in passing, by turning the danger into a general tendency rather than a drug-specific vulnerability. The larger import of the line is lost on a reader who isn't a fan of the show, just as a reader who doesn't know anything about the Holocaust will not follow the larger meaning of most of Sun Cross. Both fan and historical fiction rely on the reader already having a considerable amount of knowledge about the background universe.

Well, so does mundane fiction, I suppose, but in that case the universe in question is pretty much the one that the readers already inhabit, so that any reader over the age of eight and not certifiably psychotic can safely be assumed to understand it.

I read — or perhaps skimmed, as I was going at maximum speed — through piles of classic K/S, much of it from the early- and mid-eighties. I had a craving, you see. (though I overdosed to the point that I dreamed I was a Hard Target slash character... Those of you who have read Falling From Grace (You know just what horror this implies; for those of you who haven't, let me just say that this dream made dreaming that I was the Hellhound Avon, which I did several years ago, look like dreaming about being Bambi. Please note, however, that Fouchon was pretty good in bed.) Anyway, remembering those stories and considering [Barbara T's] suggestion in #15 that "the characters in slash represent a new literary gender role," I remember Joanna Russ et al.'s suggestion (made on the basis of K/S of just this vintage) that K/S was about reshuffling gender attributes: Spock is strong and unemotional ("male") but monogamous and dominated by reproductive physiology ("female"); Kirk is in command and promiscuous ("male") but emotional and physically enticing ("female"). Joanna and [Barbara T] seem to be saying something of the same thing, though in different terms. Why then, as Barbara asks, cannot women as well as men play this role? Well, for me partly because it's not just the role itself, it's the trajectory the character takes to it. That is, male characters move from classic-male-role to slash-character-role, and female characters do not (they have a different trajectory), and to some extent it's the particular movement, the magnitude and direction of the distance between the slash role and the normatively-expected male role, that is the attraction. (I don't, of course, mean that we necessarily see this movement over the course of the story, but that the character's conceptualization has changed in that way in the mind of the writer and/or reader, in the transition from source to fan story). I will also admit that I enjoy pornography about men more than pornography about women, simply on the level of anatomical description; I'm not sure why this is, but it is.

The book chapter on slash that Henry, Cynthia, and I were putting together several years ago has shambled from its academic grave and lurched, dripping grave mire and bad copy editing, into our mailboxes in page-proof form. I checked it over, since H&C were in Hong Kong that week, and was absolutely appalled at what had been done to it. (Starting with removing my and Cynthia's names from the byline.) Most egregious was the replacement of a paragraph about M. Fae and her fiction with a version of the same paragraph from an earlier draft, to which M. Fae had vociferously objected and which had therefore been rewritten. I rewrote it back to what she wanted, but unfortunately I (and Henry and Cynthia) have no control over what the publisher actually prints. We can only hope for the best. Nor do I have any idea when this project might actually emerge, Lazarus-like, from the tomb and appear in a bookstore near you.

I recently read Point of Hopes, a fantasy novel by Melissa Scott and Lisa Barnett [4], of which the two heroes are a/u Bodie and Doyle. (Really, they are. The authors are Pros fans and well aware of slash; Melissa read my Never Let Me Down.) Even leaving the fannish connection aside, it's a good read, set in an intriguing late-medieval-type culture.

Although I don't especially like Marcus, I disagree a little with your conclusion that it couldn't work ... I think Marcus is a romantic at heart, and that Ivanova may have been one once, when she was very young, before life beat it out of her. It's her strength and courage that Marcus is attracted to, so getting them together wouldn't require that she be toned down, except enough to let Marcus have the sweetly romantic bits he wants. (Even as a confirmed Marcus-disliker, I loved the conversation they had about virginity. It fit both of them so well.) However, judging from his track record so far JMS would be incapable of handling a relationship like that, so I'll just have to rely on you to depict it. I continue to be infuriated by the extent to which JMS has watered down Delenn; he really seems incapable of conceiving of a strong, aggressive woman in a romantic relationship with a strong, aggressive man. One of them has got to be dumbed down, weakened, and so far it's always been the woman (unless you want to count Vir and his inamorata).

I agree that the net will totally change media fandom. Fm not sure if I like that (I'm beginning to really understand old-timers like Lezlie Shell who bitched about the huge influx of people into fandom who didn't appreciate what it had been back when she got into it). But since I don't have a choice, I'll wait and see what happens. I still vastly prefer printfic to netfic, both in quality (usually) and in material reading experience.

I haven't seen any Sentinel, but the rather breathless tone of the discussion of it I've seen on-line doesn't impel me to watch it.

I have reservations about the increasing tendency toward conspiracy theories, government-bashing, etc. that shows like X-Files ride the crest of. I don't think it's a useful way to approach the world.

You suggest that Franklin could have been the pretty boy on B5. I don't think he could, simply because he's black; I don't think American tv can create a pretty-boy black character without making him into the caricature Little-Richard type. (Is it Little Richard I'm thinking of? I mean a happy buffoon type, rather than the brooding kittenish prettiness of, say, Vachon.) I still maintain that while Marcus may have potential as a character, precious little of it has appeared to my eyes so far. In that, however, he is merely continuing the trend of the show as a whole, which showed tremendous potential from the beginning and took forbloodyever to start actualizing it.

On pixel manipulation vs. fan art, the difference for me is that in fan art (except in tracings, which I do not much like for just this reason), the fan artist has created something new by copying with her own hand. The body may have originally belonged to someone else in another context (most amusing example: the back cover to Master of the Revels is based on a home pregnancy test ad), but the artist has unavoidably adapted and altered it to blend with her own purposes. The kind of pixel art you're describing, which is just a collage done electronically instead of with scissors and glue, just pastes two things together, leading to such images as the one of Riker on top of Deanna that was making the rounds a couple of years ago, in which, because of the angle of Deanna's head compared to the angle of the torso it had been stuck on, it looked as though Riker had just broken her neck. I would argue that single-figure pictures of BSOs do convey emotional content to fans, even when the poses are taken from "Playgirl" or "The Joy of Gay Sex", in the same way that PWPs do; the fan knows the pre-existing emotional context and projects it into the picture.

References

  1. ^ What is this zine?
  2. ^ In the last issue of this APA, this same fan states she doesn't really like slash anyway, and denigrates others' interests in it as well. This not unlike the Woody Allen joke about women complaining about a restaurant. Woman A: "The food here is terrible." Woman B: "Yes, and such small portions."
  3. ^ This statement about these fans being university students may be a faulty assumption; 1) a university email address doesn't guarantee the fan is a student, but may be employed there instead, and 2) in the early days of the internet, it was universities that provided most of peoples' internet access.
  4. ^ Point of Hopes
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