The answer, coffeeandink, is No.

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Title:	The answer, coffeeandink, is No.
Creator:	giandujakiss
Date(s):	December 23, 2007
Medium:	journal post
Fandom:
Topic:
External Links:	The answer, coffeeandink, is No., Archived version
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The answer, coffeeandink, is No. is a 2007 essay by giandujakiss.

It is a response to coffeeandink's question about a for-profit novel called "Touched By Darkness." coffeeandink asked her flist to guess, from the blurb, whether the novel was rewritten Sentinel fanfic.

The essay's author stated: "This is not a book review; I'm not going to comment on the quality of the writing. Instead, I want to talk about the difference between a romance novel and fanfic. Obviously, here, I'm speaking in generalities; there will always be exceptions."

Some Topics Discussed

• the fetishization of male vulnerability in fanfic
• is there a fanfic aesthetic?
• the difference between pro fic and fanfic
• femslash
• fiction by Sarah Monette

The Blurb for the For-Profit Professional Book

The Sentinels have returned to Earth, taking on human bodies, in order to track down Belians, also reincarnated Atlantians. The Belians are the souls of those who followed Belial on Atlantis and worshipped dark forces and made human sacrifices—and whodestroyed Atlantis. They are also in human bodies and they, like the Sentinels, have superhuman abilities.

It is a cat-and-mouse game between them, as the Belians mount a reign of terror and evil on current-day Earth, and the Sentinels track them and dispense karmic justice.

The two groups are well matched in physical and psychic powers, but the Sentinels have a slight edge: Conductors—a small group of humans who are able to mentally link with Sentinels and enhance their psychic tracking abilities.

A human conductor who psychically matches a Sentinel is always the opposite sex. When the conductor and Sentinel meld minds and souls in a conduction to track a Belian, powerful sexual energies arise, and it becomes much more than a mental exercise. The sparks fly as Sentinel and conductor come together in a blaze of psychic power and sizzling desire, to track unimaginable evil.

From the Essay

Here's the thing about fanfic - whatever internalized misogyny may appear in various stories, there are some pretty distinct aesthetics. If the main romantic pairing is het - and assuming the story is meant to have a happy ending - the woman is elevated relative to the man; she has real power in the relationship. That power may be expressed in different ways. Sometimes the woman will explicitly guide how the relationship unfolds, or sometimes she'll just be minding her own business and the man will pursue her, but the woman's power - and, more importantly, the man's vulnerability to her - is at the forefront.

Similarly, if it's a m/m slash pairing, there is almost always fetishization of the sexually submissive half of the pair.

There's a theme here; and that's a focus on male vulnerability, male uncertainty.

Even in D/s types of scenarios, with the woman as bottom, this will carry through. In fanfic, when one partner (male or female) is dominated sexually by another, the theme of the story is that the domination is being accomplished for the benefit of the submissive character - the top is trying to please the submissive, give the submissive something that he/she needs - which makes the top at least as emotionally vulnerable as the bottom.

(Happy stories, I'm thinking, not Evil!Character stories, which play out a little differently - there, the dominating character is often made vulnerable by his own need to dominate.)

Romance novels, at least the very traditional ones, don't do this. The traditional set-up is to have an uncertain woman and a powerful, aggressive man who dominates both her and the progress relationship. Even if the male character is harboring uncertainty and vulnerability, that aspect of his emotions will remain hidden both from the woman and from the reader until the very end of the story. This is true even in more modern romance novels; today, as compared to romance novels written 20 years ago, the woman character might be older, more sexually experienced, she might have a career, and she might be more competent both in the relationship and professionally, but she's still ultimately the vulnerable half of the pairing, constantly thrown off-balance and intimidated by the sexually aggressive man. In a very traditional romance novel, the man will sexually dominate and the woman will enjoy being dominated, but there's no suggestion that the domination itself is a type of role-play adopted for the purpose of pleasing the woman (or that the need to dominate is itself an expression of the man's vulnerability); instead, it's just presented as the natural order.

Touched By Darkness is very much in the romance novel tradition. The "conductor" of the story is the heroine. The hero is a Sentinel, with this psychic power that she can assist him with. They feel a sexual pull from the first moment they lay eyes on each other; she resists, because she doesn't want to be a part of this magic world, and he pursues, because he wants the psychic help so he can catch bad guys. He is aggressive and arrogant, with no apparent emotional vulnerabilities. She, by contrast, is scared and angry, resisting the sexual pull. He insists they work together, she balks, but he is implacable, ruthless, and, of course, morally right - he's trying to save the world and everything. I haven't gotten very far in the book, but it's obvious that she will eventually have to submit to his superior strength/logic/whatever.

[...]

This is not how it would read if it was fanfic.

If it was fanfic, and if the "conductor" was a woman and the Sentinel was a man, the man - I am reasonably certain - would start out vulnerable. He wouldn't pursue a conductor because it would assist him in catching the bad guy; he would need a conductor because his power would be unmanageable without one. In the novel, it appears that a conductor can help a Sentinel, but a Sentinel is still capable of using a great deal of psychic power even without a conductor. But I have no doubt that if this were fanfic, the Sentinel would find it much more difficult even to function without the assistance of a conductor. The story would then proceed with the woman guiding the man, helping him, and he would in turn become dependent on her for both psychic and emotional support.

Alternatively, fanfic might make the man the conductor and the woman the Sentinel. And if that happened, I would also expect to see a Sentinel who is far more vulnerable than the Sentinel in the actual novel. The difference would be the focus; with a male conductor, I'd also expect the story to focus on the man's vulnerability, but in this scenario, the vulnerability would come from the way he's drawn to her, the way he wants to heal and protect her, the way he must watch her struggle with her painful power, his admiration for her strength, and generally his own pain over her angst. I'd expect to see her want to risk danger to herself to do heroic psychic things, while the man argues with her and tries to get her to be less selfless. In other words, she'd be willing to sacrifice herself to save the world, while the man would be willing to sacrifice the world to save her.

This would be entirely unlike the actual novel, where it appears that the man is ready to try to save the world but the woman is having none of it until her own son is put at risk. And it's not like she's being portrayed as attractively or intriguingly cynical (which is another way the fanfic might unfold); she's simply, at bottom, allowing her selfish emotions to rule her choices, which is not something I'd expect to see in fanfic at all.

(Actually, now that I think about it, if fanfic made the woman the Sentinel and the man the conductor, it would read a lot like Ann Maxwell's Firedancer.)

So, no, coffeeandink, it's not fanfic. And for me, that makes it infinitely less enjoyable.

Excerpts from Fan Comments

cathexys: This is wonderful and why I still believe there's such a thing as a slash aesthetic :)

rivkat: I think the paranormal romance subgenre is more likely to have the fanfic aesthetic you describe -- Anita Blake and her knockoffs at least have a lot of the power in their relationships. I totally remember that "distant controlling man who turns out to be distant because he's afraid of his uncontrollable emotions and the woman is easier to control than the emotions" thing from Harlequin reading, though. As I recall, Janice Radway suggests this is still a narrative of female power because of the male breakdown at the end -- he can't live without her; all his external power is for naught when it comes to needing her; etc. But I agree, I want to see that need through the whole story.

giandujakiss:

I think you're right that in slash the idea of male vulnerability as a aspect of sexual attractiveness is almost universal- and there are probably a bunch of reasons for that, including that women who enjoy that gravitate to slash, and the still-dominant cultural prejudice against men who make themselves vulnerable to women.

But - and I admit, it's been a couple of years since I was obsessed with a het pairing - I don't remember seeing much het fic around with a traditional romance novel dynamic, either. I.e, I don't recall seeing much vulnerable, off-balance heroine paired with seemingly invulnerable, aggressive male, either. So I'd say the aesthetic is more prominent in slash than in het, but the difference between a traditional romance novel and het fic is still pretty obvious.

Or, to put it another way, slash is an extreme on a continuum. As rivkat notes, even in the traditional romance, the man ultimately becomes vulnerable, but not until the end of the story. So maybe continuum is the best way to think about it.

Or maybe I just miss a lot of more "traditional" sex role fics because of my choices in fandoms/stories...

ratcreature: I never read any plain romance novels either. As a teenager before I found online slash, I read lesbian mystery novels for my romance story needs (those usually came with added romance, iirc), sometimes just plain lesbian romance, and rarely het mystery novels. Reading online slash actually corrupted me into reading het pairing fanfic as well as slash, when I never used to read m/f romance.

cofax7:

Hmmm, interesting.

I'm not entirely sure I agree on the defining characteristic of fic (versus other genres) being the fetishization of male vulnerability, but I think you definitely have something here. I once got into a long talk with veejane about fic and Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles, and the overt and fetishized emotionality--basically emo-porn--that we find in both.

But I'm also coming from a place where I don't find romance (in the non-genre sense) to be the central element of fanfic. It's certainly dominant, but it's not the only thing going on.

On the other hand, emotional vulnerability? Man, that's definitely a central element in fanfic, no matter what the actual plot of the story is (het, slash, or gen). But it's not solely male vulnerability, either--you see the same techniques used in, say, Xena fic as you do in SPN or SGA.

Interesting...

giandujakiss:

Re Xena, etc - I was wondering about that. I'm not really familiar with the tropes of femmeslash, so I didn't want to comment on it - so that's interesting, if it carries over.

Fanfic generally - maybe as someone who prefers romances my vision is skewed, but I tend to think that romance is pretty central to fanfic. It's not the only thing, certainly, and there is absolutely plenty of gen out there, but it seems to me like a lot of fandom, and stories, and codes and symbols we use to identify stories, are built around the expectation of a romance.

You're right, though, that there are gen stories built around vulnerability; although I recall thefouthvine's post about all the "gen" stories in various fandoms that wanted to be slash but couldn't quite that that leap :-).

I'm on a bit of a stream of consciousness here, so maybe this is wrong, but I feel like emotional vulnerability is only part of it. It's not just vulnerability - it's also a certain need the characters have for each other - and I can't help but feel that there's an eroticization aspect, as well. It's not just about making characters vulnerable; it's finding something sexy in that.

And though this may be true of femme slash, it is important to note that there is a lot less femme slash in the world than het and slash - which suggests to me that fans (perhaps because they are mostly women and, I assume, mostly heterosexual) eroticize male vulnerability in particular.

cofax7:

which suggests to me that fans (perhaps because they are mostly women and, I assume, mostly heterosexual) eroticize male vulnerability in particular.

Oh, I wouldn't disagree with that, necessarily. But ... hmm. Part of my issue is that I don't come out of slash fandom: I started as a gen and hetshipper in X-Files, and my primary interest has usually been in the characters rather than the pairings.

So I see the fascination with emotional vulnerability not as something that's necessarily eroticized. I mean, yeah, a lot of the time it is, but as we've been told repeatedly, even slash-heavy fandoms like SPN have a lot of gen written for them. (At last count, wasn't gen neck-and-neck with Sam/Dean?)

As a result I see the eroticization if male vulnerability as one of the ways fic gets all emo with the characters, but not the defining characteristic of fic, because there's lots of fic that doesn't go there and yet is still fic. I mean, I'm not going to argue that Her Tracks Are on the Land isn't fic, and you'd have to dig pretty deep to see any eroticized male vulnerability in it. *g*

Which is not to say that it's not there, often, and there's a lot of gen fic that emphasizes male vulnerability without putting it into a sexual context--I'd point to a lot of SPN gen for that, including a lot of pre-series stuff. I mean, really: Dean Winchester is tailor-made for an examination of male emotional vulnerability. Heh.

hmpf:

Part of my issue is that I don't come out of slash fandom: I started as a gen and hetshipper in X-Files, and my primary interest has usually been in the characters rather than the pairings.

My background is not dissimilar. My first fandom was Highlander, not X-Files, and I never was into het, but I definitely didn't start out in slash fandom, nor ever really entered slash fandom. I'm a gen fan, specifically, an angst fan, and I, too, am primarily into characters, not pairings. In fact, I usually tend to focus on just one character, and while I don't mind reading said character in pairings and will occasionally grow somewhat fond of certain pairings, I'm not particularly interested in the relationship and sex aspects.

However:

So I see the fascination with emotional vulnerability not as something that's necessarily eroticized.

This is where I sort of disagree. Because to me, as a gen reader and gen writer (and specifically, as an angst reader and angst writer) - gen is definitely eroticised; very nearly every piece of fanfic is. Because in my experience, nearly everything in fandom carries an erotic charge, and the difference between sexual explicit fic and gen is just that people are turned on by different things. I am genuinely not turned on by descriptions of sex. I *am* genuinely turned on by descriptions of certain kinds of - on the surface totally gen - angst. Angsty gen - is my porn. Just because it doesn't on the surface *look* like it's about something erotic doesn't mean that it *isn't*. And the thing in it that is so damn sexy is the vulnerability - along with a bundle of related psychological things, I should add. Meta on that forthcoming... sometime soon. In my LJ. And possibly on metafandom, if I decide to pimp it to it. *g*

Of course I'm generalising a bit here; there may be people who write or read gen without any erotic 'subtext' or feelings. But since a lot of gen seems to hit certain 'kink buttons' of mine remarkably well I suspect that someone aimed for those.

veejane:

I'll concur that while romance is a big thing in fic, it doesn't dominate that much. And surely you've had one of those conversations about a really great plotty story... that comes to a screeching halt for a long and unnecessary sex scene.

I'm dredging up memories of the conversation cofax7 references, and what it came down to, for me, was the self-justifying attitude about suffering held by the author. I hated the first Lymond book because the author conspired to make him suffer beautifully, without doing the build-work that made his suffering meaningful to me. The author appeared just to assume that suffering -- vulnerability -- was an end unto itself, and somebody who suffered was blessed thereby and deserved my respect. I just wanted to kick Lymond in the soft parts, and the author's framing of his suffering just made me hate him more. The way I feel about a fair portion of character-torture fanfic, actually.

So, if there's a "fanfic aesthetic," it certainly crosses into books. In which case I'd say it's a bit of a misnomer. (Still an aesthetic in contrast to romance novels; I think you're onto something. Just -- fanfic didn't invent this wheel.)

As the misogyny_fairy could tell you, the vast majority of fannish BSOs are male; BSOs are the ones who are most often made to suffer beautifully; ipso facto and considerably more Latin, yes: male vulnerability is much more common currency than any other kind. But I think it's as much if not more about the vulnerability as about the maleness.

giandujakiss:

Well, I'm thinking about all of this on the fly, so my opinions sort of change and I don't want to overstate what I'm saying but I don't want to water it down to the point of banality, because I think there's something there...

I agree that fandom is not all romance (lots of stories come to halts over sex scenes, but that can happen in romances, too; sex is not plot, and I like plots - romance can be plot. Whatever). But I also think that fandom is to a large extent organized around romantic pairings; that's not all fandom is, not all it can be, not all it should be, but it is an important organizing principle.

I definitely agree the aesthetic crosses into books. I tend to think of fandom as a subset of women's aesthetics, and so I guess my implicit feeling was that this aesthetic was also tied to the female audience. It is, of course, opposite to the traditional romance novel, which would appear to undercut that theory - but I wonder whether that's because traditional novels are controlled by corporate decisionmakers who are not responding as fully as they could be to their audience desires, especially modern audiences. One thing I have noticed - back in the day when I read romances as voraciously as, well, I read fanfic now - there have been changes over time. In the older romances, you never saw inside the hero's head; everything was from the female POV, and so the hero's vulnerability was not revealed until he confessed all at the end of the story. More modern romances, even if they stick to the general formula, do give you the hero's point of view, often extensively, and you do get hints about how he feels about the heroine along the way. So that may be evidence of a responsiveness to female aesthetics that wasn't there before?

I'm just throwing it out there. And yes, I agree it's about maleness because the audience is, I assume, heterosexual; what it comes down to is that vulnerability is hot, and vulnerability in the object of our desire is hot. Or something.

veejane:

But I also think that fandom is to a large extent organized around romantic pairings

Only if absence of a pairing counts as a pairing. Seriously, the mountains and mountains of stories about the Winchesters as young children? It's got its own annoying/cutesy name ("weechesters"), but it's not pairing-oriented.

I wonder if it's a fame issue: pairing-exclusivity is often loudly proclaimed, and the ideology of it can become the basis for (or end of) friendships; people who don't subscribe to a single pairing (or, indeed, to any) just don't shout as loudly, because they're not invested in a One True Way.

So, the artifacts of fandom being organized around pairings might more fairly be said to be artifacts of decreasing the rate of hissyfits. ...she said, only a little bitterly.

I tend to think of fandom as a subset of women's aesthetics

I think you're going to have to lay some groundwork for such an assertion: describe which culture of women you're talking about from the start. It's possible that the romance crowd and the fanfic crowd are just different (slightly-overlapping) crowds, both of them majority-female, so that makes them both part of "women's aesthetics," no?

I don't think you mean to imply that there's some kind of inborn female aesthetic; but I also think it would be a mistake to fall into terms of gendered generalization. Unless you literally mean to posit different populations of women with different concepts of femininity/masculinity -- I'm not sure I would contrast them by age, but there is some metric of social openness or heterodoxy or culture by which I would contrast them. In which case, despite disagreeing with you on many particulars, I kinda agree with you overall.

tejas:

First off, slash and gen writer and reader, just to provide perspective. :-) Oh, and straight woman gettin' way too close to 50, but not nearly close enough to my pension. :-)

I have always detested romance novels. I've tried, with VERY limited success over the years to wade through the ones my friends would foist off on me saying, "oh, but you'll love *this* one!" - um, no. I think you've hit on why I dislike romances while at the same time will suck down romantic stories about my OTP like a starving kitten with a bowl of milk. I'll ignore the porn side of things (women in sexual situations = boring; men in sexual situations = hot; two men in the same situation = pyroclastic; IMO, of course) because that doesn't seem to be the point here.

There's a level of equality in relationships to be found in slash that's almost impossible to find in het if you're dealing with contemporary American (possibly Western?) characters. Societal expectations, socialization - all that stuff that fills the libraries of feminists everywhere - precludes a het story that begins with equal power unless that's what the story is all about. Suddenly, it's no longer a romance, though, it's a post-modern feminist treatise and as much as I love a cracking good post-modern feminist treatise, that's not what I'm looking for in fiction.

When you focus on same sex couples (I'm assuming it works the same for femslash), any power imbalance is easy to see and far easier to deal with. One's rich, one's poor; one's a major, one's a captain; one's ill, one's healthy; and so on. The imbalances are all surface things. Gender imbalances are so deeply embedded in the culture and in literary tradition it's almost *impossible* to untangle them from the character's basic identity - far too many people can't even seem to *see* them, which is probably why we're still struggling for equal pay and some folks are freaked about a woman running for president.

And I'm ranting again. :-) In short, when we start with same sex couples, we can get right to the story, which may be in part about overcoming societal restrictions - something lots of women (and probably some men, I won't speak for them, I'm sure they can speak for themselves quite well ;-) understand at a gut level.

The Pretty[tm] is just an added bonus. :-)

ladydreamer:

I'm butting in for no reason whatsoever. But I'm lesbian and I've known other lesbians who are into slash, and I think I kind of agree about the eroticization of male vulnerability. Not necessarily turning them into sloppy messes, but you can only see so many stories talking about soft skin and vulnerable necks and focusing on emotion before you notice, and lesbian and bisexual writers do it as well as the straight ones.

The thing is, I've read from other women straight and lesbian that they feel uncomfortable writing femslash because they don't feel right turning the fetishistic eye on themselves. And that's another twist in this whole thing.

I also write mpreg (I know this is a weird turn, roll with it for a sec), and explaining to ANYONE why that's interesting if they aren't into it is almost impossible. And I really couldn't tell you why people like it even though I get people on my flist reading it after professing that they don't like it on principal... but then they pull out lines in particular where the character has expressed physical or emotional vulnerability (while having withstood much before getting to that point) as something they particularly enjoyed... And they talk about how the man I've knocked up NEEDS the other one...

Even in het mpreg (it exists), you get similar treatment (unless it's badfic and then it ends up REALLY bad). And then you wonder if there isn't something about the way masculinity weathers suffering and human interaction requires interdependance that's tickling people's fancy. I think there's definitely something here. It's the best explaination I've got other than maiesiophilia.

stormwreath:

I've read from other women straight and lesbian that they feel uncomfortable writing femslash because they don't feel right turning the fetishistic eye on themselves.

That pretty much fits with my own experience coming from the other direction, as a straight man writing fanfic (one of the few...). Mostly what I write is gen or at most character-based stories with a fade to black, but I decided to take part in a porn challenge mostly as a way of stretching myself. The prospect of writing het was just intimidating: it felt like I'd be exposing too much of myself rather than my views on the characters. Not to mention that as a first-timer smut writer, I was nervous of making some huge mistake in my descriptions of what was happening, which would be especially embarrassing in het fic because I'm supposed to know what I'm talking about. :-) (I know there's also the whole matter of objectification and power imbalances in writing stories about men or about women, but that's an entire other discussion in itself.)

As for the original question: my thought is that what distinguishes the fanfic aesthetic is that it's trying to get to the emotional truth of the characters. Their vulnerability is a big part of that, and so is their sexuality and their relationships with others; so a lot of fic concentrates on those elements. (Plus, as a lot of commenters have already said, these are things that many writers and readers are particularly interested in anyway...). But more generally, I think the reason we're all writing about our favourite characters from other people's stories instead of making up our own is because we want to say "This is how I really see this person. Yes, we're all familiar with them on a surface level; but this is who they truly are at their core - this is what they want, this is why they behave the way they do, and this is how they would act in the particular situation I've decided to put them into this time."

alixtii:

That pretty much fits with my own experience coming from the other direction, as a straight man writing fanfic

Well, I think we have to be even more aware, since we have an entire culture and hundreds of years behind our fetishistic gaze. Of course, that doesn't stop me from reading and writing explicit f/f, but how much meta have I read, written, or been accomplice to in the journey from there to here?

But more generally, I think the reason we're all writing about our favourite characters from other people's stories instead of making up our own is because we want to say "This is how I really see this person. Yes, we're all familiar with them on a surface level; but this is who they truly are at their core - this is what they want, this is why they behave the way they do, and this is how they would act in the particular situation I've decided to put them into this time."

You know, I'm skeptical. The canon characterization is the starting point, of course, but I'm not sure fanfic at all is quintessentially driven by a motivation to stay true to that characterization. Indeed, I think a strong case can be made for the contrary position.

alias sqbr:

Fanfic is fanfic because it is fiction based on a pre-existing work. Fanfic written by someone outside the fanfic subculture that doesn't use any of the tropes (retellings of Robin Hood, for example :)) is still fanfic. In the same way that original stories which are written inside the subculture and use all the tropes are not fanfic, they're original slash or whatever.

I think the post is still a good(*) argument for the story probably not being based on fanfic, since most fanfic is written from inside the subculture. That doesn't mean the author wasn't inspired by/plagiarising from the Sentinel, though. (Haven't seen the show so I can't comment on that)

(*)Well, to me

green grrl:

Oh, thank you! You've just now helped me articulate why there are some slash stories I don't really care for, and they're ones that skew too far into "traditional romance" territory. In Stargate, they're the ones where Jack comes on really, really, really strong to Daniel. He's intent on overwhelming him into bed, while Daniel is resistant but unsure about his resistance. And, yeah, at the very end Daniel has a backbone, and Jack admits he's thrown by the strength of his emotions for Daniel, but too little too late for the way the flavor of most of the fic was previous.

Though the Drugged/Aliens Made Them Do It trope, while apparently similar, works so well, because usually the aggressor is absolutely freaked out and feels horribly guilty for attacking his friend, and it's up to "the victim" to be the emotionally strong partner.

Thanks for the brain food!

your librarian:

Here from metafandom

Just came across this post from another one, and thought this was a very interesting way of attempting to determine the possible origins of a story.

I've sometimes wondered if part of what writers are after in fanfic is to defuse the power of characters by making them vulnerable, and thus more accessible and human to an everyday person (especially given that so much fanfic is written about superpowered, alien, or otherwise extra-skilled characters). Because while I do agree about the male vulnerability issue, I think that this is done just as often with female characters when those characters are the focus of the story. Most fanfic is about men though so they get this treatment more often.

However I think there is commercial fiction that tends to indulge in torture-porn (both physical and emotional) that does the same thing and those characters don't come to the story with the same power that fanfic ones do because they're unknown to the reader at the start. Also I think there's a long human tradition of making superheroes suffer -- if they didn't, what would they have in common with us ordinary folk? So I'm not sure that vulnerability (or suffering) in and of itself is what makes it unique so much as the relish of that vulnerability.

I remember writing about it in this post when I said "with all the talk lately about how one defines fanfic, I’ve yet to see someone point out that over-the-top emotionalism is a central element for a lot of it). Just like physical porn it’s either the sort of thing you can’t look away from or it just squicks you completely. I’ve read people define slash as being emotional porn (het is just the same) but I’d say that doesn’t just come from the focus on a character’s emotional life but on the way that emotions are plumbed in such a shameless, hard-core way. There is no coyness in revealing the emotion, no demure semi-transparent coverings. It’s all out there on display. It’s the whole point of the exercise. That’s why plot is often a very secondary thing in fanfic and what plot does exist follows a lot of standard conventions that you see in one fandom after another. Because it’s all about the money shot."

Or as JM put it in his recent con appearance: "you guys like watching me get humiliated. I decided to suffer as beautifully as I could, with dignity."