An outsider's view

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Title:	An outsider's view
Creator:	Kaki
Date(s):	Jun 20, 2001
Medium:	Usenet
Fandom:	Star Trek: TOS
Topic:
External Links:	\An outsider's view; archive link
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An outsider's view is a 2001 Usenet post by Kaki.

The post starts off as a critique of some parody drabbles with a topic of incest which were written by a fan using the pseud Ascem Noone.

Some Topics Discussed

• what we read is not who we are, enjoying fics with distasteful topics such as rape and torture does not mean we condone either topic nor want it to happen to us or anyone else
• was the pseud, Ascem Noone, a political statement, was there a message in its choice, how does this related to feedback and criticism dynamics and community norms on ASCEM?
• the differences between the motivations and types of two kinds of fanfic writers: the Social Writers and the Craft Writers
• Happy Happy Joy Joy (HHJJ) and First Time Happy Ending (FTHE) stories
• print zine culture is timid and predictable, the writers and content don't have a sense of humor; ASCEM is better and more advanced
• [Judith Gran's]] residual grumpiness over the the reception in print zines of A Deltan Decameron and Beside the Wells
• different communities digging in and defending their turf

From the Post

One thing that strikes me as funny/strange here is that if this drabble had been posted separately from (before or months off) or without the header material that made it clear that it was written in response to the 2 stories, that the drabble probably would have gotten a few laugh and set off a discussion of the issue of incest and maybe of the purpose of parody/satire in fan fic. Most of the responses to it have been based on its use as a response to the stories, not to its content per se.

[...]

There are a number of issues that have been minimalized over the years in fanfic (and in many other places). I don't think the original authors did that; if the stories had been longer pieces and no further justification had been made, I might have thought so. But, for me, in fandom, especially in zine fandom, I've been badly squicked by the number of A/U stories where Kirk is raped/enslaved by Ancient!Vulcan!Warrior!Spock and then falls in love with him. I consider those stories worthy of comment and discussion. I'm also very pleased to have read Jess's Beside The Wells that is a response to those stories. However, I never took those stories to mean that the author would personally want to be raped and would fall in love. Or for that matter to mean that the author and people who enjoyed the stories would recommend rape and pillage as a good start to a relationship.

I think I am rambling now. I do enjoy fandom and the opportunity to discuss a broad range of concepts and viewpoints.

Fan Comments

Miss Sunbeam:

Treksmut is an interpretation, and any reaction -- positive or negative -- to a sexual act is an interpretation. The owner of the drabble said, in essence, that these two innocuous stories were immoral, and your implication is that *we* are immoral for enjoying the stories. Someone who anonymously sends a post saying what we do here is immoral is mighty like a troll.

grrrroooovius . . .

Mary Ellen Curtin:

I spend a fair bit of time e-talking with people who are fans of amateur Japanese m/m manga, known as yaoi. As one of them has said, "In yaoi, rape is a great ice-breaker."

What I believe they would say to your question is, "Can't you tell the difference between fantasy and reality? This is a fantasy, this is not about what might be 'good' in real life." As I understand it, for them one of the attractions -- one of the turn-ons -- of this scenario is that it is *not* realistic, it's free of that messy business where you have to take account of the consequences of your actions. It has the true flavor of "let's pretend".

It's like, oh, for instance, the fight sequences in "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon." I like my fight sequences as realistic as possible, with a real sense of the stress they put on a human body and mind, so I didn't care much for the CTHD fights. But if you prefer a vivid sense of magic and dreamlike power, of transcending the grip of gravity and other mundane constraints, they're superb.

The higher-fantasy-quotient people I know get really annoyed when higher-realism-quotient people tell them, "you shouldn't fantasize about X or Y (rape, incest, snuffing, etc) that is evil in reality." The fantasists say, "you've got no business telling me what I'm allowed to

imagine -- at least *I* can tell the difference between fantasy and reality."

Judith Gran:

I can't speak for Mary Ellen, but I know that I, for one, would never have posted such feedback before Ascem Noone's post. Why not? Last winter, during another discussion, I vowed that I would stop posting feedback of the "neat story, hot sex!" variety in favor of more substantive comments and constructive criticism. Unfortunately, I soon fell back into the old ways. Life is too short and fandom too precious to risk becoming the object of group attack.

[...]

Concerning Ascem Noone and the satirical drabble xe posted, I agree wholeheartedly with Jane/jat_sapphire when she suggested that the Ascem Noone by-line is an inescapable part of the poster's message.

I wonder if some of the outrage expressed in reaction to Ascem Noone's post wasn't, in fact, a sort of resistance to this message. I also wonder whether the intense curiosity and speculation about Ascem Noone's identity was driven at least in part by a desire to pigeonhole hir within the known political factions and alliances of this NG.

[...]

I agree, and I also think something similar would have happened had "Noone" used an identity that is familiar to us on ASCEM. At times in this discussion I had the uncomfortable feeling that perhaps some participants in the discussion felt almost unfairly deprived of a target for group flaming. I hope I misread those posts.

While I don't agree with everything Ascem Noone wrote about the summer incest stories, I think that to the extent hir post freed discussion of the stories from "personalities, cliques and history," xe did us a service. If I had tried to write constructive criticism of the stories when they first appeared, I might have written something very like Mary Ellen's feedback. I nodded my head a lot when I read her comments. I don't object at all to stories that present incest in a positive context ("The Left Hand of Darkness" is one of my all-time favorite novels in any genre), nor do I think that every story posted to the newsgroup needs to be deep, complex and meaningful. But I didn't feel that either story really engaged the theme or the characters. Just my personal reaction, of course.

I think it is very difficult in fan fiction communities to separate aesthetics from personal relationships. It's terribly easy and tempting to use relationships and group pressure to advance a particular aesthetic preference. Because I'm not as fond, personally, of the romantic, happy-ending-and-hot-sex variety of fan fic as I am of other types of stories, I've tended to notice when (in my opinion) personal influence, backslapping and group dynamics of varying degrees of coerciveness have been used to promote that particular type of story. Also in my opinion, that has happened primarily in print fandom. However, that's a long discussion and far beyond the scope of this post. My only point here is that the summer incest stories strike me as good examples of the way the "romantic story with happy ending" format can be used to conventionalize and domesticate (and perhaps, to use Ascem Noone's term, to trivialize) the most radical theme. And I think it should be possible to have a critical discussion of that phenomenon without being flamed.

Yours in hope of more honest critical discussion in the newsgroup.

Mary Ellen Curtin:

This issue has been recently under discussion on Fanthropology, a list on www.topica.com. People there have been developing a very useful distinction between Social Writing and Craft Writing (and between Social Critics and Craft Critics), though we all agree that it's really a continuum and that everyone writes for mixed motives.

Basically, Social Writers write (and feedback) as a way of giving & receiving love and other social benefits, such as prestige. Craft Writers write because they are trying to write well. HHJJ (happy- happy-joy-joy) stories and FTHE (first time, happy ending) stories are particularly well-suited to Social Writing, because they make readers feel good (and loved), and that makes writers feel good (and loved). Anything that interferes with this process will be seen as a threat to people who are strongly at the Social Writer end of the continuum, because it disturbs their sense of loving and being loved, and that's a *big* threat, no fooling.

I think, Judith, that your perception of printzinedom as being more Social Writerly is biased by your not getting out of Trek fandom much online. ASCEM is extremely unusual in being toward the Craft Writer end of the spectrum. In many (most?) other online fandoms, zines are seen as more Craft Writerly because they, like, oppress people with *spelling* and *grammar*. On a pseudo-Kinsey scale where pure Social Writing is 10 and pure Craft Writing 0, ASCEM is maybe a 4 and the default for online fandoms is about 7.5 (I'm making these numbers up out of thin air -- does anyone disagree?). Zines would be around 6, and one of the non-Trek mailing lists I'm on is at about 9.5, which is quite an experience.

Though I think everyone here knows I'm strongly toward the Craft Writer end of things myself, I'm not saying Social Writing is a Bad Thing. How could I say that about something so tied up in a sense of loving and being loved? But unless you know something about what you're trying to do and why, you won't be able to understand and accept people who are trying to do something different or for different reasons. Goddess knows I've done at least my fair share

of ignorance-driven toe-mangling, and thinking through the Social/Craft dichotomy has helped me understand why, at least a little.

Judith Gran:

Well, there is no particularly logical reason why HHJJ and FTHE stories should make readers and authors feel loved, unless the readers and authors happen to share that particular aesthetic. On ASCEM, a good BDSM or deathbed-fisting story is just as likely to make readers and authors feel loved. A long, complex 73-part novel crammed with Vulcan sociology and original characters, many of them lawyers, or a hypertext novel with 19 unhappy endings, will make you REALLY loved.

The variable of aesthetic preference is one reason I think this dichotomy is too simple. Another reason is that love is not the only social dynamic that occurs in communities, including those communities that form around fan fic. But that is a long discussion.

[...]

High praise from some members of the group for a type of story that other members of the group dislike will sometimes trigger strong reactions. It can even have a divisive impact in a fan fic community: "You like *that?* What sort of depraved being are you?" To understand that you have to factor in the role of aesthetic preference in maintaining community. At times, fan fic communities remind me of the kids in my son's school who hung out together at recess on different quadrangles, depending on what type of music they liked. (Of course, social background was heavily involved in this, but that too is another topic.)

Personally, I feel that the dichotomy between Craft and Social Writer doesn't really work for me because however much I am attracted by the idea of being a Craft Writer, I have to admit that I am way, way, way at the Social Writer end of the scale. It never would have occurred to me to write fan fic if I hadn't discovered fandom. What little I manage to write, is inspired almost entirely by the pleasure of being part of this community.

I could say this is because I put my Craft energy into my day job, but that's only partly true. I find that I am much more focused on craft in my other current hobby, choral music. Why, I do not know, but there it is. I'm one of the Social beings. I just prefer to socialize around non-HHJJ stories.

Karmen Ghia:

This is an interesting topic because I love being part of this community, but I have also really tried to become a better writer with each story. (And I'm really ornery.) As you will see, if you read this giagantio trilogy I'm posting, _After the Rescue_ was my first story and _Talljet Quartet_ was my last. You can see in ATR that I even got better by the middle of the end, just because I was writing and writing and working with a really great beta, Jane Skazki. Then two years went by, I'm still working with Jane Skazki, and I'm trying hard to consciously, gracefully and efficiently create, really create so you taste, smell and feel 'em, original characters, places and things in TQ.

I wouldn't say I was a crowd pleaser, because I'm ornery, but it is nice when someone enjoys a story enough or has enough of a reaction to post feedback.

There is a wonderful sense of accomplishment, almost a renewal, when you write something well. And then later, you write something better. Or revise a paragraph so it's clearer, smoother or more gripping. Or take a risk that pays off because someone reads it and sees a character or situation in a different, maybe deeper, way.

That's what writers do, I think, they create worlds. In our case, we're adding another dimension to an existing concept, but hey, there's no law against original characters or undiscovered planets and new fashion.

A. Kite:

Social and Craft Writing:

I, like so many others write toward the social end of the spectrum. Though, I do know that my abilities to get the ideas that I want to portray across to any readers have definitely improved over the four years I've been writing fanfic. I'm astounded frequently by people asking me to look at their stories and give my opinion. Lord knows, I'm not the best at spelling or grammar, but I do extoll to anyone that will listen the importance of presentation. If your story is full of bad spelling, poor grammar and punctuation, you're going to lose a bunch of your audience from the get-go. Okay, I'm preaching to the choir here on ASCEM, but there are those out there that just don't get it.

Anita, aka A. Kite

Mary Ellen Curtin:

You know there are two types of people, don't you? The type who divide the world into two types of people, and the type who say, "it's not that simple!"<wink>

But while I agree that the Social-Craft distinction is oversimple, I think it is also *useful*.

[...]

I think that with fanfic readers identify with the characters so strongly that stories that make the characters feel loved & happy are more likely to make the readers feel loved & happy, and they are more likely then to feed those feelings back to the writers.

Judith Gran: To me, this is reductionist -- I do agree that readers of fan fic tend to

seek out particular emotional experiences, but I think that feeling "loved and happy" is only one variant. For example, there's an old saying among hurt-comfort fans: "You always hurt the one you love." In TOS h/c fandom, it's the Kirk fans who torture Kirk, the Spock fans who torture Spock, and I'd be surprised if the same pattern doesn't obtain among h/c fans in other fandoms. The protagonists in a h/c story may wind up feeling loved and happy in the end, but there is a big emotional difference between a story in which the characters endure unimaginable pain and suffering as the route to happiness and a story in which the only negative experience is worrying what will happen when one half a slash couple reveals his feelings toward the other half. H/c is an example of a specific aesthetic preference among readers of fan fiction, and so is the kind of story Mary Ellen characterized as "Happy Happy Joy Joy."

Judith Gran:It's only a hypothesis, but I suspect that maybe there is a kind of homology

or "fit" between the preference for romantic, mushy, "happy" fan fic and the preference for mushy, happy feedback. (I'm sorry if the term "mushy" sounds prejorative. As should be clear, this is not my own personal aesthetic preference.) I suspect there's a fit between wanting only sweetness and light for your favorite slash couple and wanting only sweetness and light in fandom. Perhaps, to borrow Alara's term, the meme for "happy" stories propagates among the same hosts as the meme for "happy" feedback.

Now clearly, Judith, the author of "Terminus" is not motivated by such considerations.<g> But I don't think that the problems some readers have had with "Terminus" are really differences of aesthetic, but a difference in emotional needs or tolerances (or something).

I believe that Vanasati (correct me if I'm wrong), for instance, has previously said that said that she can't re-read "Terminus," it just hurts too much. I don't think of this as a different aesthetic, she's said she thinks the story is really good (an aesthetic judgement), but emotionally it doesn't meet her needs. Damn, I'm not saying this well.

Vanasati: Hmm. If I remember "Terminus" right, then, yes, it hurt to read a lot, but I think it left me with a feeling like "DesperateNeedToHaveASequel". It didn't seem to really end where it did, there was still the possibility it could work out.

Vanasati:I said the above sentence about "Bitter Glass" (though this one *does* have a happy ending, but it takes so painfully long to get there, and then it's over so soon) and definitely about "Uneasy Dancers" and "Golden Boy".

Vanasati:Then there is "Ghost in the Machine", which I love very much, I think it's an awsome story and in spite of it *hurts* every time again when I read it, I still wrote a sequel (with permission of Killa of course). Maybe I did that to take *some* of the pain away. I don't know.

Vanasati:The funny thing is, I can admire a story, even if it doesn't meet my emotional needs. If it crabs me and holds me in place until its over, I love it. :-) And I certainly can never forget such a story, and - just to repeat myself again - even if I can't read "Golden Boy" ever again, it was a story that had a powerful impact on me, I still admire it, and adore JK for her writing style.

[...]

I'm not saying that HHJJ stories are *only* at the Social end. But for Social writers, HHJJ stories are more likely to be what works for them.

cimorene also wrote: Also (a separate issue): putting Social and Craft writing at opposite ends of a continuum seems sort of wrong to me, because it implies that when one falls, the other rises.

I'm bothered by this, too. Let me think about it out loud, as it were. I started my story "The Boys of Summer" for almost pure Social Writing reasons: I wanted to give a present of "Kirk wearing shorts" to someone. As I worked on the story, it was mostly a Craft Writing experience, in that I mostly thought about how to make it a better story, but it was partly Social Writing, too, because I was working with betas, showing them drafts, kicking ideas around, etc., and it was a friendly sort of thing. Then when I posted the story, I got to feel both Social Writer goodies (readers saying I made them feel good) and Craft Writer goodies (readers saying they thought the story was well-written).

Now, three years later, the person I was thinking of when I started the story has me kill-filed, some of the people I talked to about the story are closer to me, some are less so. But the story is still there, and my feelings about it have become more "Craft-y" with time.

It reminds me of a scene in the Richard Adams novel, "The Girl in the Swing." The protagonist is thinking about his wife and how they make love, and says something like, sometimes it seemed as though they *made* love, as though they could step back and look at it from the outside as though it were a thing, a work of art, that they had made.

That's how I feel about "The Boys of Summer." It's something I made with and for love, but it's got a value outside of the social relationships I was in when I made it. That the person I originally made it for doesn't like me anymore gives it a slightly bittersweet quality for me, but only slightly -- and then, it's a slightly bittersweet story.

Judith Gran: Ah, we are using the term "aesthetic" quite differently. I'm using it to describe "the kind of story I really love" rather than "a story I think is good." It's perhaps easiest to see the differences between the two in feedback that acknowledges the author's command of hir craft but trashes the story for being the type of story it is. A striking example, for me, was the response among fans of "happy" fan fic to the story "A Deltan Decameron," by Frances Rowes (published in the print zine T'hy'la), which ended happily but was full of symbolism and literary allusions and catered to somewhat sophisticated tastes in other ways.

Mary Ellen Curtin: I am not satisfied with my comments about Social Writers and the prevalence of HHJJ among them, because of the points Cimorene has made and also because I notice a lot of h/c among Social Writer circles, sometimes to the point of quite extreme torturefic. Perhaps it's more accurate to think of Social Writing as (partly) an exchange of emotions: the writer provides a particular emotional experience, and in exchange the readers give the writer a sense of being loved. It may not actually matter what the emotional experience *is*, happy or sad or angsty or whatever, as long as the readers get the one they're looking for.

Judith Gran:

After reading Cimorene's and Mary Ellen's most recent posts on this topic, I found myself nodding my head a lot. At the risk of sounding rigid and behaviorist, I think it is possible to distinguish:

(1) the author's motives for writing, whether it be to give back to the fannish community, to perfect hir craft, or a mix;

(2) the aesthetic, or emotional, experience sought by the community;

(3) the methods used by members of the community to shape and reinforce (see, I said this was going to sound behaviorist) the production of stories that supply the experience community members seek.

I owe many of my thoughts on this topic to a fan-friend who analyzed the Letters of Comment (LoCs) in the letterzines of the day in a print fandom, and concluded that LoCs were, among other things, a vehicle by which community aesthetic standards were communicated to authors. I would add, borrowing Mary Ellen's insight.

[...]

...the LoCs told the authors, "This is the kind of emotional experience we are looking for." But my friend was more interested in the common aesthetic that was being shaped via the LoCs, which xe defined as "romantic, highly attached to descriptive passages, and uninterested in plot and story structure." LoCs would praise stories with those characteristics and ignore or criticize stories without them. LoC-writers also tended to be critical of stories with unhappy endings, without explicit sex scenes or in which the couple was not together at the end. For example, when "Beside the Wells" was published in a print zine, several LoCs acknowledged that the story was well-written but complained that it was "not K/S" because a story isn't K/S if the couple are not together If you looked closely at who was writing the LoCs and the stories they commented upon, it seemed that the authors who wrote romantic, happy ending etc. stories were writing a lot of LoCs praising one another's work.

When I was last involved in print fandom, it seemed to that some fan authors seemed to experience a sense of relief at the freedom from "correct" writing within the fan fiction community. It also seemed that some of the fannish hostility to talk to correct grammar and "literary" criticism arose from a strong sense of the irrelevance of such issues to the basic fannish project, which they said was about giving and receiving emotion. I heard the fear expressed that if fans focused too much on "literary" concerns, that might drive out fan authors' focus on emotions and feelings in their writing. Sometimes a LoC-writer stated explicitly that "we want to read 'good K/S', and we don't care whether it's good literature or not."

[...]

...if you compare the feedback that different kinds of stories received in the K/S print letterzines, as my fan-friend did, you would find that certain types of stories tended to get more gushing feedback, while others received comments such as "This story is well-written, but not what I read K/S for." So even assuming that a laziness factor exists, or a not-wanting-to-be unpleasant factor, the differential is still apparent.

Judith Gran:

My experience in fanfic communities, which admittedly is limited to Star Trek and, in recent years, to ASC* and K/S print fandom, is that the need for happy endings seems to vary widely from one fanfic community to another. In print fandom, there are entire zines whose editors will not publish a story with an unhappy ending. One editor is known to rewrite stories before publication to give them a happy ending. There's much more "dark" fanfic on ASCEML, and it seems more well-received than in print fandom. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine published Special Edition|a print zine collecting K/S fic that had been posted on ASCEML; she prefaced the zine with comment that the fic contained therein was "darker, edgier" than is typical for print fic. The zine contained much-loved classics such as Killa's Cover of Night and JK's "Golden Boy." It was interesting to me that while Golden Boy ran off with a slew of Golden O's the year it was posted, it did not even place in the analogous awards for K/S print fic. To me, all of this suggests the prevalence of different aesthetic values in the two communities. .

Oddly, there also seems to be more humor on ASCEML than in K/S print zines (and IMHO, the humor that does exist in K/S zines these days is usually not very funny, except for the stories by T'Rhys, who also posts on ASCEML). All this is just my opinion, of course. YMMV.

Judith Gran: I didn't mean to suggest that incorrect grammar and punctuation is *widespread* in print zines -- only that I have heard the concern expressed that too much criticism of such errors will discourage or distract fan authors from the desired focus on emotion and feeling. I think most print fan authors, like most net fan authors, are capable of writing grammatical sentences on a reasonably consistent basis. There are exceptions, of course. The finished product varies with both author and editor. And beta-reading is much less common and less rigorous than it is among ASCEM denizens. I think that standards are lower overall in print, but that's just my opinion, and again, it applies only to K/S in printzines.

T'Rhys: Hey, thanks! I've pretty much given up writing for zines though. That community just doesn't seem to like humor.