Citizens Against Bad Slash Interview with BT

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Citizens Against Bad Slash Interview with BT
Interviewer:
Interviewee:	BT
Date(s):	August 2, 2001
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	Eroica, slash, Manga
External Links:	interview is here, Archived version
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Citizens Against Bad Slash Interview with BT was posted in 2001.

It is part of a series of interviews posted to Citizens Against Bad Slash in which fans were each asked the same ten questions.

Some Excerpts

One turn-off is cliched description or a cliched plot set-up in the first scene. Another is a first couple of paragraphs that flat-footedly explain everything about the universe and character background. It should eventually be clear that Major Eberbach is a German working for NATO Intelligence pursued romantically by an English art thief called Eroica who is also an earl -- but not all in the first sentence.

Confusion of "lay" and "lie" is so common that I despair of seeing it improve across the board -- but a despairing state of mind doesn't help me appreciate a story that mixes them up. Much the same for "its" and "it's," and similar mistakes. Look at this this way, Aspiring Writer: The readers who don't know the difference between these forms won't mind if you use them right, and the readers who do, mind a lot if you use them wrong.

Obviously well-researched background always impresses me. So does dialogue or narration that's strongly in character. In Eroica manga the original wording is in Japanese. The characters' phrasing and style isn't set in English, so a strong fanfic characterization has to make sense of their actions and create a verbal style that is believable for the manga-page adventurers. I like feeling that I can recognize the characters at the end of the story as the same characters introduced at the beginning of the story, allowing for story events.

Study a little Japanese. Reading the whole manga in the original is quite ambitious, as it's idiomatic and topical; but knowing something of how the language works -- what the proper names look like, what forms are insulting or polite -- opens up information that is ambiguous at best in translations. (If you get interested in other manga or anime, this will pay off very quickly. Just being able to pick your title out of a list of ideograms cuts down the search time at the video store or bookstore or website.) Also, read something about NATO and modern Europe, and then contrast it with the information given and implied about NATO, Germany, Britain, and Europe in the manga stories. Aoike Yasuko, the artist and writer, is careful about many factual details, but she is also systematically creating a spies-and-robbers fantasy in which some normal aspects of reality just don't operate. Some of these are crucial to the plots: for instance, Interpol has pictures of Eroica and publishes them widely. The Earl of Gloria is a well-known socialite. Nobody ever connects the two. Fanwriting needn't always copy the source's style of fiction exactly, but if that's a goal, the story should be a fantasy in the same way the manga is.

Eroica fandom (in English) has always been small, and few new stories were being written for quite a while. As of the last two years or so there are more fans writing it again, producing, quite frankly, a wider range of both good and bad stories than ever before. I'm stunned at the emotional insight of the best of them, and equally stunned at the complete triviality some show.