Cry, the Beloved Smarm
| Meta | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Cry, the Beloved Smarm |
| Creator: | Renae |
| Date(s): | March 30, 2000 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | Fanfiction, Smarm, The Sentinel |
| External Links: | Cry, the Beloved Smarm/WebCite |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Cry, the Beloved Smarm is an essay by Renae.
It is part of the Fanfic Symposium series.
Some stories discussed or mentioned:
- Qualifying Exams
- Merry's Domesticity series
- Beach
- The Wall by Kitty
- A Brief, Shining Moment
- One of These Nights
- Absence of Justice
Excerpts
Smarm...where do I begin?It's hard for me to talk about smarm. It's rather like talking about the professor who mentored you, introduced you to the field which became your life and love, nursed you through crises and held your hand through finals, and then later...began to drift into the bottle or some other self-destructive vice; who is now a doddering, ill-tempered, bitter, petty waste of space that everyone - including you - wishes would just go away.
And yet, you remember....
My stories, before TS fandom, skirted the edge of smarm. I knew what I wanted to write because I saw it in other fan stories. But I always shied away, backed off before it could happen. Even my decidedly non-smarmy writing mentor told me I needed something *more*, that I was chickening out...building up to intense emotional scenes and dropping them.
Then came TS, and the Smarm Challenge. It was one of the few that produced large numbers of stories, many of which were really good. (It was also way before challenges got really STUPID.) The rules: Write something that contained "smarm" (then defined merely as physical or verbal expressions of affection) with NO owwies. "Not one bullet, knife, nor razor-sharp edge of a term paper is permitted to mar Our Heroes' flesh. No bruises, no nightmares."
In other words, how to get two men to open up emotionally without the usual (easy) incentives? Simple enough. I was enjoying the challenge, not really thinking about writing anything - I believed myself incapable. Then I read Kitty's "The Wall," a simple and profound story about fear of loss that still embodies to me the very best of what smarm is capable of. It had a strong effect on me - this is what I'd been looking for in fanfic, what I'd been trying (but failing) to put in my own stories.
So I kicked around a few ideas, and wrote "A Brief, Shining Moment," in which I finally broke through my barrier of reluctance and reached inside to hit that well of emotion I'd been toying with in my stories, but never tapped before. I believe the story works, though of course you'll have to decide for yourself if you agree with me.
My story was archived in the Smarm Sanctuary. I was officially a Smarmer.
Then I discovered IRC, and IRC "smarming" - writing smarm stories with other people in a channel. Which was great great fun at first, but (I believe) contributed to the degeneration of smarm as a genre. You see, on IRC, when everyone's trying to top each other emotionally, things accelerate FAR faster than they would in the normal course of story-writing. Evolution of a sub-genre is sped up like that of David McCallum in that old Outer Limits episode; what began as a reasonable person with talent and potential becomes a mishapen, exaggerated parody of its former self.
Smarm evolved. It is not what it was.Smarm began as being: "Physical or verbal expressions of affection in a gen story."
It became: "Intense non-sexual affection."
And then: "Intense, non-sexual affection, expressed physically or verbally in the WAKING presence of the other partner." (Which disqualified one of my favorite onscreen examples of smarm in TS - Blair leaves the loft upset over the death of his friend, Jim asks if he wants company, which Blair thanks him for but declines, and we cut to: Jim asleep on the sofa in front of a TV playing static. Awww! But I was told it wasn't smarm because Blair never saw it or knew about it. Huh?!)
And finally, Smarm has become: "Extreme declarations of love and physical affection up to and including kissing," (which I can buy) "with tongues," (which I can't), "in which the thought of sexual arousal never has the slightest notion of even beginning to speculate about the faintest possibility of crossing the character's minds." There's a definite sense of sex as being sordid, dirty, unnatural - which is a prevalent attitude in our culture, but one that is not remotely true. It's rooted in simplistic "matter is bad, spirit is good" dualism, and is one of the sicknesses we need to work at *curing* in ourselves, not encouraging.
And there we have it. I cannot ally myself with such a movement...yet I can't help thinking about what I remember smarm being. Smarm got me into Netfic. Smarm broke me out of the repressive resistance I had to writing physical affection between characters. I still like smarm - but not this mutated Smarm, this "I am NOT slashy at ALL, in ANY way!" kind of smarm.