Femslash and wicked
| Meta | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Femslash and wicked |
| Creator: | pdt-bear |
| Date(s): | Jan 28th, 2006 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | Wicked |
| Topic: | Femslash |
| External Links: | Femslash and wicked |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Femslash and wicked is a meta post by pdt-bear.
It has 100 responses.
Excerpts
So jennyo writes on 'fannish femslashery' here and suddenly there's a Wicked discussion half way through the comments... and I can't resist.*sigh* I'm a slouch for thinking about this... fraughtless, thoughtless, but chuffed about the discussion either way.
So I guess this is one of them 'meta' discussions? Yes.
I also should probably say something about Wicked, but I don't know anything about it. I'll just say that Wicked fandom exists, it's fairly active, and it proves femslashers can be anything any other kind of fannish person is, and so it alone proves that many excuses about f/f don't hold water.
The whole thread that I'm thinking about starts here and I need to organize the thoughts before I go invading the LJ's again... (or whenever).
Anyhow, I'll be cutting/pasting and quoting and referencing the comments as I go.
lfae wrote:The Wicked fandom is kind of divided - because there's a book and a musical. I admit to being a book snob who's going to look down on musical-canon fic which is, on the whole, fluff. And then of course there's musical snobs who think the book stuff is too dark and unhappy. And then there's those who try and 'lighten up' the book...
And then with that, there's the slashers and the anti-slashers - of course MOST of Wicked fanfic is femslash, but there's a small percent of people who just won't read that. At all. So then you get a tiny group of people writing het, and practically no one WILL read that. I'm a writer of both and plotless, boring f/f gets you far more comments than plotty, clever m/f.
Which is so true... And what's more interesting, you can see the tendrils (or buckets?) of 'femslashiness' within the musical canon; the whole effort to make the play about female friendship and so forth... seems to have smacked of 'trying too hard' and given how we've seen the original characterizations... *shrug*
One could make the argument that femslash is maintexted (or poorly hidden subtext) within the musical, and more subtext within the book... And writing femslash based on subtext is always more of a challenge, but I think, ultimately, more rewarding, for naught less than the fact that you've got a relatively wide scope for imagination to work through the ideas.
Comments
[miduhyo]: I sort of have to disagree a little, although I definitely agree with you in regards to Elphaba. Bookverse, she goes through an awful lot of growth, while there is virtually no growth in the musical (owing mostly to the fact that she's basically a paragon of virtue to start out with, and at the end she still is -- essentially, no matter how wicked she thinks she's molding herself into with her "no good deed goes unpunished" rhapsodizing). But Glinda, I think, makes remarkable change in the book as well, while musical!Glinda's growth is superficial verging on exoteric.I mean, yes, she becomes Glinda the Good and has to present herself to the public, but I don't know if she grows. By Act II she's quite obviously changed, but I don't see why Shiz-Galinda couldn't just as easily be Glinda the Good. She's really at odds with nothing, except she's going to miss her best friend (who is totally alive and junk) and that boy she liked so doesn't like her back.
While book!Glinda is... I mean, here's my biggest problem with the Galinda-to-Glinda changeover in musicalverse: she does it for Fiyero. It's a big deal in the book, it's a sign that she's becoming someone a bit different, a bit more like the Glinda we know from the Oz books and the movie, and it was a change she made for herself as a conscious decision to improve. (As an aside, if I were inclined to read musicalverse fic -- which I'm not in the habit of doing -- I'd be able to buy Galinda/Elphaba because it isn't much different from Glinda/Elphaba. But Galinda/Elphaba bookfic where she's still calling herself Galinda is sort of not the same pairing as book!Glinda/Elphaba.) In the musical, it's a snap decision which (despite it hopefully resonating more importantly with her later) she really does to impress Fiyero.
And I think we see a much better element of keeping up appearances in the book. We get the idea that her... I don't know, time away from Elphaba has turned her back into a blank slate (Elphaba's thought that Glinda's ugly skill at snobbery had returned in her middle years), which I actually readily believed (because Glinda the Good in the Oz books, despite being my favorite character ever, always seemed to me to alternate between mischievous cleverness and incredible dimness) until SoaW where her interactions with Liir pretty much confirmed for me that Glinda was a lot brighter than even I had given her credit for -- balancing this "socialite for a queen"/"glamorous figurehead" persona with The College Girl Who Has Just Begun To Think persona.
[jaybee65]:Following the conversation over both from jennyo's journal and from [femslash_today]]...Wicked meta utterly fascinates me, not just because the source material is *so* rich for analysis (as everyone's comments here demonstrate!), but also because we're dealing, in essence, with AUs springing out of other AUs, each one related to, but quite different creatures from, the "canon" source. The L. Frank Baum books; the 1939 movie; Gregory Maguire's books; the Wicked musical: each one stands independently and has to be judged on its own merits, and yet they still reflect each other in a variety of ways. I haven't come across any other fandom quite like this.
Until now, however, I hadn't stumbled across anyone else wanting to pick apart the meta, though -- obviously I was looking in the wrong places!