Gen fic & emotion (rambling)

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Title:	Gen fic & emotion (rambling)
Creator:	Jane Mailander
Date(s):	May 18, 1997
Medium:	mailing list
Fandom:	multifandom
Topic:
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Gen fic & emotion (rambling) is a 1997 essay by Jane Mailander.

It was posted to Venice Place Mailing List in response to a fan who felt that gen fic writers wrote with less passion and emotion than slash wrtiers.

Some Topics Discussed

• emotion in writing
• censors
• Starsky & Hutch, Xena, Quantum Leap, Star Trek: TOS
• double standards
• male intimacy

From the Essay

I truly think it's fear. So many gen writers and editors are so fearful of even being mistaken for slash that they carefully remove ALL emotional underpinnings from their fiction. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy; bland gen makes frustrated readers/writers/editors turn to slash simply to get that emotional high they've been craving and that's missing like a particular vital mineral in food. Which creates more of an association (emotion = slash), which drives fearful readers/writers/editors further from emotional stuff, which drives frustrated readers/writers/editors further into the arms of slash...

And in a lot of bad gen there's usually a gratuitous scene of one or both of them chasing a skirt or making loud comments about dating women. Reminds me of those tacked-on endings to STARSKY & HUTCH where, after a full hour of hugging and holding and crying with each other, the two guys are dating two bland and interchangeable bimboes (fooling nobody but the censors and the wilfully blind).

It's like all the buddy stuff we remember from the 60's that they don't dare do now, for fear of being mistaken for gay. You read that post about the SENTINEL (a show I don't watch), where the network censors, who didn't mind shootings and explosions and fist-fights, drew the line at the two male protagonists hugging each other. Imagine what a cow the censors today would have over a typical episode of STARSKY & HUTCH! (Or STAR TREK: "Okay, Spock can cut Kirk with that nasty weapon, he can strangle him -- but cut out that scene when he swings Kirk around and smiles at him.")

Thank God, the openly-lesbian producer of XENA goes out of her way to insert subtext into the episodes -- Xena and Gabrielle hugging and kissing each other, bathing together and the like -- so it can be interpreted either as two friends who love each other, or two lovers who love each other. And the actresses are being exceptionally cool about it. (I think it's neat that GUYS are now speculating about Xena and Gabrielle the way we've wondered about all the male pairs. NOW they Get It! Because there's finally a female pair on TV that's heroic enough and well-written enough for anyone.)

[...]

This reminds me of the bad old days of Quantum Leap fandom (when you couldn't MENTION the "s" word without getting flogged); I'd written a gut-wrenching story in a gen QL zine (the only kind they had at the time), and a fan at the next Mediawest told me that she'd cried so hard she'd gotten a migraine and had to take a day off work because of my story! Then she asked...very, very timidly...afraid of my reaction...if I ever...read?...slash? I said "Hon, I WRITE slash! My first QL story EVER was a slash story!" But she'd KNOWN that I'd learned to plumb those emotional depths from writing slash! That story, "Last Leap," was nominated for a Fan Q.

Fan Comments

Jane Mailander brought up a very interesting point about gen fic & lack of strong emotion; it was great to have someone finally put a finger on just what it is about most genfic that I have trouble with. In X-Files fanfic, I've found myself gravitating toward the truly angsty stuff (most of it h/c), just to get a "fix" of the level of emotion I see in the best episodes of the show (most of the stuff on the MulderTorture page does this just splendidly!) & I hadn't realized just what I was missing in most Due South genfic: most of it is terribly clever and some of it is beautifully written (AC Chapin's stuff comes to mind); but I often find myself thinking, "This Ray would never have gone to warn Fraser in the pilot" or "This Fraser could never have fallen in love with Victoria." The friendship isn't there; the passion that lies at the heart of Fraser's soul isn't there, either. I'm never quite sure if this is a function of genfic in general, or of the fact that most fanfic writers are just learning their craft.

Now I wonder if it's just that a lot of gen writers can't really handle the emotions, since the most memorable gen stuff seems connected with slash...