I Am Femslash: On Beauty and Being Femslash

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Title:	On Beauty and Being Femslash
Creator:	apparitionism
Date(s):	February 26, 2017
Medium:	Tumblr post
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External Links:	I Am Femslash, Archived version (scroll down)
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On Beauty and Being Femslash is a 2017 essay by apparitionism.

It is part of the I Am Femslash essay series sponsored by Femslash Revolution.

Excerpts

I suspect that many people who create fanworks understand, viscerally, that incitement to replicate. That’s certainly what happened to me: I saw Warehouse 13’s Joanne Kelly, as Myka Bering, interact with Jaime Murray, as H.G. Wells. My eye saw their peculiar, beautiful chemistry, and I… well, I wasn’t moved to draw, because I can’t draw. What I can do—what I do, as my profession, for my living—is write. So that’s what I did.

Not at first, of course. At first, I did what most of us do: I read what was out there already. Fanfiction as such wasn’t new to me; I’m old enough to have lived through lots of it, including Xena and the explosion of internet-based fandom. (I also remember physical fanzines. Printed on paper, sent through the mail. If you do too, come sit by me.) I read as much Bering and Wells fanfiction as I could find, way back when LiveJournal was the hub, back before the good ship “Bering and Wells” had been named by our lovely shippees themselves.

I did read it, but let’s be honest: a lot of the fanfiction out there isn’t great in the sense of literary quality. (A lot of the fanfiction out there isn’t great in the sense of punctuation.) Some of it is very good, but when a fandom is in its ascendance, here in this no-barriers-to-entry online world, it’s difficult to sort the wheat from the chaffy mass of words those enthusiastic fans generate. And in general, due to profession and temperament, I’m a very picky reader. So what drove my own impulse—in general, what drives the impulse—to inhale as much of it as possible? My best, most honest response, which brings us back to beauty, is “desperation.” Because the original text—for me, Warehouse 13—often provides tiny, tiny, far too tiny glimpses of beauty, a keyhole view of the Promised Land, and reading fanfiction is a way of slaking the desperate need to see it. Fanfiction’s very existence stands as proof that other people see it too. And the fan writers I like best are those who work hard, at whatever writing skill level, to enable their readers to see more of it.

The beauty of an AU lies, for me, in its alchemy, the transmutation it works on base elements. AUs perform that alchemy by creating a reaction: taking the base elements and combining them with something else. And the AUs that I find most persuasive are those that intersect the Bering-and-Wells (or, more accurately, Kelly-and-Murray) chemistry with alternate circumstances that I already find, or can be made to believe are, commensurately beautiful. Harmonizingly beautiful. For example, in “The Goblet,” the brilliant mrsdaphnefielding situates Bering and Wells within the Tristan and Iseult myth: an easy reach for commensurate beauty, and oh so convincing. Me, one of my devotions is to cinema history, so in “Studio,” I put our intrepid elementals into 1930s Hollywood, at MGM.