I can't decide if this is meta or a rant...
| Meta | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Creating I can't decide if this is meta or a rant... |
| Creator: | lyssie |
| Date(s): | 2010-11-19 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | Femslash, Fanfiction |
| External Links: | I can't decide if this is meta or a rant...: girlwank, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Creating I can't decide if this is meta or a rant... is a 2010 Livejournal post by lyssie on how fans interact with femslash fanfiction.
Post
I've been seeing this... I don't know if I'd call it a trend, but perhaps it is one? But, basically, there's been comments in fandom_secrets and other places that generally boil down to:No one writes the femslash I want to read.
Which is all well and good, but--look. What does that even mean?
Is it your fandom? Your pairing? The type of fic? Are you looking for curtains and fpreg and gun battles and existentialist arguments about the meaning of life when you have multiple bodies?
I don't know, because rarely do the people making the complaints bother to explain.
At one point, in f!s, I offered up femslash_today for femslashy goodness, and got the response that it would be interesting, if it listed more than the same 20 fandoms every day. (today was 21, for the record, and some days it's more and some days it's less. fs_today doesn't pick and choose fandoms, if you know one being missed that produces? Go tell them about it)
Look. I'm aware that femslashers don't comprise much of the general fan fic writer population. Some of us are specialized, some of us aren't. All of us are a drop in the bucket, compared to het or boyslash fandom, and have a tendency to write what people say they're interested in. (as well as latching onto shows for the femslash potential: Legend of the Seeker, Rizzoli and Isles, Lost Girl, Grey's Anatomy... Well, and just having pairings that speak to us, as some femslashers are mono-shippers. WHICH IS OK.)
And, yeah, we also go where the feedback is. It's only human nature to enjoy being appreciated for hard work.
(I'm using 'we' in the broad sense, and would note that not everyone is in it for the feedback. HOWEVER, as I've always said, we might write for ourselves, but we totally post for the feedback--ok, and also so that people can't say "But no on writes [insert fandom] femslash *whine*")
So. What do people want from their femslash? What are things you see that you'd like to see more of?
Do you feedback? (Because it really IS a factor to consider: if writers aren't feeling like anyone's reading, they're going to move on. For myself, I don't give as much feedback as I should, I frequently just bloody fail at it. But I'm also a writer that posts to get that feedback, so, yes, I'm as hypocritical as the next person)
And, writers, does a lack of feedback move you on from writing a pairing/canon? (am I wrong for even thinking there's a correlation?)
Do you tend to go for what you know will get interest/feedback over what doesn't? (I don't think there's a hard and fast rule for writing what you want/posting what will get more feedback)
Do people happily discussing a new show draw you into the fandom/femslash pairing?
Do you ship things for canons you've never seen?
I had a thought while I was typing this up, and it's that femslash is a little like a rare pairing: in any given fandom (Xena being the exception, obvsly; and there are probably others: Devil Wears Prada? Wicked?), it's not going to be the Big Draw. Less people will discuss it/glee about it/write about it. So it's harder to find fic or meta or what-have-you. But even so, if there's such a demand for it, why isn't there a corresponding rise in feedback and encouragement?
To everyone: what would you do to interest someone in that rare pairing you want to see?
Digressing for an instant, things like this?:
Over at passion_perfect, Ralst asked about everyone's Unconventional or Unheard of pairings.
And then, too, Femslash Fanart is also having a rare pairings challenge.
See, I have this theory: that most femslash writers (in a general sense) want to write about girls being gay together, and will invest in a fandom if there's a reason for it. If there's a following, or an inkling that there will be a following--
What I'm trying to say is:
Most people who write femslash probably aren't writing in your fandoms because no one has said "Hey, this fandom has some awesome women in it who are all gay together." or "There is one woman in my fandom, but she could be so gay with women from other fandoms or OCs." or something to that effect.
So. Y'know. Say it. TELL US WHAT FANDOMS NEED MORE FEMSLASH. Encourage us. Feedback us. Glee about us. Talk about the shows.
But stop expecting us to be bloody telepathic and just know what pairings and fic you want written.
(generic 'you')
Comments at the Post
Honestly? My 100% honest, not nice at all opinion is that people think saying that is a nice way to make it LOOK like you'd be interested in fic about women, if only those darn femslashers would just read your mind and write what the commenter wanted.Because it's a lot easier to say "no one writes the femslash I like" than to go out there, find the femslashers, engage with them, and find out what kind of femslash is out there and being written.
Because do you know what's out there? It's all kinds of femslash, all kinds of pairings and kinks and genres, and there's no "one true way" to femslash. There are too many of us (even if we're still in the minority of fandom) for that.
So if someone says that the femslashers aren't writing what they want to see, I call either laziness or shenanigans.
So if someone says that the femslashers aren't writing what they want to see, I call either laziness or shenanigans.*raises hand*
I call it monoshipping, personally. I get that there are all kinds of femslash stories, all pairings and kinks. That's cool. But when I am reading or writing femslash (or het, or slash, because I tend to monoship characters) I am looking for a particular pairing, and unless I am in a femslash-heavy fandom, there's not going to be much volume for that pairing. If I'm one of three people writing the pairing in my fandom, and I don't like the writing style of the other two (ex: in JLU fandom, I 'shipped Wonder Woman with Princess Audrey -- the only person who wrote them regularly was a guy) then I just ran out of things to read. I don't go complaining to fandom secrets or in my LJ that the femslashers are not providing me with content; it's not the job of femslash writers to cater to my particular desires. But it does mean that when the question comes up, I'm in the "No one is writing what I want to read" camp. Engaging regular femslash writers to ask what they're writing doesn't help if they're not in my fandom writing the characters I want to read about, or if the very few who are write it in such a fashion that I hit the Back button three paragraphs in. I don't think writers should change their writing style to suit my preferences, either. (Again, this also goes for het and slash. If I 'ship an unpopular pairing, it's hard to find 'fics, and if the one or two people writing it aren't doing so well, it's unlikely I'm going to finish the story or feedback it.) And if there's so little being written, and the little that I've seen isn't written the way I think it should be, then unless I 'ship the pairing really hard (and sometimes I do) I'm not going to go combing archives and comms for more. The effort to reward ratio isn't worth it unless I *really* 'ship it hard.
I don't know that there's a good solution to this. Again, I wouldn't dictate what people should write to appeal to an audience of me, unless it's a fic exchange. I'm not going to start reading femslash in fandoms I don't care about just to read femslash. Honestly? The closest thing I can think of is not pan-fandom femslash fests (although those are nice) but specific fandom fests and exchanges. More focus means people getting what they say they want, and it means the writers get rewarded with more feedback.
Anyway, that's where I'm coming from when I say no one is writing what I want to read. It's not always bullshit.
[jlh]:
Well, first, people are always complaining on f!s that no one writes what they want to read. It's a whole thing.I'm hoping I'm not just repeating stuff you've already argued against, but I think that one of the things that's surprised me as I've followed f_t and gotten closer to the femslash fandom is how much it follows similar patterns to the mega-mediaboyslash fandom, which I wouldn't have expected. I think from the far outside--the unaware outside--people think there are just a few femslashers in each fandom writing whatever pairing strikes their fancy, rather than what it looks like to me from the near outside--the observing outside--that it's just as much of a way of being in fandom as being a committed boyslasher is.
A year ago, I wouldn't have expected the drift toward only a few fandoms, or within those fandoms to only a few ships, or the consistency with which the ships/characters that attract femslashers are usually relatively young and traditionally attractive actresses. Then I got a tumblr and saw what people were calling their girlcrushes and it began to make more sense that of course the Glee slashers only want to write some combination of the mostly white, mostly cheerleader characters and not the others.
I guess, to put it another way: To a fan of Community, of course there would be lots of Troy/Abed and Britta/Annie slash. But with what I know of boyslash and femslash fandom, I can see why there isn't. I think that people who talk about how they aren't seeing the pairings they want are far enough from the femslash community to not be familiar with the tropes, etc.
As for the storytelling style, wasn't there some meta a couple of years ago asking why femslash stories so rarely had happy endings, that ended up being about how femslash writers were more reluctant to ditch canon het pairings because it was "unrealistic" I think was the word used. That there wasn't much curtain fic and all of that, and there was some stuff said about how femslash was a cycle or two behind boyslash because it's smaller, so it was writing stories that one might see in the boyslash zines of the late 70s, rather than the 'fuck it, they're gay and having babies and there's no sexual crisis here' that boyslash has recently evolved into. But this entire paragraph is me quoting from memory--I'm pretty sure that meta is on metafandom someplace, if not actually on this very comm.
Anyway that's all to say that I think sometimes people (somewhat naively) think that femslash is just fic about two girls in love, when it has a whole thing it's doing, that isn't like the het or slash sides of the fandom. (Slash can be the same, but there are enough people writing it now to dilute the effect, which used to be much more slash-as-asethetic.)