Our Mixed (And Mixed Up) Feelings About Mag7 Slash (and all those exceptions to the Fucking Rules)
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| Title: | Our Mixed (And Mixed Up) Feelings About Mag7 Slash (and all those exceptions to the Fucking Rules) |
| Creator: | its a group effort by several archivists at |
| Date(s): | 2000s? |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | Magnificent 7 |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | Mixed-up About Mag7 Slash, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Our Mixed (And Mixed Up) Feelings About Mag7 Slash (and all those exceptions to the Fucking Rules) is a group essay by archivists at Death Dogs' Tourist Guide to Magnificent 7 Fan Fiction . [1]
The site is a rec site: "Welcome to the Death Dogs Tourist Guide to Magnificent 7 Fan Fiction aka The Mag7 New Reader Starter Kit. This site contains a selective list of Mag7 fan fic story titles & links drawn from dozens of Mag7 websites."
Excerpts
All of us who put together this site like erotic fiction, including homo-erotic fic. We love shows like Queer as Folk and Sex in the City. None of us are offended by the explicit sexual content of Mag7 fan fic slash. All of us have close relatives or best friends who are gay. For those of us who have objections of one kind or another to slash, the objections are related to characterization, not m/m sex. We figure we'll probably offend people with the apparent arbitrariness of our recommendations in the slash genre, but we have tried to be up front about why we've made the choices we have. Then again, we probably won't offend as many people as we started to because this site, even while under construction, has resulted in readers sending us recommendations for stories in pairings we wouldn't have considered otherwise.
In the Mag7 fandom, our primary interest is in the characters. A story can be a beautifully written work of fiction, but if the characters don't resonate for us, it isn't Mag7 fan fiction. All slash is "alternate reality" in a show in which all the characters were clearly heterosexual men. But then any Mag7 AU is alternate reality. The trick is to work in the alternate reality while keeping the Seven as close as possible to their canon characterization.
Our adult story selections may be influenced by how well we think the sexual pairings, sexual activities, etc. retain the characteristics of the men involved. Some slash pairings often don't work for us, others never do - although some of our walls are crumbling.
[much much snipped about the different slash pairings in Mag7 and whether they were believable, feasible, and/or well-written]
We found ourselves tossing out a lot of stories that were well-written but just seemed off in characterization. We've made our love of canon characterization clear on this site. It's possible to keep them in character whether they're flying spaceships, working for ATF, living as Immortals or Vampires or loving each other. There are lots of good slash stories that keep the men in character and keep their speech patterns intact. Those are the ones we've collected for the site and cross indexed on the character and category pages. We generally don't like the stories in which the men lavish each other with the kinds of cloying endearments that just don't sound right coming from the mouths of these men - even when they're in love. And when they start necking or gropping [sic] in front of the other men - well . . . . So early on we decided - one "sweetie" and that story was out of here. Arbitrary - maybe - probably. But you've been warned.
This is where our website team stands on slash as best we can explain it:
Mojave Moon: I started my fanfic reading in the Star Trek fandom in the printzine days. I loved it and read all the Gen stuff I could get my hands on. After a while I found there were few decent gen stories being written as all the best authors had turned to slash. Like many other slash readers, I took my first steps with Kirk/Spock printzine stories. My favorite character is Chris and although I'm theoretically open to other pairings, my favorites use Chris/Vin. I don't know whether that's because the better writers started with that pairing or because I just think they're a better match. I also still have a fondness for stories that simply show a near-slash bond that doesn't need to spill over into sex.
DarkSkies: I don't have a clue why I like slash. It just strikes a chord with me for some reason. I hate the stories where Chris or Vin have a female lover. Perhaps it's because I resent the time and attention given to an Original Female Character. Slash is a way of deepening the buddy relationship between two male characters without bringing in someone extra. Does any of this make sense? Although Chris/Vin is still my favorite pairing, I'll seek out good stories in any pairing.
Midnight Blue: I came from fandoms which were not dominated or even heavily influenced by slash. And since Buck is my favorite character, I resented slash as too great a deviation from his essential character. Since I like erotic fiction and it was clear this fandom didn't have much to offer by way of het fic, even for Buck, I explored some slash, but generally preferred the Chris/Vin pairing - probably with the "keep your hands off Buck" rationale. (Once I'd read the wonderful Buckeroo by Jody Revenson and the incredible but not explicit All the Reasons Why by Gloria Atwater, I couldn't find anything else worth reading that paired Buck with a woman, jokes about his dating exploits aside.) I love slash that "justifies" a pairing, though I'm pretty tough on what will do that. Camino del Diablo is the only one that truly drew me in and made me utterly accept both the Chris/Buck and Vin/Ezra pairings. Although I don't fully accept the character justification in Joe Lawson's Hunter's Moon AU, I have to admit I enjoyed it because each sexual "event" was true to the "style" of the participants. Maygra's Shadow Riders AU promises to be one of my favorite slash AU's when completed. And perhaps her collaboration with Charlotte Hill in the Skip Trace AU will even top that.
Starke Raven: Ezra is my main man though I truly love all the others. I was resistant to Ezra slash at first because Ezra is often so much "the woman" (especially with Chris) or the stories are so cloying (especially with Vin). It was only natural that the first Ezra slash I took to (after the wonderful Camino del Diablo) was Buck/Ezra as written by Annie, Firefox, Amy and Gwyneth Rhys. That's still my favorite slash pairing for Ezra although I adore him with Vin in NotTasha's gen Amazon series. I was surprised at how much I liked him with Chris in Zeke Black's stories. Her stories keep him fully in character.
TimeTracker: My first favorites in the series were Vin (a carryover from Now & Again which I actually saw prior to getting into Mag7) and Buck (loved him in Time Trax, love him more in Mag7). Then after watching each episode several times, Ezra started to grow on me. If you ask me my favorite character now, I couldn't tell you, though it would be one [probably all] of the three. I strongly resisted all slash but after loving one of SueN's H/C, I did venture into her Vin/Chris slash. I got hooked. Since then I've found other Chris/Vin writers and have been reluctantly drawn into the genre due to the absence of het fic. I still haven't taken to any other pairings except in Diamondback's wonderful Camino del Diablo , Maygra's Shadow Riders. and Maygra & Charlotte Hill's Skip Trace AU. And although Cattraine's hard-edged Dark Angels and somewhat softer, but more humorous Burning Angels have as the central pairing Chris/Vin, her "bending" of the characters let me buy her brief Buck/Chris encounter and the more extended Buck/Raphael pairing. (Raphael from "Love & Honor")
Milagro: I love the whole seven, but am admittedly partial to the Buck-JD relationship. I hate Buck/JD slash (okay, I did like Puerro's Rocky Mountain High and Julia Verinder's Guilty Heart but I don't count those as real slash, just very clever stories). However, in the absence of decent het fic (I did find a few good JD het stories which are included on our list) I read the best Chris/Vin slash fic. And I loved Diamondback's Camino del Diablo and actually felt bad that JD didn't have a slash relationship in that one - it would have been justified.
Outrider: I never cared for slash in other fandoms - Starsky & Hutch, Simon & Simon, Andromeda (unless the slash is a female/male pairing), X-Files (except Scully/Mulder), Alias Smith & Jones, etc. Like the others, I found that many good writers were doing Chris/Vin slash that I made that an exception to my anti-slash preferences. My first encounter with slash that I really "bought" was Diamondback's Camino del Diablo. And once the walls crumbled that much, I latched onto the satirical Dark Angels/Burning Angels because the characters weren't quite our seven, but ever so interesting. Since then I'll have to admit liking selected pairings when the story keeps them very much in character -- much harder with some pairings than with others. [Except for the aforementioned Rocky Mountain High by Puerro and Julia Verinder's Guilty Heart, I've never found a Buck/JD pairing I found to be in character.] Our Buck slash consultant is, however, working on the Chris/Buck and Buck/Ezra front. I'd already loved some Buck/Ezra but she got me thinking about Chris/Buck, starting with Cobalt's Blame for a different interpretation of Chris's backstory and Puerro's Campfire series for an idea of how a relationship might have started. Whether she convinces the rest of us or not, we're looking to her to find us Buck slash for the site.
In light of our mixed and mixed up feelings, we decided the following about slash: Our standards are higher - we're only listing stories that are 9.0 to 10 on a scale of 1-10 (as opposed to 8-10 for gen and het stories). And as we said above, many of the stories we passed up were because we disagreed with characterization not the other attributes of the writing. But heck, if we get enough "consultants" for other pairings, that might change. [See below.]
OUR BUCK SLASH CONSULTANT: We done hired ourselves a consultant. We offered her a share of the hefty profits from this site - which makes her a volunteer. LovePotion has written exquisite slash in many other fandoms over the years and loves reading Buck slash in Mag7, especially Buck/Chris and Buck/Ezra. Right now we have her on board to select some Buck slash for the site -- some stuff beyond the PWP's and comedy stories we picked. We're not saying all seven of us are really going to buy into it character-wise -- we're a stubborn lot. And we'll still be reviewing the stuff for literary merit (just because we love the pompous sound of that). So we feel we'll eventually have a pretty decent selection of Buck slash.
[the Buck slash consultant's statement snipped]