Slash shock, shamelessness, and a rec

Meta
Title:	Slash shock, shamelessness, and a rec
Creator:	Ellen Fremedon
Date(s):	Dec 2, 2004
Medium:	online
Fandom:	meta
Topic:
External Links:	original essay here; Archive, page one, page two; Archive, page two. follow-up post ""Monsters! Monsters from the Id!" here Archive.
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Slash shock, shamelessness, and a rec is a meta essay by Ellen Fremedon. One of its points, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, is that because slash has become so widespread in media fandom, that bad grammar has now taken its place as a hallmark of 'shame'.

This essay also discusses Id Vortex (which Ellen first defined), shame, crackfic, and the effect of fanfiction on mainstream literary fiction.

The story that prompted this essay was MirrorM*A*S*H.

This post is discussed at Making Light: Squick and squee by Teresa Nielsen Hayden.

Excerpts

So, remember slash shock? That weird feeling you got when you read that first story about Frodo and Sam, or Kirk and Spock, doing... things.. to each other, that feeling compounded of equal parts This is strange and wrong and dirty and This makes so. much. sense and more more more more more?

Yeah, well. I've just been reading a story that threw me right back there. janecarnall's MirrorM*A*S*H WiP

It's the Mirror Universe from Star Trek. Only with M*A*S*H. And BJ is the colonel and he has a Mirror-Spockian goatee and the corresponding scary-badass manner. And there are slaves. And Hawkeye buys one away from a brothel, on a whim.

And it's Father Mulcahy. From our universe.

And it's THE MOST CRACKTASTIC THING EVAR, but... it works, in this supremely creepy sick-and-wrong immensely compelling way.

And it got me thinking.

So, I got into Star Trek at pretty much exactly the same time I entered puberty, and I don't for a moment believe the two things are unconnected. And so though I didn't think much about Spock having sex with Kirk, there was really no phase of my Trek fannish career where I wasn't thinking about Spock having sex with someone. So the issue with K/S, my first slash fandom, was about sexualizing the relationship, but it was never about sexualizing my views of the characters.

M*A*S*H, though-- I watched that when I was a kid-- I watched it religiously-- but I never entertained salacious thoughts about the characters, or gave much thought to any salacious thoughts they might have about each other. Slashing that carries a heavy frisson of OH GOD YOU ARE CORRUPTING MY INNOCENT CHILDHOOD MEMORIES. And as a result, even though I like the show, I have never gone seeking slash for it. I've read a little, when I've come across it, and it's always left me feeling rather dirtywrong, in the bad way, even when it was well-written and canonical and good.

But you know, the AU Mirrorverse slave thing is actually making it easier to read-- enough so that I'm thinking of looking for some this-universe, consensual Hawkeye/Mulcahy right now. (Um, recs? anyone?) And I think it's because of something idlerat has been talking about off and on for a while now-- the utter shamelessness of fanfic.

Because the scenario-- so, Mulcahy is thrown into a universe full of people who look and talk just like his friends, only he's a slave and they all want to rape him. (Because, really, who wouldn't?) That storyline cuts pretty close to the id, you know? And it's just one of a large number of similarly... charged storylines (soul bonds, every fuck-or-die scenario ever written...) that you see very very often in fanfic, and from time to time in profic as well.

And the profic? Almost uniformly sucks.

Because pro writers either have some shame, and relegate the purest, most cracklicious iterations of those stories to drawerfic that their workshop buddies will never see, or else they're shameless. But they usually have to be shameless alone-- and so their versions are written so solitarily that they don't have any voice of restraint, to pull them back from the Event Horizon of the Id Vortex when it starts warping their story mechanics.

But in fandom, we've all got this agreement to just suspend shame. I mean, a lot of what we write is masturbation material-- not all of it, and not for everyone, but. A lot of it is, and we all know it, and so we can't really pretend that we're only trying to write for our readers' most rarefied sensibilities, you know? We all know right where the Id Vortex is, and we have this agreement to approach it with caution, but without any shame at all. (At least in matters of content. Grammar has displaced sex as a locus of shame. Discuss.)

And so we've got all these shameless fantasies being thrown out into the fannish ether, being read and discussed, and the next thing you know, we've got genres. We've got narrative traditions. We have enough volume and history for these things to develop a whole critical vocabulary.

We have a toolbox for writing this sort of thing really, really well, for making these 3 A.M. fantasies work as story and work as literature without having to draw back from the Id Vortex to do it.

And I'm just kind of flailing now and going "Fandom is cool! Squee!" but, really, I wonder what the effect on, if not mainstream literary fiction, at least on mainstream genre fiction is going to be when the number of fanwriters taking that toolbox with them into pro writing reaches critical mass-- which I think it's going to, in the next decade."

Fans Comment Directly to the Post

lolaraincoat: "Yes, yes, and also, yes. And as someone who reads a whole lot more than she writes ... I wonder what kind of readers fanfic creates, too. Or what kinds of readers, I should say. Because just as fanfic is shameless fiction, so reading fanfic is guilty pleasure without the guilt. Isn't it?" (2004)

ellen fremedon: "Well, I know that fanfic has changed my profic reading habits quite a lot-- firstly, I'm a lot less patient with profic, or at least a lot less willing to spend money on it, because I know now that I can find a lot of good stuff for free; if I'm giong to shell out money on a novel for pleasure reading, it needs to be one I'll get more or at least different pleasure from than I would from good fanfic. I'm also a *lot* more critical of minor sentence-level problems than I used to be, but that's less fanfic than the effect of betaing and being betaed-- my internal editor has gotten a big workout since I joined fandom, and I can't turn it off that easily now. And then there's the way that a lot of published fiction these days seems very emotionally coy, and not just because it's more likely to fade to black than to show the smut. It's also a matter of having gotten used to seeing the missing scenes, in fanfic-- to seeing the conversations where the emotional fallout of the plot gets dealt with (or doesn't get dealt with, but gets *acknowledged* by the author if not the characters.) More than anything else, the thing that makes get really *angry* with a lot of books I read is that that exploration of long-term emotional effects is just not there-- things happen, and then two chapters later the characters are interacting just the way they always did, and you're left blinking and going 'When did they deal with that and get back to normal?' So much follow-up gets left out if it's not absolutely necessary to resolve the plot, and anymore it just feels like cheating to me. I'm also much more sensitive to character voice-- I've put down more than one otherwise good book lately because the characters all sounded the same." (2004)

lolaraincoat: "Yes! Now that you mention it. reading fanfic has made me able to see that there is such a thing as profic. And yes, I'm less patient with it lately too. Well, actually not so much with literary fiction, but much more cranky with bad genre fiction. And I think more appreciative of good profic, too....The distinction, to me, between literary fiction and the other kinds of profic (and they're overlapping categories anyhow and also you may not make this distinction, but, adelante) is that the literary stuff is all about those long-term emotional effects (even when it is also all about language games, as a lot of the lit I love is) but has stupid or boring or missing plots, often, but the genre profic has much more interesting plot, usually, but makes no emotional sense. And what fanfic at its best can do is combine both those things." (2004)

evalangui: "I'm also a *lot* more critical of minor sentence-level problems than I used to be, but that's less fanfic than the effect of betaing and being betaed-- my internal editor has gotten a big workout since I joined fandom, and I can't turn it off that easily now. I would make the argument that reading what often amounts to the same basic storyline (if you read the same pairing, many first time stories are quite similar, for e.g.) also forces you to focus more on the language than the content. So fanfic would be partially responsible for the increase in critical reading." (2004)

photoclerk: "You know, I was thinking about this the other day. About how fandom has created this weird group of people who can completely shamelessly discuss exactly what they find sexually arousing. That's a totally new thing for so many people. I honestly think that the slash fandom has made me a more well-balanced and satisfied person because I can express the things I like and want without feeling like it's wrong to do so. Also, I have made some amazing friends based solely on who we ship. This is such a fantastic community. ^_^ It's like going to a geeky convention, walking in the doors and knowing that these are your people. Everyone here has something in common with everyone else. <3" (2004)

ellen fremedon: "The toolbox is the big question, isn't it? I think a large part of it is simply the beta process-- that we can write these stories with someone looking over our shoulders and pointing out "Yes, it's very hot, but there's no reason for him to do that." I think another part of it is-- maybe not simply the fact that we're using other people's characters, but the sort of characterization work that using existing characters requires of us. That is, in original fiction using some of these storylines, the story gimmick can really overwhelm characterization-- if the main character has been created solely to experience the big Id Vortex-y gimmick, soul bond or slavery or whatever, she all too often becomes just a vehicle for the reader's identification-- and that's if the writer's fairly decent; she can become a complete authorial stand-in all too easily. The other characters, meanwhile, often exist not to further their own agendas but to inflict the gimmick on the main character. Fanfic doesn't let you get away with that-- the kind of questions that we're trained, through the beta-process, to ask are all designed to keep that from happening, to keep your characters from becoming Canon Sues. If you have to keep asking, at every step, what one specific character, whom you've seen in a lot of settings, would do in your story's situation-- What would Kirk do as a slave on Vulcan, or Percy do in a Muggle sex club, or what have you-- it forces the story far enough back from the edge of the vortex that it can retain some structural integrity, even if it's still in a very tight orbit around that vortex-- even if the Gimmick From the Id is the whole reason it exists." (2004)

musesfool: "Grammar has displaced sex as a locus for shame." Well, one hopes. Sadly this is not always the case. In some corners of fandom, the grammar and the sex are equally, shamelessly bad. I think the main distinction is between fantasy (ooh, it'd be really hot if...) and story (ooh, it'd be really hot if.... because of... and Character X so would act that way in that situation, and this is what would happen). But a lot of that also depends on how willing one is to suspend disbelief, how far one can be swayed beyond from one's default range of characterization (in fanfic, anyway, though I suppose I've complained often enough that "real people don't DO that" when reading profic or watching tv/movies). Of course, I have a lot narrower parameters as a reader than I have as a writer (and I have fairly narrow parameters as a writer, as well). But as long as I think the characterization is reasonably extrapolated from my view of the canon, there are many scenarios I'm willing to buy, pending other restrictions (pairing, mostly. I don't care how well-written or cracktastic something is, if it's not a pairing or set of characters I like, I probably won't read it). Still, it's an interesting theory and set of questions." (2004)

ranalore: " I can tell you one thing fandom's taught me that I didn't learn in any writing group or workshop and has proved invaluable in all my writing: self-awareness. Alpha readers and beta readers and discussion lists and debates with other authors are all very handy things, but I find they're far more effective if you first work on figuring your own motives out. What makes you tick in writing terms? What makes you squee? What makes you squick? What themes are you drawn to time and time again to explore? What character types do you like best to write? What shortcuts do you like to rely on in writing? Is style more important to you? Character? Plot? Could you write pages and pages and pages of just dialogue without someone there telling you, "Some action would be good?" Usually those first steps toward self-awareness are helped along by an external force, like a beta or critic, of which fandom has a variety. Then you start to figure yourself out from those other observations, and once you think you know yourself as a writer fairly well, you plug back in to see if you're putting out there what you mean to put out. And you find other people to help you communicate effectively, and to tell you when you're going off the edge. It's been a while since I was in a pro writing group, but I do remember there was a certain amount of paranoia and competition that, in the end, really circumvented a lot of the point of a writing group. Everyone was afraid of someone else stealing their ideas, or accusing them of stealing ideas. Everyone was alternately convinced they were the best writer in the group and the worst. Certainly, these are things that crop up in fandom, but I do think the fact we're all writing derivative fiction helps, as does the fact we're working with finite resources. There are only so many scenarios that are in-character for a certain fandom. There are only so many plotlines that are logical to a given source. The Big Questions that sources failed to answer tend to be the same for a lot of fans, and those fans are all going to give their own take on those Big Questions. Some of those takes are going to be fiction, and some of that fiction is going to look very similar on certain levels, because they started from the same place. And because they started from the same place, we all feel a lot more confident in saying to each other, "Dude, you're on the bad crack with that scene. Step back, and you'll see Character X would never do that." I'm not sure how much of that is translatable to profic, frankly, which could be one reason these are things you don't learn in workshops." (2004)

msilverstar: "Fascinating, yis. Kirk/Spock still squicks me and Frodo/Sam bores me -- in general, I find it difficult to read slash in fiction that I adore. Stuff I don't care about is much easier, I can read any pairing in HP fic. So like you, for me the AU makes it possible for me to enjoy MASH!slash. Wow. Also, I love the idea that the shamelessness of fanfic is its salvation. I have to think about it some more, but I love it." (2004)

merryst: "In my first fanfics (not of the M*A*S*H variety) my grammar was so appalling its embarrassing. I didn't realize this until I'd brushed up on Strunk & White and practiced writing for years. That said, I've read some marvelous fanfic since where grammar took a backseat to an incredible story. Fan-fic writers can tell you a character's story and personality backwards and forwards but knowing the use of commas or ellipses or any other grammatical devices is not part of the equation. Some of this may come from writing scripts first. In many cases, I think its also that a non-writer feels so passionately about being a fan that they make a foray into something unknown simply to be a part of it. In many cases, if you follow their fanfic you will begin to see an evolution of sorts as they learn the rules. Like children first learning to write, they ARE learning to write. As far as id and the pairings, I've read some seriously good fic where the pairings are actually dead-on because the writer makes the character stay within character. THAT may be the difference between what makes one squirm and what doesn't. When the character STAYS in character, it seems more...acceptable? There is an utterly brilliant Chakotay/Paris pairing in STV fanfic that does this. The characters were so true to their canonical nature, that the story was perfectly believable (FALLING by Amirin). When you see a character step out of the bounds that you KNOW from canon, that's when the sex/pairing doesn't work for me. Most fanfic is based on a character - the writer chooses a favorite and generally writes about that one character to the exclusion of all else. It is a rare writer who addresses other characters in fanfic, except as a showcase and backdrop for their favorite (or their favorite pairing). So ANY pairing will work for me if you keep the character true to canon. Even in an AU universe." (2004)

kassrachel: "I've just had occasion to reread this post, because I seem to be writing another story which arises directly out of my own id vortex, and I'm caught somewhere between feeling psyched about it (I think this story is shiny! people will like it!) and wrestling with my own shame around it (because really, what is the matter with me that I cannot look at three people who clearly care about one another without, apparently, turning them into a threesome with extra smut on top?) It's fascinating to me that even after (wait, let me count --) 12+ years in fandom, I still struggle with this one sometimes. As though y'all are going to think less of me because I'm committing this to page and screen. Even though I know that when others write these very sorts of stories, I eat them up with a spoon -- and you're right; fandom does this far, far better than any pro material I've ever seen. Besides, we write these stories in community; we know who reads them; sometimes we cater directly to the things we know our readers like. Still, it's a weird nexus of issues, for me. So thanks for this post, I guess. A million years later and all that. *grin*" (2012)

dharma slut: "Eeelllllennnnn.... Did You ever expect that TEN YEARS later, this would still be an important little essay?" (2014)