Slashcast Metachat: Sex and Romance

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Slashcast Metachat: Sex and Romance
Interviewer:	wook77
Interviewee:	tripperfunster, fiona_fawkes, starduchess
Date(s):	February 10, 2013
Medium:	online transcript, podcast
Fandom(s):
External Links:	online transcript, Archived version
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Slashcast Metachat: Sex and Romance is a chat with tripperfunster, fiona_fawkes, starduchess. wook77 is the interviewer.

It is a podcast at Slashcast and includes an online transcript.

For more in this series, see Slashcast Interview Series.

Excerpts

starduchess: Something that bugs me in fics, it seems like a lot of the times sex is used as a cover for bad writing. And so when there is lack of content have them give a blowjob and that suddenly makes it ok and to me it just feels really worthless if there not enough story there.

tripperfunster: I agree. I tend to also ship either the rivalry pairings or the pairings where the people have a lot of work to go through before they could actually believably be together. And whenever they get together too quickly, I mean again I don't mind if it's an established relationship fic, but for me I'm much more of a first time, I wanna see how it builds, I wanna see how they get to the point they can have that relationship and have it be believable and I totally agree with wook in that if they get together too quickly or if they don't even address the things that have kept them apart it's a back button for me for sure.

tripperfunster: I was going to say one of my favourite tropes, speaking of sex, is either the like the 'sex or die' or 'the aliens made them do it' or the 'sex pollen' or whatever, it is sometimes fun to have a fic where the two people that don't get along are forced to, or a forced marriage or whatever, sometimes it's great when the sex is at the beginning but under duress and then, you know they find a way to work out the differences that they have and generally in most of those fics there is some sort of attraction to begin with and they never admit it cause they don’t get along but it's kind of a fun way to do that backward, in that the fic often starts out with them having sex but they have to kind of work out all those details later.

fiona_fawkes: Something that kind of get round my head lately is, I'm a big proponent of gay rights through (inadible) and I am in a gay relationship myself and I dont not so much (inudibile) make changes or change legislation I want it to be normal, normal people who happen to be hooked up with people of the same gender in the story. And so for me what got me going on hpslashnotsmut, it seemed to be that people were so obsessed with slash with sex, it’s like people were forgetting that gay characters had lives and gay people have lives that revolved around things other than what they do with their genitals and so for me it was a big (inaudible) to encourage people to sort out the rest of the story and not just focus on gay people are different because they have sex with different things.... For me there is no real confusion about that. I think .. (inaudible). Harry/Ron and it's rated G it's still slash, you know just because they may just hold hands and that's fine. Whereas if you had characters in your headers Harry, Ron then I automatic usually assume that it's a regular gen fic and there's no romance. I never had a problem between the two. And I figure... ( inaudile) and we thought about how do you rate something, how do you classify something and doing that for posting things online. But I'm betting that a lot of lurker and consumers in fandom that don't outside of the one place where they go and find fanfiction, they don't get involved in the community at all, I'm thinking a lot of them don't understand the difference. I would assume, I mean when I first heard about slash I thought it was like horror movie stuff. Cause to be slasher fic is like, you know like Friday 13th or something, and it certainly took me a while to navigate you know, pairing vs gen, I mean there is still stuff where i'm like Alpha, Omega, Delta what? Just a lot of sorority guys?

tripperfunster: There are a lot of people our there who also confuse, like people who complain about warnings and tags, who confuse trigger with something I don’t like or something , I've heard people complain oh you didn’t warn for Buttom!Snape. and I’m like that's not a warning that’s a preference and if you don't like it it's not going to send you into a spiral of that time you were Buttom!Snape, that’s just something you don't like. I mean it could just be people who are putting all the warnings in that are heading all the whining snivelers that don’t know the difference between a warning and a preference.

starduchess: With regards to authors, that are growing up in fandom and starting as more pornographic writer and then moving on to something less basic than that it probably authors growing up and getting more comfortable as a writer and a fan and they are they are going to explore more plots. Though by default for most people more plot is going to include a little bit less sex, not all fics cause there are some very fabulous 80K word fics out there that have 6-7 sex scenes in a row and are well thought out and plotted I think as you are getting better at writing and writing longer things. I do see the opposite too sometimes people start out and they are very shy and they've never written anything above a PG and eventually you know spread their wings and end up writing higher ratings which is kind of fun to see. You know there is a writer right now I quite like in the Avengers fandom and she's, you know you can hear her squealing second-hand embarrassment as she writing the sex, cause she's written lots and it's all very good but she's just now getting into higher rating and its funny to see her squirm and be excited about.

tripperfunster: ...I mean I love to read fic where the characters are really stretched, where they are pushed to the limits, where we can really learn a lot about their characters and it's a fine line and not a remotely fine line from going to that just out of character. Like, I don't like seeing people... the difference is, I love putting a character in a situations the might never be in and seeing how they react as opposed to make a character act in a way they would never act in. You know like Spock is going to be Spock whether he gets a kitten or finds a child or is stranded in an alien planet and is fuck-or die. And I love seeing Spock react to all those things but I guess a lot of the shmoopier stuff tends to, the people who are writing it I guess want a different Spock and again that's fine for them. If the characters aren't acting the way that they are supposed to act that is a major back buttoner for me. And it goes into the thing that you talked about earlier Wook, about people having [sex] too early when they haven’t worked through their issues. I guess it just really boils down to bad writing and in my experience a lot of the fic that I don’t like is more that I've read some fics that have bad writing with those tropes and it's just turned me off the tropes. I know you put out a kid fic I probably wouldn't read it. I've read a couple kind of by mistake that weren't labelled properly or the summary sucked me in anyway and I enjoyed them. But I would say overall it's not a trope I enjoy, it's probably from being burned by some bad writing early on and reading those tropes. Things that tend to really thrill me are, I wouldn’t necessarily say like Faux Yay fic, but stories that people really have to overcome some major personality obstacles or some history they have between them that they've got to work out are more interesting to me and generally stories that have a lot of UST where the people are forced to work together. Either they are stranded on a planet together or they've been kidnapped together, or they are forced to be in close contact with each other and really work through this feeling of not getting along or not liking each other for whatever reason, are the types of stories that turn my crank.

tripperfunster: I haven’t read a lot of femslash but I mean.. I could see, and it sort of it begs to be badly written but a lot of times with men and cause most slash is written by women, be it femslash or male slash, that you somehow manage to help the men find their emotions without feminising them. I could see and again I haven’t read a lot of femslash, I do enjoy the art I haven’t part of it is not enough strong, I wasn't into Xena, I haven’t really been in a fandom with plenty of female characters that are strong and interesting, I would say actually Avengers has the most interesting strongest females and even they don’t have their own movies they don’t have their own backstories as much as all the male characters unfortunately. But I could see if I was to write it or draw it my goal would be make the women stronger and more manly in those typical ways where a lot time the slash tries to make the men more romantic and almost in some way more feminine and I could see like you just said in some ways how much the woman can endure how tough she can be vs a lot of times with a lot of slash its just more how into his, aware of his own emotions the male characters can. Sometimes just getting over yourself and realizing you love somebody, just getting in touch with your emotions. I don’t know if that's true I just was totally talking out of my ass.