So I leave the genre, if not the APA, with no regrets to be going and a good deal of relief that I don't have to try to like this stuff any more.
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| Title: | So I leave the genre, if not the APA, with no regrets to be going and a good deal of relief that I don't have to try to like this stuff any more. (untitled, the title used here is the last line of the essay) |
| Creator: | [J J] |
| Date(s): | November 1997 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | multifandom, slash |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
So I leave the genre, if not the APA, with no regrets to be going and a good deal of relief that I don't have to try to like this stuff any more. is a essay by [J J].
It was printed in the last issue of Strange Bedfellows (APA), a long-running apa created for the discussion of slash.
The essay is a flounce in which this fan tells her fellow tribbers what she she really thinks.
Some Topics Discussed
- slash as boring, as over-wrought, as both too realistic and not realistic enough, too serious, "reading slash is like chomping one's way through underdone cake"
- slash reminds her of feeling like a thirteen-year old
- slash characters are like women with PMS
- slash that this fan can no longer pretend to like
- manga and anime are okay because they are very fantasical and don't even pretend to be real
- "small-souled carping fans" will nitpick your stories "on the grounds there are no chipmunks in Surrey"
- slash feels like a term paper in school, jabs at academia
- slash is supposed to be a "genre that prides itself on being... for the populist lower middle class"
- slash characters are not gay men, or men, or women, they are "monsters never found on land nor sea"
- slash stories are nothing by "Ten pages of nattering, five pages of fucking, ten more pages of nattering about getting fucked, five more pages of fucking to lead to another ten pages of nattering..."
- and who wants to read about Bodie and Doyle, as they are so unpleasant, "there are nicer, more interesting queers in gay fiction"
Some Context
[J J] had complained earlier about what she felt to be increasingly boring and lazy tribs. Some of this low-quality discourse, she wrote, was likely due to the shiny new useless thing called the Internet.
From "Strange Bedfellows" #17 (May 1997):
Tell you frankly, I don't really feel like doing this: read everybody's trib, think of something to say, pick it out with my three typing fingers, go get 24 copies made, pay to send 240 pages of stuff to the States — and next month find half the issue consists of variations on 'The dog ate my APA' or 'I've been too busy with other things to bother answering you guys so I'll just tell you what I've been reading and what I've been watching and good-bye.' Hell, I can do that. I haven't seen any films in over a year, I don't watch TV, and most of what I read is in Japanese and hence of limited interest.[...]
And it's no surprise that the longest tribs come from people without access to the instant gratification of the Net. Yakking on the net is like spending the evening on the phone or schmoozing with friends in a pub. It's fun, I'm not denying it, but also pretty ephemeral. There's no deep thought required and no time for deep thought even if you're tempted to it. Type and send is the rule.
Where then will you get the theoretical arguments and formulations that used to fill this APA two or three years ago? I doubt if anyone will ever form a well-thought out theory of anything, or even a systemic analysis, as a result of Net gabbing.
The Flounce Itself
From "Strange Bedfellows" #19 (November 1997):
OK, I'm quite willing to admit it. The net doesn't kill APAs. People kill APAs, and have. RIP.
Yappari, I'll miss this regular visitor. The theory of slash has its own irresistible fascination. The discussions that happened in the heyday of this APA were witty, intelligent, informative, sometimes hilariously funny, deeply engrossing and always compulsively readable. Their absence will leave a gap which, alas, slash fiction itself isn't likely to fill.
I think I've finally concluded that I'm not a slash fan. I find the slash stories that I've read to be - well, lugubrious, and earnest, and very very sincere, and not a hell of a lot of fun to read. Yes, and that includes the 'light' ones. Reading slash is like chomping one's way through underdone cake. One isn't even allowed to giggle. OK, I know the parallel to slash is grand opera, which is equally as humorless, overheated, romantic and ridiculous. But there's always Mozart, not to mention Strauss, to cleanse the palate after a dose of sturm und drang. Where's the light, frivolous, enjoyable stuff in slash? Isn't there anyone who can believe that My Guys might have other things to think about than the wrenching drama of their emotional life?
What slash reminds me of mostly is what the world felt like when I was thirteen years old, with physiology, temper and everything else wildly out of control. 'The hours of fuss and fury', as Auden put it; the desperate terrible *importance* of one's feelings and the other person's feelings and life in general; the way life resembled being in a small boat on a stormy sea; the occasional giddy highs, no doubt, but also the black and tempestuous- and chronic- lows. Could this be revenge-making the guys feel not only like women but like women at the worst times of their life: in menarch [sic] or menopause or in the grip of PMS?
Then there are the conventions for writing slash fiction which I can no longer swallow. My suspension of disbelief operates on an all or nothing basis. The impossibilities of anime and manga I can live with. It's all impossible. Bishounen killer eyes, magic cloths, swords that emerge miraculously from the breast of one's fiancee (especially if 'one' is, as in this case, a girl oneself)- all are as impossible as the impossible male beauties with hair to their hips and egoless devotion to someone else. The Japanese series operate in another realm of reality: they aren't 'realistic', they aren't meant to be 'realistic' and they lose their charm when people try to make them 'realistic'. You can write Dorian as a real gay man if you like, just as you can play Hamlet as a slapstick comedy: but you lose the essence when you do.
Manga and anime are at least consistent in their unreality. Slash isn't. It insists on strict reality in one aspect and on wildest fantasy in the other. Stories must be 'accurate'- the science must be right, the geography must be right, the politics must be right, the topography must be right, even the bloody flora and fauna must be right- or a host of small-souled carping fans will rise up and damn the story on the grounds that there are no chipmunks in Surrey. [1]
The result is that writing this genre seems to involve as much research as an end-of-term paper, if not a mini-thesis. I've often wondered why authors don't just append a bibliography and be done with it. If it were all part of the game- let's see how accurate I can make this- I'd have no objection. It's when pristine accuracy is considered an absolute necessity, and its absence condemned in the roundest terms, that I smell the influence of the academic mind and the Phd committee.
Odd, in a genre that prizes itself on being at the very least by and for the populist lower middle class. After all, what does all this frantic research lead to? Impeccable authenticity in the unimportant areas of the story. The background may be perfect but what's going on in the foreground is purest fantasy, and laughable.
OK. The debate still rages as to whether slash characters are meant to be men or meant to be women or meant to be something never found on land or sea. If they're meant to be men then, as people have argued, in a series set current day they pretty much have to be gay men, or spend endless hours wondering are they gay and what can they do about it, while the reader waits impatiently for them to get it on. If they're not gay men they're not realistically going to fall into bed and have great sex the first time around. Nor are they going to do as much talking as they do; nor are they going to be as quiveringly sensitive to the other's thoughts and feelings as they are; nor are they going to sit around alone and together analyzing what they feel about the other guy and why they feel it and what can they do about it.
In fact, they probably won't do most of these things even if they are gay men because men in general don't behave like that. Women do. I'm quite fond of the disguised woman- the female coded character- but not in a realistic setting, please. Against a background of pristine realism I'm confronted with 'men' whose characters and concerns are a complete fantasy. The result for me is sea-sickness.
The characters of slash are monsters never found on land nor sea, entirely unrelated to real people, but with occasional attempts, very misguided, to make them seem such. I don't want to read about Bodie and Doyle if they're just another pair of queers. There are nicer, more interesting queers in gay fiction. I don't want to read about Bodie and Doyle if Doyle is a weeping sensitive female, because Doyle isn't a weeping sensitive female. I don't want to read about Bodie and Doyle period, because they're both such unpleasant people and reading stories about unpleasant people doing unpleasant things to each other and the world in general is depressing.
The most damning thing that can be said about slash was said by [S]: that most slash characters are people you wouldn't want to know in real life. It's fiction about dweebs and dorks, neurotics and borderline psychotics, **all** of whom do nothing but natter about their feelings and get laid. Ten pages of nattering, five pages of fucking, ten more pages of nattering about getting fucked, five more pages of fucking to lead to another ten pages of nattering...
I suppose it's all marginally more interesting than daytime television, if you except the nature shows, but still. It's not my kind of fun. So I leave the genre, if not the APA, with no regrets to be going and a good deal of relief that I don't have to try to like this stuff any more. Good-bye, all.