Strange Bedfellows (APA)/Issue 016

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cover of issue #16

Strange Bedfellows 16 was published in February 1997 and contains about 82 pages.

There were 30 members sharing 22 subscriptions. There were 17 tribs to this issue.

Some Topics Discussed in "Notes From Tomorrow"

  • nothing fannish

Some Topics Discussed in "Strange Tongues"

Excerpts from "Strange Tongues"

In Highlander, if you speculate that Duncan is too noble, competent, wise and generally perfect to write good slash about, perhaps that makes him an honorary woman?

I seem to have become the kind of fan who defines a fandom as much by what she writes as by what she reads. Is this intellectual independence or hubris?

I see what you mean about much of Japanese fans' source material being done in settings so far-out that normal laws of society, let alone polite society (let alone Japan) hardly apply. When a charismatic snake-demon is chasing one around the bedroom of an other-plane-of-reality deserted castle, I suppose one doesn't worry about the opinion of the neighbors, the family, or the spouse's employer nearly as much as about whether this particular snake demon prefers to eat its partners before or after copulation.

The few examples of B5 fanfic I've seen (a very few in zines, and one or two pieces from the net, and then the short vignette you printed [in the last issue]) haven't been what I was really looking for. Of the erotic pieces, the most common theme is sex as a means of possession or domination; symbolically of B5 station, of another man, sometimes of Delenn. The given assumption that Sinclair spends time on B5 station while Sheridan is there is a bit startling but workable - I'd use it for Sinclair/Garibaldi if I could. But having Sinclair and Sheridan be in competition over Delenn hits me all wrong: that's her choice, not something to be settled between the men. They have complementary roles built around her, and if she turns out to want both (or either, or neither) of them in bed, she can perfectly well have that - she's the queen in this triumvirate, after all. She's a grown women with her own battle fleet, not a prize princess, and neither man should be working with her if he doesn't know that.

The contrast of yaoi and june may also be comparable to the contrast of fanfiction and original fiction. Yaoi is based on a source which provides all the characterization needed, i.e., that the two guys are friends (or brothers, or enemies, or soccer teammates, or whatever), while a june story must start by establishing the characters' relationship, however stereotypically, before it can send them to bed or to emotionally-wrenching thoughts of bed. Circumstances that make the love affair alternative, difficult, doomed or otherwise conducive to anxiety rather than serenity, must be set up in the june story. From what I've seen (which may not be representative, of course) baroque difficulties are prized above simple ones, or it might just be that the difficulty must be a difficulty in the floating world of Japanese pop entertainment where membership in the same sports team (or moon-based space-fighter squadron, or demonic mob entity) means that anyone can naturally and automatically fuck anyone else.

Taking fanwriting as an advanced and interactive "reading" of the show, it's clear that second- and higher-wave writers feel a great deal of freedom to imagine what they will, and even to ignore at times what the source presents on screen. I'm not sure fanwriting can be wholly differentiated from reading (in the sense of interpretation) of the show when there's an explicit link, such as using the same character names. This is not to say that a fanwriter isn't creating something in her own right; perhaps it's to say that a reader — any reader of any fiction — is creating a unique, if often evanescent, fiction by the act of reading. The difference between reading an original story and a piece of fanfiction may be that the original story has only the clues given by the author to indicate its visual components and the background universe it creates; a fan story contains the author's own picture of the background, (however sparse it may be) as well as, overlapping on, the source show's visuals as the reader knows them. Balancing those two visions is what's unique to reading fanfic, and what is lacking in most mundane fiction. You carefully avoid the tangle of whether "slash" must be fanfiction, and rightly, since your point is about fannish versus mundane writing. It's possible for fanfic without any sexual content to benefit from the double vision fanwriting allows; that is, in fact, what gives it much of its energy and appeal. Clearly, however, those factors work quite as well in sexually explicit stories as anywhere else - and fanfiction is unique also in providing a largely uncensored venue for those stories. It's possible that slash adds something significant to the show that not all fanfic does. It's exciting and tense not just for the sex but because it presents the characters in a relationship defined (by most standards) as very different from the one given, which is nevertheless an accurate metaphorical depiction of many paired TV heros. It's an unexpected but very understandable truth.

The assumption in my SBF discussion that slash had to be inherently angsty was rather unthinking; it expressed a norm in western slash. (Other reactions in SBF seem to bear this out.) The conditions for slash as a genre don't necessarily call for it; it's just an element which is common to many stories either in the psychology or as part of the homophobic environment a western-setting story usually assumes. Stories that don't assume a homophobic environment in a present-day setting are either specialized fantasy, very narrow-focus, and/or — a large proportion - sloppily written in leaving out valid and important background for the characters and events of the story. I.e., slash-should-be-angsty is a gut feeling that results from the fact of many non-angsty slash stories being utter crap.

This last doesn't need to apply to future-setting universes including all the space operas, except that most have a social setting superficially similar to our own, and some gesture toward explaining how a hetero-looking society isn't actually as monolithically hetero as ours is would be nice. The fact of it being an other country of the future does leave an out, however. Slash having grown partly out of h/c, in western fandom, also brings in an expectation of tension, guilt, pain, suffering as part of the story set-up. Now that you mention it, the possibilities for relaxed PWP scenarios are legion, and stories where the slash element isn't a serious source of angst are fine with me — Apollo and Starbuck save the universe and know that one reward of doing so will be that they may continue their passionate fucking until the next crisis, say.

I think there's a principle, however, that stories that are dramatic stories in the western sense of significant events happening and problems being solved, will have to include tension, difficulties in reaching some goal, problems: in short, angst and resolution and a climax or two are the story. Friendly snoggles have no inherent drama, except perhaps that all drama is based on the complex of tensions and releases exemplified by good sex, and thus properly described sex should constitute a drama of sorts in itself. (I did not read this anywhere. I made it up. I do believe it's a workable theory, but I'm not quite prepared to start a school of literary and multi-media criticism all by myself, even if I think I'm right. Hasn't anybody else made this up before? Would save so much trouble.) Sometimes, as has been said, the best symbol for something is the thing itself. Working against this pretty theory, however, is the fact that any number of sex-qua-sex stories have no perceptible dramatic tension. But it has been done, notably by M. Fae and Lainie Stone.

I join you in being puzzled at the notion of waiting for JMS to finish B5 — only short series (under a year) need to be finished to be worth doing fanfic variations on. A year's universe-building, particularly at B5's dense pace, gives one quite enough to play with. However, JMS looking over everyone's shoulder on the net stifled the unbridled creativity a bit, I would guess.

Did you ever get the excessively weird typo in Sex, Lies and UNCLE fixed? It was almost existentially amusing enough to leave in the zine, but for those who are simply reading it for the UNCLE instead of the Joycean subtext, you might want to correct all those "sket cetera etch" oddities back to "sketch" and its cousins. Otherwise it was one of the most readable and believable UNCLE stories (let alone UNCLE slash stories) I've seen in the whole of the fandom.

And for something completely different, one DS story I saw in the stacks of DS netfic gave a Fraser/Scully pairing, apparently just to show off the pretty picture of the two them as a couple. It had no other plot and made no sense for any other reason. (...the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.) Is there something I'm not picking up on, perchance, or was it just dumb?

The way you describe the Methos episodes, there should definitely be a zine somewhere called The Highlander and the Babylonian or perhaps Methos' Sword. (I realize you usually have more class artistic integrity than that, but with Methos, all things are possible.) I trust any such zine will not be issued in cuneiform baked into clay tablets. Not even the cover art. It occurs to me that Indiana Jones should really meet Methos, thought he might try to steal him for somebody's private collection.

Okay, they're going to bring back DS, or so I've heard. Where now the comforting sentiment that it's safe from third-season ineptitude? (Is there a natural lifespan for an action show? Either cast changes or script deterioration strike a lot of shows by their third or fourth year, it seems. Is there any consistent quality in shows that resist this tendency?) I really can't see DS surviving the replacement of either of the two leads [1], and I hope the producers won't go on if they can't get the same actors back.

You'll no doubt have heard that the LosCon presentation by Straczynski seems to have said that an upcoming episode of B5 will show same-sex marriage as a social norm. I'd like to see it, I must say, though I have no doubt it will raise as many problems as it solves, in life as well as in slash.

I've seen some recent M/K, which certainly picks up the theme of Mulder/alien attraction, though the hints of edgy paranoia in Krycek's propria persona give him something of a presence of his own.

Condolences on finding yourself horrible susceptible to romance pushing your buttons; I too occasionally have to go read a nice, hard-edge, sexual-personality-driven slash story now and then just to remind myself that I'm still capable of being slightly more than normal.

Did you come to any particular judgements or conclusions on the new and possibly fan-interesting shows such as Millennium and (if you've seen it) Sentinel and so on? I've seen a few samples of these, and for the most part I'm not impressed, even when I can see some of the deadly suspense/two cute guys/worthy maverick/etc., that often draw slash fans. The dark-dramatic-paranormal streak that marked Forever Knight, Highlander and X-Files (among others) is being exploited full-bore this season. Do you think this is more of a good thing, or too much of one?

Eroica is so different from the average western TV show that engenders slash that I'd hesitate to draw a straight-line comparison between it and a live-action show, for comedy or anything else. It's not really a typical fandom for the west, and even so there are stories (you may not have seen them, if you were sticking to my recommendations for good stuff) that reduce it to the barest of common-denominator slash devices quite sans' humor.

Even B5 is right in there being darkly dramatic and carrying its share of aliens and awesome powers in the plotline. I think you're missing a bet if you dismiss Marcus. If the show merely wanted a pretty boy, they had Franklin already, who is undeniably handsome and existentially troubled, and there are a couple of minor characters who (to my admittedly imperceptive" eyes) seem no uglier than the majority of characters straight fans find intriguing. Any of those could have been played up instead of introducing a new actor and character to the show.

Aren't we past sex as possession? Apparently not. Apparently, fandom is just discovering sex as possession as a grand new kink. This may be conceptually a step up from it being so normal as a m/f paradigm as to be invisible, in both slash and m/f couples, but I do get the impression that fans either too young or too insulated to have lived through the sexual revolution think this is actually a new idea. But anyway. The B5 netfiction I've seen mostly has an air of setting up a situation that doesn't quite match anything likely for the screen personalities, for the sake of an erotic scenario. Sometimes it just looks sloppy - someone who can't see niceties of character, or can't effectively write them - though sometimes (as in the "Like a Prayer" vignette by elfin) it looks like a deliberate tweaking of the characters. It's possible that "Balance of Power" is better than its outline sounds, for the samples of dialogue give something of the characters' own phrasing and style, but it does seem to be based on a limited notion of sexuality. It's unfortunate (to my mind and reading tastes) that the prevailing atmosphere reeks of fuzzy thinking about consensuality. I can be happy with stories on either end of the scale (or in the middle) but I like the author to be clear about who wants what and why. Sometimes the characters aren't clear, which is fine — many characters are thick as rocks about what they really want. Maybe Sheridan and Sinclair would find themselves slugging it out (or fucking it out) for dominance over each other, both being alpha males. Sheridan, after all, is an entrenched member of the officer/owner class of old boys and might well be possessive of "his" station, even if I'd say he's too good a people-handler to think of anyone blindly as a possession. But Sinclair, being a maverick outsider even in EarthForce, seems unlikely to claim a piece of hardware as his own territory when he's got a Minbari destiny awaiting him. Meanwhile, I'm still hoping to see something more of Sinclair/Sheridan and, even more, of Sinclair/Garibaldi, even if these intriguing concepts aren't ideally served by fannish writing so far. (Yeah, I know, I should do it myself if I want it done right. Maybe.) There's some room for skewed characterization, actually - given the source, some really thorough-going characterization of Sinclair would be a relief whether it's new or already used in the show. I liked the idea and look of the character, but I have to admit the acting was a bit low-key.

Some Topics Discussed in "Twinbear"

  • reprint of a review of the book, "Gender Shock"
  • Unsolicited Opinions: Seduction School Dropout by Merrill Markoe, reprint
  • Animals' Fancies, Why members of some species prefer their own sex, by Tina Adler, reprint from Science News
  • Fox Mulder's violence
  • comments on the new show, Millennium
  • speculation about racebending in Due South
  • quilting and ficcing

Excerpts from "Twinbear"

I am sick and tired ofMulder beating up on suspects/prisoners. It's a persistent pattern with him; he's done it at least three times when I was paying attention. A) I don't like it, b) it's illegal, c) it's stupid (with cameras and witnesses? Give me a break! Not to mention if Krycek has been even remotely helpful in the past than two or three good beatings will definitely change that and d) it's icky. See A). It does lend credence to my 'Mulder was abused by his alcoholic father' theory, but it's still icky! Fortunately, Scully keeps him usually on a tight leash, and she doesn't like it either.

I don't mind Millennium — I watch it without fail — but I don't think it's a great show. I think Carter's visually oriented, not aural — the look of the show is outstanding, but the dialog fairly stinky. And it oozes testosterone to the point of mild nausea. Leaves it very unbalanced. The wife is there only to tilt her head and look concerned; the daughter to be protected. There is no lightness to Hendrickson's gravitas, and earth without fire, air or water comes off leaden as clay. Profiler is the better show....but I'll watch them both.

Unfortunately, I'd have to agree with you that Due South would not have slash if Ray were black. (Would it if Benny were black? Hmm. Have to think about that.) What I'd like to see is a nice, normal, middle-class sane black man or woman being the POV character, looking at the absolutely weird white people all around him/her— Oh, wait a second, they did that! The show was called Bakersfield, and it was an absolute hoot—two of the cops were gay, as I recall. Lasted a whole four episodes. I don't even think it was the racial aspect; I think the rest of the country just doesn't get how extraordinarily humorous Southern California finds Bakersfield

In Voyager, the real slash couple for me is Paris and Kim, even if it does lead to the specter of an ugly, ugly genre known as Tom dickin' Harry fiction.

I gave thought about what you said in your letter, that about 80% of slash can be attributed purely and simply to rampant heterosexuality. I have to agree with you. The impulse to say, while watching, "Oh, he's cute! Let's slash him!" is just too strong. But the other 20%, or whatever, seem to be marked as crossing gender lines handed down by (GOD) society; they're physically male, often socially outside traditional roles, emotionally female, and sexually both male and female in their preferences and lovemaking styles. They are tough yet tender, strong yet vulnerable, able to put out a fire and diaper a baby at the same time (using an undiapered baby to put out the fire does not count), yada-yada-yada. This has nothing to do with any enlightened perspective that the yin and yang of both male and female personality traits are needed for wholeness. This is generally promulgated in shows, like Due South, Pros or Starsky & Hutch, where the creator/producer/writers/stars are all or largely male and production is a boy's club with a No Grils Allowed! sign posted largely outside. They don't want any women and they don't figure they need any women. After all, men are Perfect and Can Do and Be It All. Tough but tender, yada-yada.

[Having finished up a quilt project, I realized that] I really miss having that needlework frame set up in front of the tv set, with that long, long project that will never actually get finished, until it did. I've come to the rather daunting conclusion that I prefer sewing to writing. Writing gets a heck of a lot more feedback, and I m better at it--spent much more time, energy and effort on it for much longer. But with sewing the process itself is so much more enjoyable — the rhythmic thrum of needle pulling thread through fabric, the textures and colors and sure progress of form out of chaos, while I sit in a comfy chair with the tv on. With writing I'm either scritching ink over paper or hammering keys, and I can't have the tv on, only the radio at best. Of course, both of them hurt my wrists about equally.

Some Topics Discussed in "Ghost Speaker"

Excerpts from "Ghost Speaker"

Yes, I always did think the funny K/S stories (like the series in Kan't Stop Laughing) were the best of the general run of K/S. But... while these are the best to read, and can be the most lasting in the mind, I've yet to read a high comedy slash story that also passed the wet test, to speak crudely. Some of yours came close, mind - in particular the Murphy/Doyle scene in your sequel to "Look Through My Eyes".

[You comments in the last issue were enjoyable] but not enough to say more than RAE, BNC. Or as [C] said we should say, "Your trib felt as smooth as a naked breast; it tickled my fancy, but not into words."

Some Topics Discussed in "Yamibutoh"

  • descriptions of Comicate, includes a map of dealers' tables
  • much analysis about Babylon 5
  • f/f slash, "numinous females," power, independence, and agency, especially in Babylon 5

Excerpts from "Yamibutoh"

This year, [Comicate] was the 28 and 29th of Dec. It filled 10 enormous convention halls of the Ariake Center and drew an estimated 200,000 people per day. I really think this [is] getting out of hand. It is now seriously impossible to skim everything. I ended up going mostly to dealers I knew, especially on the 28th which was for anime, movies, music & sports fanzines. The 29th was mostly girly and gaming zines (lots of slash here, but I don't know the characters.). I mostly looked at the Junes.

[...]

All I can say is [Comicate] is like a cross between a bargain sale feeding frenzy & fan desperate zine hunt multiplied by about a million. I was exhausted.

One theory we Japanese res fans are playing with is that Sinclair could not remain B5 commander because O'Hare and JMS between them had made him too competent & too observant. Bringing in a new & out-of-his-depth boss in 2nd season let things go to hell the way the plot demanded.

Some Topics Discussed in "Mardi Gras Favors"

from the The Teacup Photo Caption Contest, from the Mulder/Krycek Romance Association

Excerpts from "Mardi Gras Favors"

Few experiences compare with the unique impact that first reading slash has! I picked up a flyer for WALKING IN THE MOONLIGHT at CaliCon in 1989. The flyer had a photo of B&D which, a month later, inspired me to mail my $5 deposit for the zine. At that point I hadn't seen the series. Several months later it dropped into my mailbox and I flipped thru its lavender pages wondering where to begin. I read the raunchy "Blue Jean Fantasy". Well met! Several weeks later, I found a flyer for the first RevelCon here; it indicated that its chairwomen's Pros circuit Library would be available there. I called her and was invited over to enjoy some stories now. Besides taking home an armful of Pros' story binders, I was finally able to see the series via borrowing some of her tapes, Bodie & Doyle definitely lived up to their zine appearance, I've never been able to prefer one more than the other. So let's just have them both! Bodie & Doyle just grinned grinned their agreement, too!

Katherine Scarritt's FK story "Serpent's Tooth" is in the FK archive which is listed in the Satiricon Au Go Go pages which have 2 FK story archives. You can use Karen Nicholas' multi fandom slash listing also. Katherine was at last year's RevelCon here on the FK Boss Vampire panel. She said what really interested her about LaCroix was the continuing level of intensity in his interaction with Nick. Looking at "Serpent's Tooth" I see that she sent it via email in Oct 25, 1995. I wonder if her interest continued to a novel as I've never seen any other FK stories by her.

I’ve found a page devoted to ”FK Fan Fiction, dedicated to Javier Vachon.” I wondered what they had. Dozens of stories including all of Apache's, a VERY good photo of Ben Bass, and a new ? story by Apache "Duende” from an unsettling experience he had in 1966 at Santa Monica Beach. As I like Susan Garrett’s stories I wondered if she’d written any for him. Yes, ’’Occupado por La Noche" which I've partially read; she’s also included Nick & LaCroix very well. But I have to take this over to Office Depot to copy. More later.

Cody's new Mulder/Scully "A Fine Romance" was lovely: that song lyric "A fine romance this is - with no hugs & no kisses..." summarizes their lives too well - just one damn thing after another.

I looked thru the Mulder/Krycek Romance Association at www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/1121/ and enjoyed everything, especially your photo montage of M&K. Really loved the "Teacup Photo Caption Contest": it has such an arousing photo of DD that I'm including it on the next page. How did DD happen to pose for that 99.9% skin shot? And the "Terma - We Can Rationalize That!" page was so eloquent ' "Deny Everything...Especially Terma!" I hope that Cody is continuing to write "Lo Traviato" etc. despite Chris Carter's crass, thoughtless plotting in "Terma." Can CC have wandered into the X-Files Gossamer Archives' adult/slash section "Auto Erotica?"

M/K Romantics' Association also includes a link to the growing slash stories and I found a new one by Brenda Antrim. "Tunguska... Missing Scenes." It won't make a TV ep this century!. I have also included for your perusal "Essay: Psychological Underpinnings of Homoerotic Themes in "Tunguska", just after DD and his teacup.

I found Nick Lea's very own Homepage at members.aol.com/nicci73813/ nicklea.htm which as been updated to include Ratboy Fanfic.

What's that tingle in my fingertips? Perhaps it's time to create another Web site.

Some Topics Discussed in "The Magic May Return"

  • complaints about the quality of the fic on the Internet
  • not having confidence in JMS and his vision for Babylon 5
  • comments about the story, Balance of Power

Excerpts from "The Magic May Return"

It's probably not fair to expect people writing pornography for the body (gay men) to consider the same details as those writing pornography for the soul (slash), any more than the instructions for a CD player should resemble a guide to nurturing your inner child.

Your distinction that the androgynes we write about are not men but 'slash characters' may clear up the thinking on the topic a little. I presume you mean that regardless of degree of conformity to social norms they are all, alike, characters who may with impunity be paired with a same-sex partner? to allow for those with the kink of writing their male characters as true jerks manly men except for the little detail of their homosexual activity. Hence any female character may be defined as a slash character and paired with the female of choice. Yes, good. This is making sense so far. But then - first, you have to find someone to pair her with, the old problem; and then, as you note, you have to find something for her to do besides save the world and agonize about 'does she love me' or 'if I love her does that mean I have to start smoking cigars?'

As I've been saying to a few members of this APA, I think we need a new category of fiction in English - the yaoi story. That's where you want to see Your Guy doing something sexual that, face it, your guy wouldn't do, such as - let's make it unreal - fondling chickens. I mean, you know, I like to fondle chickens and I think the sight of a man fondling chickens is a real turn-on and I really want to see Johnny fondling a chicken. So I write a story where a chicken from Down Below's wandering poultry crop makes its way into Johnny's cabin and - Johnny gets to fondle a chicken and we're all happy. Now, it's not impossible that Johnny is in fact a real chicken-fondler, since nothing in the series has dealt with his attitudes to chickens. But it does deal with his attitude vis-a-vis his military position, and I would strongly suggest that Johnny and Jeffy [of Babylon 5] necking in front of their staff and the Centauri ambassador is a pornographic fantasy and not something two career officers are really likely to do. Hence by me, 'Balance of Power' is pure yaoi in the Japanese tradition. 'Never mind the improbabilities: I wanna see them screw.'

I understand the appeal of slash for you, in that it explodes the 'perfection' of those terribly perfect male types so constantly featured on television. But for this to work one has to be able to view the Captain Kirks from the standpoint of society as a whole and not from one's own headspace. To me (and how many other viewers?) the all-American farmboys looked either android - unreal or seriously damaged. The charge of slash for me is that it says 'Hey! These guys are actually real people who feel - who can feel - just like you!' Slash humanizes the celluloid inhuman. (My five cents worth in the minor sub-debate on Why Do Gay Women Like Slash.)

I'm trying to watch like Xena, I really am. It ought to be a piece of cake for an anime fan to ignore the idiocy and dig out the nuggets of dark psychology - the delicious subtexts lurking under the frivolity - but it's a slog. Maybe the live action genre gets in the way; maybe the camp is too camp. The homages to the Incredible Voyages of Sinbad oeuvre come a bit too fast and thick for this viewer. But thanks for the pointers. I'll have my eye peeled for that secret damaged soul.

As a staunch supporter of print media, I hope to God there's a place for you in the future. Your criticisms of Net fiction are the same as mine: so much of it is dreck, so little of it is proofed, and if any of it has seen an editor's hand I'd be surprised. The question being how much fen in general will prefer the quick fix over the quality fix. Surely in time people will get tired of garbled sentences and lackluster plots and go back to the reliable standbys?

Please, please, drop-kick JMS the rest of the way through puberty. B5 is giving me definite feelings of watching a train-wreck in progress, and I'm not referring to all the Horrible Things that are going to happen to the characters in future (though that is a worry) but what's happening to them now. I've lost faith in JMS' vision completely.

Fanwise, in Japan I picked up a bunch of anime-based dojinshis for series known only to anime fans (Yuyu Hakusho, Gundam Wing), found another one-eyed man to drool over in a totally silly series I wouldn't have considered watching while it was on, and sent Dear Editor a box full of Sho-con manga which will eventually come back to me in xeroxes begging for translation. Sho-con seems to be the current rage amongst the-never forget-female yaoi-drawing population. It's short for 'Shota-kun (a typical little boy's name) complex', apparently the female response to Lolita complex amongst the men. It involves an obsession with pubescent boys rather than pubescent girls. This is fine - what's a bishonen if not a pubescent boy? But the boys in these manga, although stated to be thirteen and fourteen, are often drawn to look like six to eight-year-olds, and the Other Guy in the configuration is mostly an older teenager or man. Grilling my informants [J] and [M] on why nice little office ladies would want to draw stories featuring the rape of what looks like small children elicited the comment from [J] that it's probably a form of revenge on the spoiled rotten little brothers that Japanese girls are expected to cater to and indulge as much as their mothers do. I wouldn't be surprised, actually.

But [M] pointed out that there's a difference in technique between Sho-kun and standard kiddy porn, or even the Rori-con male-drawn stuff. The latter caters to the rape fantasies of the viewer: he's invited to put himself in the place of the aggressor. In Sho-kun, there's no such invitation. A scene is presented to you which you are invited to watch but there's no place for the viewer to insert herself in the action. The characters are presented as distinct people, not the faceless prototypes of pornography. They're themselves doing what they're doing for comprehensible even if, often enough, inexcusable reasons, and the viewer is left on the outside.

Several of the stories I've read and translated are fairly subtle psychological studies of the mentality of both abused and abuser, a fact which rather surprised me. The Japanese in my experience don't do psychology the way we do. Still they left me feeling queasy. I couldn't see anyone wanting to either draw or read stories like this for fun. I had a long e-mail correspondence with my editor about 'I don't think the fans are going to go for this.' Her response was 'Why not?' My editor is originally from Taiwan, even if she's in the American Air Force now, and her take on the subject was that it was all a fantasy with no relation to reality whatsoever. She liked the stories for the art style and that was all.

Somehow I think this basically Asian attitude must be what's at the heart of the Japanese attitude to yaoi's standard themes of rape and domination. It's a fantasy. It's not real. Getting upset at the subject matter for them may be a little like someone jumping up and down at a performance of Macbeth - "Look, he's killing everyone, it's terrible, you shouldn't show things like that!" Hey, relax, it's just a play. I suppose this is getting into the area of how much a work of fiction can be supposed to affect people's behaviour and attitudes. Plato was all ready to ban plays precisely because he believed that 'just a play' had a definite (and deleterious) effect on people's morals. Shakespeare's company got into hot water for putting on a performance of Richard II badly timed to coincide with Essex's rebellion. We may not buy that - we may believe that the American Civil War would have happened even if there'd been no 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'- but it seems to me there's still room to argue that art has some effect on its viewers. Why write, otherwise?

Some Topics Discussed in "Wide-Eyed and Breathless"

Excerpts from "Wide-Eyed and Breathless"

I was intrigued by your idea that characters in slash represent a new literary gender role - it felt true, as well as being intellectually convincing. In a way, it also bypasses the acrimonious gay/not-gay argument: if they're sui generis, a thing apart (which fantasy characters are to a certain extent if they're powerful enough to take on iconic stature) then the labels become irrelevant. Perhaps that's behind the puzzling but heartfelt insistence of some authors that their slash couples aren't gay: to call them gay is to categorise them, put them into a box which their creators feel is too small, make them too ordinary. Many writers-and-readers (me included) want their fantasy heroes - and I make no bones about Bodie & Doyle's being creatures of fantasy for me - to have a larger-than-life quality. It's connected with what you went on to say about the slashy thrill of hero/ines being good at derring-do. I want my slash characters to be superlatively good in some field or other, preferably pretty far removed from my own areas of expertise. I love Doyle's legendary skill with a gun or Avon's way with a computer. As for Ivanova, what I relish about her is that she does all those Boys' Own, shooty-bang things extremely well and nobody thinks it extraordinary, least of all her. It's absolutely taken for granted; just Ivanova.

I did enjoy what you wrote about B5, by the way. Re. your describing it as Dickensian, yes. Have you noticed how many nineteenth-century literary references there are? Marcus, in particular, appears to be steeped in the C19th. novel Actually, that struck me as rather convincing, seeing how he's meant to hail from a colonial planet. It reminded me of the way the education system in India and the British West Indies was, until quite recently, a perfect model of what you'd get in the more conservative small public school (And surely Marcus' colony was founded by Brits? How else do you explain his accent? Believe me, if anyone were to be potty enough to take Little Nell to the stars, it would be us;)

Some Topics Discussed in "With Friends Like These..."

  • a rumor about the demise of On the Double, see that page
  • more information about fanfic and other fannish websites and mailing lists
  • a defense of the quality of fiction on the internet

Excerpts from "With Friends Like These..."

I've been something of a slash geek lately. I've started an Internet mailing list devoted to Mulder/Krycek (mostly discussion, though there is some fanfic). Anyone who is interested in joining should e-mail [email protected]; put "subscribe" in the subject header. I've also put up a web site devoted to Avon/Tarrant. The URL is: http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/2967. Another page that might be of interest is the Mulder/Krycek Romantics Association Page. I don't own this page, but I contributed some animated GIFs!☺ Here you can download every known M/K story on the net (including some that are unavailable elsewhere); there's also info on zines, and humor, photos, essays, etc. Point your browsers to: http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/1121. Note: these sites are semi-underground. It's okay to tell your friends, but please be discreet about announcing them in large public forums, especially those which might not be slash-friendly.

"Slick," I would say, is quite polished for netfic. A lot of what's out there is far rougher. It is, however, a PWP and perhaps not to your taste. There's an amazingly diversity of fiction on the net. You might like Jane Mortimer's stories, "The Same Everywhere" and "The Hand We Were Dealt." They are available for download at the MKRA Page. (They are way too long for me to print here, or I would.) (And to be fair, there are plenty of very rough stories available in zines, too. It's just that we long-time fans know which zines to grab and which to avoid. Netfic is evolving in that direction, too; some people accept only stories that meet their standards for their sites.)

I doubt Chris Carter is going to let Mulder get together with his real soulmate on-screen, but he's not above teasing us. "Tunguska" was incredibly slashy - and, if you believe the rumors, intentionally so. Reportedly, Nick Lea and David Duchovny, who are close friends in real life, deliberately played up the homoerotic elements of the script. (Yes, they know about Mulder/Krycek slash fanfic.)

I wonder if Mulder's complaining about Krycek's "Stupid-ass haircut" was in the script or a Duchovny ad-lib? We know Duchovny doesn't mind slash; the Larry Sanders thing was his idea! And have you seen the XF 3rd Season Gag Reel? It's extremely slashy. There's one scene with Mulder and Skinner simulating intercourse, and another where Duchovny is supposed to tell Mitch, "I was too busy getting my ass kicked" and accidentally says, "I was too busy getting my ass licked." But my favorite is an outtake from the car scene in "Apocrypha." Mulder gets into the car, turns to Krycek, and says, "You're a really good-looking kid, you know that?" Then he smiles, grabs Krycek by the back of the neck as if he's going to kiss him — and shoves his head down in his lap. Nick is laughing and squealing, "Hey! He's pushing my head down!"

Anyway, "Tunguska" was a slash fan's dream, but the second part, "Terma," was a major disappointment. Yech. That episode totally trashed all previous Krycek characterization. Overall, however, those episodes have been very good for M/K fandom. "Tunguska" caused a sharp spike in interest: we have web sites, we have mailing lists, we have zines and music videos. Even the frustration of "Terma" had its good points: it's fueling a lot of fanfic, as annoyed fans try to write it out of existence. ☺

Eclecticon was tons of fun, as usual. There was a good turnout at the Avon/Tarrant panel (and no Tarrant-bashers dared show their heads!). The Avon-Tarrant party was a success as well, with more food that seemed decent. But two of my slashy pictures were stolen. One was on a flyer posted by the elevator, of Tarrant kissing Avon. The other was a full- page, full-color printout of the photo of Mitch Pileggi kissing Nick Lea that I used in my last trib. Both were stolen sometime Saturday night. Not sure if someone thought they were hot and wanted them for herself, or was just so offended she ripped them down in outrage! And I know it's early, but I'm already thinking about MediaWest. As usual, the Tarrant Nostra will be having our annual Tea For Tarrant. This year, we are going to try and reserve the party suite, since it's becoming far too big an event for our room. We're aiming for Saturday afternoon, as usual, but check flyers for the actual time and location. I'm also hoping to have some sort of Mulder/Krycek get-together. Maybe not a full-blown party, but at least a video showing with snacks and such. This will probably be in my room, since I don't anticipate it being as big an affair as the Tarrant party. Again, check for flyers.

Some Topics Discussed in "Untitled by M G"

Excerpts from "Untitled by M G"

Have read some stuff [on the net]. Mainly lots and lots of bad to mediocre Due South netfic. Will not start the usual discussion of why netfic seems to have more lousy stories than zinefic.

Have made many many many vids for people (think it might be a good idea to shop for a new VCR before the current one dies of overwork) starting with about 20+ copies of each of the five Babylon 5's from our UK suppliers. This is I realize my own fault for hooking too many people who then have no contact except me to supply them with B5. Maybe next year I won't get them early? Actually, it's kinda amazing there are so many new converts in Season 3. I quit trying to convert people after Season 2 ended, figuring it would be too hard to catch up. (I'm still betting Earth gets destroyed, just because nobody's ever done it on TV before — "We've got to save the Earth from certain destruction!" And they always do save it. And I think JMS would enjoy not saving it.. Now, the question is, will it be the Shadows or the Vorlons that do it.)

[...]

Also taped many sets of Wiseguy. Only thing of interest here was the woman that saw Frank in a music vid and wanted the show based on one look at our favorite Grumpy Fed. Ah, the magic is still there.

Oh, yes. Saw the XFiles blooper tapes! (All three.) Somebody [in this APA] was talking about giving Scully an honorary penis for slash purposes. To that subject there were two points of interest. Like all blooper tapes there are many instances of actors screwing up lines and emitting profane and/or obscene comments on the situation. Gillian is usually found saying 'fuck' or 'fucking' when this happens to her. In one memorable scene she said "suck my dick." I move that we decide she has already received her honorary slash penis. The other memorable scene was from "Humbug" where GA ate the cricket. It was awe-inspiring watching her simultaneously gross out and win the admiration of a vast filming crew of almost all men with this little scene....

Pixel Manipulation vs. Fan Art.

It's clear to me that fans are looking for different things from a nude drawing of an actor/character that from a nude photograph of an actor/character. (I will be using Mr. David Duchovny as an example... Fan artists have long used photographs as source material for fan art. This nude Playgirl layout with a change of head becomes Mr. Ray Doyle nude. This advertisement becomes Skinner and Mulder in a playful moment. This is accepted, acceptable, and does not interfere with the viewers enjoyment of the art, or, in many cases, the willingness to bid high at auction. The transformation into drawing doesn't affect its appreciation by fans. Now take that same Playgirl layout and through the means of pixel manipulation take the nude torso and attached head of Mr. David Duchovny and combine it with the nude crotch and legs of the nameless male model. The result: a created representation of Mr. D in the nude.

The fan does not respond with "Oh! Nice job!" the way they would for a piece of fan art. No, the fan responds by studying the picture to determine if it is "really" David. Clearly it is "really" David - parts of him at least. What the fan really wants to determine is "Is that really David Duchovny's penis?" In fan art one presumes that the artist, unless she got very lucky, did not have the real Duchovny penis as her model, but this never seems to interfere with the fan's enjoyment of the art. So what's the problem with enjoying the pixel manipulation the same way? Apparently, fans look for truth, evidence, facts in photographs — well, nude photographs anyway, and something else in fan art. It can't just be a representation of an emotional relationship, because fan art also contains examples of single figures posed no differently than the guys do for Playgirl, or gay skin magazines.

No, I don't have any really grand conclusion to make. I just find it interesting.

Some Topics Discussed in "Lavender Lilies"

Excerpts from "Lavender Lilies"

Anybody who has had Bodie/Doyle stories published in my zines, please feel assured that you are free to put them out on the Circuit or circulate them around to any friends as you wish. Speaking of Bodie/Doyle fandom, I have noticed that it seems to be on a downturn. 'Which of course happens to any fandom; they go through cycles. I'm not even sure that the Circuit as such even exists any longer.

ALL MY CHILDREN is a soap opera which airs on daytime. So I have to tape it while I'm at work and watch it on the weekend. It's the first US soap opera which is featuring long-term gay characters and two of these characters are actually having a love life. They don't show all the passionate bedroom scenes they show with the heterosexual characters, but it's a big step to show gay men dealing with a budding romantic relationship. And the response has been quite positive. TV execs were concerned that the mainly (presumably heterosexual) female audience wouldn't be interested in a relationship between two men. Obviously they haven't kept track of the wildly enthusiastic female audience/readership in Japan which avidly follows male/male relationships depicted in anime/manga. At any rate, the mostly female audiences in the US have been quite pleased, so far, to see the gay male relationship unfold.

Crockett/Tubbs (as opposed to Crockett/Castillo) being a ’weirdness,” of course I don’t think it's weird at ail. I've always seen a lot between Crockett and Tubbs in the MIAMI VICE series. But frequently when I mention Crockett/Tubbs to other slash fans, they give me these weird looks, as to say, “What is wrong with you???" Then I usually get sighs and explanations as to how Crockett/Castillo is the only viable slash relationship in VICE. A few times I’ve asked VICE slash fans about C/T in zines, and get told that many VICE (or multi-media) zines don’t accept C/T stories but only C/C stories. Which of course is their right. But I would like to discuss that wonderful, compelling scene in the VICE episode (forget the name of it, but I have it on tape though it’s been a while since I’ve watched it) where Sonny is out, thinking that he is a drug dealer named Burnett. And Castillo reluctantly is ordering Rico to track him down, and perhaps kill him. And Rico says plaintively, "that’s my partner." And I can hear the thought as plain as day. "That's my lover." And I haven't been able to find another VICE fan who really understands what (I think) really is going on here.

The two Rosemary Callahan zines you mentioned are the ones which reinspired me. As well as some of the more over-the-top AU Kirk/Spock stories. For some perverse reason, the idea of keeping James Kirk as my personal sex slave intrigues me, so I’ve been reading some of the more recent slave stories. Of course none of these stories have the slightest resemblance to Kirk, Spock, Star Trek, Vulcans, Terrans, or anyone else. So do I care!!!!!  :-) :-)

Thelma & Louise: You don't have to apologize. I love discussing [them] with anyone with any interest, even they see the scenario differently than I do. I've been in this one person fandom for years, and it gets rather lonely.

Actually, I don't see Thelma and Louise's deaths as a loss for them. Perhaps it's because I've read/seen a lot of Japanese literature/movies where the main characters choose an honorable death rather than capture/exploitation/whatever. What would have been a huge loss is if either of them had listened to the one "sympathetic" cop and decided to turn themselves in. Which is what too many movie/TV female heroic outlaw characters do. Or even < gak > one of them ends up falling in love with the cop, perhaps Thelma, who had been running away from her dork of a husband. And then Louise ends up making up with her ex-boyfriend and they all live happily ever after. < G-A-A-A-A-A-K!!!!!! >

How much more heroic in my mind is for Thelma and Louise to refuse the preferred offer of pity and sympathy and a return to female victimhood. How much more heroic for them to say "death before dishonor." Which is a deviance in itself because women are supposed to be afraid of death. Only men are supposed to be willing to die honorably for a principle or for their freedom. Thelma and Louise proclaim their love, show it openly, and then act once more in a final statement of "I REFUSE TO SUBMIT."

Of course anyone knows that when two heroic characters kiss each other, then drive over a cliff.... Thelma and Louise are alive and well and living happily ever after on the Island of Lesbos :-)

Some Topics Discussed in "Tales From the Obsessed"

Excerpts from "Tales From the Obsessed"

Kira...I liked her a lot the second and third seasons of the show, particularly, and wish they hadn't watered her down so much lately. I don't think much of the slash possibilities. Dax doesn't do much for me, but even before it became suggested in the storyline I really liked the idea of Kira/Gul Dukat, since it seems to me (in retrospect, since I turned on to them before I became a slash fan) that they have a lot of the characteristics one finds in an interesting slash pairing, the combination of interesting conflicts (they were on opposite sides during the occupation of Bajor — he in the military, she a terrorist/freedom fighter) and equally interesting similarities (they're both natural warriors, both aggressive, both go right after what they want in the most direct manner possible). I had a whole series planned, really I did, back before they killed her religious love interest, which I thought was a shame, be cause that added an extra twist to it, that she'd be "betraying" a religious figure she respected. And the taboo aspect of Kira with a Cardassian is in the same ballpark as the same-sex taboo in m/m slash.

Since [L] is heavily into Mulder/Krycek these days, maybe this is the place to mention that one of the best I've seen recently has been published on the net, Jane Mortimer's "The Same Everywhere." I love this writer's style, the quirky power balance between the two, and her incredibly unique way of combining angst, sex, and a truly unique brand of humor. She's in the progress of writing a sequel, "The Hand We Were Dealt," which is being posted in segments on [L's] M/K. list, and it's just as good.

Some Topics Discussed in "Untitled by B B"

  • commentary on the Bible and how it is lazily misused, misquoted
  • dutyfic

Excerpts from "Untitled by B B"

I think you're right about the importance of specific characterization. I also think there's a trend toward more and better f/f and slashy f/m, although I suppose I can't be sure whether fandom is changing or if I'm just seeing different parts of it. But it seems, from where I sit, that the mainstream is getting more inclusive.

When I went to my first couple of MediaWests and attended panels on slash, there was always someone to argue that "You say the female characters aren't interesting? Well, why don't you make them interesting?" It sounded a lot like "Why don't you do your duty like you're supposed to, and the hell with what you like?"

Now there seems to be more genuine interest in specific female characters, rather than insistence that writing about women is a Good Thing.

Some Topics Discussed in "When Correctly Viewed"

  • discussion of an article by Samuel R. Delany currently running (in three parts) in The New York Review of Science Fiction, on "The Politics of Paraliterary Criticism." (topic: slash as social object)
  • BLAKE'S ZINE LIST: ALL - B7 FICTION: SLASH, ADULT, AND MIXED ZINES

Excerpts from "When Correctly Viewed"

I have a fannish project that, although it seems like something of a busman's holiday, has kept me sane for several months now: I've been cataloguing B7 smut zines, listing the contents of every zine I could find, and alphabetizing the stories by author. The results have been posted on the Space City mailing list, and there will probably be a hard copy version of A Guide to Blake's Seven Erotica ready by Eclecticon, in a little over a week. (If anyone's interested, it will be $10 plus postage.) Stuck on to the end of this trib are my lists of all the B7 smut I could find. (These are based on lists that [L] started.) I'd love to know of any additions, especially for the multimedia zines. Also, for some of the zines I wasn't able to find a copy or get information on the B7 content.

My slashiest activity has been watching videotapes of those old Hong Kong movies from the early 70s that I remember so very fondly. I found a bunch of them — in the yucky English dubbed versions, alas, but still — in a video store in Cambridge, Mass. What a blast from the past! And lordy, those things were slashy. There's every bit as much chemistry between my two favorite stars, David Chiang and Ti Lung, as I remembered. And that's what makes the things work, in the face of silly plots and godawful production values. And the guys almost always get beaten up at some point, and usually die in the end, which is great for a wallow addict like me. <happy sigh>

Some Topics Discussed in "To Be Announced by T H"

Excerpts from "To Be Announced by T H"

I've found the secret to watching and following TV shows - don't tape it. Since moving I still haven't got the video's set up right (can't find the fine tune so tapes come out watchable but not very good quality) but I'm actually watching programs now, not just taping them and putting them on a shelf unwatched, to wait the day when I finally get around to watching the tape. I've got loads and loads of tapes that I haven't watched - all of Chicago Hope, Earth 2, Sliders - all sorts of stuff - but now I'm not taping I've actually watched Millennium (as it shows late night here I'd have taped it, and filed it on the shelf), Nash Bridges, Chicago Hope, Murder One etc.

I still can't watch Voyager - we are still in season 1 here [in the UK]. I'm not watching it but I'm totally hooked by the slash stories on the net. In fact, I've spent the last week formatting and reading Voyager stories rather than writing this. I'm going to have to find some good eps of the show to watch, I want to see the characters I'm falling in love with - I just can't watch them in the crappy eps we're getting at the moment.

[...]

I'm falling out of that 'high' with Due South, it's just another fandom now, though still one of my favourites - and though I hate to say it Voyager is moving into that gap - at least it's only the slash I'm hooked on now, not the show itself. Oh the joys of being a fan.

ways used to think that 'slash' by definition was male/male or very occasionally female/female but I have got the same slash buzz from some of the B5 het stories that are on the net. The Susan/Marcus stories are good het stories that don't appear to be slash, but the Susan/Garibaldi/Sheridan (or Susan and any other two males) seem to give that feeling of slash. Part of it may be that the three way relationship still pushes the boundaries of 'conventionality' but I think the main part for me is that Susan is a real character and there in her own right, not as some appendage to one of the male characters. I've not watched much of Voyager but in the fiction I've seen the Torres/Paris/Kim stories have the same slash feel. In these too, Torres is there in her own right, as much a 'real' character/person as Paris and Kim whereas in a lot of the het stuff the female character is hardly drawn at all, more a cypher than a character.

The Wrap Party - well, we'd like to see slash/adult zines being sold openly on tables, you know, people browsing and exclaiming over their latest find. As it is a con open to all the only way to do this is to give the slash/adult dealers their own room with an 18 only warning on the door. No, there are not that many, and in all truth it probably won't happen but its going to get a good try first.

References

  1. ^ See The Ray Wars.
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