The Advantages of Erotic Fan Fiction as an Art Form

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Title:	The Advantages of Erotic Fan Fiction as an Art Form
Creator:	Jane Mortimer
Date(s):	November 1998
Medium:	online
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External Links:	The Advantages of Erotic Fan Fiction, Archived version
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The Advantages of Erotic Fan Fiction as an Art Form is 1998 essay by Jane Mortimer. It has the subtitle: "A More Shameless Essay."

It is a companion piece to The Advantages of Fan Fiction as an Art Form.

Opening Paragraph Excerpt: New Author's Prologue:

Added November 8, 1998:

Some people have expressed disappointment that I didn't go into more detail here, particularly in discussing slash. (Others felt it was too heavily weighted toward slash.) Of course, there is a great deal one can say about slash, and many people have. I wanted to treat this particular essay as something that could be read by someone totally unfamiliar with this genre of writing, and give a few answers to the question, "Why do some people like this so much?" There is a great deal I would like to say one day, not only on the subject of slash, but also on that intense, focused view of relationships so dear to the hearts of fanwriters in general. Gentle reader, this is not that essay. I hope, however, that you find it worth reading; and if it gives you any ideas of your own on the subject, feel free to share them. One of my missions in life is to break down the artificial walls that have accreted around certain types of writing -- between pro and fan, genre and mainstream, drama and prose (I know there are those out there who want to argue that last pairing with me, but bear with it for now), and to dig out and identify that thread which seems to connect a lot of disparate writing, at least for me. I'm still working on it, and for the time being, all I can say is, I know it when I see it.

Some Topics Discussed

• PWPs
• slash
• fanfiction as storytelling
• the constraints of pro fic
• the shortcuts and speculations that fanfic can have

Excerpts

All right. Erotica. Porn. Smut. That thing nice girls don't do, and conventional wisdom has it that women aren't interested in.

After all, women are turned off by the hardcore male porn rags -- Hustler and the like -- and when it comes to Playgirl, there are a fair amount of females who find the pictures sterile. Women, you see, like hearts and flowers and true love, and possibly heaving breasts of passion in a romance novel.

Right. And if you believe that, there's some oceanfront property in Florida I could show you.

We'll leave off for a moment the implied slur against the romance genre, a form of fiction that's wider in scope and quality than the uninitiated give it credit for. Some of those books with flowers on the cover or bad paintings of Fabio-clones have pretty damn explicit stuff inside there, and some of them have some interesting things to say about men and women.

But we'll pass over that for now and instead we'll ask, as all post-Freudians must at one point or another, What do women want?

I am about to generalize shamelessly. A great many women enjoy a good erotic read, but they like something beyond the specific body parts; hence a story is often more useful in that way than a picture. Eroticism, for women (and for some men) may be invested in many things: in attitude, voice, the tenor of a relationship, the way a man grins, the way he whispers, the things he whispers. In leather jackets and tight jeans, in white tie and tails. In power or in obsession. In sudden acts of kindness or unexpected witticisms. In heroism or in guilt.

These things, you must understand (I assume here that I'm speaking to a space alien) are not simply endearing, they can also be erotic. A turn-on. A signal that goes right to the groin and the lungs, catching the breath, flushing the cheeks.

Because, you see, chicks like it all. The whole thing. The old in-and-out is the least of it, a mere expression of a long and diffuse tickle that starts with a sudden cast of light on a face, an abrupt realization that thank god, now all things are new again.

And thus we come at last to fan fiction.

Fan fiction, faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive. Able to get two characters panting over the bedsprings in a single bound. Because the baseline is established; the audience knows the characters; they've walked that mile in their shoes, they are primed.

The dynamic between these two people is clear to the audience. Now you, the writer, have the challenge of expressing that dynamic, of taking it to a place that would make the producers blush -- but a place that must follow logically from that baseline development. Having, say, Fox Mulder suddenly announce that he's never been really interested in this alien stuff, and hey Scully, what about a weekend in Fort Lauderdale, will not quite fill the bill.

And damn, it's hard enough to write what my friends and I so respectfully call chickporn in the first place. After all, how old a subject is this? How many ways can two people (or three) do the same thing? But here we are helped by the nature of fan fiction itself; if you're being true to the characters, it will never be the same thing, because the history between them will be different from everyone else's history.

In the best fan fictional erotica, that backstory will be there, unspoken or not, in what these people do and how and when they do it. What's more, the immediate plot of the story will express itself in the bedroom just as it is playing out in dark alleyways or alien planets. What I'm talking about is a seamless, mergeless whole, in which no character can be substituted for another, no sex scene can happen at any place other than where it is, and where not only is the world of the story reflected in the sex scenes, we learn more about that world by watching these people do it -- because we learn their reactions to that world in their reactions to each other.

No voyage into the waters of erotic fan fiction, however brief and shallow, would be complete without a stop at Slash Island. Slash, for the uninitiated, refers to same-sex pairings; usually male/male (the authors are most often women, after all, and a few gay men). The word comes from the designation of the type of story: Kirk/Spock (for the oldsters among you), or Mulder/Krycek, or Blake/Avon, or Paris/Kim.

Readers will have favorite pairings, based not only on physical appearance but on the baseline relationship as it is presented on-screen; some are more intriguing than others, and this is a matter of taste. (Remember, The Dynamic Is All.)

There's a double challenge here. Some characters, it may be argued, could plausibly be bisexual (thereby allowing the wicked slash girls among us to let their paper fantasies roam free). Mulder, for instance, manages to present himself as both a monk and a depraved individual simultaneously, a stunt that only adds to his charm. And while one might protest, "But I never saw him checking out any guys on the show," let's be real. He's a character in a TV show in the late 1990s. He would never be shown checking out any guys, any more than he would be shown going to the bathroom on-screen.

Clearly there are those among us who will not let their harmless pleasures be fettered by the constraints of Network Standards and Practices. For their part, such writers might argue, "Perhaps Mulder is irrevocably straight; we can't prove it either way. But if he were bisexual, here is how he might behave in this situation, given everything else we know about the character."

For some fan fictional purists, even so debatably free an interpretation is irritating; if such a personal concept is not foreshadowed on-screen, they feel it's bad form to play with it. And yet, and yet. Sexual orientation is such a big deal in our time; there have been other cultures that took it more in stride. It is, in fact, such a big deal that I was actually a bit shocked when I came to the realization that changing Mulder's sexual orientation was one of the most trivial things one could change about him. Make him give up UFO-chasing and retire to a fishing boat off Key West; now there would be a change. He would no longer be Mulder. But have him sleep with a guy, and he remained the same obsessive, distrustful, smartass, paranoid fellow he always was.

Why do many women like slash? Well, why do many men like watching lesbians? (In other words, I don't know.) Certainly there is something rich and decadent about doubling one's visual pleasures. And as a writing challenge (all right, I can't help it, I like writing challenges; they have all the rewards and delights of a difficult piece of music) they present, for a woman, two alternate male points of view that she must describe believably. And men are, to some degree, alien to women; beloved but different. To express one's affection for their maleness while still doing justice to them as fellow human beings is an artistic joy.

Beyond this, slash beckons because often the meatier roles in the original source material went to males; female characters were portrayed inconsistently, their roles watered down, leaving the more intriguing and edgy relationships as the ones between the men. Expanding them erotically seems more natural, in some cases, than trying to animate a secondary character simply because she's female.

Politically, too, there's a certain attraction; it levels the playing field. If one is exploring, for instance, a power dynamic between two men, the focus is on these particular men. Play it out between a man and a woman, and several thousand years of history rise to distract and oppress us, no matter who comes out on top. Sometimes you want a cigar to just be a cigar.

The final advantage of erotic fan fiction in general is as folk art. There is a fascination in following this new (and in a way, old) art form as it evolves on the Net. Following the branching tributaries of the river of canon, as each is explored by writer after writer; seeing how that dynamic, that world-view, is expanded and enriched. Working with a series form gives you time for subtlety of character, for that moment when the baseline is twisted into some new momentary flair of sunlight; working with the infinite alternate realities of fan fiction gives you a thousand, a million views of expression. The Impressionistic camera taking a picture of a Vermeer interior, later to be examined through the microscope of the rigorous Roman fresco. Identity fragmented and re-knit. And, we can only hope, fiery as anything.