Why does het fic get such a bad rap?

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Title:	Why does het fic get such a bad rap?
Creator:	Ivana Spankoff (iamtheliquorr)
Date(s):	August 28, 2006
Medium:	LiveJournal post
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External Links:	Why does het fic get such a bad rap?, Archived version
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Why does het fic get such a bad rap? is a 2006 essay by Ivana Spankoff (iamtheliquorr).

"This is not going to be one of those het-vs-slash circle-jerks (at least I hope not). This is partially in defense of het; partially just me wondering why it gets such a bad rap in fandom. So I'm going to take on the (unflattering) generalizations most commonly thrown at het fic and why I'm genuinely bewildered (and honestly, more than a little annoyed) by them."

From the Essay

1. Het is boring.

Well, I guess this depends what you're reading the fic for. If you're looking for some quick and dirty word pr0n, and you're put off by girly parts, I suppose this is a valid personal opinion. But it's just that--a personal opinion. It's unfair to tar an entire genre of fic with the same brush b/c of a personal preference. Some het fans read fic for more than the pr0n. Some of us are intrigued by the actual relationship between the characters. If I wanted nameless, faceless pr0n, I wouldn't bother with fanfic and would just watch/read the stuff at your average XXX site. I read het fic because that particular pairing intrigues me. When I write sex scenes, they're not just there for titillation. They should be like any other scene--they should move the story forward, reveal a different aspect of these characters' relationship, and be unique to the characters involved. If you can take the same sex scene and substitute different characters' names, then that's just bad fic. That's not because it's het--if you could do that to a slash sex scene I'd say that same thing. And that is boring.

DISCLAIMER: Before you slashers start pelting me with hot-pink vibrators, I'm not saying y'all just want nameless, faceless pr0n. The stuff I said above about the characterization and relationships can be applied to slash fic as well. That discussion is not specific to any particular genre of fic--that was my point. "Boring" is a quality of badly-written fic, period--not specifically slash or het.

2. There are more crappy het fics than slash fics.

Now, I rarely peruse slash archives, but it's my impression that there are more het fics online, period. And I figure, the more fic there is, the more likely it is that most of it will be bad. But news flash--fanfic in general is bad. Perhaps in small, relatively obscure fandoms, it's easier to find the diamonds in the rough. But when a fandom is as big as say, HP or the Whedonverse, good luck.

Furthermore, if people who make this claim are going by large unregulated archives like say, The Pit of Voles, what do you expect? True, the HP section of the Pit seems dominated by bad teenybopper het (although I've seen several bad teeny slash fics as well). But generally, het appeals to a broader audience. This doesn't mean it's better. It just means there's more of it. So of course it will appear that there are more bad het fics. But the ratio of goodfic::badfic is probably roughly the same in both slash and het.

So I'm making the same claim for het that you can make for slash--if you want good fic, don't go looking at FFnet or AFFnet unless you want to lose all faith in humanity. There are many great het fics at smaller, less well-known archives. I find good het fic almost exclusively through rec lists or word of mouth. I almost never find it just perusing an archive. And the het fics I do find are verrryy good.

3. Het is for 14-yr-olds and bored housewives.

So I suppose every slash fan is hipper than the casts of FRIENDS, Sex in the City, and ummm... some other show about hot single people put together?

... OK, that was bitchy. But I couldn't resist. At 28, single, and not completely unfortunate-looking, I resent being called a teenybopper or bored housewife b/c I happen to like my fic with girly bits.

I don't really see any basis for this except stereotyping. Yes, het writers exist who meet those criteria. Slash writers exist who meet those criteria. This is the internet. If we all led fabulous, exciting, worthy-of-our-own-reality-show lives, why the hell would be writing fic about someone else's characters on livejournal?

4. Het is something I can get every day; slash is exciting/unusual.

OK, first off... as a non-slutty single girl not in a relationship, no, I can't get het every day. Well, I could but not unless I wanted to out-ho Ginny Weasley and Martha Jones Paris Hilton and Lindsay Blohan put together. And umm... what does this have to do with fic? Fanfic is not masturbation (OK, there are some who can argue with me about that). Going back to point #1, I'm reading it more for a good story than to get my jollies off. I just like a good story, period--whether it involves het or slash, that doesn't change the quality of the writing.

Which leads to my next point. Slash is to fanfic what funky alternative bands are to the music scene. Everyone's sick of the top 40 shit already, so they shun it and instead listen to obscure bands no one's ever heard of. But, like music, alternative =/= quality. There are plenty of shitty alternative bands whose stuff makes my ears bleed every bit as much as the worst Top 40 stuff. This is not to say that all slash fics suck... far from it. I'm just saying that they're capable of sucking as much as het fics are.

5. Het fics = romance novels.

I think this perception is a lot of what feeds into #3, because that's the stereotype about those Mills&Boon serials you see at the grocery store. And for the most part that's true. But again, it's an assumption based on little evidence. Het fics are no more like romance novels than slash fics are. Either way, if the fic is about a romantic/physical relationship between two characters, that would make it... ummm... a romance. The fact that one involves two guys as opposed to a guy and a girl doesn't change that. It might not be as poorly-written as those Mills&Boon novels, but it's still a romance.

Furthermore--and this applies to any pairing fic, het or slash--the main plot need not necessarily be romance. It could be a dark fic in which the relationship is anything but romantic. Not all het fics are wish-fulfillment fantasies for the lovelorn. Many of them can be quite depressing. They don't all end in Character A marrying Character C (heh!) and having 2.5 children and a yellow lab. Many of them are simply about examining the characters themselves and the dynamic between them--not necessarily about falling in loff.

So here endeth my essay, b/c I am boring myself and want to go do something else already. I sincerely hope I didn't offend anyone... that was not my intention. I will admit I do find some of the above statements offensive, but the last thing I want is to do the same thing to slashers that I feel some of them do to het fans.

Excerpts from Comments

avidbeader : I'm a very het person when it comes to the written word. I can enjoy a good episode of Queer as Folk when I'm in the mood for it, but when it comes to reading, whether it's fiction, fic or pr0n, I prefer reading het.

The only slash fics I've ever read more than a sentence of are by mijan and marksykins. And I actually haven't finished reading mijan's big opus Eclipse yet, bad me. What hooked me about her story was how absolutely in character she kept Harry and Draco and how slowly she built the relationship between them, making it utterly believable rather than some OOC pr0n with a couple of HP names thrown in just to get the built-in audience (which, to be fair, can happen just as easily in het fic).

I honestly get the feeling sometimes that many people who are so into slash to the exclusion of anything else are trying to make themselves seem edgier than they are. To be even more different than just being a major fan of something.

I'll stick to reading fics about the characters I care about. Only so much time to spare.

surrexi : thankyouthankyouthankyou.

I hate the way slash fans have developed this sort of elite mentality, like they're better/cooler/smarter because they read slash. Whatever. Pr0n is pr0n, whether there's two kinds of "bits" involved or not, lol.

I also sort of feel like being a slash fan has taken on some of the same "consciously edgy" or "consciously different" attitudes as, for example, goth/emo/punk types irl who are so worried about being different from non-goth/emo/punks that they don't realize they're all exactly the same.

angiepen : I hate the way slash fans have developed this sort of elite mentality, like they're better/cooler/smarter because they read slash.

I'd like to point out that this kind of attitude, labelling all slash fans as jerks when pretty clearly only some subset of the group has actually done you any injury, isn't likely to help at all in calming things down or solving the problem. Rather, this sort of comment could be taken to underscore that het fans have their own share of less than nice people, or at least people who hit [Post] before they've thought through what they've typed.

Just as a data point, I'm primarily into slash these days (although I used to be mostly into het) and I don't consider myself to be better, cooler or smarter than het fans. We enjoy reading and writing different things, that's all.

iamtheliquorr : I don't think she meant every single slash fan... just a certain very vocal cross-section. Often a vocal minority can seem like the majority because they make so much noise. Admittedly, it is this particular group that inspired much of this essay. Slash fans like you, I don't have a problem with. It's just the ones that make blanket statements like, "90% of het sucks; that's why I read slash" "Het is full of teenyboppers who write self-insert Sues" (yes, I have actually heard/read almost those exact words in various places) and generally act like slash fic is better quality writing merely on virtue of it being slash.

I do believe some of this group are echoing the party line because it makes them seem cool and hip. It's like those kids who listen to indie bands and seem more concerned with what the music says about them than the music itself. They fancy themselves edgier, hipper, and with better musical taste than people who listen to Top 40 stuff, simply b/c few people know about/appreciate X band rather than b/c X band really is that much better than popular mainstream Y band. Again, not saying all slash fans are like this, just a particular group, same way I'm saying not all lovers of indie bands are like this.

I also think that some of the anti-het movement might be a backlash against anti-slashers. I have a friend who writes mostly slash, but she did put a bit of het in a story and has been receiving several comments along the lines of "ewwwwwww het" "plz take out the het, it's disgusting" and such (no, not exaggerating; those are the reviewers' exact words). Another common complaint among slashers is that anti-slashers blast their fics for being "non canon." Ironically, I've recently seen slashers blast rare het pairings on account of being "non canon" but umm... unless they're writing for Queer as Folk, when is their slash canon? I've also seen slashers make fun of shmoopy het fics and then list slash/mpreg on their interests.

Erm, sorry, didn't mean to ramble so much. What I meant to say was that it's that minority of slash fans to which I believe the comment was referring, not perfectly sane, reasonable ones.

angiepen : I'm willing to buy that she probably didn't mean every single slash fan, but the fact remains that that's what she said. If a slash fan had made a similar comment about "het fans," she'd probably have complained about it, since she, umm, did. [wry smile] I was just trying to point out that this sort of posting without thinking can start a lot of arguments, and is quite possibly what gave her her negative view of slash fans, if some thoughtless slash fan made a comment about "all" het fans when that's really not what she meant. I sometimes wonder how much of the wank and flaming would go away if people read over their comments, carefully, before hitting the [Post] button.

And yeah, there are fans on both sides who are idiots and make stupid comments. I remember this one story a while back, a Sean Bean/Viggo Mortensen story, with Orlando Bloom in a side role. The writer had a female OC actress who was set up with Sean by their mutual publicist to distract press attention from how much he hung out with Viggo [cough] and the female (who wasn't a Mary Sue, but rather a well-written supporting character) was cool about the situation and gave Sean a nudge at the right time. Once the main story was wrapped, the writer did a brief Epilogue to "reward" the woman for being a good sport and showed her going out to dinner or something with Orlando, from the POV of the press covering the story for the gossip rags. The implication was that they were "going together" and would probably end up in bed later that evening, but no such thing was actually shown. It was cool and I liked it, along with most of the other commenters. But this one chick (who'd been reading and commenting positively all along) felt it necessary to post an incredibly nasty, raving comment about how horrible and barf-inducing it was to see Orlando Bloom walk into a restaurant with a FEMALE!! and how she'd have to spork her own eyeballs out and scrub them with bleach, etc. [eyeroll]

This was pretty clearly not just a misunderstanding :P and yeah, people like this piss off slash fans too. I can certainly understand why a het fan would want to kick her ass. Frankly, I'd hold her down while you did so.

I think every group has its loud, obnoxious minority. Christians do, and teenagers, and science fiction fans, and feminists, and the NRA, and yes, slash and het fandoms. They're too stupid to realize they're doing their "own side" more harm than good. [sigh] But when the rest of the world takes the ravings of the idiot minority as the views of the larger group, it causes a lot of grief.

carmarthen : I don't think she meant every single slash fan... just a certain very vocal cross-section.

Much like the vocal cross-section of het fans who think all slash is digusting and the most OOC thing you could ever, ever do to a character? Accusations of elitism go both ways, and I hope don't apply to either majority.

(Er, and what about those of us who are bifictional?)

amireal : Here via metafandom. *waves*

The thing is... I find it's all about perception and a lot of people who don't understand statistics.

1. If you don't like something, it's everywhere.

2. If you don't like something, you'll find something at fault with it far quicker.

3. Numbers of stories are not percentages of stories.

I like het, I like slash. What drives me through a fic I really like? Characterization and plot. Personally I find most hetshipping fics to be... grossly mischaracterized. It could be my fandom, it could be that hetshippers and slashshippers just have diametrically opposed veiwpoints on how these characters would act.

There's plent of 'Good god, is this author 12??' going on when I read my slashfic as well. Just-- if we don't like something, we'll point to the easiest thing to explain it sometimes.

I also think there's the occassional OTP moment going on in the whole shebang, so it gets strangly personal and really far more about "OMG THIS IS THE ONLY WAY I CAN SEE THEM."

I also feel the need to say that slashfic fen totally have a similar set of 'bad rap' listings. :)

airinshaw : Hi there - just sauntered in from Metafandom and thought this was an interesting discussion.

Fist up, I'm a slasher, through and through, when it comes to my main pairings. Remus/Sirius? Yes please. John/Rodney? More! And so on. Do I think that het it boring? Nope. Not really. What I more feel is that het is not what I'm interested in so I, personally, get bored. I think that ties in quite nicely with #1.

You're somewhat right though that slashers can have that "Het? Pffft - boring" mentality, but I think that some of it is in direct response to how slash is viewed by a lot of people. You have to know that there are a fair number of people out their, het shippers, who not only don't like slash, but bad mouth it and pretty much direct some damn homophobic sentiment its way.

It's not as bad now, but as you say - the majority of people out there are reading/writing het, meaning that slashers are a minority. And for a long time they were a minority that almost had to hide themselves. To a certain extent there is an almost "I'm out and proud now dammit! Screw you to all the normal people who made me want to hide!" thing going on.

Does that make it right that het then gets viewed as boring? No. But I guess no more so than slash being viewed as perverted and/or "not canon" (because of course all het is?)

I also think that some slashers view female characters as very Mary-Sueish. That isn't to say that they are, but it's true that very few women in books/films/tv are as well written as the male characters (how much do we love Joss right about now?) and it's interesting that I have never slashed the various Jossverse, with it's wonderful array of strong female characters. Again - does that mean that all het is Mary-Sueish? No - but if the slash reader is not reading the fics then they might be hard pressed to know that this maybe-weak-written female character has been written a lot stronger.

Finally - I really do think that some of the slash view comes from one simple place. A feeling of "Why would you read/write het when you can have these pretty boys loving each other? When you can explore not only their attraction to each other, but then how they/everyone else deals with the fact that they like other boys?!?" But then isn't that vague disbelief true of any pairing that you love? Het or slash?

Anyway - no real point there, more just a slash POV.

few :

What I more feel is that het is not what I'm interested in so I, personally, get bored.

Which is perfectly understandable to me, since that's how I tend to feel about slash.

I've read some, and I've even written a couple of fics that could be defined that way, but the pairings I'm interested in are almost all het*--and since I'm something of an OTP kind of person, I tend not to read pairings that don't interest me.

Since I nearly always skip over sex scenes in fic (so few of them, IME, are necessary to the story and/or characterisation, and smut itself frankly bores me--yes, I know I'm a freak), whether the people involved have similar or different physical characteristics really doesn't come into it. I'm perfectly fine for slash to be out there, and for it to be popular; no one's making me read it when I don't want to.

In fact, the only problem I have with slash is actually with that subset of slashers who imply I'm repressed or homophobic or just plain boring simply because my reading tastes differ from theirs. Which means I co-exist just fine with the majority of slashers. :)

airinshaw : You know? Pretty much everything you just wrote? I could have written, but from the slash side. I can and will read PWPs - but I love the more emotional, characterisation fics. I'm also a very OTP person (I'm a John/Rodney shipper and so no way do I want to read things where someone breaks up their happy home! ;) ) and that colours what I read.

Part of the reason why I love slash is that there always seems to be this idea that the perfect, pretty boy gets the perfect, pretty girl. I live in a world where the perfect, pretty boy is often arrogant and big-headed and where the perfect, pretty girl is a bitch. Or where the perfect, pretty girl is dating the other perfect, pretty girl. Life is so diverse that I want my fic to be too. I think that some slashers tend to mistake all het as non-diverse which is where some trouble comes from. I notice that any pairings I love would not fall into that "perfect" catagory. In HP I love Ron/Hermione because Ron isn't the "hero". I love Elizabeth/Ronon in SGA as they have such differences and so would make a more interesting story.

I think mainly it comes down to individual preference. I don't understand why everyone doesn't ship John/Rodney above all other, slash or het, the same way I don't understand why some people like mushrooms when I don't. Does that mean I don't accept that they don't? Nope. Does that mean that I judge them? Well - maybe for the mushrooms thing...;) But no. I think the main problem is that, het or slash, some people do.

elasg : I have no problem with slash as a genre, but the attitudes of some of its more vocal proponents turned me off to it quite early on.

vegetariansushi : Here via metafandom.

I'm not really a slash or a het person. Given the option, I'll take a gen piece every time. That said, when gen isn't available, I tend to gravitate towards slash, and for a reason that you didn't mention.

One of my biggest problems with het fic (and I have this problem with both the best and worst examples of the genre) is that I always have something to compare myself to. It sounds so silly, right? But I can't read it without wondering if character X has nicer breasts than I do, if she gives better head, if she manages to work a job and still keep her house clean and have time for sex three nights a week. When the character is well-written and sympathetic, I'm left feeling inferior. When she's not, I'm left feeling vaguely disgusted with her. Neither is a feeling that I especially like.

With slash, since it's the one kind of sex that I have never and will never have, it's easier to remove myself from uncomfortable comparisons. Harry gives better head than I do? Whatever, he's a boy and obviously would better understand what boys like. Rodney can come after three quick strokes over his prostate? Sure, no problem. I have no prostate -- it doesn't matter that it takes me longer to come.

It's not an especially rational response, because really, comparing yourself to a fictional character seems to be just begging for problems, but it's something that I can't shake when I'm reading het fic.

ghost lingering : I *so* second this. I'd only add that in addition to either getting jealous or feeling inferior there are cases where--regaurdless of how well written the fic is--I'll Mary Sue-ify it in my head, because I either identify with or want to be like the canon version of the character. Which is an odd kind of thing come to think of it: instead of the author inserting herself into the story, the reader is. Odd that.

Still, it would be nice to know where to consistantly find good het for a variety of pairings. For gen & slash (both the m/m and f/f varieties) I've got my sources, but when it comes to rare het pairings I simply don't know where to go. Added in that I prefer plotty and weird to straight up romance (of which there is quite a lot in both het and slash), and the task becomes that much harder. Of course, I also come from a corner of fandom which would make you believe that more slash is produced then het. Which is quite obviously the exact *opposite* impression of what's expressed here. So, really, it's just that there's a world of good het out there and I don't know where to begin looking. And I think it's at that point when you're going: "I might as *well* check out fanfiction.net for all the luck I'm having" that you run into the bad stuff in an attempt to find *anything* and the rumors about the teenybopper het writers (or the snotty self-entitled slashers) start. It's because (based on my limited experience) the fannish infastructure linking the two groups is rather weak, so you're always going to find the ever abundent bad stuff first (and probably second and third and fourth, too).

(For the record: I started with gen, moved to *really bad* het, dropped that when I found in slash a wealth of good writing, rediscovered gen when I found in slash a wealth of *bad* writing, and then promptly stopped reading fic for shows I that loved beyond reason, because I realized that the quality of the fic overall depressed me. Which means now I'm left with fic for the flings, the abusive boyfriends, and the guys I'm crushing on but don't really want to get to know. So beyond a few tentative forays and a handful of stories here and there, and I never really found where good het lies.)

elasg : My reason for liking het fic is basically the converse of yours, though I've found lots of people who share your view and few who share mine.

Since slash is a kind of sex I never will have, I kind of wonder what the point is of me reading it? It's like sticking a five course meal down in front of me and telling me I can't have even one bite. The characters as they are presented in a m/m slash fic would never look at me, so I can't shake the feeling of being depressed, rejected, unwanted and unwelcomed by the characters in the story. That isn't fun, so I don't read slash.

On the other hand, in a het fic, I have no problem seeing myself as the female part of the equation, no matter what her features. She's a woman and (as long as she's well written) its easier for me to see myself as her than as a man because I am a woman already. I like and admire women, so it is easy for me to like and admire, and identify with, well written female characters.

In a discussion I had on this subject with a dear friend who reads only slash, she said something I found quite unsettling. She said she found it easier to see herself in the position of a male character because she saw no benefit in being female and didn't value herself as one. This comment disturbed me a great deal but it also got me wondering if other slashers felt the same way. Perhaps slash is a way that some people express their response to the value (or lack thereof) society places on women?

kyuuketsukirui : This is always something that really annoys me. I read and write primarily slash when it comes to fanfic, but not because het is by definition worse than slash. I simply find that for myself, in writing, I'm more interested in exploring queer characters, plus if I have a favorite het couple in canon, generally their canon relationship is satisfying for me and I don't feel the need to read or write fic about it. And when it comes to reading, I already read plenty of professionally published het fiction, but it's a lot harder to find pro fiction with queer characters, so fanfic is usually where I go for that. But as someone who primarily reads slash, I have seen so much that sucks, so to see anyone claiming slash is so much better than het just makes me laugh. I'd really love to see this magical world where the majority of slash is not crap. As for the accusation that all het is like romance novels, well, so is most slash. I think a lot of people who say that have actually never read any, so maybe they don't realise that their plots are exactly the stuff of romance novels. And sure, there is a lot of het about marriage and babies and domestic stuff, but hello? What is this whole genre called mpreg we have? Why yes, that would be the exact same thing but with two guys. And there's plenty of marriage and domesticism in slash even without mpreg.

grapefruitfizz : I have noticed two things that annoy me. Firstly, I don't have enough pet female characters, which could be a feature of the writing or it could be my irritating tendency to rillyrillyadmire the character of an actor I just happen to find attractive. I can think of two female characters in all the fandoms I've ever followed that I'd read fic for. Secondly I get the impression in some het fic that the writer is giving a lecture about How To Do Foreplay, Boys. Since I know RL het I'm bound to have a different view of how much and what kind of foreplay and sometimes go "No! Don't get him to do that! Tell him to do this instead!", which, again, is partly my fault.

opera142 :

A lot of fen start out reading/writing het then move onto slash. That creates a sort of I-out-grew-het mentality, and gives slash an artifical veneer of maturity or hipness.

Also, and this is pure snarky opinion (and I say this as someone who writes 90%slash/10%het), but I think the majority of slash fics out there land squarely in your points 3, 4 & 5. They're just as mundane, whitebread-suburban and romance-novel-y as het fics (supposedly are).

tenillypo: Slash is to fanfic what funky alternative bands are to the music scene. Everyone's sick of the top 40 shit already, so they shun it and instead listen to obscure bands no one's ever heard of. But, like music, alternative does not equal quality. There are plenty of shitty alternative bands whose stuff makes my ears bleed every bit as much as the worst Top 40 stuff.

I really like this analogy. As someone who enjoys both slash and het, I've always been a bit baffled to see fans of either genre slamming the other for many of the reasons you list above. I also wonder if the people who hate het in fan fiction also dislike it in other forms of media. I mean, that would leave out 99% of movies and published fiction, not to mention tv shows (warning: completely fabricated statistic :-). As you say, het is the mainstream. It's the majority. From what I've see, there are definitely some slash fans who seem to like slash simply as a way to rebel against the norm. And in order to rebel, you need to demonize the thing you're rebelling against, so...het becomes the big bad.

Personally, I think it really just depends on the fandom. Some fandoms have more female characters than others. Some have better female characters than others. Those shows lend themselves to different dynamics in fan fiction. Back when I was deep into X-Files, it was almost all het Mulder/Scully for me. But X-Files had a strong main female character involved in a very emotionally intimate relationship with a man in canon. Likewise with Buffy and Firefly (ah, Joss, how we miss you so...). Lately, I've been more into slash simply because the shows I'm watching (Supernatural, SGA) lack that strong female presence. In HP fandom, with its plethora of characters, I read both. In the end, a good story is a good story.

I like to think a lot of people who make the "slash is better that het" arguments may be new to fandom. Maybe this is their first fandom and because it's one where there is a lot of slash - and therefore a greater percentage of good slash - then it seems to them that slash must be better. *shrugs* People always like to believe that the thing they are interested in is the best. It's silly, but, that's people for you. :D

angiepen : I got heavily into romance novels when I was twelve and enjoyed them very much. When I started posting fiction online (original fiction -- I didn't get into fanfic until I hit LJ a couple of years ago) it was mostly het. I had a solo story I wrote that was m/m but my other stuff and everything I wrote with other people was het or bi, and come to think of it my character was always female, which is sort of weird looking back but anyway. :)

Once I got into fanfic I moved completely over into m/m slash for my writing, and I don't read much het anymore either. I consider myself a slashgirl now and that's mostly where I hang out. But I used to read and write het and I don't hate it or think it's inferior or whatever, and some day I might go back to reading and/or writing more het. It's just a preference, a taste. It's not genetic and it might well change again, just as most people don't have exactly the same interests and hobbies they had ten or twenty years ago, or will have ten or twenty years from now.

If there really is more het than slash around (I've never gone looking so I'll take your word for it) then I have a hard time seeing how het has a "bad rap" in fandom. If more people are writing it than are writing slash, then clearly more people like it than dislike it. Sure, there are people who dislike het and say so. There are some people who express their dislike in rather illogical terms, or who enjoy being snarky about it just... because. [shrug] Whatever. There are people who express their dislike illogically and snark about anything and everything you care to name; het fanfic isn't being singled out in any way here. I've seen reasons just as ridiculous given by het fans for why they hate slash, and just as much anti-slash snark, but I've never assumed that every het fan in the world agreed with the snarky ones. Some people who are into crewel get into snark wars with people who are into counted cross stitch, some people who do original costuming snark back and forth with people who do re-creation costumes, and I'm sure people who are into fly fishing snark at people who are into bait fishing. No matter what you point at, any large group is going to contain its share of jerks and idiots and the larger the group the larger its "share" is going to be in absolute numbers.

Different people like different things and there's nothing wrong with that. Reasonable people should, I hope, be able to ignore the snarkers and realize that the vast majority of the "other side" is too busy with their own interest to spend the time and energy making nasty cracks about their side. Taking great offense at what the immature minority says and getting all worked up about it just gives them more importance than they deserve IMO.

Personally, I'd just as soon let the immature idiots on "my" side snark at the immature idiots on whatever they've decided the "other" side is, in the hope that they'll keep each other occupied and the rest of us can get on with writing and reading our favorite kinds of porn, or whatever it is we want to do with our time. :)

bluewingedpixie : Now this is interesting. I agree with your points, totally, and I'm sick of having justify the het, too. I find it's not just slash, though. I mean, look at the Firefly fandom. How many whacko ships are there in that fandom, seriously. It's like anything *remotely* canon is the most uncool thing ever, just *because* it's canon. Whatever.

The slash = hip thing bugs the crap out of me (as does the alt. music whatsit. If my ears like it, that's enough for me and deal with it). I slash four or five pairings, but I don't ship them *because* they're slash. Every ship I have picks me, and I ship them because they grab me in some way - the characters, their individuality and dynamic, the context they're in, the potential, everything.

But when it comes to the Hip Slashers, I've come across many a slash fan who slashes for the hell of it, just because they like to read/write two guys getting it on. That annoys me just as much as it discredits my slash pairings, all of which have subtext basis (though how strong is always going to be debatable).

And as for the ratio of bad fic, that's like people who say there's more badly written television than other mediums not taking into account there's also more television. But as someone who has loitered mainly in the slash sections of some fandoms (usually because the fandom in general makes me want to tear my hair out so I concentrate solely on my ship) I've found shockingly high numbers of bad fic. I seem to come across the same amount of bad fic in the Josh/Sam fandom as in the Draco/Hermione.

So, yeah, rec lists are love. You go into The Pit nowadays and you're more or less guaranteed to lose your sanity. My point? I think shipping as a whole has become about what's Hip and Daring rather than honest to god shipping, and slashers fill me with dread as, aside from all your points, they hurt us real slash shippers.