Slash vs Same-sex pairings

[aadler]

 
Last week, frogfarm and I did a brief exchange of e-mails, discussing various aspects of our attitudes toward fandom in general and fanfiction in particular. With that individual’s permission, I’m posting my last note, as illustrative of part of my outlook.

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I offered to explain why your preferred pairing [frogfarm is an inveterate Faith/Willow ’shipper] didn’t fall within the category of things I dislike. You expressed interest in my opinion. That follows.

There is a tendency to interpret opposition to slash — not just “not to my taste”, but actual opposition and rejection — as indicative of or synonymous with that dread thing, “homophobia”. (A term I despise and the foundations of which I utterly reject. The word is just a way of saying, “Anybody who disagrees with me on this issue is stupid and wrong and repressed and hateful and bigoted and evil, and I don’t even have to prove those things because just applying the label automatically invalidates everything they say and everything they stand for and HA HA I WIN.”)

No, when I speak of disliking slash (and I truly do), I’m not talking about same-sex pairings per se, but using shorthand for something a bit more specific and limited. What I actually dislike and oppose, and for which I see no justification whatsoever, is the habitual, systematic, gratuitous, and artificial homosexualization of canonically heterosexual characters, for no good purpose. (Maybe the first time it was done, it was “breaking new ground”. Now it all seems to fall under self-titillation, pandering, jumping on the ho-yay bandwagon, or even deliberately designed to offend those benighted knuckle-draggers who dislike slash.)

Because of this, I don’t apply the same objections to Willow/Tara. Or Willow/Kennedy. Or even Willow/Faith. This is because those pairings are neither gratuitous nor artificial. Tara apparently was genuinely same-sex oriented. Willow (whether fundamentally lesbian, or a bisexual who thought it necessary to expunge any twinge of opposite-sex-attraction from her personality) was nonetheless canonically shown as part of two separate same-sex relationships. Faith, for all the fact that every bit of her demonstrated sexual activity was aggressively heterosexual, put out some deliberate and explicit overtures toward Buffy in Season 3. (Even if it could be argued that she didn’t mean it, and was just doing it as a kind of personal power-play, the fact remains that she did those things.)

As far as same-sex pairings are concerned, Willow is canonical. Tara is canonical. Kennedy is canonical. Faith is canonically plausible. I’m still not crazy about the whole business — for that matter, specific focus on ANY ’ship is boring to me — but those, and perhaps others, don’t require that familiar characters be twisted into knots to accommodate someone’s agenda.

So, no, I don’t have a lot of patience with femslash or any slash. For that matter, I have no interest in any story, same-sex or opposite-sex, that centers the story around sexuality; I have better things to do with my time. The [Willow/Faith] pairing you favor, however, while it doesn’t intrinsically appeal to me, doesn’t automatically trigger “don’t read” status.

And that’s where I come from.

Comments

[aadler]

I actually came very close to citing all-human AUs as an offshoot example, something different that I disliked for much the same reasons. It’s as if someone said, “Ohh, Buffy the Vampire Slayer! I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer! And there’s all this Buffy fanfic around, so here’s what I’m going to do: I’ll write a BtVS fanfic of my own, and because I love Buffy so much, I’ll completely change the characters, make them totally different people in a totally different setting and a totally different situation. If that isn’t love, nothing is!”

I just don’t get it. It doesn’t offend me, because I don’t read it, but I can’t understand WHY it would even remotely appeal to anyone. Take Buffy and make it not-Buffy, as a Buffy writer and posted for Buffy readers … Nope. I don’t get it at all.

[raynejelly.livejournal.com]

I think it's only fair to tell you that one or two of us have decided to carry the debate elsewhere, largely because we think it's an interesting question.

I invite you to read some of our thinking on why we find slash so engaging:here (http://raynejelly.livejournal.com/30299.html).

[aadler]

I did take a brief look at the entries there, and — without intending any offense — they lost me quickly because the fundamental feelings there are entirely alien to me. I find nothing even vaguely interesting in the fact or process of turning a straight character gay, and other people explaining why it so interests them just manifests to me as meaningless noise because the disconnect is total.

You’ve been civil. I appreciate it. I hope I have succeeded in being equally polite … but there will never be any meeting of the minds here, because we’re speaking to one another from different universes.

Insofar as the discussion continuing, I have no objection, but I’m frankly happy about it moving elsewhere. I never intended to start a discussion at all; it was just that, so many people having condemned me for what they believed my attitudes to be, I wanted to clarify what those attitudes are.

[raynejelly.livejournal.com]

I think you'll find that's what I said. Granted, I'm a bit verbose, but what you read as civility was, in fact, sympathy.

"I think writing primarily male characters is an interesting exercise because women, who are broadly understood to be a construction of “the other,” create a different “otherness” in gay men who were, in canon, straight, perhaps in an unconscious effort to sublimate the dominate culture. ... I think the primary reason that aadler has difficulty with slash is because he is a heterosexual man [which makes me sound like a man hater. I’m not, I’m really not, but if you’re a member of a sub-conscious dominant paradigm, then attempting to embrace the radical opposite of that paradigm is counterintuitive]. His major objection was the habit of writing straight characters into gay ones simply for the sake of writing slash fiction, and if you’re not interested in subverting the dominant thinking, I can see why that would be problematic. In fact, I can pretty easily see where he’s coming from; when we write fanfiction, we’re using pre-established characters and doing interesting things with them, so to fundamentally change an aspect of a character suggests that we might as well be writing original fiction. However, that assertion carries the unfortunate corollary thinking that a singular aspect, in this case sexuality or sexual orientation, is all that makes a character [which we know not to be true], so I think the argument is invalid, and his real issue is one of characterization. Unfortunately, when characters are awkwardly written, or not very well developed, the story tends to lack something, but that problem of characterization is not limited solely to slash fiction and most frequently manifests in very inexperienced writers."