Oh dear: the Guardian has discovered slash
Aug. 9th, 2006 01:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dianeduaneI guess it had to happen.
'Harry Potter gay porn,' she corrects me. 'We write it. It's called slash fiction. You take the characters and you imagine them in different scenarios. There's het fiction too, where they think the characters are straight. Whereas we assume that everyone is bisexual until proven otherwise.'
...The quotes are from attendees at the recent Lumos HP convocation in Las Vegas. My favorite line from the article, for reasons that will doubtless amuse some of the NY area fans I hung about with all those years ago (and will be on a panel with at Worldcon):
This is Harry Potter for adults. A concept that I'd always thought of as one of those minority tastes like quantum physics for children. Or Star Trek for girls.
(snort)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Star Trek for girls.
Date: 2006-08-09 12:35 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2006-08-09 01:04 pm (UTC)(This is a time-worn rant. You can tell, can't you?)
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Date: 2006-08-09 01:09 pm (UTC)*headdesk* There's so much wrong with that sentence I don't even know where to start.
It's not just Harry Potter
Date: 2006-08-09 01:16 pm (UTC)The link is mostly SFW, seeing that it uses footage from the US animated series.
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Date: 2006-08-09 01:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-09 01:24 pm (UTC)I could rant, but what good would it do? Better to write my Sarek/Amanda story and see where it goes. *g*
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Date: 2006-08-09 01:56 pm (UTC)I hear the weather's lovely there.
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Date: 2006-08-09 01:58 pm (UTC)...well, maybe a little irked.
*sets cluebat on stun*
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Date: 2006-08-09 01:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-09 02:25 pm (UTC)I know, because a little thing I wrote for a fanzine got quoted.
[nearest I ever got to being a published author!]
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Date: 2006-08-09 02:27 pm (UTC)heee hee...
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Date: 2006-08-09 02:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-09 03:06 pm (UTC)"...although it's when I go to 'Out of Bounds: Transgressive Fiction' that I get really annoyed. It's a seminar analysing Hermione Granger-Professor Snape fan fiction. That is to say, a relationship between a teenage girl and a fortysomething man, which often, it transpires, takes the form of a rape narrative. There are 200 women in the room. And a whole lot of talk about female empowerment and gender reversals, but, frankly, if it was 200 men talking about rape narratives involving underage schoolchildren, it would be a matter for the police, and I don't think this is empowering anybody."
No shit.
But apart from that... wow, somebody really needs to get out more.
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Date: 2006-08-09 03:26 pm (UTC)You mean, the fans or the newswriter?
re story
Date: 2006-08-09 04:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-09 04:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-09 04:41 pm (UTC)This is a man who by his own admission has only read one of the Harry Potter books and not even seen one of the films!
Does he focus on the actual topics discussed, no he zooms in on the sex, gay sex at that! Now what would his reaction have been I wonder if it had been two men discussing lesbian sex with Ginny and Hermione? Was it the fact that it was two women writing such stuff that disturbed him or the content itself? Is it the fact that females have an imagination of a prurient nature that shocks him, or the fact that the Harry potter slash does broach the taboo subjects of under-age sex. As if noone has ever had a crush on a teacher?
This is definitely written by someone who is ignorant of fandom in general, never mind Harry Potter fandom.
I can't help wondering if the phenomenom really started with Kirk and Spock though?
Did Victorian ladies dare imagine what Holmes and Watson got up to in their rooms in Baker street? Certainly some of the pastiches had introduced a romantic element, though naturally of a "het" nature as homosexuality was such a taboo! Interesting thought!
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Date: 2006-08-09 04:56 pm (UTC)(says the "girl" who has been a fan since the 60s)
Diane, care to venture a guess as to which decade will it be before they acknowledge that we "girls" are at least half of sci-fi/fantasy fandoms?
*sigh*
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Date: 2006-08-09 04:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-09 05:16 pm (UTC)Re: It's not just Harry Potter
Date: 2006-08-09 05:40 pm (UTC)BTW you may be amused to know that there's at least two Translashers reading around here, and I know because I'm one of them. ;)
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Date: 2006-08-09 05:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-09 06:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-09 08:02 pm (UTC)Still giggling.
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Date: 2006-08-09 08:25 pm (UTC)I write HP threesomes. See icon for details. :P
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Date: 2006-08-09 08:43 pm (UTC)But the rest of it, Star Trek for girls, the first time that women have ever dominated fandom in this way, and so on...
... I've got it! Her calendar is stuck on April 1st, isn't it? Isn't it?
Didn't journalists research their stories once upon a time? Or was that back in the days when every knight slew a dragon and married a princess?
Given the old Grauniad reputation for its quality of spelling and proofreading, I'm amused by the fact that it does now manage to get all the letters into "fanfiction" and even in the right order, but the conversion for the web turns the fi ligature into " fi " and fills the article with "fan fi ction" and "fi rst" and so on. Will they ever learn to look at what they've produced? It's just as jarring as the old spelling mistakes in the printed paper in the 70s, when my father used to read it.
--Peter Murray
PS. Ooh, spelling checks. Whee! Fanfic = fungi or funk? Fandom = random, fondue or Fundy's? Fanfiction = infection, infarction or conviction?
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Date: 2006-08-09 08:57 pm (UTC)The article? Meh. Journalists like to write about the slashers because it grabs attention. To some of the non- fans, there's still the "shock value" of it I guess. The rest of us just know better and read whatever we like.
If I hear one more time about how the female characters are boring? I'm going to scream. Loudly. Or write more femmeslash....hah hah hah!
As for the part upthread about the Snape/Hermione bit? Most of us write about them when she's out of school, thanks. (The are notable exceptions) It's not about the age difference. It's not about the societal differences. Nope! It's about the intellect, baby. Smart people dig other smart people in my universe.
As for preferences? Het is the red headed step -child of fic these days, I tell you.
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Date: 2006-08-09 09:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-09 09:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-09 09:33 pm (UTC)Oh that's standard. It's gotta be kinky. I'm told an editor at Vanity Fair sent back the article written by a reporter who "covered" a midwestern anthrophomorphic convention several times before he'd modified it enough to turn the whole thing into some sort of costumed orgy (much to the mortification of the concom who had given this doofus a full tour of the actual con). Ghu forbid it should be an accurate review.
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Date: 2006-08-09 11:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-09 11:40 pm (UTC)Female characters are often boring because females still don't occur to some writers as having the potential to BE interesting. It's a very insidious form of sexism that there aren't enough personalities for females.
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Date: 2006-08-10 01:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-10 10:34 am (UTC)Yeah, I've seen the same sort of article before where a journalist who Just Doesn't Get It gets sent out to write up the local convention and comes back with a piece deliberately focusing on the weirdest things he could find as opposed to a piece on the convention itself. It's more laziness on the writer's part than anything else, I think: grab for something sensational as opposed to actually doing research and learning the subcultures. I haven't seen it happen to filk or MSTies yet... but I think that's because the mainstream media is too lazy to realize there's more than one kind of fandom. To them, there are Trekkies, Potter fans, LotR fans, and a generic nebula of "sci fi fans". Anything more specialized than that only rates a passing reference in an article, and that usually only in regard to a costume that the writer happened to notice.
Given the generally poor treatment of SF by the mainstream media outlets, I have to think the longer they keep their hands off, the better. Historically, as soon as a show has developed a solid audience and fan base, that's when some pinhead in pinstripes decides he knows better than the creator and starts dictating changes to "meet a demographic"... or decides that the show can go, because he doesn't get it or because it's not his creation and therefore not his success. JMS' battles over B5 and Crusade are known, thanks to JMS himself and the Internet. MST3K fell victim to idiot veeps at two different networks. Farscape's cancellation ... I have no idea what happened there, but it was just as capricious as the others, and of course Star Trek's struggles with NBC is legendary.
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Date: 2006-08-11 12:13 am (UTC)Second generation girl Trekkie
Date: 2006-08-14 10:12 am (UTC)I'm told this explains a lot about me...