So, this meta: Meta: Femslash ToTTBoTB? showed up on metafandom tonight and I'm not in any kind of state to comment tonight. But I think some other people on my f-list might have cogent thoughts. So people who think about these things should go read and comment and stuff.

Dear Femslash Fandom,

You know that I criticize you because I love you, right? You exist in that squishy place in my heart and that love is never going to go away no matter how frustrated with you I get. No matter how many times we fight, I'm always going to be willing to make up. And I hate to compare you to slash, I really do, because right now slash for me is new and shiny and I know that I have no perspective because slash gives me thing like squee worthy Alexander Hamilton fic and hot, steamy Kirk/Spock/Uhura OT3s (there will be a rec post after this).

And yet, these shiny new things make me long for femslash that is just as squee worthy and that seems to be so much harder to find. And I think that I have pinpointed the problem in our relationship. You exist in the sqishy place in my heart but the other things that I've been reading lately, they've been creating squishy places in both my heart and my head. There used to be a time when you did this too but it was long ago and it's possible that I was easier to please then.

Don't get me wrong, I know that these are mass generalizations and there are some of you out there still trying. I am super excited for femme_fic and have high expectations for awesomeness and on the femmeslashy side of things lgbtfest has had some interesting stories this year. thelittlebang also looks like it will be awesome.

I'll admit that my own stories are not as well thought out as they could be. I have this problem too. But I'm much more of a reader than a writer when it comes to fiction and I'm pretty sure that my meta will always be better than my fic. I'm okay with that. It allows me to engage fannishly in a way that I enjoy. I think too much; this gives me an outlet.

But I think that you've gotten lazy femslash fandom and that makes me sad. I'll admit that we were spoiled early on with Xena where the subtext was so obvious that it was practically maintext. But so many of our other iconic couples are based off of nothing more than pronunciation of a word and a brief glance. Have you forgotten the days of SVU when TPTB didn't know that we thought Alex and Olivia were sleeping together and weren't trying to half heartedly pander to us? Back then we didn't get upset when Alex only had 5 minutes of screen time (and there were a lot of episodes where she only had 5 minutes of screen time). We were happy dissecting what they did give us. Now, if she isn't in half of the episode the only response is to bitch and whine. You wanted Alex to come back but it doesn't seem to have produced an influx of fic now that she is (or happiness for that matter).

I understand the excitement behind Olivia and Natalia (I dvr GL. I bounce giddily whenever something exciting happens). I understand the excitement behind Callie and Arizona. Canon couples!!! We don't really get those. This is new and exciting and yay!!! But have we lost the ability to see the glances, to hear the change in inflection in a character's voice when she talks to the women that we just know she's secretly pining for?

I know it's been hard lately. I think there are fewer and fewer shows that have more than one prominent female character and finding that plus chemistry can be hard. But there are other places to look. I'm sad that Star Trek didn't give me anyone to slash Uhura with (and how much of a travesty is it that she was the only woman in that movie? I will never get used to this) but there are other movies. There are books, there are real people and there is incest. I know people get squicky over those last two, I'm just presenting the option. I don't really want to read fic about Helen and Ashley from Sanctuary but that Parent Trap fic about Hallie and Annie was at least interesting and it didn't treat it like it wasn't just a bit fucked up. When we look at Shakespeare, do we have to keep writing about Twelfth Night over and over? I know that he wrote other plays with other women in them.

We see to have forgotten that we don't need canon relationship to write fic (yes this is a gross over generalization). We don't need to have things spelled out for us. We're more than capable of going out and finding things to write about. Make me love you again the way I used to femslash fandom. Go forth and find something different to write about. Go forth and bring me back something that I've never heard of before or thought of before and make me believe it. Go forth and give me something to think about.

And bring me back some realistic sex scenes too.


P.S. If you're into Olivia/Natalia, why don't you try Y&R. I swear to you, Jill Abbott would sleep with anyone and she's already gone through all of the men in town. Also, she has CHEMISTRY with everyone. She has chemistry with the house plants.


ETA: As of May 14th I'm not really going to have computer access for about 5 days. Something went kerfluey and the Apple people have it until at least Monday. I'll try to respond when I can.

This entry was originally posted at http://twtd.dreamwidth.org/161648.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

An introductory note, I watch CBS soaps. I particularly watch The Young & The Restless and Guiding Light (though I have some familiarity with The Bold & The Beautiful and As The World Turns). Any attempt to generalize beyond those four shows is just random flailing about in the dark hoping that I hit something accurate. Here's the thing... I don't particularly like soap operas. I get frustrated with the unnecessary drama, I think that most story lines need to be about half as long as they are, I wish that the the writers realized that if you made all of the characters bi, you'd double the number possible sexual partners for everyone and create exponentially more sources for drama (okay, that last one really isn't a huge issue but I thought my list needed three things and really, wouldn't that be awesome).

I started watching them because my roommates watched them and my girlfriend watched them. There would be gatherings of 5 to 10 people in our apartment sitting around the giant TV in our living room, so they were pretty hard to escape. Now, I'm writing my maters thesis and I'm very lucky in the fact that it's the only thing I'm doing. Of course, it leaves me with lots of time right in the middle of the day when I don't so much feel like reading about Manchester in 1850, 1950, or any other time period. And what should happen to be on right in the middle of the afternoon? Soap operas. It doesn't help that my gf dvrs Y&R where she can watch it at night.

Anyway, there's a challenge going on at passion_perfect called Life Begins At Forty and I've had some thoughts about that and soap operas and Catherine Chancellor's absolutely adorable romance with Murph (squee!). I'm not sure if this is quite femslashy enough but we'll see where it goes.

I've discussed most of this with my gf at various times, so some of this is her (cleo2584) and some of this is me and any attempts to untangle the two would be next to impossible.

( Here's what I've noticed (yes, I like lists): )

So, I was reading fallon_ash's very lovely Mary Poppins fic today (and it is lovely and everyone should totally go read it) and it made me think about why it is that I'm attracted to so many super tiny fandoms. By super tiny I mean one or two or three stories total for the entire fandom. I spend most of my time in femslash fandom and beyond Xena and Star Trek, I think even our biggest fandoms are still small enough to say, quality for Yuletide. So, super tiny fandoms and why I like them:

Well, first, there's just the visceral thrill of something popping up on my f-list that I never would have thought about ficcing. It makes me look at things differently and that's always cool. Second, and this is the really big one, I think that (and this is generally speaking) when someone is writing in such a tiny fandom, one where there is absolutely no assurance that anyone else out there is going to think your story is a great idea, where there is absolutely no guaranteed squee, you know that when they looked at this text (book, tv show, movie, whatever), you know that they have a story to tell. You know that there was something about the text that stood out and that they couldn't let the idea go. It's almost a compulsion.

Now, I'm not saying that there aren't people in big fandoms writing for exactly the same reason. Obviously, we've all looked at these texts and seen something in them that we want to explore, a story that we want to tell. But I think as you become more and more enmeshed in big fandoms (and even small fandoms) that isn't the only reason that people have for writing. As much as we don't always like admitting it, when you know you have an audience, when you know that people are going to respond, sometimes you write for that, either for the gratification that comes with feedback and comments or out of a sense of obligation. Sometimes is isn't just the compulsion to tell a story.

And I think that's when the storytelling begins to suffer, when you're no longer writing to service the story. I'm sure some of that goes on in super tiny fandoms too but I feel like there's less motivation for it. It seems like every time I've clicked on a link for the one story I've ever seen in X fandom, I haven't been disappointed. They've all been compelling and (typically) well written.

Just my thoughts for the night.

Also, I know that there's more Mary Poppins fic out there, I've read some of the Yuletide stuff, but Mary Poppins femslash. I defy you to find me some more of that. (No really, defy me. That would be so AWESOME).

A response to cleo2584's post about fandom participation and history:

I'll start this with I've been in online fandom for more than 10 years but less than 15. I shouldn't have been so surprised that you (cleo2584)were ten, I couldn't have been much more than 12 or 13. I'm actually much less of a lurker than I used to be. I read massive amounts of Xena fic and never said a thing to anyone. If you were trying to recover my fannish history 100 years from now, there'd be no way that you would know that I was involved in the fandom at all except for statements I've made after the fact (like this one). Much like wizened_cynic said, I tend to read fic for the shows that I don't watch and am less involved in the fandoms for shows that I do. I can't tell you how much Stargate fic I read before I had ever seen an episode of the show.

Let's see... I started lurking in Star Trek fandom and moved to Xena and X-files and I remember trying to find Law & Order fic about Claire and Jack. Then I moved to Magnificent 7 and JAG and SVU (because L&O is ubiquitous) and Buffy and things I can't even remember now. Then I ran a West Wing mailing list (badly), in charge, but basically a lurker. And somewhere in there I discovered femslash but I can't pinpoint where. I know that when I first started reading Xena fic it was all Xena/Herc stuff and I started reading the alt later. Somewhere in there, I read tons of Harry Potter fic. It was coming to lj that really got me involved and even then it was only after cleo2584 forced me to start rping. RPing led to writing fic and making icons. Doing that led to wanting to make vids (which I haven't finished one yet but I will). Reading meta has led to writing meta. Some of the change in my behavior is due to change in formant. Some of it is simply having more self confidence.

I think it's also interesting how I want to interact with different fandoms. I've written Criminal Minds fic but what I really want to do is vid. I watch Guiding Light for Natalia and Olivia, I want to write au fic about them but I don't really read any of the other fic in the fandom. In fact, as I become more involved, I've found that I read less. When I'm rping more, I feel less of a desire to write fic. I love reading the random stuff, the capslock posts and the squeeing over congressional testimony and the twittering that happens in political fandom (even as I worry that I'm going to start seeing it too much as a fandom and not enough as stuff that actually effects my life) but I don't really read the fic (though I have written that one crossover which might spawn a series). I adore FNL and I love the graphics but I rarely read the fic there either even though everything that I have read has been awesome. If someone wrote meta on it, I'd probably read that. I love thinking about Grey's Anatomy from a critical point of view, ripping it into tiny little pieces, but don't want to write meta about it.

Criticism has practically taken over my fannish life. Everything is now about what a source text is saying, what the message is. Maybe that's part of why I love political fandom because it isn't about the politics, it's just about the squee and I can resist the urge to pick it apart. Kings is the first show in a while where I'm reading the fic and writing fic and giving feedback and making graphics and it can sustain being critiqued too.

I've read het and gen and femslash and slash in varying degrees in varying fandoms. I love all of it (the genres, not every piece of fic I've read). I've read drabbles by the scores and epic multi-novel length X-Files/Star Trek/Fantasy universe crossovers. I'll read stories for fandoms that I've never head of (particularly if I know the author). I love tiny fandoms and literary fandoms. I tend not to have OTPs because if the character dynamics are compelling, I want to read and write every pairing imaginable.

I think Yuletide might be a fandom in and of itself.

But for a touch of continuity, I've always been very multi-fannish in my interests. I've never been able to settle down and say "this is the one fandom that I'm going to devote my time to." If I read in a fandom at one point, I'll generally happily go back to it. I started reading ST and XF fics for the het and then, when I discovered femslash, went back to them to read that. I suppose I could go back again and read slash (as it took me the longest to really get into it but I just don't have that kind of time anymore).

I've always been interested in the female characters and I think that's part of how I interact with various fandoms. I'm thinking specifically of FNL, because while most of the fic is very well written, it's written about the boys or about the couples and that's just not what interests me about the show. I'm there for the women. Kings will probably keep or not keep my attention based on what they do with the women. It's true of SVU and XF and ST and even when I was watching Mag 7 (7 men, 1 woman) I was primarily watching it for her. I watched SG for Sam and Weir (an even more dubious proposition than watching Mag7 for the lone woman). It's a big part of why I love Top Chef. It's part of the reason that I'm less interested in slash (not not interested, just less). There's one thing that all of the shows that I really love have in common: interesting WOMEN. It's part of the reason that I'm not more involved in the fic in political/pundit fandom. I want stories about Rachel Maddow and Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama. Rahm might be a BAMF (and great for a laugh) but if the women weren't there, I probably wouldn't be either. They get mentions but they don't really get the fic.

Somewhere over the past 10 years, I've developed a permanently attached set of fandom goggles and I don't know how to take them off. I watch the news and want to see if there's any Brian Williams fic out there (I haven't looked). I have friends that would never be in a relationship because neither of them is even slightly gay, and I want to ship them (how screwed up is that?). I think these goggles are integrated with my academia goggles because everything is a fandom and everything is a paper topic.

And this got long. But that's my basic fannish history, my thoughts about being involved in fandom.

eta: this got metafandomed so I thought I should maybe go back and fix the typos.

In the spirit of the new year and State of the State addresses (hearing that always cracks me up) and Inaugural speeches (of which I do not claim to be anywhere near the same level) and other reflective type writings, and most directly in response to this discussion on genderswap in femslash and this post on insularity in femslash, and also vaguely to a poll about starting a new femslash community. I thought I'd reflect on the current state of femslash. I think I'm the perfect person for this for various reasons. Let me list them for you:

1. I'm pretty convinced that most of femslash fandom already doesn't like me. I'm okay with that.
2. I don't mind people coming into my journal and yelling at me. I expect that this post will generate a fair bit of wank and I'm okay with that. I'm also hoping that it will generate even more thoughtful discussion. So please, prove me wrong about that first bit.
3. I like to think that I keep abreast of both the goings on in femslash fandom (doing those recs meant I read a lot of stuff that didn'tget reced) and in larger fandom in general. I read my metafandom and try to follow the discussions on gender and race and privilege and acafen (a group in which I count myself) and How Terrible That Thing They Did was and How Great That Thing They Did was and all of the other thinky thoughts that people have. I am not claiming to have read everything but I try to get around.
4. There is no 4. There's just symmetry.

So, the state of femslash today (YMMV, this is my opinion, grains of salt, and Cherokee Medicine Wheels):

Let's start with the good stuff because as much as I complain, there is good stuff. femslash_today is one of the best things about femslash fandom and I hope that the people compiling links know that. It's great because it does exactly what it says it does. It compiles links. There's no politics. It's just a well organized list. It visually represents why the smallness of femslash fandom can be great. Can you imagine doing a list of links for every slash story posted in one day? Maybe you can, I haven't looked to see if this exists, but I doubt it. And generally, if it lists a fandom that you've never heard of before or never thought of and there's only one story posted in that fandom, chances are it's a pretty good story. And if it isn't perfect, at least it's generally both thoughtful and thought provoking.

And those stories are another, perhaps the best, part of femslash fandom. Let's face it, we're all really here for the stories. And the stories can be wonderful. They can be well written and well characterized and thoughtful. They can be AMAZING. That's why I started writing recs because in femslash, as in every fandom, there's a lot of bad writing out there, and I wanted to call attention to the good stuff, the stuff that I thought everyone should read without regard to specific fandom. Every one of the fics I reced, I reced because it did something and I thought the author was trying to something beyond merely having bodies move on a page.

This brings me to femslash06, femslash07, femslash08, and presumably femslash09. This fest consistently inspires great fic every year. It's also, as far as I know, the biggest femslash fest out there. There are all sorts of other challenges, but they're either very new or they're just not as successful. I think that part of the reason that this fest, as opposed to a lot of the challenges out there, does so well is that it has rules and consequences. I think this keeps most people who aren't serious about it from signing up. It's the closest thing that femslash has to Yuletide. Yuletide, btw, also produces some great femslash every year. I know that there's a difference between a challenge and a fest. I just think that we tend to get overloaded on the no commitment/no consequences/OMG YAY!!!11! any fic is great fic challenges. They have their place but they don't always inspire quality.

girlslash and femme_fic are also on my list of things that make me happy. I'm tempted to hug them to my chest and keep them there and never let them see the light of day because in comparison to something like passion_perfect, they're tiny and kinda hidden (not really) and the fic on them is either going to be terribly bad or incredibly good and telling the difference is quick and easy. The fics on them tend not to get cross-posted beyond femslash_today and fic from other places tends not to get cross-posted to them. I selfishly don't want that to change. I like my little communities the way they are. *sigh* Thus is life and I can hardly complain about the problems of our insularity if I'm actively working to propagate it. I don't have a problem with everyone going off into their own little corners, but I'd really like it if the corners could maybe talk to each other once and a while.

So, now for the problems, as I see them (numbered to keep me from rambling off onto completely divergent non-points):

1. I will not complain abut bad fic. There is bad fic everywhere. If you can't deal with that and find your way around it, you're in the wrong place. But, well, it is a problem, which I'll touch on in point 2.

2. The general thin skinned-ness of femslash authors. I swear that most of femslash fandom has not heard of constructive criticism. You can be effusive in your praise of a fic but if you mention one tiny thing that just did not work for you everyone gets all defensive and suddenly, YOU ARE THE DEVIL. This is a bit hyperbolic but you get the idea. And it doesn't just apply to the fic. It applies to how the fandom handles itself in general. For the most part, growth is painful and yes, hearing criticism sucks but we are pussies. We may write about uber tough, super butch women, but we are not them and we cannot take it. I'm totally in the same boat; I don't like it any more than anyone else. But I try to handle it like an adult. I'm very sorry to break it to you, femslash, but every story ever posted is not great. We are not so small as to be grateful for the burnt gruel scrapped off of the bottom of the pot and we need to realize that.

3. I think that most people like the fact that femslash fandom is so small. I generally like it too. The problem is, we tend to live in our own little world, our own little bubble. For the most part, we don't go out and interact with larger fandom. We don't cross-post our fic or our graphics. We don't engage. We simply sit in our bubble and talk amongst ourselves until we get to the point where we're all saying the same thing. We're sitting in an echo chamber and it's group think to the extreme.

An example: I used to think (naively) that femslash was immune to the gender issues that show up in slash, the cyclical discussions of "where are the female characters?" Clearly, we're writing about the female characters and if the guy don't show up very often, that's okay, because we're not bashing them and they're around all the time anyway. Then Will had the misfortune of wandering into JJ's story arc. Poor Will, who's generally portrayed as a pretty good guy on Criminal Minds, has turned into a (sometimes) emotionally abusive, (sometimes) drunk, often absent, generally unsupportive SOB who also has the misfortune of being Southern. Poor Will. All he did wrong was fall in love with JJ, who is canonically very straight (I'm sorry, Emily codes as gay, JJ does not. /personal issues), and now all of femslash fandom loathes him. Hello gender issues and character bashing. But do we talk about them? No. We just go on making Will worse and worse in our own private echo chamber. And that brings us to point 4.

4. We don't think about what we're writing. How much femslash meta is out there? Beyond those links at the top of my post, not a lot. You have to go searching. Meta isn't written by the meta gods in the sky who search the interwebs looking for things to write about, who just never seem to see that femslash is out there. It's written by authors asking questions about themselves and what they do and how and why they do it. And we, we just don't do that. I'll admit to complicity in this. I could be writing a lot more meta than I am.

Beyond Character A+Character B=Angst or more generally Character A+Character B=Sex!, we're just not interested. For the most part, we don't ask big questions, either through our fic, or about it. No one's written the SVU fic where Olivia talks about how hard it was to be a gay cop in the NYPD in the 1980s. No one's written the Stargate Atlantis fic where Telya looks around and thinks, "gee, there aren't a lot of women around here." No one's writing the post about how maybe Women's Murder Club sucked so badly because it was a show about women conceived by a man and that's significant. And we could be because we're supposed to be focusing on the women. Slash writers look around and there are pretty boys everywhere and they still manage to get into discussions about the lack of female characters on tv shows or in movies. And yet, when we're looking for women, we don't seem to notice that they're not there. Clearly, this is a piece of meta for another day.

Now, I'm all for teh sex! and teh pretty! but I like it when my sex comes with a side of something more. I should say this lack of self-consciousness is not universal. There are some authors out there who are thinking about how and why they write and they're giving their stories more layers and meanings. I heart them all very much.

eta: Not to imply that meta is the be all and end all in fandom. I know it isn't. Mostly, we're all here for the stories.

5. Something that I think follows from the last point, we're all very conservative about what we write and what we read. In reference to the genderswap post, there's just not a whole lot of genderswap going on in femslash fandom and as one of the commenters pointed out, there probably wouldn't be much of an audience for it. If we're happy with A+B=Sex!, then there isn't much call for any sort of experimentation. So, no genderswap, no rare pairings, the death of what was uber (which Xena fandom raised to an artform) but is now more and more being called au by people writing slash and het and gen, no altered mental or physical states in general. There's no need to think beyond, to ask what if. Some of it's the fandoms. The mainstream shows that garner the biggest femslash followings tend to be very rooted in reality. As I've said, it's hard to say, "aliens made us do it" if you're writing CSI fic. And the shows with aliens (both literal and metaphorical) just don't have as many women on them. But beyond canonical restraints, we're just not trying to push boundaries and if we did, there just doesn't seem to be the audience.

And I think I'm going to stop there. But I have questions. My biggest one being why? Why have we evolved in this way? Why have we, in a sense, devolved since Star Trek and Xena, become less sophisticated? Why don't we go out and engage in the discussions in general fandom (I know I will get answers to this from the few people who do. I heart all of you too)? What are we so afraid of?

eta: Andif you've managed to find your way here with going through cleo2584's entry you should head over there and read it too.

eta II: I'm polling on whether there's any interest in a femslash reccing community.