Denial, you're doing it wrong...
Oct. 20th, 2007 04:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
graculusI'm doing this from memory, so apologies if I miss stuff out, since I'm sure it's a poor representation of the views expressed - please feel free to correct/add stuff since I'd like the following account of my con panel to be as accurate as possible before I cross-post to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
connotations:
Is there a difference between gen and pre-slash [aka smarm: please, you're so far in denial the camels are complaining].
In hindsight, I'm not sure whether we covered the ground the person who suggested the panel intended, but there you go... ;)
We started with a brief survey of who read/wrote what, with most of the people there admitting that they read gen in at least one of their fandoms at least occasionally, if not regularly.
We then went on to look at some definitions of the key terms involved: in this case those would be gen, pre-slash and smarm. All of this with the caveat that denial in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing, as many of those present were in denial over entire seasons or movies, let alone little things like genre.
Gen was roughly defined by those present as being episode-like, character-driven, plot heavy, not involving a romantic aspect. I noted that in some fandoms you might well see some disagreement over what 'gen' entailed as they would consider some m/f activity (particularly 'canon' activity) as not being outside of the realm of a gen story. This wasn't, however, a view particularly shared by those present, probably because we were all slashers. I think I may have commented (if not then, then certainly later on) about those archives which used to differentiate between slash and het in that even pre-slash would get an NC-17 rating while a het writer would have to work hard for a similar rating based on the content of their fic.
Pre-slash was felt to be applied to stories where the writer was trying to set up a future romantic/sexual encounter, which might or might not get written in a subsequent story. It was as much or more focussed on 'thinky thoughts' about the other character than on events going on around them.
Smarm was a term that a number of people present had come across but which was something alien to others, since it just wasn't a label used in their fandom. Fandoms in which it was used were those such as The Sentinel, and to a lesser extent Due South and Stargate SG-1, or those fandoms to which smarm writers had moved from there. A smarm story was characterised by emotionally charged acts between two characters who were not sexually involved with one another - examples were given of characters who were otherwise portrayed as straight males showering and sleeping together.
The point was made that to most of the people present, the term 'smarm' was likely to be seen as pejorative - this, I theorised, might be a cultural issue rather than a fandom one, as the use of the term may call up the term 'smarmy' to us Brits, which is an unpleasant association.
There was then a discussion about why people might write a story that fit one of those labels more easily than the others: there was some consideration of whether labelling a story 'pre-slash' was a bit of a cop-out on the part of the author. This might be particularly the case in a fandom where slash was prolific and had a larger readership than gen, so a story might be labeled 'pre-slash' in order to give that writer an 'in' to that coveted readership and thus increase their potential audience. There was also something of a feeling that it was harder to write both good gen and good slash, so a pre-slash story might be easier to turn out.
I asked whether it was possible to have a fandom that was completely without gen stories, but even in the case of both Torchwood and Queer as Folk, where the sexual component of storytelling was likely to be intense (particularly in the latter), there was still gen, even if some of the gen in Queer as Folk was apparently about making the guys straight?
I then went on to talk about authorial intent... did the people present often come across stories labelled as gen which were slash (or vice versa) and, if so, did this matter? It was felt that people wanted to know what they were getting and that a story's category should accurately reflect its contents, but that sometimes people didn't get it right when they labelled. I suggested that perhaps, as slashers, we were happier to actively subvert what we were being told by the creators of fiction if we felt it was mislabelled (or they were deluding themselves), because that was what we were used to doing with source material. As a sub-culture, were we more willing to look for/accepting of different readings of what we're coming across, rather than just taking what we're told to?
Note to self - there was a mention of the Sith Academy during the panel, but I can't quite recall where it fitted in... anyone?
connotations:Is there a difference between gen and pre-slash [aka smarm: please, you're so far in denial the camels are complaining].
In hindsight, I'm not sure whether we covered the ground the person who suggested the panel intended, but there you go... ;)
We started with a brief survey of who read/wrote what, with most of the people there admitting that they read gen in at least one of their fandoms at least occasionally, if not regularly.
We then went on to look at some definitions of the key terms involved: in this case those would be gen, pre-slash and smarm. All of this with the caveat that denial in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing, as many of those present were in denial over entire seasons or movies, let alone little things like genre.
Gen was roughly defined by those present as being episode-like, character-driven, plot heavy, not involving a romantic aspect. I noted that in some fandoms you might well see some disagreement over what 'gen' entailed as they would consider some m/f activity (particularly 'canon' activity) as not being outside of the realm of a gen story. This wasn't, however, a view particularly shared by those present, probably because we were all slashers. I think I may have commented (if not then, then certainly later on) about those archives which used to differentiate between slash and het in that even pre-slash would get an NC-17 rating while a het writer would have to work hard for a similar rating based on the content of their fic.
Pre-slash was felt to be applied to stories where the writer was trying to set up a future romantic/sexual encounter, which might or might not get written in a subsequent story. It was as much or more focussed on 'thinky thoughts' about the other character than on events going on around them.
Smarm was a term that a number of people present had come across but which was something alien to others, since it just wasn't a label used in their fandom. Fandoms in which it was used were those such as The Sentinel, and to a lesser extent Due South and Stargate SG-1, or those fandoms to which smarm writers had moved from there. A smarm story was characterised by emotionally charged acts between two characters who were not sexually involved with one another - examples were given of characters who were otherwise portrayed as straight males showering and sleeping together.
The point was made that to most of the people present, the term 'smarm' was likely to be seen as pejorative - this, I theorised, might be a cultural issue rather than a fandom one, as the use of the term may call up the term 'smarmy' to us Brits, which is an unpleasant association.
There was then a discussion about why people might write a story that fit one of those labels more easily than the others: there was some consideration of whether labelling a story 'pre-slash' was a bit of a cop-out on the part of the author. This might be particularly the case in a fandom where slash was prolific and had a larger readership than gen, so a story might be labeled 'pre-slash' in order to give that writer an 'in' to that coveted readership and thus increase their potential audience. There was also something of a feeling that it was harder to write both good gen and good slash, so a pre-slash story might be easier to turn out.
I asked whether it was possible to have a fandom that was completely without gen stories, but even in the case of both Torchwood and Queer as Folk, where the sexual component of storytelling was likely to be intense (particularly in the latter), there was still gen, even if some of the gen in Queer as Folk was apparently about making the guys straight?
I then went on to talk about authorial intent... did the people present often come across stories labelled as gen which were slash (or vice versa) and, if so, did this matter? It was felt that people wanted to know what they were getting and that a story's category should accurately reflect its contents, but that sometimes people didn't get it right when they labelled. I suggested that perhaps, as slashers, we were happier to actively subvert what we were being told by the creators of fiction if we felt it was mislabelled (or they were deluding themselves), because that was what we were used to doing with source material. As a sub-culture, were we more willing to look for/accepting of different readings of what we're coming across, rather than just taking what we're told to?
Note to self - there was a mention of the Sith Academy during the panel, but I can't quite recall where it fitted in... anyone?
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no subject
Date: 2007-10-21 12:25 pm (UTC)Also, I'm so with you on the warnings for het. Unfortunately many writers who like (or at least don't actively dislike) the 'canon' pairings seem unable to balance this with the plot in stories which would otherwise be gen and so I end up giving up as soon as the ickiness appears. If I wanted het, I'd go looking for it, in the same way as if I wanted slash...
no subject
Date: 2007-10-21 01:00 pm (UTC)