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silveradept[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]
There are a lot of sex and gender-tropes that follow fanworks around that have and are variously associated with other genres and media. Romance novels often have a public perception of being erotica that's acceptable to the society around it, anime and manga both deal with the perception that their works are all tentacle porn, and then further stereotypes about the various genre forms of Boys' Love and Girls' Love (not usually mentioning, say, josei or other related forms, because of the lack of exposure), furry culture has to incessantly deal with the perception that it only cares about explicit works, there's a severe gendering of media genres and properties, such that there's a widespread belief, despite multiple debunkings, that boys aren't interested in properties starring girls, and girls shouldn't be welcome or couldn't possibly be full and true members of various fandoms, because that genre/story/form isn't for girls. (Get Rid Of Slimy GirlS is a parody, Gamergate is far too serious about it.)
If you want a particularly illustrative example of how things got twisted horribly around, you can follow Anne Gilbert's 2015 article in Transformative Works and Cultures about defining bronies, which pays attention to the ways in which the definition of a brony is about non-normative ideas around gender and sexuality, how cultural perceptions of what's for boys, girls, men, and women get strongly entangled in trying to define bronies, and about how those ideas get put into practice in ways that largely step on the intended audience of the show and privilege brony comfort in regard to traditional masculinity, rather than striking out on their own to establish a space more compatible with the intended goals and audiences for the show.
(Another reason for anonymity and pseudonymity is to be able to participate, even though that sometimes means that toxic people try to get back in under another name and continue to be themselves. Tradeoffs, the need for effective space moderation, etc.)
Transformative fanworks, even in their early stages, carry the idea that they're about transgressive ideas, and most of the ideas culturally considered transgressive in the United States have to do with sexuality and gender expression. It's telling, in a lot of ways, that the interracial kiss that made it to screen essentially needed to hide behind the idea that a character wasn't in control of themselves. It's also telling that the idea that the male leads of the show having a romantic relationship couldn't similarly hide behind the fact that one of them was an alien and therefore could have had any number of ideas about what constituted an appropriate relationship. Especially since a Vulcan would not, ideally, bring emotional content into it. But media is always a mirror to the culture that produces it, and the culture didn't have the space for that idea.
If transformative fanwork is always going to be transgressive, even if only against the canon establishing what happened, then it shouldn't be a surprise that a large amount of works are going to embrace that transgressive space. And with that comes the perception that transformative works are M/M relationships (slash) written by women who are specifically looking to write their own sexual fantasies on those men. Which is, of course, an entirely separate category from fanworks devoted to transforming women characters into pinup art (assuming they aren't already improbably proportioned) and/or writing pastiche where a character is very clearly getting into (hetero)sexual exploits that will make the other men jealous, but with enough of the serial numbers filed off that the lawyers can't claim that you're writing a specific character into those contexts without the permission of the author. Or the category of adult films that are explicitly parody works (and thus protected from the lawyers), almost always directed by men, that use those characters (and sometimes even the names) and put them in unmistakably sexuality explicit situations, making sure that it's an extremely male-gaze framing the entire way through.
There's also an..."interesting" additional facet that's probably at least as old as the Hays Code, if not older, but that's starting to show up in the post-Hays, post Comics-Code landscape and is moving with the same speed at which societal space is allowing queer people to exist in non-media roles. The Premise, such that it was, couldn't get a whole lot of frank discussion airtime. If we fast forward, though, into a world where relationships between men are not immediately universally condemned and that there isn't an immediate requirement to Bury Your Gays or have them meet untimely ends for their gayness, you end up with situations where the author has accidentally or intentionally put a story line together where it looks for all the world that certain characters are very much going to be queer and have queer relationships, only for the story to shout "no homo!" and introduce a heterosexual relationship or to have one of the potential participants disappeared or killed.
One of the most formative experiences of queerbaiting for the current generation was when the very clear, textually-supported love story between Remus and Sirius was abruptly derailed by the narrative pairing Remus with Tonks instead. This wasn't new, in the sense that nobody else had been queerbaited before, but it was one of the first times it happened in an extremely popular series where a much bigger acceptance of queer people and queer culture (comparatively, anyway...), connectivity, community, and the World Wide Web made it a much bigger "WHAT." that was heard around the world than it might have otherwise been. (I have other thoughts about that post, but they're not germane to this idea. Many thanks tomarginalia for posting the thing, even though I'm recontextualizing it a lot here.)
The spectre of sexuality and gender identity hanging around transformative works is not solely Rule 34 or the presence of a lot of queer people, though, because fanwork often gamers a reputation of being predominantly about explicit sex acts (or the closest you can get and still display on your booth, possibly with the actually explicit work tucked into the browsing folder (appropriately warned for, of course)) and that fanwork is the place you go when you desperately want characters to hook up and the show itself isn't going to go there. Some of that can be blamed on Standards and Practices, or creators trolling their audiences, but even with the increased amount of content being created and delivered solely on subscription streaming services, it doesn't seem like they're taking advantage of the significantly looser rules about sex and sexuality as much as they are about language and violence. What's part of media is always a mirror to the culture that produced it, even when in a space where media itself had a much bigger possible space to play in (and is trying to monetize that space by offering exclusive content that can't be found anywhere else.)
There are always exceptions. Steven Universe, for example, is a hella queer show that flat-out flaunts the fact that the Crystal Gems are aliens with no real concept of gender or sexuality like humans are to get stuff past the radar (Well, not really: the creators of Steven Universe often work hand-in-hand with Standards and Practices at Cartoon Network to know what they can actually get away with depicting) that they would otherwise have the Moral Guardians breathing fire at them for daring to corrupt a young child's brain with the idea that queer people exist and can have healthy, happy lives. Friendship Is Magic has clearly started some interesting conversations about what defines masculinity and whether it's kosher to enjoy a show that's aggressively targeted at little girls. (Admittedly, that discussion is tangential to what FiM is actually about, as noted in the Transformative Works piece linked earlier.)
But for the most part, if you're looking for mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors, there's not much to choose from in the canon of a lot of really good works that matches your experiences. Or that admits and explores what the real consequences would be of a character having the backstory that they're supposed to have. Or wants to know what happens when those characters awaken into sexual beings and then have to deal with those complicating facets of reality instead of having them glossed over or the characters spending an episode or a chapter suddenly making decisions of the relationships they are going to embark upon, which will never be spoken of again or otherwise changed because the canon isn't listening to you la la la la.
I'm not sure I've actually given any answers or suggestions about the truth regarding the perception or ways to make that perception go away if it's an unwarranted one. I'm not sure it's unwarranted or false, given the space that's been sketched out for transformative works to play in, but I think it's incomplete if the idea doesn't include an awareness of how little space is covered by the canon, and the ways in which that space often is in tight orbit around very specific cultural norms and ideas about what is "default", what is acceptable, and where the boundary between the fringe and Here Be Dragons territory is. Make of it what you will. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on the matter, too.
Ultimately, if you want to create smut, create smut. If you don't, don't. And nobody should make judgment of you about who you are based on whether you do or don't. Although, we do ask that you share your good stuff, regardless of your choices. Or perhaps participate in when it rolls around again.
alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]There are a lot of sex and gender-tropes that follow fanworks around that have and are variously associated with other genres and media. Romance novels often have a public perception of being erotica that's acceptable to the society around it, anime and manga both deal with the perception that their works are all tentacle porn, and then further stereotypes about the various genre forms of Boys' Love and Girls' Love (not usually mentioning, say, josei or other related forms, because of the lack of exposure), furry culture has to incessantly deal with the perception that it only cares about explicit works, there's a severe gendering of media genres and properties, such that there's a widespread belief, despite multiple debunkings, that boys aren't interested in properties starring girls, and girls shouldn't be welcome or couldn't possibly be full and true members of various fandoms, because that genre/story/form isn't for girls. (Get Rid Of Slimy GirlS is a parody, Gamergate is far too serious about it.)
If you want a particularly illustrative example of how things got twisted horribly around, you can follow Anne Gilbert's 2015 article in Transformative Works and Cultures about defining bronies, which pays attention to the ways in which the definition of a brony is about non-normative ideas around gender and sexuality, how cultural perceptions of what's for boys, girls, men, and women get strongly entangled in trying to define bronies, and about how those ideas get put into practice in ways that largely step on the intended audience of the show and privilege brony comfort in regard to traditional masculinity, rather than striking out on their own to establish a space more compatible with the intended goals and audiences for the show.
(Another reason for anonymity and pseudonymity is to be able to participate, even though that sometimes means that toxic people try to get back in under another name and continue to be themselves. Tradeoffs, the need for effective space moderation, etc.)
Transformative fanworks, even in their early stages, carry the idea that they're about transgressive ideas, and most of the ideas culturally considered transgressive in the United States have to do with sexuality and gender expression. It's telling, in a lot of ways, that the interracial kiss that made it to screen essentially needed to hide behind the idea that a character wasn't in control of themselves. It's also telling that the idea that the male leads of the show having a romantic relationship couldn't similarly hide behind the fact that one of them was an alien and therefore could have had any number of ideas about what constituted an appropriate relationship. Especially since a Vulcan would not, ideally, bring emotional content into it. But media is always a mirror to the culture that produces it, and the culture didn't have the space for that idea.
If transformative fanwork is always going to be transgressive, even if only against the canon establishing what happened, then it shouldn't be a surprise that a large amount of works are going to embrace that transgressive space. And with that comes the perception that transformative works are M/M relationships (slash) written by women who are specifically looking to write their own sexual fantasies on those men. Which is, of course, an entirely separate category from fanworks devoted to transforming women characters into pinup art (assuming they aren't already improbably proportioned) and/or writing pastiche where a character is very clearly getting into (hetero)sexual exploits that will make the other men jealous, but with enough of the serial numbers filed off that the lawyers can't claim that you're writing a specific character into those contexts without the permission of the author. Or the category of adult films that are explicitly parody works (and thus protected from the lawyers), almost always directed by men, that use those characters (and sometimes even the names) and put them in unmistakably sexuality explicit situations, making sure that it's an extremely male-gaze framing the entire way through.
There's also an..."interesting" additional facet that's probably at least as old as the Hays Code, if not older, but that's starting to show up in the post-Hays, post Comics-Code landscape and is moving with the same speed at which societal space is allowing queer people to exist in non-media roles. The Premise, such that it was, couldn't get a whole lot of frank discussion airtime. If we fast forward, though, into a world where relationships between men are not immediately universally condemned and that there isn't an immediate requirement to Bury Your Gays or have them meet untimely ends for their gayness, you end up with situations where the author has accidentally or intentionally put a story line together where it looks for all the world that certain characters are very much going to be queer and have queer relationships, only for the story to shout "no homo!" and introduce a heterosexual relationship or to have one of the potential participants disappeared or killed.
One of the most formative experiences of queerbaiting for the current generation was when the very clear, textually-supported love story between Remus and Sirius was abruptly derailed by the narrative pairing Remus with Tonks instead. This wasn't new, in the sense that nobody else had been queerbaited before, but it was one of the first times it happened in an extremely popular series where a much bigger acceptance of queer people and queer culture (comparatively, anyway...), connectivity, community, and the World Wide Web made it a much bigger "WHAT." that was heard around the world than it might have otherwise been. (I have other thoughts about that post, but they're not germane to this idea. Many thanks to
marginalia for posting the thing, even though I'm recontextualizing it a lot here.)The spectre of sexuality and gender identity hanging around transformative works is not solely Rule 34 or the presence of a lot of queer people, though, because fanwork often gamers a reputation of being predominantly about explicit sex acts (or the closest you can get and still display on your booth, possibly with the actually explicit work tucked into the browsing folder (appropriately warned for, of course)) and that fanwork is the place you go when you desperately want characters to hook up and the show itself isn't going to go there. Some of that can be blamed on Standards and Practices, or creators trolling their audiences, but even with the increased amount of content being created and delivered solely on subscription streaming services, it doesn't seem like they're taking advantage of the significantly looser rules about sex and sexuality as much as they are about language and violence. What's part of media is always a mirror to the culture that produced it, even when in a space where media itself had a much bigger possible space to play in (and is trying to monetize that space by offering exclusive content that can't be found anywhere else.)
There are always exceptions. Steven Universe, for example, is a hella queer show that flat-out flaunts the fact that the Crystal Gems are aliens with no real concept of gender or sexuality like humans are to get stuff past the radar (Well, not really: the creators of Steven Universe often work hand-in-hand with Standards and Practices at Cartoon Network to know what they can actually get away with depicting) that they would otherwise have the Moral Guardians breathing fire at them for daring to corrupt a young child's brain with the idea that queer people exist and can have healthy, happy lives. Friendship Is Magic has clearly started some interesting conversations about what defines masculinity and whether it's kosher to enjoy a show that's aggressively targeted at little girls. (Admittedly, that discussion is tangential to what FiM is actually about, as noted in the Transformative Works piece linked earlier.)
But for the most part, if you're looking for mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors, there's not much to choose from in the canon of a lot of really good works that matches your experiences. Or that admits and explores what the real consequences would be of a character having the backstory that they're supposed to have. Or wants to know what happens when those characters awaken into sexual beings and then have to deal with those complicating facets of reality instead of having them glossed over or the characters spending an episode or a chapter suddenly making decisions of the relationships they are going to embark upon, which will never be spoken of again or otherwise changed because the canon isn't listening to you la la la la.
I'm not sure I've actually given any answers or suggestions about the truth regarding the perception or ways to make that perception go away if it's an unwarranted one. I'm not sure it's unwarranted or false, given the space that's been sketched out for transformative works to play in, but I think it's incomplete if the idea doesn't include an awareness of how little space is covered by the canon, and the ways in which that space often is in tight orbit around very specific cultural norms and ideas about what is "default", what is acceptable, and where the boundary between the fringe and Here Be Dragons territory is. Make of it what you will. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on the matter, too.
Ultimately, if you want to create smut, create smut. If you don't, don't. And nobody should make judgment of you about who you are based on whether you do or don't. Although, we do ask that you share your good stuff, regardless of your choices. Or perhaps participate in
