i didnt realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes
it wasn’t, like, ~~~we luv pedophilia, it was way more complicated than that!
although it’s true AO3 does allow all fannish content provided it’s properly warned for, there’s a long history there – of spaces being used by fans until the host decided whatever we were doing was too weird and distasteful and either kicking us off, banning certain content, or changing the nature of the site until it was no longer viable as a host.
you’re referring to the LJ Strikethrough of 2007, which, being an ancient crone, I lived through, and since I was hanging out in the last vestiges of SGA and in bandom, I saw some of the fallout. this was before LJ was sold to the Russians (which is a whole ‘nother story), when it was still owned by Six Apart; in an effort to clean up LJ’s act, Six Apart decided to delete all accounts using tags like underage, incest, rape, etc.
this was supposed to get rid of actual child porn on the site, and I hope it did, but it also targeted fan communities. this was a problem for a couple reasons; for one thing, not every story tagged with these words is in favor of them; for another, these things happen to real people and these personal posts were also potentially in danger of being attacked; for the last one, look, I ain’t into this kind of fic but people write about what people write about, and if it’s fictional and not explicitly banned in the TOS (correct me if I’m wrong; I don’t think written content about this stuff was banned?) then it’s not cool for a content host to just start deleting communities without warning.
but that’s what happened! these deletions were also primarily targeting slash communities, which smacked of some serious homophobia since things were deleted that had nothing to do with any of this kind of content.
eventually someone found out it was this super conservative religious group who’d sent a list of journal names to Six Apart, and who if I remember correctly targeted slash fic on purpose, even after it became clear that the fic was, well, totally fictional. after a while, Six Apart admitted they’d made a mistake and started to reinstate journals, but all of fandom was pretty shaken up.
THEN Boldthrough happened, which was essentially the same debacle several months later, at which point fandom began its long slow migration from LJ to GJ, IJ, and eventually AO3, Twitter, and tumblr.
AO3 was opened in 2008 in response to several incidents, of which Strikethrough was a really intense one. remember, also, that back in 2008 the stigma surrounding fandom was significantly greater and more shameful than it is today, so finding hosts willing to archive fic was difficult unless someone had the dough to pay for server space – often not an option. this was also back when fanfic.net’s HTML restrictions were so great that users couldn’t use any special characters or bold or italicize anything, and it didn’t allow R-rated content, so it was clearly not ideal. in addition, although cease & desist letters were much less common than they were in the early 2000s and before, DMCA takedowns were still a phantom on the horizon.
LONG STORY SHORT, even though pedophilia is reprehensible and I personally cannot stomach fanfic that involves that kind of content, AO3 was founded specially as a safe space for fandom communities that could not find homes elsewhere. it requires warnings precisely for that reason, and if you find a story that is not properly warned, you can alert the admins and get the story labeled appropriately.
IDK, maybe it’s just because I am, again, ancient, but I was in and around fandom before homosexuality was legal in all 50 states. so were most of the people who started AO3. for most of my formative life, being gay was associated with pedophilia, and so was writing about gay characters. just – it’s a lot more complicated than you might expect, and there’s a reason many older fans who have been involved in several generations of fandom were so grateful to have AO3 as an option.
I don’t read, for example, Hydra Trash Party fics. They squick me, and I generally feel they are pretty gross. But writing noncon body-horror is not the same as saying “yeah, I totally want to go out and rape and torture people for years while brainwashing them!” or even “yeah, I wouldn’t do it myself, but it would be totally okay if someone did!” Nobody is hurt by it, and nobody is going to be hurt by it. So should I have the right to go, that is gross, you don’t get to write or read that? No.
In the same way, writing about underage teens getting it on–sometimes with each other, sometimes with adults, sometimes consensually, sometimes not–is not the same as child pornography, nor does reading a fic about Hermione and Snape getting it on while she was his student mean someone thinks that would be a good and/or healthy thing in real life.
Fiction affects reality, but fiction is not reality. And writing about something does not mean you want to do it in real life, or believe that anyone should.
Let’s take a closer look at that “Ao3 supports pedophilia!” shall we?
1) The only fics I have ever come across that had actual pedophilia (i.e. someone having sex with a child), it was clearly and explicitly abuse. It was not meant to titillate or arouse. It was meant to horrify. It was seldom explicit.
2) There’s a lot more incest, but it is usually portrayed either as explicitly mutually consensual (i.e. Sam/Dean) or as abusive.
3) I’ve been in fandom for a decade and a half. When people start getting upset at “omg pedophilia, think of the children!” the fics they are usually objecting to aren’t actually pedophilia. Usually, it is teenagers having sex, especially queer sex. And people don’t like that, and use pedophilia as an excuse to shame people for writing/reading sex they don’t like.
Let’s look closer at Strikethrough, shall we? I hope that, if there were any communities of actual pedophiles on LJ, they got taken down, too. But here are some of the communities that got taken down that were not in any way supporting pedophilia and/or rape and/or incest that got taken down:
1) at least one support community for survivors of sexual abuse.
2) a literary book discussion group that was reading Lolita.
3) lots of slash fanfic communities, for things like Draco/Harry fic set in their fourth year (when both boys would have been 15).
Basically, this very conservative “family values” group hated porn, and they hated queer stuff even more, and used “but think of the children, it’s pedophilia!” to pressure LJ to get rid of huge swathes of things they didn’t like. And one time taking down the worst of it wasn’t good enough for them. No, this was step one on a moral crusade. If you acceded to their demands, all that did was whet their appetite, and soon they would be back with a new list of demands. This is why the 2007 strikethrough was not an isolated event, but rather one of a series of events, nor was LJ the only website thus targeted. It starts with anything that can get labelled “pedophilia” or “incest” because that’s low-hanging fruit. But they use that to go after anything relating to queer teen sexuality. Then anything with teen sexuality. Then once the community is already divided and diminished, they go after anything with non-con. Then whatever is next on their list. It doesn’t stop until they’ve won the point and nothing but suitably “family-friendly” fics that match their purity test are allowed.
Which is why AO3 has no morality content in their terms of service. You can’t break copyright beyond fair use (and AO3 has an expansive view of “fair use” and a team of lawyers on call). You can’t use AO3 for commercial advertising. And you can’t post ACTUAL child pornography, i.e. the things that are legally prohibited, i.e. actual photographs or videos of actual children (not teens) in sexually explicit positions–you know, the stuff that actually hurts kids. Other than that? It’s fair game. You can post anything you want, and the archive will not judge. There is no handle for the Moral Majority Family-Friendly Thought Police to latch onto, no cracks they can exploit to divide and conquer.
We’ve been down that road. It doesn’t lead anywhere good.
Reblogging this for the excellent explanation of what exactly the moral crusaders did last time. They had an explicit agenda of anti-queerness, and they specifically targeted slash and femslash communities in particular, such that many ship communities became (or started as) deliberately members-only. You had to apply, and your personal blog had to look like a real person and a fan. You were vetted, a la 1990s private servers.
During this period, Dreamwidth was also targeted by attacking its payment processor. They had to get a new one. These “Warriors” (literally called themselves that!) were totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom they didn’t like.
If you’re carrying out harassment of people right now because they’re posting works with sexual elements you don’t agree with? (And it’s always sex, never non-sexual violence, how strange….) If you’re doing that, you’re also totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom you don’t like. Because your tactics are fandom-destroying, and so is your agenda.
reblogging because this is important: strikethru and boldthru and all the various “purges” that fandom went thru about 10 years ago: this had to do with OUTSIDERS deciding that fandom in general and fanfiction in specific were evil and needed to be destroyed; unless we were writing and shipping good vanilla M/F married people. These were outsiders, going after fictional writing about fictional characters.
AO3 and OTW are HUGE, because now we have an organization, with very smart women and a lot of lawyers, that have our back. Fannish history is important, people! It has not always been this way.
This is so, so important: there’s that other post about AO3 and fanfiction floating around, about our history. People decry violent video games but no one is trying to force companies out of business. But people can and do attack fanfiction: an activity primarily written by women for women, about fictional characters. And often about sex. We have to constantly defend ourselves, protect ourselves, support each other against charges like “paeodophilia”.
^^^rebageling again for excellent commentary
Throwing this in because I was also present: This was during the American Government’s attempts to pass censorship laws on the internet. As MOST of those domains had their serves in America, they were beholden to those censorship laws. A great deal of fanfiction.net was removed because they happened to lose a goddamn courtcase. I’ve been on the site since 2002. They may not have ‘officially’ allowed NC-17 rated content (what it used to be listed as in the filters), it never did a damn thing to remove it. Ever. They had it listed as a rating option during ‘New Story’ uploading after all. It was i nthe search filters. After they lost the courtcase however, they legally had to start doing things about the mature content reports they got. The admins and mods were not actively looking for fic to remove, they were just responding to reports they had already received.
tl;dr – I know tumblr is all about black and white “you’re either all right or all wrong” thinking, but it’s important to understand what actually happened before going “ew ao3 was made to give pedophiles a safe place to post” because that is 110% not what happened.
This is why so, so many of the comparatively older fannish folks on tumblr like me are so vehemently against stuff like the anti movement and “all ships are valid UNLESS”. It smacks of censorship and content policing – and we’ve been there. We got our shit deleted and our accounts banned because someone else thought what we were reading or writing or talking about needed to just… not exist. No warning. Literally overnight. We just woke up and stuff was gone.
And yeah, the group was legit called Warriors for Innocence (or maybe of). I knew several people that were members of survivor/support groups that lost their groups – and their main support network – when Strikethrough happened (ten years ago holy shit).
You antis need to listen when us older fans tell you that the censorship you’re advocating for, when put into practice, is NOT a positive thing; it’s an extremely scary thing!
I can guarantee that you would be very, very upset if another event like LJ Strikethrough were to happen today because *you* are just as vulnerable as the rest of us! If you support the rights of marginalized groups of people, if you’re a slash or fem slash shipper, if you support gender identities that aren’t defined by biological sex, if you care about representation, if you support women, if you have any kind of kink, if you care about fandom in any capacity beyond its eradication, YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY WANT THE SORT OF CENSORSHIP YOU’RE ADVOCATING!!
People were terrified during Strikethrough. I was there. Communities were being shut down, individual users were being shut down. People were losing access to their own fics, their feedback, their comments – a LOT went on in comments on LJ. Think more coherent reblogs, much more personal, very widespread. Comments were also very important, and in terms of networking/communicating, were absolutely critical.
LJ was, for many people, central.
It was a fundamental part of the infrastructure of fandom at the time.
Having it attacked, having parts of your fandom’s territory just deleted like that, was very very scary. People didn’t know who was next. Every day, the list of stricken journals grew. And not all of them came back, not all of them recovered their content. Some people even voluntarily deleted their content as a form of protest. It was a bad time.
You do not have to interact with fic that grosses you out or makes you uncomfortable. Tagging is a thing. And even outside of tags, you are responsible for curating your own fandom experience. It is not right to expect it to be curated for you. And it is not right to lash out when someone refuses to do so and expects you to walk away from things that do not concern you.
I was gonna say “things that don’t harm anyone” but I realize you can argue that. If you get triggered, that’s upsetting. That could be considered harm. And I have sympathy for that. I do.
I have run across fic that triggered me. I have pretty specific triggers, and people don’t always think to warn for them because they aren’t that big a deal for a lot of people. Or it’s sort of bundled into kink and is presumed, that if you’re okay with certain kinds of kink, you’re okay with this. So I’ve been blindsided by it before. And it sucks for a couple of days while I get over it.
That was not the fault of the authors! You could argue that tagging should have been used, and maybe it should, but ultimately that’s not an ironclad obligation. It’s a tool people provide out of courtesy.
That was not the fault of the site! The site is there to give authors a way to make fiction available, not to judge each work and interrogate its validity and make sure everything is tagged so that nobody has to see anything bad, ever.
That was not even my fault! It was my responsibility to try to curate my experience, and I tried, but it wasn’t my fault because I didn’t deliberately set out to trigger myself.
When I get triggered, unless it is by a deliberate act, it is actually the fault of the people who hurt me in the first place! And I refuse to let them off the hook and blame perfectly innocent people who just wanna write their fanfiction! I may hate that fanfiction, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether or not people should be allowed to post whatever they want.
Also, some people cope by writing about fucked-up shit. My best friend in the whole wide world has shared her fic with me, and HOO BOY it is messed up. She wrote it during a time in her life when she was in and just coming out of a horrifically abusive relationship. I mean, it was exactly the kind of relationship all of us here on Tumblr love to hate. She was married to a shitty, abusive man who preyed on someone younger than he was and used his influence over her to treat her in a way that would be right at home in that Lundy Bancroft book Why Does He Do That? He was a real rapist, a verified grade-A bad fuckin’ guy. (She was lucky to escape. I have immense respect for her.) And she wrote some fucked up fic to deal with it, and she shared it, and people were invested in it. And because this was early 2000′s, she had to host it on a foreign server and cover her tracks, because at that time no-place was safe to post it.
“Yeah, but if she’s writing it for therapy, she doesn’t have to post it where other people might have to see it!” I hear you say.
But like … what the hell??? “Shut up, don’t talk about it, it’s bad to talk about these things, because these things are bad!” is something used against folks with trauma.
“This isn’t good for me, I can’t talk about this, I can’t be your audience for this,” that’s fine, those are boundaries that people with trauma use to defend themselves. You should learn to say those things! It will help you!
But expecting other people to never create and share art about trauma is just so thunderously oppressive I lack the ability to fully articulate it.
And nobody should have to disclose their history of trauma to prove their motives are pure or virtuous enough for their speech to be protected. I’ve only really been able to openly say “I was assaulted, it was traumatic, I am a little fucked up from it” for the past couple of years, tops. I couldn’t talk about it before that. Couldn’t! And it was over 20 years ago!
I also believe, very firmly, that you don’t need a history of abuse to find writing really messed-up shit satisfying, or to find reading it cathartic. I believe 100% in the freedom of creative expression, and the freedom to read whatever fucked up shit you want to read.
All y’all fandom youngsters can spit nails all you want over gross rape fic, incest fic, whatever.
Fine, I don’t like it either!
But that fucked up shit? That fucked up shit helped carve out the spaces we have today. You don’t have to like it, but campaigning to get it deleted, harassing content creators, calling people rapists and pedophiles who have never done and would never ever do such a thing, that is not the way to improve the world, it doesn’t keep actual kids or teens or assault/rape victims safe. It wouldn’t have made me feel safe when I was 16 and did’t want what was going on. It doesn’t make me feel safe now. I can say with the perspective of someone 24 years away from that event, it doesn’t make the world safer for people like I was. It actually makes it worse.
Learn to steer clear of the messed-up stuff you don’t like. It’s a skill, you get better with practice. Have someone else vet stuff for you if you need help doing it now.
Everything that is sketchy and gross is not criminal, and writing about a thing is not morally the same as doing it. Please stop acting like writing about an adult and a teenager having really questionable, gross sex is as bad as the actual registered sex offender they caught hanging around an actual elementary school two neighborhoods over from mine, just trying to talk to the kids. The former is, at most, in poor taste, and potentially triggering to abuse victims. The second makes me want to vomit because even though he was just talking, that guy was gearing up to try something and create another abuse victim. A g a i n.
The first can be avoided because it is imaginary and you, an adult, have power over your back button so that you don’t have to witness harm to imaginary people. The second, those very real kids had to rely on real adults and real law enforcement to keep them safe from very real assault.
(It worked! The neighborhood rallied! He was arrested for violating parole!)
Pretty sure Sleazebag McDongface didn’t read some gross NC-17 Draco/Lucius fic before deciding to harm an actual human being. Pretty sure not having read it didn’t keep him from doing it. ‘Cause he fuckin’ did it. And he would have done worse. But actual people stopped him.
I get wanting to protect victims when so many of us are victims ourselves, but man, going after fiction is not the way to do it.
An author is not a perpetrator. Stop trying to make those things synonymous in the minds of other fans, and in the minds of other recovering victims.
I’m a crone who also lived through strikethrough, and all y’all young fans need to read this and understand it if you don’t want history to repeat itself someday.
Here’s the thing, also: it doesn’t stop with fic about objectionable stuff.
If you have a website with TOS that includes any kind of “objectionable content” rules, there will be parties who will use those rules to try to silence other people whom they want silenced.
Let’s look at the alt-right and MRA movements today, or GamerGate a few years ago. What is one of their primary weapons? They report black or feminist or really any leftist YouTube channels (or Twitter accounts, or whatever) whose message they don’t like and claim those channels are are violating TOS by posting hate speech or incitations to violence or whatever bullshit they can come up with, in an attempt to silence those channels.
When Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequence came under fire for starting a crowdfunding endeavor to fund the production of her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series of videos, male gamers tried to get her KickStarter and various social media accounts shut down by reporting her for for hate speech and promoting terrorism.
Luckily, that became a big enough story that the dudes failed and their efforts backfired. But a lot of times, these tactics work.
How do I know this? Because it happened to me. Not over major shit like the examples above, but over something completely petty.
Back in the mid-to-late 90s, before LiveJournal really became the place for fandom, before FF.net was really a thing, you had to create your own personal website on whatever free webhost you could find (GeoCities was popular, but there were others) if you wanted to host your fic somewhere.
And back then, TV studios and book authors were still sending their lawyers after people who wrote fanfic, issuing cease and desist letters to not only the authors, but also to their webhosts.
At the time, I was writing perfectly het Mulder/Scully fanfic. No rape, no pedophilia, no slash. Maybe a little BDSM. But largely it was unobjectionable.
Then the 8th season of X-Files started, David Duchovny decided he only wanted to be involved part-time, and the show decided to bring in another male character. The fandom lost their shit–as fandoms do–over the idea of “replacing” Mulder blah blah blah.
One of the most popular fanfic mailing lists–one that had previously had no restrictions on what characters or pairings could be posted–decided that if you wrote fanfic involving this character, you were no longer welcome. Well, this was the mailing list with all the readers. Sure, authors could go to other mailing lists, but they wouldn’t have exposure to the sort of readership this other list boasted.
I spoke out, saying that this change was unfair to fic authors and that the moderator of this list was behaving in a pretty vile way. The moderator and her friends took aim at me and began a campaign of harassment, and a few days later, suddenly my website with my XF fanfic was TOSed because someone had reported it. So was the next site I tried to create to host my fic, and the one after that.
Thanks to the way AO3s TOS are constructed, that sort of shit doesn’t happen now. I can speak up if I need to, and while I may receive harassment on my various social media accounts, there’s no chance they can have my fic taken down just because they have an agenda and don’t like me for reasons not relating to my fic.
So yeah, AO3′s rules protect fic a lot of us might find objectionable. But they also protect fic that is in no way objectionable from being targeted by unrelated harassment campaigns. And since any of us could find ourselves in the sights of those sort of campaigns at any time, we need to thank our lucky stars for that.
I like this last addition.
When I helped write the ToS for AO3, I wasn’t primarily thinking about strikethrough. I was primarily thinking of FFN, where so many people post things that are technically against the ToS but that the community tolerates. Any time someone gets pissed off, they can go on a grudge-reporting spree and target their enemy’s work. Often, that means guys targeting slash or Twilight fic because it’s “for girls” and thus sucks. Sometimes, it’s one ship vs. another. I was also thinking of Miss Scribe and all of that other Harry Potter fandom drama. (And if you think fans are above destroying an entire archive just to strike at one enemy, think again!)
We can’t force people to like each other. We can’t force people to be nice to each other. But we could take away fandom bullies’ favorite tools.
So we did.
Watching young (ostensibly liberal) bloggers and fans take up the deeply conservative rhetoric and moral crusading of the right wing and evangelical groups from the 90s has been both fascinating from an anthropological perspective, and fucking horrifying for someone who lived through this time period and the death of LJ.
This thread keeps getting better.
It galls me to think that those of us who went through all this shit might have to go through it again because people who were still in primary school at the time don’t see anything wrong with harassing us over
Like, I hate to pull this argument, but we are your fandom elders, we did what we did to preserve fandom for y’all, so y’all would have space to safely explore the sane things we did and still do. And in doing so we rightly realized that if we wanted to protect the comfortable, cuddly parts, we also needed to protect the dark parts.
You can hate non-con fic all you want, and I will always advocate for adequate tagging/warning (especially with franchises that are aimed at younger audiences, e.g. MLP:FIM and SU) so that you don’t have to see it because I sympathize, but I will never support people who want to make sure that it isn’t even there to be seen. I’ve been through that once. It didn’t help anyone. It didn’t fix anything.
Please, learn to curate your own online experience. You are responsible for not clicking, or clicking away. Don’t try to force others to do it for you. That’s not cool. You aren’t protecting children. You are asking fandom to treat everyone like a child. There is a massive difference.
Reblogging for the history (was there; can confirm), and also–
Come on. When you hear an extreme claim like “ao3 supports pedophilia,” an entire protocol should kick off in your head. Who, exactly, is saying it? How much confidence do you have in your knowledge of this person? (A more important question than it used to be; I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that 15% of “fandom leftists” are actually Russian bots.) What basis do they have for this claim–were they in a position to know first-hand, are they known to have studied the topic carefully? How complete is their knowledge? Could they be missing important context? Do they have any known biases or preferences that might slant their reading of something? Do they have motives to be untruthful? Could they just be mistaken? What are the underlying facts supporting their claim? Are there other readings of those facts that you can think of? Do you have any biases/preferences that you need to keep in mind that might lead you to prefer an inaccurate reading?
Honestly, were you all raised by wolves, that you need this explained to you? Why do we have to tell you not to set everybody’s house on fire because you want to drive out imaginary intruders? Kneejerk reactions to buzzwords is for followers of our current president. Do better.
“you can’t control who’s going to read your gross fic!!”
yes i can. it’s called tagging appropriately. the only people who are gonna read my gross e-rated dead dove dubious consent mind control vore porn are
1) adults who want to read that content, and
2) people who looked at those tags, looked at the mature content warning, and then said “well that looks like absolutely nothing i want to be a part of” and then clicked it anyway to get angry about
[Oglaf cartoon (“Annals”)
Person 1: “If they hate the show so much, why do they keep coming back?”
Person 2: “Do you know some people can orgasm from outrage alone?”
Person 1: “What? No!”
Person 2: “Me neither, but it’s the only guess I have.”]
I’ve mentioned “romantic fantasy” in a few recent posts, and some of the responses have made it apparent that a lot of folks have no idea what that actually means – they’re reading it as “romance novels in fantasy settings”, and while some romantic fantasy stories are that, there’s a bit more to it.
In a nutshell, romantic fantasy is a particular genre of Western fantasy literature that got started in the 1970s, reaching its peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Its popularity sharply declined shortly thereafter, for reasons that are far too complicated to go into here; suffice it to say that you won’t find many pure examples of the type published after 1998 or so.
It’s tough to pin down exactly what romantic fantasy is in a few words, but you’ll definitely know it when you see it – there’s a very particular complex of tropes that defines it. I’ll try to hit the highlights below; not every romantic fantasy story will exhibit all of these traits, but most will exhibit most of them.
Romantic fantasy settings are typically “grown up” versions of settings that traditionally appeal to young girls: telepathic horses, wise queens, enchanted forests, all that stuff. Note that by “grown up”, I don’t mean “dark” or deconstructionist; romantic fantasy is usually on board with the optimistic tone of its source material, and any grime and uncertainty is the result of being a place that adult human beings actually live in. Protagonists are natives of the setting, rather than visitors from Earth (as is customary in similar stories targeted at younger audiences), though exceptions do exist.
In terms of stories and themes, romance is certainly a big presence, but an even stronger one is politics. Where traditional fantasy is deeply concerned with the geography of its settings, romantic fantasy focuses on the political landscape. Overwrought battle scenes are replaced by long and complicated discussions of political alliances and manoeuverings, brought down to the personal level through the use of heavily stylised supporting characters who function as avatars of the factions and philosophies they represent. Many romantic fantasy stories employ frequent “head-hopping” to give the reader insight into these philosophies, often to the point of narrating brief scenes from the villain’s perspective.
The “good” societies of romantic fantasy settings tend to be egalitarian or matriarchal. Patriarchal attitudes are exhibited only by evil men – or very occasionally by sympathetic male characters who are too young and sheltered to know better (and are about to learn!) – and often serve as cultural markers of the obligatory Evil Empire Over Yonder. Romantic fantasy’s heydey very slightly predates third-wave feminism, so expect to see a lot of the second wave’s unexamined gender essentialism in play; in particular, expect any evil or antagonistic woman to be framed as a traitor to her gender.
Usually these societies are explicitly gay-friendly. There’s often a special made-up word – always printed in italics – for same-gender relationships. If homophobia exists, it’s a trait that only evil people possess, and – like patriarchy – may function as a cultural marker of the Evil Empire. (Note, however, that most romantic fantasy authors were straight women, so the handling of this element tends to be… uneven at best.)
Magical abilities are very common. This may involve a unique talent for each individual, or a set of defined “spheres” of magic that practically everyone is aligned with. An adolescent lacking magical abilities is usually a metaphor for being a late bloomer; an adult lacking magical abilities is usually a metaphor for being physically disabled. (And yes, that last one can get very cringey at times, in all the ways you’d expect – it was the 1980s, after all.)
In keeping with their narrative focus, romantic fantasy stories almost always have an explicitly political character with a strongly progressive bent. However, most romantic fantasy settings share mainstream fantasy’s inexplicable boner for monarchies, so there’s often a fair bit of cognitive dissonance in play – many romantic fantasy settings go through elaborate gymnastics to explain why our hereditary nobility is okay even though everybody else’s is icky and bad. This explanation may literally boil down to “a wizard did it” (i.e., some magical force exists to prevent the good guys’ nobles from abusing their power).
I think that about covers it, though I’m sure I’ve overlooked something – anybody who knows the subject better than I do should feel free to yell at me about it.
(As an aside, if some of this is sounding awful familiar, yes – My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic draws a lot of inspiration from romantic fantasy, particularly the early 90s strand. It’s not a straight example of the type – there are very few of those around today – but it’s not at all subtle about its roots.)
Oh, I read so much of this as a teen and young adult. It might have started a touch earlier than the 70′s with Anne MacCaffrey and Dragonriders of Pern? The most obvious example I can think of is Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books and over in the comic book medium, I think Wendy Pini’s Elfquest just squeezes in.
One thing about this genre, when I reread something from it that I loved 20 or 25 years ago, I go from extreme and affectionate nostalgia to quite literally blushing in embarrassment over some of those cringe-worthy bits you mentioned.
Yeah, Lackey’s Valdemar books are basically the platonic ideal of romantic fantasy for a lot of folks – though in spite of being arguably the most influential romantic fantasy author of her generation, Lackey herself was a relative latecomer to the genre.
As for McCaffrey, I’d hesitate to classify her Dragonriders of Pern series as romantic fantasy. I’ll grant that later entries in the series certainly develop in that direction, but especially early on it hews a lot closer to traditional heroic fantasy. Her Talent universe, however, is a dead-perfect example of the type, in spite of having an extremely variant setting.
(For those who haven’t read them, McCaffrey’s Talent books take place in a gonzo far-future space opera setting, revolving around the personal dramas of a pseudo-noble caste of godlike telepaths who enjoy their privileges as a consequence of being the setting’s only economical source of faster-than-light communication and transport. Weird stuff.)
I read so much Mercedes Lacky and Anne McCaffrey as a kid. I’d love to hear about the decline of the genre – I’m guessing that modern feminism and the lgbt movement had a lot to do with it? That is – the growth out of a lot of the more cringey tropes morphing the genre into something distinctly different?
Yeah, there were a number of different factors involved. Losing the LGBT audience was certainly part of it – not because of the inept handling of the subject matter per se, but because a lot of LGBT readers were reading romantic fantasy simply because they couldn’t get that kind of representation anywhere else, and when more LGBT authors started getting published in the mid 1990s, they had better options.
The Internet itself was another big culprit. Commercial Internet service went mainstream circa 1995, and suddenly, a lot of content that had formerly been the province of a hard core of dedicated hobbyists was accessible to everyone – most critically, online fanfic. Many folks, particularly among younger readers, found that online fanfic scratched the same itch as romantic fantasy; I recall a great deal of mid-to-late-1990s fanfic that basically applied the tropes and forms of romantic fantasy to video game settings, for example. (Chrono Trigger was an oddly popular choice – anyone old enough to remember that?)
This was compounded by mishandling by both authors and publishers. Though the new communication channels afforded by the Internet could have been a great boon to them, most romantic fantasy authors (correctly) perceived online fanfic as competing for their audience, and responded with extreme hostility. We’ve talked a bit about Mercedes Lackey; her stance on online fanfic was legendarily draconian, and often backed with litigation, to the extent that her nascent Internet fandom was basically smothered in its crib. By the time she mellowed out on the medium, it was too late. A lot of other romantic fantasy authors and publishers followed the same trajectory.
Lastly, the final nail in romantic fantasy’s coffin was basically J K Rowling’s fault, believe it or not. During the period in which romantic fantasy literature enjoyed its peak popularity, YA fantasy literature was in a low ebb; there wasn’t much of it coming out, and most of it wasn’t very good, so a lot of kids were reading romantic fantasy (in spite of its subject matter often being wildly inappropriate; I’ve mentioned in the past how many books about teenage girls having sex with dragons I ended up reading!). That youth demographic ended up being the last bastion of romantic fantasy’s mainstream readership – then the YA fantasy renaissance of the late 1990s stole that audience wholesale.
There were probably half-a-dozen other significant factors that contributed to romantic fantasy’s commercial decline, but those are the highlights.
I knew it was Rowling’s fault I couldn’t find “my” type of fantasy anymore! All of a sudden, everyone seemed to be trying to write the next Harry Potter. It was quite upsetting, as I had rather liked the fantasy genre the way it was before, back when it was generally agreed upon that magic ought to have actual rules 😛 I had no idea there was an actual name for this type of fantasy. I miss it dreadfully, though 😦 though, yes, certain scenes in the Mage Winds trilogy were pretty horrifying when I was ten…
Another element in the decline was related to the development of the internet, but only tangentially.
In the late 80s and early 90s, anime and manga began to be licensed more and more in the Americas and Europe. At first, most offerings were male-focused and had a narrow audience, but with the shift from bbs and rec.alt. to free personal webpages (thank you Netscape!), information about series from Japan spread much faster. At this point, the fansub community boomed (no really, boomed to the point where there were distributors in countries all over the world, not just in college clubs), due to the ability to publish their catalogs and contact information more easily. This brought a variety of shoujo and josei series to the attention of a wider audience, specifically of women, and suddenly female geeks who formerly had been following Romantic Fantasy found out that entire swaths of television and comics were already dedicated to them in Japan. (You can thank Sailor Moon for the explosion of shoujo that decade. No, really. I’m serious.)
1995 was a big turning point. In a single year, while Sailor Moon was finishing up season S and moving on to Super S, the following powerhouse anime were released: Fushigi Yuugi, Magic Knight Rayearth, Wedding Peach, Gundam Wing, Evangelion, and Slayers. Of these, the first 3 were shoujo; Fushighi Yuugi was an ancient China-themed portal anime that pretty much nailed the Romantic Fantasy genre right down the middle, Magic Knight Rayearth was a mecha portal magical girl series, and Wedding Peach was a real world magical girl series. As for the others, Gundam Wing was intended as a shounen SF war story to reboot the Gundam franchise, but it ended up with basically a yaoi fanbase dominated by women (fandom-wise, it was the Supernatural of its day, but with more lead characters and less incest). Evangelion was a groundbreaking grimdark apocalyptic disaster as notorious as it still is famous, and its audience was pretty well split in every way imaginable, including on whether they hated it or not. The only unmitigated success of the year not to draw most of its fanbase from among women was Slayers.
The impact of that year and the following (1996 was the year of Escaflowne and Hana Yori Dango) was immediately obvious if you went to SF&F cons in the US. The cosplay shifted, the panels shifted, there was a lot of sudden interest from women in what had been presented as a mostly male genre often erroneously equated with porn. Many women I had formerly discussed Bradley, Lackey, McCaffrey, and Rawn with were now discussing CLAMP and Takeuchi-sensei and the best places to get reasonably-priced import manga.
So yeah: internet fanfiction, Rowling/Duane/the YA crowd in general, books by queer authors who didn’t encourage us to think of ways to die heroically, anime & manga, and of course Supernatural Romance. Romantic Fantasy was a genre so tenacious that it took that many blows for it to mostly fall (and I would argue that it still informs fantasy television today). Or, conversely, you can think of the need that women have to see fantastical stories that reflect us as so powerful that for over 2 decades it drove an incredibly diverse group of women to all converge on a genre that didn’t entirely satisfy most of them but on which they were totally willing to spend money, because it was a genre women were actually producing for ourselves, and nobody else was listening.
A post just crossed my dash that put the worst taste in my mouth. I don’t want to reblog it, but I do want to address the contents because I think the subject is super important.
The post basically boiled down to: fanfic writers are thin-skinned babies “these days” because no one can take constructive criticism. In “my day” we all sent page-long critiques like the dedicated heroes we were! It made us better writers! Moreover, if I didn’t like something, I told the writer all about it! It was my job!
Hold up, what?
I’ve been posting fanfic online since 1998. Twenty years. Pre-archives. And “in my day” we had betas if we wanted/needed/asked for them (whose critiques didn’t have an audience). We said “concrit welcome” if we actually wanted constructive criticism. We did not show up unannounced to point out a work’s flaws because that is rude. Look, I am an editor. People pay me real money to edit things for them. I would rather cut off my own fingers than burst into someone’s comments and start “critiquing” their work without being asked first.
Here’s something that needs to be addressed: fanfiction is real writing, yes, but it is, by its nature as something that isn’t monetized, a hobby. As in, a thing people do for fun. A thing that hopefully brings both authors and readers joy! The story an author posts is a gift; how dare anyone rip a gift apart in front of the gift-giver and all the other party attendees? How entitled and ungrateful can you be? Fandom is not a frigging battleground where authors learn to harden themselves for war. It’s a hobby. Done out of love and enthusiasm.
Yes, some fanfiction writers (certainly not all!!) aspire to be original fiction writers. They may use fanfiction as a training ground. They may want or benefit from constructive criticism. Still, they have to ask. They have to start the conversation. I know (think?) it’s harder to find betas these days, but it’s always worth asking around if real critique is what you want. Put “concrit welcome and even begged for” in the author’s notes and hope someone takes you up on it.
Some fanfiction writers with original fiction aspirations still don’t want criticism about their fic. Fic may be their fun-writing outlet. It may be about instant gratification (and there’s nothing wrong with that; we’re not in the business of denying ourselves pleasure out of some moral superiority here. It’s fandom). It may be the place where they post to get around their fears of showing things to others. It may be the place they take risks they wouldn’t in their original work because the stakes are lower. When you work on your original writing all day, every day—often putting that work through far more vigorous and exhausting paces than fanfic sees—the last thing you want is someone showing up during your time off to point out a frigging comma splice or shift in POV.
The point is unless someone asks for critique, you don’t know what’s going on with them. Maybe fic is the only fun thing they have in their lives. Maybe they’re writing in a different language. Maybe they are 14. Or 82. Maybe they’ve never written fiction of any kind before and this is their baby step forward. Maybe fic is just escapism. Maybe they are depressed or anxious as hell and criticism is going to push them over an edge. Fandom belongs to everyone. Not just people deemed “good” or “perfect” or “permitted” or “thick-skinned.” People don’t need to be saved from grammar mistakes or poor turns of phrase or even plotholes so wide a semi could drive through them. Authors sure as hell don’t need to be told when a reader just doesn’t like something. There is no fandom police force in charge of perfection. If critique is so important to you, advertise your willingness to beta. If you do not like a story or think it’s “bad” hit the freaking back button.
Unsolicited criticism is not helpful. Maybe you just catch someone off-guard and startle them. At worst, you may totally shatter someone’s self-esteem while they are partaking in a hobby they 100% do for fun—and not in pursuit of some unattainable perfection.
Don’t ruin a stranger’s day or week or hobby because you “know better” and somehow think you need to prove it. You don’t.
A friend and I were scowling over that same post last night, and this is a much kinder response than the one that I started writing. I love and agree with 100% of what you’ve said here, but I’d like to go a step farther, because I think that fandom’s general evolution away from negative feedback is about more than just our amateur status. I always see the assumption in the pro-unsolicited-criticism camp that negative criticism is somehow the only thing that can ever help a writer improve, and I’ve always found that idea to be absolute horseshit. Hearing things that people liked about my work isn’t some kind of newfangled emotional safety feature that’s keeping my fandom babyhood intact, it’s genuinely helpful to me as a writer. Not only in the sense that it feels nice and makes me motivated to write more, but in the sense that it gives me specific information about how a reader responded to my work which I can then use to do an even more enjoyable job of engaging my fellow fans for fun the next time I write something. Friendly positive comments ARE constructive criticism!!
Also (and I’d love to get your perspective on this as an editor?) I’ve found that negative criticism tends to be very work-specific. It’s stuff like “don’t do this particular thing at this particular time,” or “I didn’t like that this specific character said this specific thing,” etc. That can be incredibly useful during the editing phase because it helps me polish a specific piece of writing. I can’t say enough good stuff about literally every editor and beta reader I’ve ever worked with, because each one of them made the stories they worked on stronger and more enjoyable, and they certainly didn’t limit themselves to unquestioning praise in their feedback.
Once I’ve posted (or published) a story, though, I am done editing it. I’m done fixing it, I’m done adjusting it, I’m probably done even thinking about it for at least a week. I mean, sure, if you spot a giant typo, fine, let me know, but someone telling me they didn’t like the pacing or that the characterization was all wrong or that my sentence structure didn’t fit the genre or whatever is absolutely useless, both to that particular work and to my writing as a whole. The thing is done. It’s built. Unless I have unwittingly perpetuated some kind of miserable bigotry or whatever, I am moving on to the next thing, which is very likely to be an entirely different thing. I’m genuinely sorry if a reader didn’t enjoy it, but for the love of the little baby jesus in the hay, why are they still wasting time on something they didn’t like when there’s an entire internet of other things out there for them to discover???
For whatever reason, positive notes about things I did right in a story are much easier for me to carry forward and apply to whatever I might work on next. Knowing that someone liked a scene or an idea or even a particular line tells me that all the various technical things I did to make that part of the story happen were successfully deployed. Knowing what I did right for readers lets me do it again, lets me build on it, lets me ponder new directions that I might go with whatever the thing was, even if I’m doing that in a completely different story or piece of writing.
So yeah, negative feedback on completed fic or published work that’s disguised as “constructive criticism” isn’t just kind of asshole-ish and antithetical to everything that fandom means to most of us, it also tends to be genuinely unhelpful in … basically every way. Especially when you compare it to how helpful a positive comment of the same duration and detail would have been, both to the writer’s relationship with their hobby and to their growth as an artist.
THIS IS SUCH A GREAT ADDITION TO MY POST! MAX KUDOS. I agree with (and love) everything you’ve said 100%.
I think something most people don’t realize is that an editor’s (and beta’s) job isn’t to tear a work to shreds; it shouldn’t revolve around negativity at all. Ideally, an editor works with an author to yes, fix errors, but mostly to read, observe, analyze, and ask questions the author (who is so close to the work) might not have thought about. The editor is trying to preemptively ask the questions a confused reader might ask, so the reader never has to ask them. Those answers then help the author clarify, polish, and further build their work into something even better. Absolutely work-specific.
type one: fan fiction is a love letter to canon, only small changes unless it’s an au!!
type two: the source material can bite me, I don’t give a fuck
type three: horny
sorry, I forgot one
type four: canon COULD be so good if it wasn’t so straight/white/horny, so I fixed it while holding unblinking eye contact with the creator and mouthing ‘die’
I get the impression that a lot of fanfic writers tend to get tangled up in the idea that a fanfic needs to have a single, unified narrative from beginning to end. Thing is, that’s not actually true – there are lots of literary forms that can be adapted to fanfic that have no plot to speak of.
Take the picaresque, for example: in its simplest form, it’s a frame story about a journey from point A to point B, in which each chapter forms a self-contained micro-story about a single encounter that happens along the way. Apart from the protagonist and perhaps one or two companions, each chapter features an entirely new setting and cast of characters, and while there may be a thematic arc to the work taken as a whole, there’s no narrative continuity between episodes, which can be read in essentially any order.
(Also, many works in the genre maintain a running gag whereby every single chapter ends with the protagonist fleeing for her life for some reason, thereby moving her on to the next episode, though that’s by no means required.)
I mean, that’s just one example, but the point is: if you want to write a massive 100 000 word fic, but maintaining continuity gives you hives, there are forms that don’t require continuity. Not everything needs to be an elaborately plotted continuing narrative – a long-form work can totally be just a bunch of stuff that happens. Many well-respected works of literature are exactly that.
a frame story about a journey from point A to point B, in which each chapter forms a self-contained micro-story about a single encounter that happens along the way
Isn’t this essentially what we do with Five Times (Plus One) fics? They’re not always about a journey, but they fit the same narrative structure: each segment is (or should be) self-contained, a story within the story, that is thematically connected to the other parts of the complete work.
And while Five Times fics are usually shorter in length (I’d guess that most fall within the 1k-5k wordcount range), I have definitely seen some that surpass 50k.
Mm – not so much.
It’s true that both are episodic after a fashion, but the distinguishing feature of the five-plus-one fic is that they often don’t stand alone; many consist of fragmentary vignettes that can only be fully understood with reference to the specific work on which the story is based.
The picaresque story, conversely, ls self-contained not only on the whole, but on the level of individual chapters. Each episode presents everything you need to know about the characters involved, at least as far as that particular episode is concerned, and any needed backstory is directly incorporated by reference, reminiscence or anecdote. (Or, in plain English, if you need to know it, somebody will mention it.) It’s an intensely economical form, narrative-wise.
By that definition no fanfic can be a picaresque, because all fanfics draw from the larger work that they are a fanfic of. If I write a story about Kirk and Spock exploring different alien planets, that’s still dependent on the audience’s knowledge of Kirk and Spock… and if I don’t draw on what the audience knows, I’m failing at the great strength of fanfic, the thing that is most valuable about the form, which is that it does draw on information the reader already knows, so you don’t need to actually write down everything that the fanfic reader needs to know to fully understand the work.
All prose fiction draws on information the reader already knows. In this respect, fanfiction isn’t exceptional; like all fiction aimed at a particular target audience, it simply makes certain assumptions about what the reader already knows. A Star Trek fanfic that’s written in such a way that it’s literally impossible to figure out how the plot hangs together if you’re not already versed in Star Trek lore is no different from – for example – a cyberpunk story whose plot only makes sense if you know how public key cryptography works; it’s merely the particular domain of knowledge you’re assuming on the part of your readers that differs.
I’m confused then: how can any fanfic meet the standards of your picaresque suggestion? in terms of drawing on assumptions of previous information? maybe can you restate how the picaresque would work in terms of fanfic?
Fanfic doesn’t actually need to be structured so that you need to be familiar with the source material in order to understand it. I’d argue that most well written fanfic isn’t set up that way at all; given a decent Star Trek fanfic, somebody who’d never heard of Star Trek before could probably figure out the premise and tenor of the show in fairly short order. Indeed, I’ve read plenty of ‘fics with no prior familiarity with the source material and gotten by just fine. Granted, it’s true that some ‘fic doesn’t work that way, but the notion that being incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t already immersed in the lore of the source material is a defining virtue of the medium is both extremely peculiar, and not an especially accurate assessment of most actual fanfic.
Basically, I think
a lot of
fanfic authors tend to hugely overestimate the importance of being familiar with the source material with respect to properly appreciating their work. In most cases, it just ain’t that critical.
Look no shade but I do get a little salty when people say there’s not enough non-shipping fic when anyone who’s ever tried to write gen knows you have to be twice as good and write twice as much to get anyone to care about it
I honestly was not prepped for the raw truth of this post and it fucking clocked me across the jaw. The lack of interest in genfic is genuinely quite…upsetting? Like, I’ve literally had fics which I’m high-key proud of and I’ve found myself HAVING to include a subtle shippy ‘element’ just to try and ensure that people actually…read it. The alternative? Total tumbleweed.
Which is really depressing because there’s more to the characters involved than who they’re fucking and I think people miss out on a lot of good content by JUST looking at the ship tag and nothing else. So many good artists, lost to the void 😔 saddens me xx
critical role relationship week (critrole rsweek) is a week-long low pressure community event where the fandom gets to experiment with different relationships between characters by using the randomizer below. you spin twice for every day, getting a pairing for each day of the week. you then take those pairs and make something for it. it can be fanfic, fanart, graphics, etc. honestly, anything goes.
you do not need to make the pairings romantic if you don’t want to. you can keep it platonic or do whatever you want with it – just explore the relationship between the characters you roll however you want!
that said, this event (and all future events) have a flat ban on incest and non-con.
although not required, it’s highly encouraged that you roll your pairs before rsweek starts because it gives you time to work on them!
RANDOMIZERS
this year features TWO randomizers! one for campaign 1 and one for campaign 2! feel free to mix and match the randomizers and end up with pairings like keyleth/jester for a hardmode challenge, should you wish!
as a side note: don’t be upset if you have to skip a pair or have to put things up late! rsweek is not a contest, it’s just a fun little community event. ❤
when you finish your work and decide to post it, tag it with #critrole rsweek so we can see it!
but all people have weird ideas about sex and how it’s done, it’s not a limited population category thing. women are copping the brunt of this dumb discourse because the discoursees are applying some really shallow readings to content on two sites, where the content is generated by women by a huge margin over any other gender, and making some hogwild logical leaps to end up endlessly circling the mlm discourse echochamber.
occasionally you’ll luck out by bedding some fuck shaman who opens your third eye through the power of labe grinding your armpit or whatever, but Regular Guy and Population Median Woman probably know diddly shit beyond PIV and anal on birthdays. sex ed sucks beyond ‘don’t do it/this is a condom on a banana/from the front the uterus-womb-ovary complex looks like a buffalo kinda’, live action porn is stuck in a one-upmanship overton window shift (except, y’know, for sex), and sex positive material online is like a infinite house of mirrors except every reflection shows you erica moen advising you to stick a lamp up your ass
and that’s just the cisgender hets bumbling their way around.
finding out info about what the hell to do and how to do it if you’re gay is hard, and damn near impossible if you’re not cis and probably juggling an extra course load of terminology, body perception, and having to do a 101 How Not To Talk About My Junk to every Brock and Chriss on Scruff.
when all the material out there is basically boiling down getting that dick into a hole as the ultimate goal, it’s a wonder that anyone is even writing anything other than ‘he shoved it in, he came’. 1-2-3-dick is formulaic but man, that it’s even around enough to become formulaic is new.
‘straight girls write anal wrong! they don’t know anything about anal!’ well i mean without getting into the whole thing of yes it’s possible to have comfortable anal penetration with spit, yes it’s possible to have comfortable anal penetration with nil or extremely fast minor fingering, no your o-ring will not blow out and prolapse if you take a pounding without 40 minutes of getting tenderly fingered with free trade lube handmade by monks in the peruvian alps, etc etc etc (i.e. every thing some sanctimonious chucklefuck will grandly declare as absolutes) but lmao women absolutely know about anal. a quick glimpse at cosmo magazine will tell you that. a quick glimpse at fuckin’ pornhub will tell you that. straight women do anal, lesbians do anal. every population microselection you can name has been getting pleasure from the asshole for as long as human beings have had assholes!!!
‘straight girls only write about penetration! real gay people frot and grind!’ again: PIV/PIA is everywhere. EVERYWHERE! gay porn is penetration focused! straight porn is penetration focused! romance stories with a regulation fade to black cut imply penetration! the popular concept of what constitutes sex itself is based on penetration! you can’t get furious at someone for doing a thing when everything around them is doing the same thing!
everyone is stupid about sex. sometimes people get less stupid. sometimes people get brave enough to actually ask for what they want. i really can’t fault anyone for not having every intricacy of boning nailed down straight out of the gate but if the alternate is going ‘women are harming me by not faithfully depicting ultimate best practice safe sex in their fiction written for the purpose of hopefully getting the reader off, and for that sin they’re all b*tches who will never understand what it’s like to be sexualised or objectified 😦 :(*’ then god, just end it.
anyway i got totally off track from your ask, but yes, 100% i am supportive of more sexual education that isn’t based solely around cis bodied reproduction and how to avoid it/recognise it, but amatuer erotica is not the venue to get educated and it’s unreasonable to demand that it should be en masse. that doesn’t mean people can’t strive for good practice and authenticity or whatever. if it works for you then shit yeah, make gloving up a feature, go nuts, the only way to normalise something is by including it, but the smarmy attitude of ‘if you don’t include items a through f, practices 1 through 4 and do my towers of hanoi puzzle to decode the Problematic Content Of The Day then you’re a homophobe who is actively hurting and fetishising smol mlm beans and you deserve to be hounded’ is just… nah. nah, nah. nah.
you know, this entire slashcourse could be cut off at the knees if every time someone said ‘but no REAL gay man writes x, y, z’ their browser was force directed to nifty.org with a posting ban until they do a book report on a randomly selected story.
*’women don’t understand sexual objectification’ is a phrase i read with my own gay eyes on a yaoicourse blog and i had to stare out of the window for a while to absorb the goddamn
audacity of it.
I feel like god personally came down from heaven and kissed me on the mouth with tongue when reading this, this is poetry, this is modern art, if no other document makes it past the burning of our libraries and the fall of society, I hope this is preserved somewhere for someone or something to find in the inevitable ruins
So the thing I find fascinating about this, is that I feel like I’ve been around fandom long enough to have seen this whole thing come full circle. Back when I first started reading slash the sex was often fairly unrealistic. And then there was a BIG BIG BIG push by people within fandom to mock any unrealistic sex tropes, ESPECIALLY in slash fics. I remember post after post about “Things I Never Want to Read in Slash Again” about how much preparation anal sex requires and the wonders of lube and how unrealistic simultaneous orgasms are, how sex can’t really last that long etc, etc.
And this really seemed to take hold. I would occasionally see people mention things like “well this fic has them come at the same time but otherwise, it’s pretty good.” It was very much a Thing.
And personally I became very self-conscious about writing sex to make sure I wasn’t breaking any of those rules. Even the ones I didn’t completely agree with I made sure to follow because I didn’t want anyone dismissing my fic on that basis.
But things started to feel very formulaic to the other extreme. Every slash fic had to be very careful not to make anal the be-all end-all, and make sure there’s endless preparation with gallons of lube and blah, blah, and yanno, it gets kinda boring.
And real, actual sex varies. A LOT. By person, by couple, by day, by taste. I mean, I’ve actually gone and researched some stuff for fics of like biological function of male orgasms and stuff and it’s way more weird and complicated than the “acceptable slash fic” rules would have you believe. And I know my own experiences don’t conform to a lot of that stuff either.
So, I think stereotypes are bad, whether it’s “real gay men do X” or “real gay men don’t do x” or whatever. I always think sex is best when it has a realistic grounding, but at the end of the day this isn’t a textbook. It’s supposed to be sexy and romantic and hot. (Except, I guess, for when it isn’t.)
And ultimately there are only so many ways for human beings to get off. I mean, yanno, props can add variety, but ultimately there aren’t that many sex acts. That’s almost never the point of the story. ‘Dude has an orgasm’ just isn’t very interesting unless we are made to care about that dude and how he FEELS about his orgasm. And that’s almost always the actual point.
Everything about this is gold.
“Everyone is stupid about sex” is the truest shit on here.
It’s supposed to be entertaining in whatever way the writer is going for: hot, fluffy, romantic, awkward, frightening. One thing I’m pretty sure no writer is going for is boring. Putting all sorts of new “rules” on who is privileged to write certain kinds of sex is a recipe for dull writing.
So: the latest research indicates that the substantial majority of women simply cannot reach orgasm through vaginal penetration alone.
Meanwhile, in my extremely scientific survey of the field, in ninety percent of porn written by men, the D alone is enough to get things done. Even when a woman is getting fingered, it’s usually just as a form of penetration, not involving clitoral stimulation at all, or only incidentally.
Do we constantly beat up on male writers for this unbelievably unrealistic depiction of m/f sex? No. It’s rarely even mentioned. In fact, we are so willing to indulge the male fantasy about what gives women pleasure, and so willing to privilege that over reality, that many women have never heard the truth.
I personally tend not to care for explicitly unrealistic sex in otherwise realistically-pitched stories, because then the author’s inexperience is like an awkward third party hanging around the room. But let’s not pretend it’s a form of oppression. Or, if we’re going to start using that analysis, let’s not act like slash is one of the lead offenders.
UNPOPULAR OPINIONS:
Since we’re talking about fiction, consider for a moment that the sex in a story is FANTASY sex. FANTASY SEX is allowed to be better than the real thing, otherwise, why bother?
SEX has to be true to the characters and the story. Period.
Is your character a slightly gormy virgin? Is your character a fuckshaman? Does your character have nonstandard equipment? Does your character have a sexuality that wouldn’t fit on a normal questionnaire?
All those things will come into play when writing the sex scenes.
And it’s okay for the sex to e better than it would be in real life. Really, everybody can have simultaneous orgasms and explode into rainbow unicorns and kittens.
You’re the writer, you can do it.
honestly i have nothing to add here other than that the last point is the best, and meatbeat fantasy fanfiction should NEVER be held to random progressive sex ed standards, because that’s an insane obligation for a hobby? it doesn’t have to be realistic and it doesn’t even have to be good. things can just, like, exist.
i'll apple your turnover 