A hat floating out to sea

I have a lot of feelings, but only one thought: I'm just in it for the dog.

Anyone who wants to talk spoilery stuff, my comments are open to you, and I'll try to respond in a coherent manner.

Also: I know the dog's the only one who likes me. You have no idea how happy that makes me.

While doing some gun research, I stumbled across this website: http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Main_Page

It's got lists of the guns used by characters in various movies, TV shows, video games, and anime. It's far from comprehensive, but it could still be very useful to add a little verisimilitude to one's fan fiction.

Also, I love Amazon's little ads. I was checking out the W's and ran across William Hurt's name, so I clicked on it. After giving me the information about the guns his characters used in Body Heatand Gorky Park and A History of Violence, there was a link that read: Buy William Hurt on Amazon

I didn't click. I'm sure I couldn't afford him, and I don't really have anyplace to keep him.

[Note: I saved this so I would never forget, and so no-one could ever persuade me I was remembering incorrectly. I'm posting it now (6/16/10) because I'm cleaning off my desktop, and because I'm no longer afraid to post it. But this is the post--this is the issue--that finally got it through my head that I'm not a part of fandom. All names redacted.]

Some are posting this under lock. I'm so, so not.
NO. Fucking. Way.

[lj username redacted] has posted an entry in which she asks fans to each send her the cost of a book, in cash, so she can quit her job and write novels. Oh, and the reason you should do this? Because hey, she's got all those WIPs you want her to finish and if she can quit her job, you'll get the fanfiction you've been clamoring for!

I suggest we let her know what we think of this idea. In strong language.

I clearly need a stronger icon than my "WTF", "CLUE!" and "HULK SMASH!" icons; none of these do my current reaction justice. Perhaps a FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCK, AND BE SURE TO HAVE A SIDE HELPING OF ANAL RAPE icon....

ETA: She's made a second post, with comments open, explaining that *prayer* helped her come to the decision to ask strangers for money so she can quit her job. Well, I guess that makes it all right, then! Can't argue with that - you'd be going against God's will! I better send money!

Interestingly, the other people on my flist who posted about this . . . well, the posts are gone. Or gone from my sight, anyway. So is the one I quoted above, at least as far as I can tell. But the others disappeared very quickly.

I have to say that my feelings about asking for money for fan fiction have changed. I understand that it puts the author in a more precarious legal position, though I don't think it endangers fandom at large. And I understand the asking for money, not because times are hard, but because so often writers are getting nothing in return for their hard work and talent. In the zine days, I wrote to support my fan fiction reading habit. Write a story, get a zine, have something to read you didn't have to pay money for. Life was good.

Now I don't know why to write. To connect with other fans, only I seem to have developed attachment issues. I've watched people find Wiseguy fandom, then wander off after the new big thing. They'll happily read your stories--and happily pillory you for saying you need some human contact. (Not that I handle human contact well anymore; again, attachment issues.) It isn't any prettier if you post saying you can't keep writing if no one will talk to you--the same over the top anger will be spewed forth upon you. So I say, fuck it. Ask for money, because when fandom dumps you for the next shiny, new thing, maybe you'll walk away with at least the price of a hamburger.

And besides all that (see? I warned you I'd been thinking about this!) where is all the moral outrage regarding people who make their livings off fandom? They drown one poor girl in anger and ugliness, but do they use any of that against someone like [name redacted], who is apparently living off her zine sales? Of course not! And you know why not? Because she's one of their suppliers, because she publishes their friends, because they have a use for her. If any of this outrage against making money off fandom was real, there'd be a hue and cry at every con she attended, instead of just nasty snarking behind her back. But too many people want what she's selling.

I've become very cynical.

The original post--the whole lj--is gone. She had disappeared by noon the day she made the post. I think she drowned under a torrent of just plain meanness. I wrote her a private email, telling her (before the shit hit the fan) that she was going to want to duck and cover.

It was suggested that sexual assault would be an appropriate response, though I'm unsure as to just what this was supposed to teach her. I'm assuming that the reason this suggestion was met with such glee was that the suggestion did not come from a man. In fact, I'm assuming that if it had come from a man, there wouldn't have been much glee at all, that those standing on their soapboxes would have switched topics, and those whose soapboxes hadn't been in evidence would have got them out.

I am so tired.


For all of the holier-than-thou attitude fans possess, the truth is we're just like mundanes. If you're a small-time crook, you'll be punished, and harshly. If you're big-time, you'll be rewarded.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. (Oscar Wilde)

(I started this back in February but didn't finish it because for some reason it descended into gibberish. I'm hoping I've excised the gibberish and tacked on a decent ending in its place.)


I've been reading about misaimed fandom--which I never heard of before. I'm going to summarize it, but I'm sure I'll be inaccurate and snarky, so for someone who takes this seriously, you might want to go here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MisaimedFandom.

Misaimed fandom is when fans in a significant number decide we like the badguy as much as--or more than--the good guy. We are Doing It Wrong. There are no examples given in the essay itself, but if you go to the bottom of the page, there's a list of media you can click on that gives examples. The only ones I'm truly intimate with are The Shield, Sopranos, and Gilmore Girls. And I don't think Gilmore Girls really fits. Fans who sided with Vick Macky or Tony Soprano weren't getting how violent and corrupt they were. [Disclaimer: I haven't watched The Shield since Pat died, and I didn't watch the last season of Sopranos.]

Where I read about this was metafandom, in a post where the characters' sins were neither illegal nor violent. They were politically incorrect. The author was concerned about how to write such a character in a way that readers would understand that they weren't supposed to like him.

I think you now have the context I'm writing this in.

The first badguy I remember writing is Ben Horne from Twin Peaks. There was a guy writing a zine that was a continuation of the series, and in his interpretation of the finale, Ben was killed when Doc Hayward punched him and he hit his head on the mantlepiece.

For reasons I no longer recall, I objected to this, and I ended up writing Ben back to life. The zine fizzled out shortly after that--not because of Ben, I don't think.

Now, Ben started off as a bad guy, had a breakdown of sorts, and became a good guy. I wrote him as reverting due to the hit on the head. And you know what? It was a blast writing him. There's something liberating about writing an unapologetic bad guy. I later wrote him again in my Twin Peaks novel. Still a bad guy, still fun.

The next bad guy I wrote was Sonny Steelgrave, and I'm not over him yet. Sonny is a criminal. He kills people, he has people killed, beaten up. He corrupts the the justice system. And he's homophobic, a firm believer in the Madonna/whore binary, and an unrepentant racist.

You wouldn't think it would be hard to write him unsympathetically, but the writers of the show couldn't do it because the actor who played him was both charming and skillful enough to make an audience love Sonny in spite of his moral lapses, let them see his heart and his loneliness. (I could analyze how he did it, and how the writers failed to villain him up sufficiently, but that is for another day.)

The art of writing fan fiction, as I've said before, is getting the characters right. If I wrote Sonny as nothing more than a cold, calculating criminal, I'd be doing a terrible job as a fan writer. Trying to keep other fans from coming over to the dark side of liking people who do things society disapproves of--that's not my job. It's not anybody's job.

Somewhere today I read about skinheads taking some evil characters Pink Floyd's The Wall (the movie) as the heroes. This is an example of misaimed fandom. (And I'd guess that the Manson family's use of the Beatles' White Album would be, too, though [tellingly] it's not mentioned.)

So are we talking about a some kind of sliding scale of misaim? My screen name comes from a Shirley Jackson character who poisoned most of her family when she was twelve years old; I adored her then (when I was twelve) and adore her now, at fifty-one. And she was neither the first nor the last. Badguys have a lot of freedom other characters don't. They don't have to follow society's rules, and by extension, neither do we. We share their freedom, so of course we find them attractive. What could be more attractive than that kind of freedom?

It's not that we long to be sociopaths. It's that we have so little control over so much of what goes on in our lives, that living vicariously through people who take control--even if that means breaking laws or social conventions--is something we need. The very fact that it's somehow considered dangerous of us to like the "wrong" characters proves that. Hell, we live in a society where people think they have the right to tell other people how they're allowed to feel about fictional characters! If we didn't expend real frustration through vicarious rule-breaking, we really would become weaponized.



(Melody, I pulled this quote for you from here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Applicability. "Contrast with The Walrus Was Paul, where the audience tries to find meaning in a work when in fact the work isn't supposed to have a hidden meaning — the author's just fucking with them.")

Which has lit a fire under my ass to get my stories properly locked up. I'm moving everything that's on a community and leaving links to where I'm posting those stories here.

There are 80-something of you who have friended me, though there are more people I've friended, because I check out sportshoes every so often and add new members, to give them a chance to actually click those links and get some story. Right now there are there are about 150 or so people I have friended.

Why am I telling you this?

I can't tell you how much better it makes me feel to have a number of people who might have read a story I posted when comments are few-to-none. I can't really explain why, but I want to try.

I don't feel as though I know everyone on my flist, but you all have names, and lives, and for the most part I'm welcome in the parts of those lives that you share here. It changed what felt like being consumed by invisible masses and sharing with my peers. I'm more relaxed, more comfortable. I like all of you.

So! A couple of weeks ago I posted my first in what will be an intermittent series of why I write slash. One comment I got was from linkspam, which, if you've never heard of them, is an "Anti-Oppression Linkspam Community." Their policy is to link to any posts they find-- Well, here, I'll let them speak for themselves.

[From the mini bio on the profile page]

Linkspam's goal is to serve as a resource for anti-oppression efforts. We do not subscribe to the belief that there is an objective perspective on any oppression. We believe attempting to be "objective" often results in contributing to the oppression. We will not try to present "two" sides equally. We hope to present resources for people to follow multiple perspectives expressed in anti-oppression discussions relating to fandom online, but we do not pretend to present resources in a neutral context. The organizing principles for Linkspam posts will be roughly chronological. [http://linkspam.dreamwidth.org/profile to read the full description.]

The comment told me that my post had been included in linkspam. Cool, I thought, and went over to take a look.

What I found was that [Warning: derailing] had been affixed to the front of my the excerpt to my post. Somehow, by minding my own business, writing in my own LJ, I was derailing the debate they were archiving.

Derailing is a serious thing. It refocuses people's attention from the important discussion at hand. So the question of why linkspam would want to include my post arose, particularly since their stated goal is not to present "two" sides equally. And what I was saying wasn't even a side, it was a sideroad that led someplace entirely different. Very strange.

(Personally, I think my post is relevant. But if the people who chose to link to it don't--I'm still baffled as to why they chose it. It felt like the whole reason for linking to my post was to tell people not to listen to me. Honestly, I like fandom_wank better. At least they're upfront about their purpose.)

I went to linkspam's site and read everything I could find about their policies, and what I discovered was, they will only remove links under extraordinary circumstances. Since this seemed to be pretty much SOP, I didn't see anything extraordinary about it, so I didn't ask to be removed. (I mean, my God, you know what it's like if you ask for anything above and beyond online--you're immediately designated a speshul snowflake, and held up for ridicule. I have no idea what's done to extraordinary snowflakes [or how the misspelling of extraordinary would go], but I wasn't interesed in finding out.) Instead, I locked my post.

Then I got pissed off and removed the text of the post and replaced it with an explanation of why the post people thought they were getting wasn't there, and reposted the original text in a locked post. If I'm forced to hide, I want people to know why. And I wrote to the mods to let them know that I was not happy with this policy. (To date I still haven't heard back, though last night I did hear that I will be hearing back. And I know that they're busy. But when the reply you get is silence, you don't know anything else is coming. I figured they were blowing me off.)

And that was the end of it, until one of the mods posted this:

http://hl.dreamwidth.org/58528.html?format=light

Since I hadn't heard back through official channels, I commented. You can read the whole thing. What I find interesting is how all of the policy questions get the response of, redirect these to the proper channels--even though included in the proper channels are private messages to individual mods. I'm confused as to why asking the question in a comment is different from asking it in a private post, and having the individual mod pass it along. (Although she does exactly that with regards to the official-channeled comment I sent.) And all the comment threads with questions are now frozen.

I write slash.

I've been writing slash for a good many years now--about half my life. I first heard about slash in a feminist newspaper, Off Our Backs, which had printed Joanna Russ's essay, Pornography: For Women, By Women, With Love. That was when I discovered that the stories I'd been telling were being told by other women, too. It was revelatory.

Unfortunately, it didn't provide any access to "organized fandom." Nor did the book that essay was published in, though it did tell me about zines. But how to find them? I didn't know the password!

That access came serendipitously from a friend at work. She'd heard about zines from a friend, and she knew I liked Starsky & Hutch, so when she got a zine with an S&H story in it, she loaned it to me. I expressed my gratitude, and when she got a copy of an adzine (a zine that advertised fannish things for sale, zine editors looking for stories, and upcoming cons), I surreptitiously wrote down the names and addresses of the people selling S/H. (My friend is not a slash reader.)

One of the women was here in town, and Pat and I went out to her house one night and bought a big box of zines and unpublished stories. (She had edited zines, and so had copies of rejected stories. This was probably not kosher, but we didn't know that.)

Besides having stories to read, I now had people to write to, places to submit my fiction.

I got published pretty quickly, started meeting people, became an active part of SH fandom.

Since then I've also written slash in Twin Peaks, The Man From UNCLE, and Wiseguy (which I'm still writing). In all of this writing, there's only one thing I've strived to do in terms of characterization: make it match up with what I see on my TV screen.

If you asked most of these characters if they were gay, they'd at least equivocate, if not downright deny it. I write old fashioned "I'm not gay, I'm just in love with my partner" slash. I've read that's homophobic. Well, some of those characters are homophobic. I write 'em as I see 'em.

And like the name of Joanna Russ's essay, I write them for women. Specifically, I write them for women who are fans of the show who also see the characters as potential lovers. Because here's the thing: what I write about, first and foremost, is TV characters. TV characters who, for the most part, are seen by their creators as straight, but because of the chemistry of the actors, and the limitations of television, could be seen as more than just good friends. (By the limitations of television, I mean that literally. The physical closeness of Starsky and Hutch, that shared space--one sitting on the arm of the other's chair even when there's an empty chair right there--has to do with the size of the average TV screen at the time. If they were both going to be in a close-up, they had to be close up.)

A good friend of mine--straight, male--once told me that the sex scenes we slash writers write are unrealistic because men just don't think that much during sex. And I smiled at him and said, "Yeah, we know. But we don't care." I then told him that Hemingway was considered a great writer, but I found his women unrealistic.

I think the problem I have with the whole idea that gay men are upset because women are writing fictional characters gay is that I've never identified that closely with a TV character. (Well, I was Catwoman in the second grade, but that seems to have passed.) No matter how well-rounded the characterization is, their lives are make-believe with, when you think about it, glaring holes in the narrative. Real life isn't like that.

And I don't understand how trying to write about already-fictional characters has any effect on the lives of--well, anybody. Maybe the actors who portrayed them, if they feel very close to them, but otherwise--I don't get it.

Apparently I'm supposed to be curled up in a corner, crying, because the fan_wank people think I'm stupid/too emotional/other stuff I don't remember. Also, I'm supposed to be ashamed of what I posted Sunday.

But my emotions don't embarrass me. I don't know why they should. And expressing them doesn't embarrass me, and neither does other people holding them up to ridicule.

Of course, I am going to have to poison all their sugar. But that's easy enough.

If anybody had told me there would be 127 comments on the post I wrote yesterday, I would have thought they were insane.

I'm writing this because I'm sure I've missed responding to some people, and I want to assure you, it was unintentional. If you said something you really wish I'd answered, please direct me to the comment, and I promise I will comment.

Also, I did freeze one thread, just because someone came over to call me names in all caps, with multiple repeated letters. (Like: COOOWWWWAAAARRRDDD.) If she'd just written like a normal person instead of someone yelling across a playground, I wouldn't have frozen the thread, but really, who needs that on their on LJ?

I want to thank everyone who commented. I don't know about you, but I feel like I need a nap. *g*

Have a lovely day. Hell, have a lovely year! *g*