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and remember your furious valor
May. 10th, 2013 01:24 pmI just got a new power pack for my laptop delivered at work, and I am hoping so hard that it's going to mean I get to actually move my laptop off my desk, oh my god. Give me a portable computer again.
That 1D fic is now in my top 5 most popular fics at AO3, of course. Which doesn't even mean it's doing particularly well, for the fandom. I'm always a weird mix of pleased and embarrassed when I write fic for a popular slash pairing, because of course it's lovely when lots of people want to read what you wrote, and I can never keep myself from tracking hits and kudoses, but also so much of 1D fandom is terrible and so much of Harry/Louis fic is even more terrible than that and most of the people who have read it would have read it just the same if I'd written it entirely in lower case, made Louis's girlfriend evil and referred to Harry exclusively as "the curly-haired younger boy". I mean, probably.
I am feeling really pro-slash at the moment, though, more than I have for ages. Which I think just means that I'm riding the same waves of fandom sentiment as a bunch of other people, because baa etc. It just feels really powerful to me at the moment that we've created this space in which the mainstream is depictions of boys behaving in ways designed to appeal to the female gaze (largely), whether that gaze is queer or straight. I've seen a lot of arguments that of course girls in fandom write about boys, because the male characters in our canons are better written, more relatable, more accessible, so gravitating to writing about boys is natural. But the truth is I'm pretty sure most of us who were writing before we got into fandom started out writing about girl protagonists. That was what we felt we had the authority to write, because we were girls; if we wrote boy protagonists, probably we would get them wrong. Slash is pretty liberating, because it lets you claim these popular male characters, and you don't have to worry about getting them right or wrong, they don't have to be authentic, they're ours. Male writers have been writing fantasy girls for centuries, and all they had to ask was "will this depiction appeal to the men in my readership". With slash we get to do the same thing. And some people will still say you got it wrong, slash gets it wrong, this subsection of slash gets it wrong, but in the end you've got an audience of people who love your fic about sixteen year old boys cuddling and talking about their feelings, and it doesn't have to be vetted by anybody but them.
I'm starting to think I won't be doing anything for the female character trope fest, which is a bit sad because in concept it's basically my favourite thing in the world. I'm just not feeling, I don't know, the sense of community I need to actually want to write a fun tropey story for the sake of fun tropeyness? I could write something more serious, of course, but I don't really want to start another wip I'm taking seriously.
That 1D fic is now in my top 5 most popular fics at AO3, of course. Which doesn't even mean it's doing particularly well, for the fandom. I'm always a weird mix of pleased and embarrassed when I write fic for a popular slash pairing, because of course it's lovely when lots of people want to read what you wrote, and I can never keep myself from tracking hits and kudoses, but also so much of 1D fandom is terrible and so much of Harry/Louis fic is even more terrible than that and most of the people who have read it would have read it just the same if I'd written it entirely in lower case, made Louis's girlfriend evil and referred to Harry exclusively as "the curly-haired younger boy". I mean, probably.
I am feeling really pro-slash at the moment, though, more than I have for ages. Which I think just means that I'm riding the same waves of fandom sentiment as a bunch of other people, because baa etc. It just feels really powerful to me at the moment that we've created this space in which the mainstream is depictions of boys behaving in ways designed to appeal to the female gaze (largely), whether that gaze is queer or straight. I've seen a lot of arguments that of course girls in fandom write about boys, because the male characters in our canons are better written, more relatable, more accessible, so gravitating to writing about boys is natural. But the truth is I'm pretty sure most of us who were writing before we got into fandom started out writing about girl protagonists. That was what we felt we had the authority to write, because we were girls; if we wrote boy protagonists, probably we would get them wrong. Slash is pretty liberating, because it lets you claim these popular male characters, and you don't have to worry about getting them right or wrong, they don't have to be authentic, they're ours. Male writers have been writing fantasy girls for centuries, and all they had to ask was "will this depiction appeal to the men in my readership". With slash we get to do the same thing. And some people will still say you got it wrong, slash gets it wrong, this subsection of slash gets it wrong, but in the end you've got an audience of people who love your fic about sixteen year old boys cuddling and talking about their feelings, and it doesn't have to be vetted by anybody but them.
I'm starting to think I won't be doing anything for the female character trope fest, which is a bit sad because in concept it's basically my favourite thing in the world. I'm just not feeling, I don't know, the sense of community I need to actually want to write a fun tropey story for the sake of fun tropeyness? I could write something more serious, of course, but I don't really want to start another wip I'm taking seriously.
