Fandom and Fanfic and Wanking and Spock Is Gay (Jigga Whuh)?

[40cakes]

So somebody made a post in marysues about fans with "mental abberations" who pervert canon and blah blah blah.

A while back, I made a comment in kannaopheila's journal about people who hook up two characters just because they're pretty getting on my nerves.

And thus, clarification.

I'm not really deep in the WeiB fandom. Actually, I'm not anywhere near it. Let's just say I have a passport and a language guide should I ever decide to visit. But I've seen it in pictures.

Somewhere, that makes sense. Really.

There's a whole helluva lotta yaoi in them thar parts. Which sure, yaoi exists, I haven't been shown anything to draw me to that side of the Force, but I don't deny it. But I want to analyze that.

Yohji is just about my fave character. He's a pervert, and them's my people. He sure does like the ladyfolk. It'd make sense that he sleeps with men.

WHAT?! Granted, the men he hangs out with sure are effeminate, but come on! What's his pick-up line? "Hey, you've got a hole, right?" Perhaps if someone wrote a fic where he bears his soul...he was kind of an outcast growing up, and knew he was gay at a young age, but he wanted to deny it so much, he wanted so badly to be straight, that he really tried to be a ladies' man. And he sobbingly confesses all this to Ken/Omi/Aya/Crawford/Schuldig/Nagi/Farfarello (another point) who decides to help him through this tough time with gay sex. But instead, we see a Yohji ripped directly from Queer As Folk, ready to club and get down and dirty with the menfolk.

Trigun is quite possibly maybe my favourite anime in the whole yooniverse. I lurve Vash and Meryl and want those crazy kids to get together. Of course, that didn't stop me from being a co-writer on a Knives/Meryl, and egging on jaina in writing a Wolfwood/Meryl. The difference between these weird pairings and the one I described above?

These are fucking hard stories. Trying to keep everyone in character while they do decidedly out-of-character things is just as tough as it sounds. What separates slutfic from any other KxM on Fanfiction.Net? It's not a romance. It's as realistic as it can be for a story about animated characters who live on a desert planet and rely on giant light bulbs for survival.

Typical KxM on FFN:
Knives: Grr, I'm evil!
Meryl: You're a jerk, that's what you are!
Knives: You talked back to me! Instead of killing you, I shall fall in love with you!
Meryl: And I will transfer every lovey dovey emotion I have for your brother to you!
:: snugglecakes ::
Vash: I was wondering when those two crazy kids were gonna make it. *sigh* L'amour...

I really hate those stories. I think it's because I have a soft spot for Knives, and hate to see his character besmirched. It's all the manga's fault - it showed us that he was the twin who had the curly hair while his brother got stick-straight, always stands up perfect hair. Trust me, it's enough to drive someone to genocide, it really is.

And someone brought up that fanfic is how people play with the canon. Right. Play with it. Not put it through a paper shredder, set fire to it, and rewrite it. You want to support Trigun yaoi. Fine. Tell me how it works. Tell me how it works when Vash spends the first half of the series chasing skirts (even telling a male assassin in his hotel room "I don't like sleeping with men - especially one as ugly as you"), and Wolfwood flirts with Milly until they finally get to sleep together (though I've heard some great theories on the latter. Sue - the anime community has some *interesting* views on film theory, I gotta tell you. I should write a new text based on what I've learned).

And yes, I know that I'm not only a geek, but a friggin' wackjob. While writing this, I'm contemplating, "Casey, why are you taking this so seriously?" I'm not entirely sure. But it's my journal and this is something that's been irritating me for some time and grar.

If you wrote a het fic starring Shuichi or Yuki in the Gravitation fandom, you'd be beaten to death. Really. I've seen those fangirls. Why? Well, first because yaoi fangirls can be rabid, and second, because the two guys spend the entire series pretty much doing each other. You can't deny that. "Oops, not gay anymore, whaddyaknow! Fa la la la la!"


The difference between fanfic and totally out-there-nothing-to-do-with-the-series-tripe is that fanfic has some basis in the reality of the series. You want to write about pretty guys having sex? Fine. Make it believable. You want to write a het fic about main characters? Fine. Make it believable. You want to write a story where a teenaged boy has sex with a pie? Fine. Make it apple. There's a line between a fanfic and a completely original fic with other character's names tacked on.

Oh, and I don't think Spock's gay. Or straight. He's just always seemed very asexual to me. Really. He's just...Spock. Kirk, on the other hand, is fuh-laming. Him and Bones, man...whoo.

>^..^

Comments

[kannaophelia.livejournal.com]

Yes but.. .Spock? Spock really does seem far more gay than straight. He simply doesn't relate to women the way he relates to Kirk. He has to have ponn farr before he will look at a woman, and even then he's relieved to be out of it... I have no interested in K/S or McC/S, but damnit, I can see where it's coming from.

I was snippy with that idiot because a) she's laying down her personal interpretations as canon. I have no patience for that. And she was just so... so ... wanky. Every word she put down was pure wank. Spitting in the face of the authors and true fans? Give me a break. That's Cori Falls-ish level tripe. And in the wrong community, too, because what she said was only marginally relevant to Mary Sueism.

and b) I figure she's an ignorant little anime fangirl who knows zilch about fandom stemming back more than a year or so, doesn't realise that K/S is one of the foundation fandoms, and that she can't make fuckwitted remarks like "Spock isn't gay" as if they were fact and *not* be mocked. Or, alternatively, she was deliberately trolling. Either way, again, no patience. ~g~

I was far more polite to her than I could have been, really. And I'm glad she ended up on fandom_wank before I needed to take the time to report her myself.

ALl fanfic has to arise from canon in some way, but that's just part of the skill of writing, and fanfic as a distinct genre. The writer can do anything she likes, but it's her job to make the readers suspend disbelief.

One of my biggest probems with rocketshipping is that it makes James relate sexually to a female without bothering to do any of the characterisation and story work that would make it even faintly believable, so you get these weird stories where either an ubergay guy is having a white het wedding for no real reason - and spends the bodysuit in feathers and a bodysuit declaring his flamingness? - or you get a horrendously OOC character who is all ubermacho and bears no resemblance to canon. I can accept rocketshipping perfectly well *if* the writer doesn't insult my intelligence along the way - Zelda does it rather well, for example. Unfortunately, most rocketshippers are too lazy or too in love with their own crushes on James to actually take the time to do, you know, characterisation.

I'm basiucally agreeing with you, because you see - that's an issue about lazy writing and bad fanfic, not about what's possible. This little person was laying down, in the strongest terms, what *she* found acceptable, and ignoring the fact that it was not only interpretation, but interpretation from someone who really wasn't coming across as the brightest spark in the lightbulb factory.

[kittytreats.livejournal.com]

*LOL* I think fan fic writers rock...oh no..you brought up star trek

[jaina.livejournal.com]

Hee. I love you.

"Hard" pairings indeed. *smirks*

Grar

[zelamenomiko.livejournal.com]

I hate WeiB (can't do that fancy B thing) with a passion. I think it was a complete waste of the materials it took to create it in the first place. The characters are so flat I can't even bring myself to call them two deminsional. The exact same characters the show started with are the exact same characters it ended with, meaning there was no character development to begin with. Geez, Omi goes through Hell in the beginning of the series, but it doesn't change him at all. He's still the naive, slighly whiney little kid he started out as in the beginning (and, unfortunantly, I've watched the ENTIRE series). Also, where's the blood? they're hacking, stabbing, strangling, and shoot people, and there's no BLOOD?! What are they vampires?

I also hate yaoi for yaoi's sake and the yaoi fangirls who all get on my case because I'm not a fan of yaoi. They make it sound like I'm not a fan of anime (or that I'm some kind of blasphemere) because I don't write Vash and Wolfwood banging each other's asses, or Gourry and Zel or Orphen and Magic, or Inu Yasha and SEsshoumaru (FOR GOD'S SAKE THEY'RE BROTHERS!). They act like I don't know jack about anime and the anime genre, when I was a fan of the medium long before they were out of daipers (though I didn't know it at the time that what I was watching was anime), and could tell them more about the genre and the "bishounen" that they all fawn over and love to write having butt sex. After all, I wrote my thesis on the subject of bishounen and why effiment men are so prevelant throghout the anime genre.

Now, I'm not saying I'm against homosexuaity or yaoi, to put it bluntly I don't care. As long as you're happy in a relationship, what does it matter if it's with the same sex or opposite sex? But if you can't have me believing that Vash only chases skirts because he's in denial over his true, yaoi nature, then don't bother.

Guh, didn't mean to rant. I'm just fed up with Weiss fangirls (Like my friend Monica) who thinks it's "da shit" and completely blow off series that are 100 times better like Inu Yasha, Rurouni Kenshin, Blue Seed, and Trigun. That right there is what gets my goat every single time. >.<

Bleh

[zelamenomiko.livejournal.com]

Heh, my favorite excuse for that scene in the Slayers fandom is, "If it had been Zel that had caught her, she'd have kissed him instead!"

Suuuure, and Zel REALLY tried to catch up with her. He wouldn't have moved if Gourry hadn't gone ballistic and chased after Lina first. ^^

[crisischick81.livejournal.com]

You do realise that I'm using this rant in my presentation on fan culture for my lit class, right?

Really, we study you people now. We do stuff like monitor your conversations and poke you with sticks. And we make our univercities pay for us to go to fan conventions so we can write articles for academic journals.

Yeah, I find it creepy yet cool too.

Re:

[fadingembers.livejournal.com]

Whoa! How do I get in on this?

Do you have to buy Star Trek uniforms to wear, too?

>^..^

[pale-jezebel.livejournal.com]

*poke*