Against the Default

[supergee]

Seanan McGuire on reading and fanfic.

Thanx to andrewducker

Comments

[glassonion]

Hmm, i dunno. I mean, on the one hand, i think it's great when pro authors who came up through fanfic talk about it.

And she's not wrong about the link between opinions of fanfic and the fact that primarily women write it. If i had a nickel for everyone i've heard say "fanfic is trash, except Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is great," i would have a sizeable army of nickels with which to defend my thesis that this statement is not unrelated to the fact that the author of Methods of Rationality is known to be a dude.

On the other hand, i think you actually have to do some work to demonstrate that fanfic is primarily out there fixing gender representation in fiction. I'm not saying there's no relationship between shitty representation and the existence of fanfic, but i am saying the numbers don't support the idea that fanfic is written to "fix" representation, so you gotta make the qualitative argument some other way, you can't just assert it.

[minoanmiss]

I didn't quite read her statement as being that fanfic itself is about fixing the gender representation in fiction so much as that fanfic presents an avenue for those who are excluded (such as women from active roles) to put ourselves into the story. As an example, if I can write a story from Jim Kirk's POV, I can imagine being a starship captain even though I'm a woman and there was a whole episode about how women can't be captains. (For a ten-year-old value of me who had only seen TOS.)

[glassonion]

Yeah, you're right, that is what she's saying. And i think that's a lot of people's experience, but it's not really mine, so tell me more about how it works. You writing Kirk doesn't change the fact that Kirk is a dude.

But, okay, the point is: fanfic doesn't *fix* representation (and i'll get into that more on the later comment), but it takes the edge off of bad representation for particular individual authors, because writing a character is a way to see yourself in that character's shoes even if the showrunners didn't intend for you to be in that character's shoes.

(TOS had an episode about how women can't be captains? Things i missed out on by never watching Trek, i guess.)

[minoanmiss]

Yeah, "Takes the edge off" is a way to describe the effect I was trying to convey. My writing Kirk doesn't change that he's a dude, and isn't meant to, but it lets me imagine myself as the hero captain the way only dudes get to, or at least got to, imagine themselves. ANd part of the fun of being in fanfic communities is sharing these different stories with each other.

("Turnabout Intruder" is the title, IIRC. A woman uses a bodyswap device to steal Kirk's body since women couldn't be captians. Fortunately that got retconned before TNG came about.)

[bibliofile]

Maybe you can't just assert it, but I sure can. Of the many reasons why people write fanfic, changing representation is right up there. As the next commenter replied, ST:TOS had so many possibilities that it didn't show. That show's fanfic, including slash, birthed the current movement.

Also, isn't that why it's called the Organization for Transformative Works? Not the only transformation, for sure, but gender representation remains important.

[glassonion]

Those are all true statements, but they don't have much to do with the actual effect of fandom on either improving or blunting the impact of gender representation in fiction.

If you write yourself as Kirk, or if you write Kirk as a woman, or if you write a Mary Sue where most of the attention is put to fleshing out Kirk, none of that changes the fact that what you're doing is continuing to pay word-count attention to Kirk, a dude. (Obligatory disclaimer: i have nothing against Mary Sues, and i imagine some Mary Sues put a fair bit of attention into their original character protagonists, but for most of them it's mostly about Kirk (or whoever)).

And my observation has been that most people do that. Nothing is stopping you from saying, "Gee, _Seveneves_ was an interesting premise with what should have been fully realised female characters, but Stevenson can't or won't write them so i'm gonna." But that takes a lot more authorial chops than looking at two dudes who spend 35 minutes of each episode bantering at each other and saying, "huh, what if it went beyond bantering..." And if you actually look at what people are doing with AO3, especially if you look at the stats, it's overwhelmingly the latter.

I'm definitely not saying fanfic doesn't have the *promise* of being transformative, and i've seen people hit it out of the park. But when you're riffing off a base body of work in which 85% of all interesting characterization is attributed to men, saying "well, people can do anything they want" doesn't in and of itself improve that.