a paradigm shift, or two dudes in bed
Jul. 29th, 2015 11:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
veronica_richOne of the first romance novels I found in Grandma's bookshelves when I was about 11 or 12 was titled "Captain's Woman." It featured all the best tropes: girl forced to live as a boy to please a cold grandmother for an inheritance flees home at 17 and stows away aboard a pirate ship as the cabin boy, is found out by the captain to be female, they fight for a while and then embark on a torrid affair, he casts her aside for her own good, she becomes a real pirate, they meet again, blah blah. She was a fiery emerald-eyed redhead, he was a devilishly handsome rogue. Because why not.
This wouldn't be the last pirate romance I'd read, or the last pirate history book. I was sort of put off the pirate romance genre a few years later, though, when I came across a novel in which the pirate captain blatantly forces himself on the heroine ... and she later falls in love with and "tames" him. I found the whole thing so repugnant that I didn't even finish the book and decided the bad taste in my brain was a sign to move on to better romance writers like Jennifer Crusie.
It was over a decade later when the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie hit theaters. My interest in the A-Team fandom was waning - as inevitably happens with all my fandoms; it's not their fault - and I was ready for something new. Before getting into watching reruns of the A-Team in 2000, when I watched something with two same-sex characters who seemed to give off a vibe that was not quite friendly, not quite platonic, I'd chalked it up to my imagination and ignored it, probably because I was raised in a very heteronormative atmosphere and hadn't really learned to look beyond that (though Xena and Gabrielle sure did test it in the 90s). But by the time I watched Jack Sparrow and Will Turner sparring and arguing and cursing, I was willing to engage in some fanciful imagining for the sake of fandom fun.
Starting to write m/m romance and sex was strange for a couple of reasons. First off were the pronouns - "she" and "he" are relatively easy, but "he" and "he" are trickier, and it's repetitive to constantly be using the names. As verboten as the practice of using "the tall one" and "the older one" and other descriptors is in writing, I can understand why slash writers use the convention - they're looking for another way to say "Jack and Mack boned" without having to use the names all the time.
Second is trying to adjust your thinking about romance and gender. If most of the male-female romantic interactions you've read have adhered to a mostly traditional Western gender-dictated roles paradigm, there's a tendency to want to slot your two characters into that template, no matter how "off" or unsuitable it might be for those characters. Writing two men getting ready to fuck forced me, over time, to question why males are often written a certain way and why females are written another way, and to experiment with it in different stories - both slash and het stories I wrote as I went on. It forced me, at least, to think more about the characters themselves and how they might react in the situations I was writing, and to each other.
But, lest I fall into the trap of overstating the importance or role of slash in modern fandom, let's be clear: I saw two characters interacting well onscreen and I wanted to get them together for sexytimes. We're not talking about Proust or Tolstoy here. There are plenty of excellent fanfic writers who deal exclusively or mainly in het or gen stories, who have found a way to question notions of what's traditional or trope, and rise above it (which I am not suggesting I do at all). I've known a few fanfic writers personally who went from fandom to regular paid publishing, and there are a number of well-known authors who have proudly admitted to writing fanfic either in the past or even currently. One whose name doesn't seem to come up much now is Peter David, whose TNG, Star Trek: New Frontier, and other books I read voraciously through the 90s and into the current millennium - he's a fanboy-made-good on the publishing front.
So, I guess this raises another dilemma for a lot of fanfic writers who have also harbored dreams of being A Real Author someday and haven't achieved it (including yours truly): What is the value of writing all that fanfic, anyhow?
This wouldn't be the last pirate romance I'd read, or the last pirate history book. I was sort of put off the pirate romance genre a few years later, though, when I came across a novel in which the pirate captain blatantly forces himself on the heroine ... and she later falls in love with and "tames" him. I found the whole thing so repugnant that I didn't even finish the book and decided the bad taste in my brain was a sign to move on to better romance writers like Jennifer Crusie.
It was over a decade later when the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie hit theaters. My interest in the A-Team fandom was waning - as inevitably happens with all my fandoms; it's not their fault - and I was ready for something new. Before getting into watching reruns of the A-Team in 2000, when I watched something with two same-sex characters who seemed to give off a vibe that was not quite friendly, not quite platonic, I'd chalked it up to my imagination and ignored it, probably because I was raised in a very heteronormative atmosphere and hadn't really learned to look beyond that (though Xena and Gabrielle sure did test it in the 90s). But by the time I watched Jack Sparrow and Will Turner sparring and arguing and cursing, I was willing to engage in some fanciful imagining for the sake of fandom fun.
Starting to write m/m romance and sex was strange for a couple of reasons. First off were the pronouns - "she" and "he" are relatively easy, but "he" and "he" are trickier, and it's repetitive to constantly be using the names. As verboten as the practice of using "the tall one" and "the older one" and other descriptors is in writing, I can understand why slash writers use the convention - they're looking for another way to say "Jack and Mack boned" without having to use the names all the time.
Second is trying to adjust your thinking about romance and gender. If most of the male-female romantic interactions you've read have adhered to a mostly traditional Western gender-dictated roles paradigm, there's a tendency to want to slot your two characters into that template, no matter how "off" or unsuitable it might be for those characters. Writing two men getting ready to fuck forced me, over time, to question why males are often written a certain way and why females are written another way, and to experiment with it in different stories - both slash and het stories I wrote as I went on. It forced me, at least, to think more about the characters themselves and how they might react in the situations I was writing, and to each other.
But, lest I fall into the trap of overstating the importance or role of slash in modern fandom, let's be clear: I saw two characters interacting well onscreen and I wanted to get them together for sexytimes. We're not talking about Proust or Tolstoy here. There are plenty of excellent fanfic writers who deal exclusively or mainly in het or gen stories, who have found a way to question notions of what's traditional or trope, and rise above it (which I am not suggesting I do at all). I've known a few fanfic writers personally who went from fandom to regular paid publishing, and there are a number of well-known authors who have proudly admitted to writing fanfic either in the past or even currently. One whose name doesn't seem to come up much now is Peter David, whose TNG, Star Trek: New Frontier, and other books I read voraciously through the 90s and into the current millennium - he's a fanboy-made-good on the publishing front.
So, I guess this raises another dilemma for a lot of fanfic writers who have also harbored dreams of being A Real Author someday and haven't achieved it (including yours truly): What is the value of writing all that fanfic, anyhow?
