Answer for Hermione re:Slash
Feb. 22nd, 2005 01:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tarotgalHermione asked a most enjoyable question for me to answer: "how did you get started writing slash? what motivated you to be as into it as you are? i know that some people get more into it than others, but i was just curious, since you're one of the biggest slash writers on our list ;)"
I fully blame nermal for, among many other wonderful things, my leap into the world of slash. But, then again, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan are also to blame. Believe it or not, the first time I watched 'Star Wars: Episode I' I did not immediately think that the two were lovers. Now, of course, I can't watch it without shouting at them to kiss during their last scene together. I read a SW slash sneezefic of hers and liked it, though I didn't quite see the light, automatically. Then I read a couple others that contained slash, but with no more than G or PG13 stuff. Again, I liked it a lot but I didn't quite see it.
Somewhere during a conversation with nermal one day- either on e-mail or AIM, I honestly can't remember- I mentioned something to the effect that I didn't really see Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan as gay. I really wish I had a copy of that now so that I could laugh hysterically at it. She gave me this absolutely lovely explanation- some of which I still use today when talking about slash- about how she saw them beyond such terms/labels. About how love can be boundary-less and how it's a nature of a Jedi to love everything and everyone so deeply. Should it matter if the targets of their love are men or women or both? Nermal put it far more eloquently, I promise. LOL! But I thought through her argument very carefully, and I finally decided she definitely had a point. Why couldn't they be lovers if it made a good story and if it was justified? And it certainly did make a good story, from those I'd read.
Anyway, I learned what slash meant… though I honestly can't remember how I learned what it was. Then I started reading some nonsneezefics with Obi/Qui and the sweetness and perfection sort of started to rub off on me. Then when I read some more Obi & Qui sneezefics I simply couldn't *not* see them together.
Many times my "fanon" is set based on the first fanfics I read about a certain situation. For example, I've read literally hundreds of "Sirius & Remus get together for the first time" fics, but to me, I still feel the way it actually happened was the way in the first fic I ever read about the subject. That same influence, I think, is what keeps me so committed to my one-true-pairings and what keeps me, now, from thinking of anything but Obi/Qui when I think of their characters. When a story puts something so perfectly and explores emotions and explains in a way that suddenly opens my eyes, I cannot then deny it. So the more I read with the two of them, the more undeniable the pairing became until I could see nothing else.
Another thing that really drew me in, apart from nermal's beautiful logic, was the fact that I always loved buddy-buddy stories. I've ALWAYS found myself drawn to that sort of thing. It's a classic argument most slashers make, I've found, but I really do think it's true in my case. Fraser & Ray on Due South, Hercules & Iolaus in Hercules, O'Brien & Bashir on Star Trek DS9, and the list goes on. Many times what made the buddy-buddy-ness most special to me were the hurt/comfort moments. Even now, I have a hard time thinking of buddy pairings without bonding moments or h/c moments simultaneously coming to mind. I don't know whether that's because of my attraction to h/c or whether it's because h/c brings them together and I think that's cute. Probably six of one and half a dozen of the other.
Even with my own characters who were unarguably hereosexuals, some of my favorite scenes to write were hurt/comfort scenes between two guys. One guy holding another who was crying over the death of his mother, two guys stripping down and huddling together to prevent hypothermia, a group of boys sharing their fears and desires and angsting together. When I look back at how much I love those scenes- both in writing and in reading/watching- it seems to me that slash was just my next, normal step. I still absolutely adore buddy-buddy stories, but there's something about slash that heightens what I feel about those and takes it to a more intense and appealing level to me.
And, in many ways, slash became my perfect venue for writing/desiring hurt/comfort stories. As I've said a number of times, I love men when they're in the hurting role and I love men when they're in the caring role as well. So when I'm only dealing with male characters, it's like having it both ways. Slash fanfiction gives me a way to play out those situations with characters I already love and enjoy playing with. But that's more why I kept being drawn to it. Once I see characters in a slashy way, I prefer that to any other way- partly because of my interests and part because of that OTP mindset of mind.
I really couldn't tell you when my mind made that mental switch into ALWAYS seeing slash at every available moment. I'm not sure I'm in that now, even as big a slasher as I am. Took me weeks to properly see Jack/Will, for example. And there's a pairing in Highlander I have more trouble with than anything (I could write an entire essay about mixing slash my favorite fandom and characters I think are perfect as-is, but you probably wouldn't understand it without knowing much of the fandom) Of course even when it takes a while, something in me still sings in a way I don't when I'm confronted with het. There's probably a million reasons why… I couldn't begin to list them, really. But I do find myself reading slash into fandoms immediately in many cases. And I like that. Slash makes me happy. The types of emotions given to the characters, the relationships, the depth- everything that goes with it from love to sex- all is very appealing to me.
Also hand-in-hand with slash is fanfic in general. I've written fanfic since I was 4, if not earlier than that. I wrote maybe three or four non-sneezing-related fanfics that I shared online, once I found the net. And I wrote about that many with sneezing in them- most of them quite crappy and/or unfinished. But I didn't really start writing fanfics- or really learned the term for that matter- until I read those Obi-Wan/Qui-Gon slashfics and learned about slash. It was like a whole new world opened up to me, then. People actually wrote and shared the sorts of things I'd been writing for years. And what was more, they saw more into the character's relationships than there was in the canon. It was cute, it was appealing to me, and it was something I wanted to do. So I tried a few. And posted a few. And before long, I adored Obi/Qui and then I'd moved on to other pairings and fandoms.
I felt sad that I had loved Star Trek for so many years and never known about slash (many people say Spock/Kirk was their first pairing one upon a time). I felt that I'd been missing out on something I would have loved. So I read a lot of slash- in many different fandoms I already knew. And I read slash sneezefics in fandoms I didn't know (like Harry Potter) which made me want to know those fandoms and made me crave more. So, in a way, my absorption into online fanfiction and slash fanfiction came nearly at the same time. It was something I suddenly realized I liked, and for some reasons liked more than het or gen fanfiction, and then my interest grew exponentially.
So it all started some time after reading 20 or 30 Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan slash fics (a good handful of them sneezefics). It was then that I started loving slash and reading more and more of it than anything else. Sometimes I wonder if I hadn't been introduced to it in a hurt/comfort situation if I would have taken to it so easily. Now I look back at those buddy-buddy characters from my childhood and teenage years and all I see is slash- when I know for sure I never thought that before. I just thought it was adorable and sweet when the guys hugged each other and helped each other out. But I feel that my interest in slash is as closely tied to my preference for guys bonding as it is to hurt/comfort themes and the entire idea of online fanfiction. But (don't get me wrong) the other elements of what slash is, in general, are equally as appealing to me. I just love my boys feeling for each other so romantically with all that comes with that and getting it on with each other as well. I just plan love it and everything that comes with it.
Hope that's not TMI :-) And sorry about any spelling errors during my ramblings, here! I haven't really looked it over much, I just sort of let the answer spill out as it wanted to come. But, yeah, thanks & hope that answered your question!
I fully blame nermal for, among many other wonderful things, my leap into the world of slash. But, then again, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan are also to blame. Believe it or not, the first time I watched 'Star Wars: Episode I' I did not immediately think that the two were lovers. Now, of course, I can't watch it without shouting at them to kiss during their last scene together. I read a SW slash sneezefic of hers and liked it, though I didn't quite see the light, automatically. Then I read a couple others that contained slash, but with no more than G or PG13 stuff. Again, I liked it a lot but I didn't quite see it.
Somewhere during a conversation with nermal one day- either on e-mail or AIM, I honestly can't remember- I mentioned something to the effect that I didn't really see Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan as gay. I really wish I had a copy of that now so that I could laugh hysterically at it. She gave me this absolutely lovely explanation- some of which I still use today when talking about slash- about how she saw them beyond such terms/labels. About how love can be boundary-less and how it's a nature of a Jedi to love everything and everyone so deeply. Should it matter if the targets of their love are men or women or both? Nermal put it far more eloquently, I promise. LOL! But I thought through her argument very carefully, and I finally decided she definitely had a point. Why couldn't they be lovers if it made a good story and if it was justified? And it certainly did make a good story, from those I'd read.
Anyway, I learned what slash meant… though I honestly can't remember how I learned what it was. Then I started reading some nonsneezefics with Obi/Qui and the sweetness and perfection sort of started to rub off on me. Then when I read some more Obi & Qui sneezefics I simply couldn't *not* see them together.
Many times my "fanon" is set based on the first fanfics I read about a certain situation. For example, I've read literally hundreds of "Sirius & Remus get together for the first time" fics, but to me, I still feel the way it actually happened was the way in the first fic I ever read about the subject. That same influence, I think, is what keeps me so committed to my one-true-pairings and what keeps me, now, from thinking of anything but Obi/Qui when I think of their characters. When a story puts something so perfectly and explores emotions and explains in a way that suddenly opens my eyes, I cannot then deny it. So the more I read with the two of them, the more undeniable the pairing became until I could see nothing else.
Another thing that really drew me in, apart from nermal's beautiful logic, was the fact that I always loved buddy-buddy stories. I've ALWAYS found myself drawn to that sort of thing. It's a classic argument most slashers make, I've found, but I really do think it's true in my case. Fraser & Ray on Due South, Hercules & Iolaus in Hercules, O'Brien & Bashir on Star Trek DS9, and the list goes on. Many times what made the buddy-buddy-ness most special to me were the hurt/comfort moments. Even now, I have a hard time thinking of buddy pairings without bonding moments or h/c moments simultaneously coming to mind. I don't know whether that's because of my attraction to h/c or whether it's because h/c brings them together and I think that's cute. Probably six of one and half a dozen of the other.
Even with my own characters who were unarguably hereosexuals, some of my favorite scenes to write were hurt/comfort scenes between two guys. One guy holding another who was crying over the death of his mother, two guys stripping down and huddling together to prevent hypothermia, a group of boys sharing their fears and desires and angsting together. When I look back at how much I love those scenes- both in writing and in reading/watching- it seems to me that slash was just my next, normal step. I still absolutely adore buddy-buddy stories, but there's something about slash that heightens what I feel about those and takes it to a more intense and appealing level to me.
And, in many ways, slash became my perfect venue for writing/desiring hurt/comfort stories. As I've said a number of times, I love men when they're in the hurting role and I love men when they're in the caring role as well. So when I'm only dealing with male characters, it's like having it both ways. Slash fanfiction gives me a way to play out those situations with characters I already love and enjoy playing with. But that's more why I kept being drawn to it. Once I see characters in a slashy way, I prefer that to any other way- partly because of my interests and part because of that OTP mindset of mind.
I really couldn't tell you when my mind made that mental switch into ALWAYS seeing slash at every available moment. I'm not sure I'm in that now, even as big a slasher as I am. Took me weeks to properly see Jack/Will, for example. And there's a pairing in Highlander I have more trouble with than anything (I could write an entire essay about mixing slash my favorite fandom and characters I think are perfect as-is, but you probably wouldn't understand it without knowing much of the fandom) Of course even when it takes a while, something in me still sings in a way I don't when I'm confronted with het. There's probably a million reasons why… I couldn't begin to list them, really. But I do find myself reading slash into fandoms immediately in many cases. And I like that. Slash makes me happy. The types of emotions given to the characters, the relationships, the depth- everything that goes with it from love to sex- all is very appealing to me.
Also hand-in-hand with slash is fanfic in general. I've written fanfic since I was 4, if not earlier than that. I wrote maybe three or four non-sneezing-related fanfics that I shared online, once I found the net. And I wrote about that many with sneezing in them- most of them quite crappy and/or unfinished. But I didn't really start writing fanfics- or really learned the term for that matter- until I read those Obi-Wan/Qui-Gon slashfics and learned about slash. It was like a whole new world opened up to me, then. People actually wrote and shared the sorts of things I'd been writing for years. And what was more, they saw more into the character's relationships than there was in the canon. It was cute, it was appealing to me, and it was something I wanted to do. So I tried a few. And posted a few. And before long, I adored Obi/Qui and then I'd moved on to other pairings and fandoms.
I felt sad that I had loved Star Trek for so many years and never known about slash (many people say Spock/Kirk was their first pairing one upon a time). I felt that I'd been missing out on something I would have loved. So I read a lot of slash- in many different fandoms I already knew. And I read slash sneezefics in fandoms I didn't know (like Harry Potter) which made me want to know those fandoms and made me crave more. So, in a way, my absorption into online fanfiction and slash fanfiction came nearly at the same time. It was something I suddenly realized I liked, and for some reasons liked more than het or gen fanfiction, and then my interest grew exponentially.
So it all started some time after reading 20 or 30 Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan slash fics (a good handful of them sneezefics). It was then that I started loving slash and reading more and more of it than anything else. Sometimes I wonder if I hadn't been introduced to it in a hurt/comfort situation if I would have taken to it so easily. Now I look back at those buddy-buddy characters from my childhood and teenage years and all I see is slash- when I know for sure I never thought that before. I just thought it was adorable and sweet when the guys hugged each other and helped each other out. But I feel that my interest in slash is as closely tied to my preference for guys bonding as it is to hurt/comfort themes and the entire idea of online fanfiction. But (don't get me wrong) the other elements of what slash is, in general, are equally as appealing to me. I just love my boys feeling for each other so romantically with all that comes with that and getting it on with each other as well. I just plan love it and everything that comes with it.
Hope that's not TMI :-) And sorry about any spelling errors during my ramblings, here! I haven't really looked it over much, I just sort of let the answer spill out as it wanted to come. But, yeah, thanks & hope that answered your question!
no subject
Date: 2005-02-22 11:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 12:39 am (UTC)I couldn't agree with you more, on so many things you said in your post. Funny how appealing those male/male buddy shows are to us females when you add in a dash of angst, isn't it? SG-1 is the best example of this in my fandom preferences. In fact, I have very little interest in slash fics that have no angsting/ill/injured-followed-by-comforting elements in them. I don't care for those fics where Daniel and Jack are living together in sweet bliss forever, having perfect sex every night...no matter how hot the sex might get, it's boring without a plot to reel me in. Bring me off-world accidents, misunderstandings, mishaps, kidnappings, alien viruses...you get the idea! *G*
And Obi and Qui are totally the source of my slash preferences for me as well. Before SW:TPM, I pretty much only read Mulder/Scully (Ah, Muldertorture Anonymous Archive, greatest shaper of my H/C desires!), Jadzia/Julian, and Deanna/Riker. I did notice that there were some Mulder/Krycek and Garak/Bashir fics out there, but I just couldn't manage to wrap my mind around the concept of slash at that time. I remember being squicked by the first few Q/O fics I read that were NC-17 slash, but the cute Padawan with the hedgehog haircut and sexy braid won me over quite quickly! To this day, I greatly prefer slash over het. I find het borderline squicky now, with the possible exceptions of Mulder/Scully, Will Turner/Elizabeth Swann, Aeryn/Crichton from Farscape, and Aragorn/Arwen (though the latter MUST have strong Legolas elements to get me to read the story in the first place *G*).
I also love the way fanon is shaped over time, evolving with the fandom participation, as people latch onto concepts they really like. There's a series of around 20 stories now by 'daw the minstrel' on storiesofarda.com that follows Legolas from birth to just before Fellowship age, focusing on his development from elfling to adolescent to warrior to gaining a position of leadership among his people. I adore this series, and I consider Legolas's family history as presented in it as my preferred version of the way I choose to portray it in my mind. I always think of him as the youngest son of Thranduil now, less confident than his older brothers but maturing slowly over the centuries, slightly more slender in body, quick to criticize himself, but fiercely loyal to those he gives his heart to, possessing but a few faded memories of his now-deceased mother, and indisputably the best archer in Mirkwood. I'm starting to consider it fanon now that Legolas and his brothers really did have personal bodyguards as well, to protect, provide advice, and generally ensure they survive life as warriors. And to her credit, in daw's stories, Legolas's best friend, brothers, and father are every inch as developed in characterization as Legolas. I can't recommend them highly enough.
The fetish adds a whole extra complicated twist to fic preferences. Personally, I've found that going backwards in my fic timeline and adding sneezing to fandoms that I knew and loved before fully recognizing what my 'thing' for sneezing was completely and utterly squicks me, particularly if it's something I can trace back to childhood. For example, adding the sneezing element to X-Files was much easier for me to reconcile and eventually enjoy than, say, Star Trek might be, since I started watching ST:The Next Generation in 6th grade but didn't discover X-Files until my freshman year in college. This is why I adore Obi sneezefics (second only to Legolas fics in my heart), but I can hardly force myself to finish a single read-through of sneezefics taking place in the Original Trilogy universe. The concept almost literally makes my skin crawl, despite the fact that I had a huge crush on Luke Skywalker when I was in elementary school. I can't predict which fandoms will trigger this sense of 'wrongness', and I can't help but wonder if anyone else has experienced something like this...
Anyway, sorry for my long-windedness, but it's such a fascinating topic that I just couldn't help myself!
no subject
Date: 2005-02-25 05:22 pm (UTC)In re: to tg's comments re: slash- that was so awesome and interesting to see how it developed. I'm started to really like some slash parings and I definately think that the first good set that you see sort of develops your "thoughts" about how things developed. I read an awesome story about first encounters on a bus with Jack and Daniel from SG-1 and it just sticks with me.
Oh- and I know that this more pertains to another thread- but I thing that all the work that you do with regards to getting the right sneeze with right person pair up is Awesome!! I'm really stuck with that at the moment. I'm loving the character, adoring the verbal interaction and getting inside his head- but I'm just not getting the sneeze parts and it is killing me.
Oh- and very belated. I ADORED your "Omen" story- tg. I used to play in orchestra and oh my- that was just so good and yummy and just...... Anyway- I very much loved it. Thank you Very much.
Thanks for sharing things from your writing process. I really enjoy reading them.
tma