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reddwarfslash2007-11-18 12:28 pm
felineranger.livejournal.com) wrote in reddwarfslash2007-11-18 12:28 pm
A Short Essay
I've been doing a lot of thinking lately and this is the result. Basically, I'm hoping that it will open up something of a discussion thread on slash and the reasons why we love it so. I'd love it if people could respond by sharing their own feelings and experiences. If you think I've got it all hideously wrong or if you can totally relate to my views then please let me know. I'm hoping the results will be interesting and rewarding for all of us! I have made references to other fandoms but only to illustrate various points - I hope nobody minds.
So what is it that drives us slash writers? Let’s start by looking at the basics - my own experience of the genre is that the vast majority of us are female – not gay or bi-sexual men as I first expected when I ventured tentatively into this world – and relatively young. Fan-girl crushes aren’t restricted to adolescents anymore, but slash fiction in particular I think comes with hang-ups and taboos that mostly only the younger generations are willing to face. Homophobia may be increasingly a thing of the past but I wonder how many women over forty would feel comfortable openly discussing the kind of fantasies that we share here? I am in my twenties and I am selective about who I reveal my slash fetish to –even among friends. It’s certainly not a revelation I would ever share with my parents. Luckily for us, the internet allows us to remain anonymous or even in these ‘permissive’ times I don’t think we’d see nearly as many people in this community.
I think it’s fascinating just how widespread slash fiction is these days. Any fandom you care to mention has slash pairings these days. Rimmer and Lister, I suppose, always had it coming. The concept of the two sex-starved men alone together in space makes it hard even for non-slashers not to make the odd jibe – including the cast themselves. I used to think I was part of a slightly pervy minority but clearly this is not the case. Slash now seems to be a part of many fangirl fantasies – which suggests a major shift in both social attitudes and female sexuality. American writer Nancy Friday has made a career out of examining women’s sexual fantasies (read her books, by the way because they are fascinating even if a little too reliant on Freud for everyone’s tastes) and she remarks in Women On Top that female fantasies of two men having sex are a relatively new phenomenon, which she attributes to a growing sense of female independence and empowerment (this was written in the early nineties).
While I’m not 100% convinced that this analysis tells the whole story it does tie-in with the one of the great truths of fan-fiction – we like to watch the men we love suffer. Angst and hurt/comfort fics make up the basis of a lot of fan-fic – particularly slash. Okay, for any decent story you need conflict and drama, that’s a given, but we do tend to push it to the extremes. I’m as guilty as the next writer – I’ve tortured the boys horribly in my time. I have a slight excuse in that I’ve always had a naughty little taste for S&M and anyone who’s read my back catalogue of fiction will know that for me it’s a simple equation of Listy + Bondage/Pain = Love. Once again, I’ve learned that I’m not in the pervy minority. Just one visit to FF.Net confirmed that for me. If you browse through the Lord of the Rings section, you’ll notice that there are enough Legolas rape fics contained within to compile a collection the size of the great epic itself. Are we all perverts?
Personally, I don’t think so. Yes, there is a sense of empowerment in writing such stories; we can make the boys do in fantasy what we’d never get to see in reality and admittedly, some guys are prettier in their suffering than others. Lister’s big brown eyes look lovely magnified by tears and Legolas has the kind of fragile beauty and poise that it’s very tempting to shatter. Rimmer’s a coward and it’s always fun to take him to the edge of his fear before bringing out the hero in him and sometimes it’s nice to see the somewhat cocky Jack Sparrow taken down a peg or two. I could go on but you will all have your different favourites, and your reasons for torturing them without me listing them all here. I think what we really like in these stories isn’t the suffering itself (none of us actually approve of rape whether it’s male, female or anything else – at least I hope), it’s the emotions that it brings out in our heroes. We all know that men just ain’t that good at emotion. It takes a bit of trauma for them to break down and admit that deep down they’re as romantic and slushy as we girls are. Can any of us imagine Rimmer declaring his undying love for Lister under anything but the most extreme circumstances? Could Aragorn ever bring himself to clutch Legolas to his chest if he didn’t think his beloved was mortally wounded and on the brink of death? It’s not the pain we want to see, it’s the romance that comes out of it.
I used to think that it was only a particular type of man that was slash-prone, but as with many things regarding the genre I have been repeatedly proved wrong. I always felt there had to be some kind of feminine element to the character in question, even if it was something small. Lister (for me at least), while in no way effeminate, has a kind of feminine softness about him, both physically and personally. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in all the Red Dwarf slash fics I’ve read that touch on gender-play, it’s always Listy who ends up in drag. I couldn’t imagine slashing a character like Commander Sam Vimes, for instance, who is all male through and through (although I do find him very sexy) – but plenty of people have done it. This may be simply down to personal taste but, for me, good slash has to be at least slightly believable. I have a feeling that no amount of torture and pain would be enough to make Vimes admit that actually he quite fancies Captain Carrot. But I suppose wish-fulfilment is the main reason why fan-fic exists...
However, I have a theory that there is another reason why women write slash. For any woman writing a love scene between a man she’s attracted to and another woman it’s hard to keep the dreaded Mary-Sue at bay. We put ourselves in the other woman’s place, spelling out the words we want to hear him say to us, we let our imagination loose with what we’d like to do to him and have him do to us. It can be a very revealing business, writing a love scene. By putting the action between two men, we can take a step back and admire the view. We can linger over every detail, confident that we have revealed nothing intimate of ourselves in doing so. We are voyeurs, not participants. That can be very important to a writer who’s not entirely convinced that what they’re writing is A: Any good or B: Very normal. Even in anonymity, sexual fantasies can be a hard thing to share.
I started writing fan-fiction at a very early age - around twelve to thirteen – and even then it always featured a lot of sex and violence, even if it wasn’t always entirely anatomically correct! In those early fics the action was always strictly hetero; beautiful women, usually Kristine Kochanski and Nirvanah Crane, were always miraculously turning up in some escape pod or another to make the boys lives that bit more interesting and of course, like any budding fan-ficcer I wrote my share of Mary-Sues. I had heard whispers, I don’t even remember where from but my older siblings and their friends may have had something to do with it, that Rimmer was secretly in love with Lister, but I didn’t believe it. They hated each other! The very idea was repellent to me. I continued with my naive and slightly incorrect hetero fics, which over time and with access to Just Seventeen became slightly less naive and rather more correct.
All this changed when a year or so later I discovered the novels of Anne Rice. Suddenly the possibilities of homosexuality were much more intriguing. The lives and loves of Lestat, Louis, Armand et al gave me a whole new perspective. Cross-over fics naturally ensued with dear Listy and Rimsy joining the uber-sexy ranks of Rice’s undead pantheon. Of course, in my versions, vampires could and frequently did make love... although Lister and Rimmer still never quite found their way into one another’s arms. In the end it was Last Human that gave me my breakthrough. The dynamics of the relationship between Lister, Rimmer and Michael McGruder offered too many avenues to not be explored. By this time I was older and wiser and had begun to see the things in the series itself that had fuelled the shocking whispers I had heard on the school playing field. My transformation into a fully-fledged slasher was complete and even now it is almost exclusively what I write.
I was lucky. I had a small group of friends who not only shared my passion for writing, but also my passion for my subjects. Long before our home had an internet connection, my fics had an audience and I had access to another source of ideas and inspiration. I often wonder how many of the wonderful writers who grace this community had that advantage – and if not how they managed without it.
On a recent trip home to my parents I went through the cathartic experience of cleaning out my old room. This included a dog-eared pile of notebooks, folders and scrap paper, literally thousands of pages – more than ten years worth of work by a budding writer and slasher. Except for a few choice pages which contained the seeds of good ideas never completed or maybe a nice turn of phrase which could be re-used, I shredded the entire collection. Writers cannot always afford to be sentimental and most of what was contained in those pages was just too, too horrifically humiliating to keep. I do all of my work on my computer now, where it can be password-protected, altered and deleted for good if ever necessary. I suppose it was reading through those pages and seeing how far I’ve come since those days of shamefully scribbling smut in my bedroom that prompted this essay. We are indeed lucky to have a community of such talented, like-minded people to share our work with. I know for a fact that the concrit and inspiration I’ve received here and in the Red Dwarf Slash Society has made me a far, far better writer than I would have otherwise been. And for that, I would like to thank you all and ask you to continue writing. Because we can only get better.
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That's quite a generalization. I'm not sure I agree, frankly. Stereotypically masculine men, yes. But those are not the only men in fandom. And look at Lister - but I'll be getting back to that.
Can any of us imagine Rimmer declaring his undying love for Lister under anything but the most extreme circumstances?
I can't see him doing it, ever. Though, of course, a well-written story could probably convince me otherwise. ;)
Lister (for me at least), while in no way effeminate, has a kind of feminine softness about him, both physically and personally.
That's very interesting, because to me, he's one of the most masculine characters I know of. A super masculine man... who is also highly emotionally competent, and displays them openly without having any hang-ups about it. To me, that's a sign of true masculinity; he's so secure in his masculinity that he can cry; can openly display emotion.
In a couple of stories I've written with
As for wearing drag, could you ever see Rimmer in a dress? I certainly couldn't, but not because he's so masculine. I don't find him very masculine at all (not that this is a negative thing). It just wouldn't suit him. It's odd though; I've read so many stories where Rimmer is on top, and just can't see that happening; not after years of healthy sexual experiences, anyway. And I don't think he is a dominant person. I think it's a height thing, probably. It's a fannish stereotype that the shorter man is always the submissive. And oh, how my inner Lister laughs at that idea!
We can linger over every detail, confident that we have revealed nothing intimate of ourselves in doing so.
Except we do. Well, I do. And it think it would be hard for anyone not to, really. When I write Lister having sex, there's a lot of how I like to have sex in there. That's only natural. Not that I'd write him OOC to fit my own desires (this is what fanbrats do, and is how badfic happens), but where my own preferences coincide with what I see as his, I use them. And actually, when I write het, there's a lot less of me in the female characters than there is of me in Lister when I write RD slash. Writers, IMO, cannot help but put parts of themselves into their writing. And I think that's a good thing. It makes for variety and unique flavors.
Except for a few choice pages which contained the seeds of good ideas never completed or maybe a nice turn of phrase which could be re-used, I shredded the entire collection.
That's... very different from how I think. I keep everything I've written, no matter how bad. Yes, even my horrific Jim Carrey/Mary Sue RPS story from before I knew there was such a thing as fanfic. You say "writers cannot always afford to be sentimental," but I strongly disagree. I think we need to keep what we've done, because no matter how bad it is, it is a part of us, and represents part of our development. We shouldn't be ashamed of it. Without it, we wouldn't be where we are today. I just went through my old things just like you did, and I currently have all my old writings, every single thing I wrote since the age of seven, in two large boxes in my bedroom. They are among my most treasured possessions. They are part of me.
You are an excellent writer, and I hope to see more from you soon - and thank you for this interesting essay! I hope it promotes discussion. :)
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You know the funny thing about this? Quarantine. And Demons and Angels. But still, people have a much easier time picturing Lister dressed as a woman.
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That's quite a generalization. I'm not sure I agree, frankly. Stereotypically masculine men, yes. But those are not the only men in fandom. And look at Lister - but I'll be getting back to that.
I agree it is a generalization, but sadly I think it is a generalization that even in this day and age still holds water. I don't know any men in reality who are 100% comfortable with talking about or showing their emotions. This may be partly a cultural thing - we Brits are notoriously reserved - I was always taught while growing up that excessive displays of emotion are somewhat innappropriate and tacky (although I never believed it!)Of course there are men out there who can do it and we should treasure them. But I'd like to point out that even Lister struggles at times with hard emotions. Take Holoship for instance - he thinks Rimmer's about to be gone forever and what is his parting shot? 'See ya Smeghead'. We know and I suspect Rimmer knows that he means a whole lot more but he cant say it.
I've read so many stories where Rimmer is on top, and just can't see that happening;
Ah, the age-old debate of who goes on top! As you already know I see it the other way around but not because Lister's shorter or more submissive. Hell, any of us who know the character know that with a snap of his fingers Lister could have Rimmer underneath him reduced to a quivering mass of jelly. For the very reason that Lister is more confident and more adventurous, I think he'd be willing to take the 'submissive' role. He'd just see it as something new to try whereas Rimmer would see it as a loss of control and dignity. To begin with at least, I think Rimmer would be more comfortable in the traditional male role of being on top - it's safe, it's what he knows. Also I disagree with you that Rimmer is not a dominant character. He is dominant - he's just not very good at it, bless him :-) If there's one thing that Rimmer craves more than affection its authority and I think that would come out in his sex life. Lister met Low Rimmer, he knows the score, he'd lead Rimmer by the hand with the philosophy of 'I know this is what you want, I know you can't ask for it so I'm going to play along and let you think it was all your own idea'. After all, not being the one on top, doesn't mean you're not the one in control...
I feel I should reaffirm here that I don't consider Lister to be a feminine character - he isn't. But he does have elements to his character that are, perhaps wrongly, traditionally held to be more feminine such as sensitivity and as you say, emotional competence. I don't think I expressed that very well in the essay.
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I disagree with your assessment of Rimmer as dominant, though I do agree that it can be supported by canon. I wouldn't find it OOC in a fic, if it was written well, but it's just not how I see him. I would love to discuss the whole sexual dynamic thing more, but it touches on some plot points in a WIP I'm writing, so I don't want to say too much about it. ;)