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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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When I first got into Red Dwarf and more specifically, Red Dwarf fanfictions, the idea of slash I admit, creeped me out a little. Perhaps it was because I was looking at the obvious too much rather than the subtle. Lister and Rimmer, as far as I was concerned, hated each other and the mere idea of them being in love or even just lust seemed alien to me. But then, and I can't actually recall what happened to changed my mind, I read something - a fic, I can't remember, but it was enough to change my mind and then I saw the kiss in Blue - the obvious was right there on screen, albeit it in a dream. Maybe as I got older, as I matured I started to look at Rimmer and Lister in different lights, they weren't just amusing characters any more, they became people and writing my own works led to see them more and more as actual, real individuals, which obviously made it rather difficult to distinguish reality from fantasy sometimes. As I read more and more into RD slash, I found myself straying away fro het fics, not out of spite but to me, and I apologise to anyone if this offends them, most of them smacked of Mary Sues - I'll hold my hands up on this one, I've wrote Mary Sues, heck I'm sure we all have - but there was something about het fics, as good as they were that seemed to deny the two characters of Rimmer and Lister from something....Friendship? Affection? Sex? Love?
The reason I think RD slash, most noteably between Rimmer and Lister works is becuase, deep down the pair just want to be loved. Look at Rimmer's childhood, the lack of friends, the career that he considers worthy enough to take the place of a lover in his life. Contrast this with Lister, abanndonned as a baby, clinging onto a brief liason with Kochanski - I always get the impression that Lister is terrified of being alone. The pair effectively want and need the same thing, no matter how much they might procrastinate that they are actually completely opposite.
I agree that a vaguely sensetive element in a character is likely to be exploited, take Lister - more often than not, and I admit I do this a lot, he is typecast into the subservient role in the relationship, he's the woman for want of a better word. Why? Purely because perhaps we see him as slightly more human that Rimmer, he's more emotive, more sensetive, more thoughtful - more feminine? Interesting point "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 " - because I am still currently writing a RD story where Lister is in drag, partly for comic effect and partly because there was so much material to run with!
I guess in the end, the concept of slash doesn't end with the attraction of two men - it runs much deeper, to me it lies with character, I also prefer canon pairings to totally random pairings (Voldemort and Harry? What in the world?!) and with Rimmer and Lister, there is so much to go with. Yes we've got the sexual frustration, the lack of affection, the necessity of company but we've also got the conflicting personalities, something which truly makes Red Dwarf, Lister needs Rimmer around to make him more orderly, more grown up and Rimmer in turn needs Lister to make him lighten up. The pair need each other and as slash writers, we take that concept on board and bring out something truly beautiful.
I never claim to be a good slash writer, far from it, my early stuff was badly written, cliched and demonstrated an acute lack of knowledge of everything. But I read other slasher's stuff and I smile - simply because it's so brilliant and at the same time so simple, the one shots that frequently appear on RDSS are superb, it's often one lines that sets off a short story, no more than a few hundred words but what is said in those few hundred words is so meaningful and so true, it's no wonder we all get a little excited about it.
I'd better end this now, before I ramble on a bit more, but once again, your essay was brilliant, I don't think I've ever agreed on so many points raised as I have just now! Bravo and I also agree that we all should keep writing, if not for the sake of our sanity!
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I think you're right. In a way. He enjoys his own company, I think, but it's more... he needs interaction, and he's a very touch-y, physical person. This, of course, only aggravates the R/L UST frustration. ;)
I agree about character being paramount; I ship pairings that make sense to me and that I like, irrespective of gender. :)
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But Lister and Rimmer works, I was actually surprised that a few people I've spoke to recently just couldn't see the slashiness of R/L - alright, if you take the episodes at purely face value, the pair loathe each other but when you look deeper, delve into implied meanings, numerous references, backstories, 'in jokes' - there's this whole world of longed for affection.
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And I love a bit of crackfic. It made me laugh, and was actually perfectly IC (if you disregard the fact that I doubt Lister would ever go for Hollister. But, you know, apart from that. ;))
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