I'm a bad yaoi fangirl
Feb. 23rd, 2004 04:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xparrotNew fandom, new fanfic, same old issues. For all that many animanga series give me in canon more of what I crave than nearly any Western show, anime fic too rarely satisfies. Mainly because despite my One True Pairing tendencies, I'm honestly not that into pairings--any pairings, a kink which puts me at odds with fundamental fangirl tenets. Ranting to follow, with the caveat that I know my tastes are not the norm, but after this long they're unlikely to change. I'm always up for trying to figure out why I like certain things, and I have my theories, but when it comes down to it, I like what I like and knowing why doesn't alter that I do.
First off, lemme get this straight - I am a yaoi fangirl. I own and love Kizuna, KKH, Gravitation, FAKE. I read Smallville slash and suspect Ban and Ginji are locked in passionate liplocks whenever the camera pans away from their hugs. This wasn't always the case; for a while I avoided slash, on the principle that I didn't like romance. While that's no longer so, the truth is, I've always loved stories about friendship more than sexual attraction. "Smarm", it's called in some Western fandoms - "the physical/verbal display of platonic friendship". I'm a hopeless hurt/comfort junky and a smarm fan to the end; giving into slash did not affect that. I'll enjoy a good bit of smut, but give me two guys putting their lives on the line for one another, and you'll melt me into a puddle of fangirl goo faster than a box of Crayolas cast into the sun.
Obviously h/c and slash are not mutually exclusive; where would yaoi be without comfort sex? But platonic love can be just as appealing. And here's where I run into problems, because anime gen fic is a rare phenomenon, and too often it's what I most crave.
I'm not sure why it's unusual. In most of my Western* fandoms, there was a strong gen contingent. Stargate has tons of Jack/Daniel (and Sam/Jack, but there's only one blonde officer making it with her colonel that I care for at present, and they're not it), but scads of well-written team-fic as well, and a surprising amount of authors who divide their time between both. I only wrote gen for The Sentinel, and was far from alone. Even X-files had quite a number of fics in which Mulder & Scully stayed true to their show-selves and solved cases together with extreme angst but no forays under the covers.
[*in case it isn't self evident, by "Western" I mean North American & European shows, movies, cartoons, etc. Not really into the whole cowboy thing unless it's Bebop or Trigun]
In most anime fandoms, however, it's difficult to find any fic in any fandom that doesn't involve someone lusting for someone else, be it a het or yaoi coupling. And I'll be damned if I know why.
Obviously if you're writing a fic for, say, Fushigi Yuugi or X/1999, the majority of your chars have gotta be romantically interested or else they're not going to be in char. And yes, to write a long story in which no one is thinking about a special someone or sex in general is not going to be believable if your chars are over twelve. But does it always have to be the central theme? Go to ff.net's anime category and page through the archives of a show; how many fics don't have a pairing or two or six listed in the summary?
I'm not anti-romance; the amount of shoujo manga on my bookcases would debunk that argument fast enough. But take a look over my oeuvre of fanfic, and consider that most of the time, what I write is what I want to read. I've got one long story with a focus on a romantic relationship, though it wouldn't be classified as a romance (it's for Final Fantasy 8. I like Squall/Rinoa. Sue me. I also like Miaka/Tamahome and Cyclops/Jean Grey, so you'll have plenty of supporting evidence). The rest of my longer stories may have touches of romance, but tend to focus on friendships, partners, teams, "brothers in blood", etc. You'd also note that a lot of the relationships I love to pieces in canon - those above, not to mention Van/Hitomi, Sheridan/Delenn, Enjouji/Ranmaru, many more--I don't read or write about. I like them, but I don't crave more action than what we're given.
Even when I do read yaoi/slash fic, it often is for the story--no, really!--the character relationships involved; once they're in bed, unless it's damn fine writing I'll usually skim. I can argue I'm not that into smut because there's only so many ways to write a guy banging another guy, or a girl, or whatever; you run out of metaphors and bodyparts sooner or later. But that doesn't explain why I don't tire of snowfic h/c, even though there's only so many ways to save a hypothermic buddy, and no matter how many times one char screams his friend's name when said friend goes down in a fight, I'll still love the next time they do it. I can't say why sacrifice and concern and empathy stir me quite as they do, but a well-written affirmation of friendship will move me more than the hottest sex scene. My bro calls the over-the-top h/c and smarm stuff my personal porn...embarrassingly accurately.
It doesn't help that over time I've become a fanfic snob; I want well-written, grammatically correct, in character stories, preferably with a modicum of plot to keep things moving. All this, and for someone to get injured or mentally tortured or whatever, so I get their friends worrying about them. And while I'm at it, I'm an inveterate lover of happy endings as well.
When I first got into anime, I was assuming that since that kind of thing was so thrillingly prevalent in the canon--how many fight shounen don't have the scene when the best friend/rival goes down and the hero goes psycho, often with tears and flashbacks?--there would be plenty of fic with it. And sure, there was tons of fic out there--but more people cared about how Vegeta and Bulma got together than exploring the complexities of Vegeta and Goku's relationship, and no one at all wrote about Tasuki and Tamahome's friendship despite all their squabbling. It was a disappointment--but I did find some excellent DBZ out there of the sort I wanted; luck of the draw, maybe I'd picked poorer fandoms.
Four years and countless animanga later, I'm still going back to my Western fandoms when I want a good dose of h/c smarm, and not just because word for word, Western fandoms have better-written fic (Western fans tend to be older; anime fen are mostly teens, while the majority of Western fen are 20s-50s. Not to say there aren't some 16 years old who write better than some 30 year olds, but in general older fen are more discriminating) And this frustrates me, because there's a lot of anime fandoms for which I'd love to read some good friendship stories.
I thought for a time that I had it made - with GetBackers and Saiyuki, the friendships I fell in love with I also saw romantic sides to; I wanted them to see them be more than just friends. Maybe I was at last becoming a true yaoi fangirl, squeeing madly over my favorite couples with hearts in my eyes and shoujo bubbles in the air! Disregard that in Saiyuki my favorite relationship became Gojyo and Sanzo's sniping, though I'm a 58/39 girl so deeply and completely that alternate numerology almost makes me cry--and it was easy enough to ignore my love of the platonic Ban-Shido dynamic in the overwhelming light of the BanGin. (Ignore, too, that my main reason for wanting BanGin is because I can't see them with anyone else, more than wanting to see them with each other. Which isn't to say I don't want to see it, but it's outweighed by the friendship factor, which explains the paucity of sex in my GB fic, if you were wondering.)
And then I got into FullMetal Alchemist, and now One Piece, and I'm back to square one - not seeing any slash, hardly seeing any het, and not wanting any pairings because the relationships that most interest me aren't a whit romantic or sexual. FMA isn't so much an issue, because I'm not especially interested in reading fic for it; One Piece is another story altogether, but I'll save that rant for another day. OP is a bigger problem for me than most; in a lot of my fandoms, it's not that I'm against the yaoi, it's just I enjoy more. There are other relationships every bit as compelling, intense, and fascinating as the sexual or the romantic, and I wish those realms were more explored.
And if you know of some good gen anime fic, go ahead and point 'em my way!
First off, lemme get this straight - I am a yaoi fangirl. I own and love Kizuna, KKH, Gravitation, FAKE. I read Smallville slash and suspect Ban and Ginji are locked in passionate liplocks whenever the camera pans away from their hugs. This wasn't always the case; for a while I avoided slash, on the principle that I didn't like romance. While that's no longer so, the truth is, I've always loved stories about friendship more than sexual attraction. "Smarm", it's called in some Western fandoms - "the physical/verbal display of platonic friendship". I'm a hopeless hurt/comfort junky and a smarm fan to the end; giving into slash did not affect that. I'll enjoy a good bit of smut, but give me two guys putting their lives on the line for one another, and you'll melt me into a puddle of fangirl goo faster than a box of Crayolas cast into the sun.
Obviously h/c and slash are not mutually exclusive; where would yaoi be without comfort sex? But platonic love can be just as appealing. And here's where I run into problems, because anime gen fic is a rare phenomenon, and too often it's what I most crave.
I'm not sure why it's unusual. In most of my Western* fandoms, there was a strong gen contingent. Stargate has tons of Jack/Daniel (and Sam/Jack, but there's only one blonde officer making it with her colonel that I care for at present, and they're not it), but scads of well-written team-fic as well, and a surprising amount of authors who divide their time between both. I only wrote gen for The Sentinel, and was far from alone. Even X-files had quite a number of fics in which Mulder & Scully stayed true to their show-selves and solved cases together with extreme angst but no forays under the covers.
[*in case it isn't self evident, by "Western" I mean North American & European shows, movies, cartoons, etc. Not really into the whole cowboy thing unless it's Bebop or Trigun]
In most anime fandoms, however, it's difficult to find any fic in any fandom that doesn't involve someone lusting for someone else, be it a het or yaoi coupling. And I'll be damned if I know why.
Obviously if you're writing a fic for, say, Fushigi Yuugi or X/1999, the majority of your chars have gotta be romantically interested or else they're not going to be in char. And yes, to write a long story in which no one is thinking about a special someone or sex in general is not going to be believable if your chars are over twelve. But does it always have to be the central theme? Go to ff.net's anime category and page through the archives of a show; how many fics don't have a pairing or two or six listed in the summary?
I'm not anti-romance; the amount of shoujo manga on my bookcases would debunk that argument fast enough. But take a look over my oeuvre of fanfic, and consider that most of the time, what I write is what I want to read. I've got one long story with a focus on a romantic relationship, though it wouldn't be classified as a romance (it's for Final Fantasy 8. I like Squall/Rinoa. Sue me. I also like Miaka/Tamahome and Cyclops/Jean Grey, so you'll have plenty of supporting evidence). The rest of my longer stories may have touches of romance, but tend to focus on friendships, partners, teams, "brothers in blood", etc. You'd also note that a lot of the relationships I love to pieces in canon - those above, not to mention Van/Hitomi, Sheridan/Delenn, Enjouji/Ranmaru, many more--I don't read or write about. I like them, but I don't crave more action than what we're given.
Even when I do read yaoi/slash fic, it often is for the story--no, really!--the character relationships involved; once they're in bed, unless it's damn fine writing I'll usually skim. I can argue I'm not that into smut because there's only so many ways to write a guy banging another guy, or a girl, or whatever; you run out of metaphors and bodyparts sooner or later. But that doesn't explain why I don't tire of snowfic h/c, even though there's only so many ways to save a hypothermic buddy, and no matter how many times one char screams his friend's name when said friend goes down in a fight, I'll still love the next time they do it. I can't say why sacrifice and concern and empathy stir me quite as they do, but a well-written affirmation of friendship will move me more than the hottest sex scene. My bro calls the over-the-top h/c and smarm stuff my personal porn...embarrassingly accurately.
It doesn't help that over time I've become a fanfic snob; I want well-written, grammatically correct, in character stories, preferably with a modicum of plot to keep things moving. All this, and for someone to get injured or mentally tortured or whatever, so I get their friends worrying about them. And while I'm at it, I'm an inveterate lover of happy endings as well.
When I first got into anime, I was assuming that since that kind of thing was so thrillingly prevalent in the canon--how many fight shounen don't have the scene when the best friend/rival goes down and the hero goes psycho, often with tears and flashbacks?--there would be plenty of fic with it. And sure, there was tons of fic out there--but more people cared about how Vegeta and Bulma got together than exploring the complexities of Vegeta and Goku's relationship, and no one at all wrote about Tasuki and Tamahome's friendship despite all their squabbling. It was a disappointment--but I did find some excellent DBZ out there of the sort I wanted; luck of the draw, maybe I'd picked poorer fandoms.
Four years and countless animanga later, I'm still going back to my Western fandoms when I want a good dose of h/c smarm, and not just because word for word, Western fandoms have better-written fic (Western fans tend to be older; anime fen are mostly teens, while the majority of Western fen are 20s-50s. Not to say there aren't some 16 years old who write better than some 30 year olds, but in general older fen are more discriminating) And this frustrates me, because there's a lot of anime fandoms for which I'd love to read some good friendship stories.
I thought for a time that I had it made - with GetBackers and Saiyuki, the friendships I fell in love with I also saw romantic sides to; I wanted them to see them be more than just friends. Maybe I was at last becoming a true yaoi fangirl, squeeing madly over my favorite couples with hearts in my eyes and shoujo bubbles in the air! Disregard that in Saiyuki my favorite relationship became Gojyo and Sanzo's sniping, though I'm a 58/39 girl so deeply and completely that alternate numerology almost makes me cry--and it was easy enough to ignore my love of the platonic Ban-Shido dynamic in the overwhelming light of the BanGin. (Ignore, too, that my main reason for wanting BanGin is because I can't see them with anyone else, more than wanting to see them with each other. Which isn't to say I don't want to see it, but it's outweighed by the friendship factor, which explains the paucity of sex in my GB fic, if you were wondering.)
And then I got into FullMetal Alchemist, and now One Piece, and I'm back to square one - not seeing any slash, hardly seeing any het, and not wanting any pairings because the relationships that most interest me aren't a whit romantic or sexual. FMA isn't so much an issue, because I'm not especially interested in reading fic for it; One Piece is another story altogether, but I'll save that rant for another day. OP is a bigger problem for me than most; in a lot of my fandoms, it's not that I'm against the yaoi, it's just I enjoy more. There are other relationships every bit as compelling, intense, and fascinating as the sexual or the romantic, and I wish those realms were more explored.
And if you know of some good gen anime fic, go ahead and point 'em my way!
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Re: ...pardon my rabid fangirl moment ^_^;
Date: 2004-03-17 04:19 pm (UTC)I was never much into GW, but I've read a little of it, and some of those stories felt more like smarm to me, with a bit of yaoi thrown in at random - I suspect you weren't the only one to put in the kisses just 'cuz they were expected. Not that there's anything wrong with that (and from what I remember of GW, at least Trowa and Quatre were not exactly "just friends" ^^;;) but the h/c is just so much more entertaining than the sex! And you definitely aren't alone in your favorite eps being the ones where your fave chars are in Big Trouble. ^__^
Ah, sorry about lack of defintions - gen is "general" fic, fic without het or slash pairings; "fen" is an older term for fans. More Western vocab, I think.
And you should see about getting into Western fandoms, if h/c is your thing! Stargate SG-1 is a good one. There's a lot of slash, but a lot of well-done gen as well. (I got into SG-1 because of the fic, before I saw any ep, just the Stargate movie. ELG's "Ripples" was enough to make me want to get into the show. Wrote a bit of fic for it myself as XmagicalX.)
And One Piece...yes. Love the show & chars so so so much but wish there were more people writing for it. Especially writing gen, because I cannot see yaoi there, except as a joke. And I have read Quatrina's stories, enjoy them very much. Glad you're liking Overboard - will be posting more of that in a bit, hope it continues to entertain!
And last but definitely not least - OH MY THANK YOU SO MUCH!! So~~ glad you like IllMir!! As an original work, that one's really my baby, so it's great to hear someone's read it. and liked the chars. I'm verra fond of them myself. ^_^ Aww, Gear...I don't know what happened, he wasn't hardly meant to be a char at all, but he's so silly, and a good whipping boy ^^ And Adam's outfits, hee, glad you like his later stuff. The first outfit was Nick's clothes, hence them being rather preppy-ish. More fun to draw his present skater-gamer-punk-whatever style - Monica's got a much better fashion sense than me!
Re: ...pardon my rabid fangirl moment ^_^;
Date: 2004-03-17 04:54 pm (UTC)lol yeah... thats pretty much right ^_^
sorry about lack of defintions - gen is "general" fic, fic without het or slash pairings; "fen" is an older term for fans. More Western vocab, I think.
hey, no prob ^_^ it actually amuses me how much i say could easily be confusing if you don't know what the shorthand meant. i think gen and fen are more Western like you said... maybe. just cuz i havent heard it before. gen makes sense... helpful word to have. fen.. aww. its cute XD
And you should see about getting into Western fandoms, if h/c is your thing! Stargate SG-1 is a good one.
oo thanks for the rec! i have some friends totally into Stargate. i think i've seen the movie and a few random eps here and there. i love Richard Dean Anderson, though, so *_* yeah. i'll have to look into the links, thanks!
Love the show & chars so so so much but wish there were more people writing for it. Especially writing gen, because I cannot see yaoi there, except as a joke.
lol i can KINDA see the yaoi... kinda. i dunno. i havent really looked into it much. i imagine i could make myself see it possible, but pretty much, i am muuuuch more into the gen. i agree.. i do wish more people were writing for it. especially since the anime has been around so long, yknow?
directly from the show, yeah, yaoi doesnt seem nearly as believable as just gen. especially gen done the way you do it with there this like.. fond bond between people ^_^
Glad you're liking Overboard - will be posting more of that in a bit, hope it continues to entertain!
oh, im certain it will continue to entertain. though XD you may never get around to posting it if i keep accosting you XD
OH MY THANK YOU SO MUCH!! So~~ glad you like IllMir!! As an original work, that one's really my baby, so it's great to hear someone's read it.
^____^ no prob at all! im realllly glad you posted the link at ffn. i never wouldve found it otherwise. i know what you mean about original works... it's great writing fanworks, but when people comment on original stuff, it's like "AHHH THANK YOUUU!" the characters are so great XD
, Gear...I don't know what happened, he wasn't hardly meant to be a char at all, but he's so silly, and a good whipping boy ^^
LOL yes, he DOES make a good whipping boy... a cute one too XD i loved that "my.. my... MY BRAND NEW FLATSCREEN MONITOR!! a hug would help" XDXD i could sooo see myself doing the same thing hahaha
The first outfit was Nick's clothes, hence them being rather preppy-ish.
rofl yes, Nick. i love the boy, but he DOES have preppier outfits. he looks good in them, though ^_^
dude, on a random aside, i love the random chibi-ish moments XD it's SO CUTE. like the scene where Nick first appears and is checking Seth's temp.. or the time when Seth makes sure it's ok with Nick the lie he said about Adam's presence and Nick's all "no it's fine!" XD SOOO CUTE XD
More fun to draw his present skater-gamer-punk-whatever style
its so fun ^_^ i like the style a lot.
Monica's got a much better fashion sense than me!
LOL me too! do you get her shirts from real shirts youve seen? i loved her Unregistered Mutant one... and then one ring to rule them all *_*
ohh speaking of clothes. i love the fun extra pics in the gallery ^_^ like the WK cosplay one XDXD i laughed so hard XD Nick as Yohji was hilarious.. HAHA.. and then the one where theyre all naked.. LOL ohh and the one h/c pic *_* soo pretty. and also the one where i think it's seth who has the 'yaoi boi' shirt XD i WANT THAT SHIRT XD
...ok, im done XD sorry lol just wanted to say i love how much fun you have in the extra art. ohhh theres a link down though. the fanart from jeannine doesnt exist. just in case you wanted to know ^_^