Thank you for the explanation -- and, for my part, I really do want to apologize for my snappiness and intolerance in the comment you're replying to. I have no right at all to criticize how other people fan, and I really do co-exist happily with slash/ship, most of the time (and I do often enjoy reading and writing it).
And let me preface the following by saying that I know human relationships are so complex they can't be easily packaged into neat categories, even in fiction -- and some of the slash authors I most enjoy reading (like auburnnothenna) are those whose stories capture that blurring and shifting of categories, the ambiguity of life.
But having said that, the real crux of the problem is that "friendship" and "romantic love" exist in my head in separate boxes -- not to the extent that I think one relationship can't exhibit both, but the specific things about friendship that make me fan on it are more or less mutually exclusive with sexual love and the particular set of societal and personal expectations and prejudices that go along with it.
If that makes any sense.
I guess it's hard for me to conceive of a friendship staying the same once it become sexual, and the changes that tend to happen are ones that lead it away from the aspects that drew me to it in the first place. It doesn't have to go that way, but I am inclined to think that for it not to do that would be unusual enough that it would need to be dealt with in the story. And, again, this can be done; it's just that the majority of slash doesn't deal with the negotiation of those sorts of details. When the curtain goes down on "... and then they consummated the relationship", every reader's brain fills in the future details, which is great if you believe in happily ever afters, but I don't. My brain (see one of the comments above for a capsule history of my family that probably explains a lot of my negativity towards sexual relationships) fills in the blanks in a fairly negative way. I am not saying that I'm so far gone as to believe that merely getting involved in a sexual relationship is suddenly going to turn John into an abusive alcoholic. *g* But because my view of sex and romance is pretty dark, or at best kind of ambiguous, I think that I need to see John and Rodney negotiating the troubled waters of a relationship rather than assuming everything will be hunky-dory after the first sex act and they'll still be playing with remote-control cars and relating to everyone around them, and each other, the same way they always have.
The first five years or so of my relationship with my husband were one problem and fight and negotiation after another -- figuring out how to deal with jealousy, with mutually incompatible future goals, with differing opinions on religion and politics and children and sex. All this stuff never seemed too important before we were in a committed relationship, but suddenly took on huge significance when we tied our futures together. Because that's my experience, and many people in my family have had much worse experiences as the first blush of love faded and they figured out who and what they were married to, my default assumption is that adding sex and commitment to the mix will uproot and distort and change the friendship. No matter how well you think you know somebody, there's always that moment when you realize that you're going to have to come up with a compromise on [x] mutually incompatible belief and suddenly you never want to speak to this idiot who holds this stupid belief that you're going to have to bend and accommodate.
I actually like watching fictional relationships go through that process, and grow and change over time; I tend to gravitate towards slash that deals with precisely this sort of thing. But in the process, things will be gained and lost; what they end up with is not what they started with in the beginning.
Which brings me to part 2, because I can't squeeze into one comment!
no subject
And let me preface the following by saying that I know human relationships are so complex they can't be easily packaged into neat categories, even in fiction -- and some of the slash authors I most enjoy reading (like
But having said that, the real crux of the problem is that "friendship" and "romantic love" exist in my head in separate boxes -- not to the extent that I think one relationship can't exhibit both, but the specific things about friendship that make me fan on it are more or less mutually exclusive with sexual love and the particular set of societal and personal expectations and prejudices that go along with it.
If that makes any sense.
I guess it's hard for me to conceive of a friendship staying the same once it become sexual, and the changes that tend to happen are ones that lead it away from the aspects that drew me to it in the first place. It doesn't have to go that way, but I am inclined to think that for it not to do that would be unusual enough that it would need to be dealt with in the story. And, again, this can be done; it's just that the majority of slash doesn't deal with the negotiation of those sorts of details. When the curtain goes down on "... and then they consummated the relationship", every reader's brain fills in the future details, which is great if you believe in happily ever afters, but I don't. My brain (see one of the comments above for a capsule history of my family that probably explains a lot of my negativity towards sexual relationships) fills in the blanks in a fairly negative way. I am not saying that I'm so far gone as to believe that merely getting involved in a sexual relationship is suddenly going to turn John into an abusive alcoholic. *g* But because my view of sex and romance is pretty dark, or at best kind of ambiguous, I think that I need to see John and Rodney negotiating the troubled waters of a relationship rather than assuming everything will be hunky-dory after the first sex act and they'll still be playing with remote-control cars and relating to everyone around them, and each other, the same way they always have.
The first five years or so of my relationship with my husband were one problem and fight and negotiation after another -- figuring out how to deal with jealousy, with mutually incompatible future goals, with differing opinions on religion and politics and children and sex. All this stuff never seemed too important before we were in a committed relationship, but suddenly took on huge significance when we tied our futures together. Because that's my experience, and many people in my family have had much worse experiences as the first blush of love faded and they figured out who and what they were married to, my default assumption is that adding sex and commitment to the mix will uproot and distort and change the friendship. No matter how well you think you know somebody, there's always that moment when you realize that you're going to have to come up with a compromise on [x] mutually incompatible belief and suddenly you never want to speak to this idiot who holds this stupid belief that you're going to have to bend and accommodate.
I actually like watching fictional relationships go through that process, and grow and change over time; I tend to gravitate towards slash that deals with precisely this sort of thing. But in the process, things will be gained and lost; what they end up with is not what they started with in the beginning.
Which brings me to part 2, because I can't squeeze into one comment!