[ SECRET POST #1067 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #1067 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

101.


__________________________________________________



102.


__________________________________________________



103.


__________________________________________________



104.


__________________________________________________



105.


__________________________________________________



106.


__________________________________________________



107.


__________________________________________________



108.


__________________________________________________



109.


__________________________________________________



110.


__________________________________________________



111.


__________________________________________________



112.


__________________________________________________



113.


__________________________________________________



114.


__________________________________________________



115.


__________________________________________________



116.


__________________________________________________



117.


__________________________________________________



118.


__________________________________________________



119.


__________________________________________________



120.


__________________________________________________



121.


__________________________________________________



122.


__________________________________________________



123.


__________________________________________________



124.


__________________________________________________



125.


__________________________________________________



126.


__________________________________________________



127.


__________________________________________________



128.


__________________________________________________



129.


__________________________________________________



130.


__________________________________________________



131.


__________________________________________________



132.


__________________________________________________



133.


__________________________________________________



134.


__________________________________________________



135.


__________________________________________________



136.


__________________________________________________



137.


__________________________________________________



138.


__________________________________________________



139.


__________________________________________________



140.


__________________________________________________



141.


__________________________________________________



142.


__________________________________________________



143.


__________________________________________________



144.


__________________________________________________



145.


__________________________________________________



146.


__________________________________________________



147.


__________________________________________________



148.


__________________________________________________



149.


__________________________________________________



150.


__________________________________________________



151.


__________________________________________________



152.


__________________________________________________



153.


__________________________________________________



154.


__________________________________________________



155.


__________________________________________________



156.


__________________________________________________



157.


__________________________________________________



158.


__________________________________________________



159.


__________________________________________________



160.


__________________________________________________



161.


__________________________________________________



162.


__________________________________________________



163.


__________________________________________________



164.


__________________________________________________



165.


__________________________________________________



166.


__________________________________________________



167.


__________________________________________________



168.


__________________________________________________



169.


__________________________________________________



170.


__________________________________________________



171.


__________________________________________________



172.



Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 13 pages, 325 secrets from Secret Submission Post #153.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 2 3 - not!secrets ], [ 1 2 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 3 4 - too big ], [ 1 - repeat ], [ 1 2 3 - ships it ], [ 1 - would hit it ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[ginzai.livejournal.com]

I think fandom is more slashfriendly than it once was, but I take a high objection to your "I miss the time when things were gentastic!" somehow equating "I miss the time when there was no slash!" No slash =/= gen. Honestly.

Seems to me that there's just as much gen as there used to be, it's just that fandom has gotten larger and the slash friendly portion has grown faster than either the het or gen portions.

Pretty much any time you have two characters with chemistry, you'll find a shipping base for them. In this case, I wouldn't blame the fans nearly so much as blaming TPTB that emphasize slashtastic relationships over gen ones. In most of my fandoms, slash only becomes really popular when there's a lack of developed female characters or when they don't have chemistry with the male characters. When the ratio of male to female characters is relatively equal - and I'm referring here to the ones with growth and development - then slash doesn't seem to overwhelm the fandom. Or so it's been in my experience, anyway.

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, in my fandom there's really not that much slash at all, but there's a lot of het shipfic (non-porny, but shippy in addition to plotty) and porn. So, how would the OP feel about that?

Still, though, I have to say as much as authors pretend like they don't care whether or not anyone reads their stuff... there just isn't as much demand for gen as there is for shipfic. I've written a few gen pieces that I sweated blood and tears over, really plotty, non-shippy, non-porny, adventure stories and... crickets in my inbox. No one reads them. No one cares. So, yes, that does somewhat effect my enthusiasm for writing similar in the future. If all these gen fans would actually get out there and *support* the authors writing gen, maybe that would turn the tide. Because the slash fangirls and the smut-readers *do* really support their authors, enthusiastically.

[joereaves.livejournal.com]

While that probably doesn't help you also have to consider that writers are just 'normal people' so if the majority of readers like ship fic, it's likely that the majority of *writers* like it too, so they're going to write it.

I can write fic of any rating and I prefer long and plotty to just short porny stuff, but because I have a preference for romance in my fic even if it's only in the background, that's what I write. I'd be willing to bet most other authors feel the same way.

[poisontea.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this. To your second paragraph at the very least. I'm usually better at writing some of the male characters from my fandoms, and not the female characters as often, and mostly when I write I like... I cannot write something and make it non-romantic in some way, seriously. I try to write gen and it comes out reading as pretty gay, even if it is in a G-rated way. It makes me :| a little but I'm mostly amused by it; I would love to read genfic between characters I also ship but can't quite write it -- and, to be honest, am happy writing ship fic.

[joereaves.livejournal.com]

Apparently I put in vibes when i don't even know about it. I wrote for a virtual season and I knew there were some A/B subtext but that's OK it's there in the show and I was no more subtext-y than they are and it was still safely gen IMO. One of the comments mentioned how much they loved the C/D subtext and I was like ... I wrote C/D subtext? Rereading the allegedly gen fic I can certainly see why someone would see that (along with some other potential ships), but I didn't put it there deliberately lol.

I have issues writing female characters too, I've come to the conclusin after some experimentation - it's not me. The *writers* for most of my shows suck at female characters.

[poisontea.livejournal.com]

Oh, gosh, I usually catch when I'm doing it but now I wonder how much of my stuff has subtext that I didn't even notice. Usually it's just the case of me shipping something and apparently really preferring to write their romantic connections rather than something completely without any sort of subtext between them, and I see the way it's going while I'm writing it and go "LOL OH WELL."

Haha, that may well be the case. |D For myself, it's usually just a numbers thing. A lot of the fandoms I'm in have more male characters than female ones, and I'm not gonna be able to write about 90% of characters in any of my given fandoms, male or female. So usually I write up with mostly male characters I can write and a much smaller handful of females.

[meredith44]

Honestly? I would love to read your "really plotty, non-shippy, non-porny, adventure stories" if they were in a fandom I was even tangentially knowledgeable about. (My favorite Supernatural stories are by big_pink and are exactly the sort of gen plotty stuff I love.) Unfortunately, as someone said above, there may be just as much gen, plotty, etc. fic out there these days, but there is a lot more shippy fic. Thus, it is really, really hard for me to find the gen fic and I consequently don't comment on it to encourage writers to do more.

I know that there are LJ communities for pretty much every pairing in every fandom, but I have rarely (never?) come across a LJ community that is just for gen. The "standard" communities tend to accept everything. Thus I have to wade through a lot of posts to find any gen stories. Most of the time it's just not worth the effort to me and I end up waiting for recs from friends and/or stick to the easier to find fic about pairings that I like.

I wish it were easier to find and enjoy the type of fic you're talking about. I like ship fic, but I also like gen fic, and I miss reading it.

[mythtaken.livejournal.com]

crack_impala has a gen rec post (http://community.livejournal.com/crack_impala/tag/gen) every Monday.

[meredith44]

I know. And I already have today's post opened in a tab for reading. Thanks for taking the time to comment, though. I wish there were more resources like that for finding gen (especially good, long, plotty gen) in various fandoms. :)

[amaresu]

Have you looked at spngenlove? I rather love them.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Or in canons that have a female lead, though in those canons the other things are also true.

Anyway I think it's much more that you used to be able to just read what you wanted and avoid everything else, and on LJ fandoms are much more porous.

[lyssie.livejournal.com]

but I take a high objection to your "I miss the time when things were gentastic!" somehow equating "I miss the time when there was no slash!" No slash =/= gen.

THAT. I'm puzzled as to how everyone has been conflating that, since the original secret doesn't say so AT ALL.

As for your last paragraph, YES. For example, BSG had massive amounts of women and loads of femslash back during the first two seasons. It's only more recently that the boyslash has started to get more production (while the quality of the series' treatment of the female characters has gone downhill like whoa). The het was always swallowing everything else.

[ginzai.livejournal.com]

I think the conflation came due to responses to the comments, for the most part. And there is a school of thought that considers gen to include the exploration of any canon or almost canon pairing, with the impression I got being that such exploration was fine provided that the pairing in question was het. Dean/Anna from Supernatural would therefore be fine, since it's a het pairing and they slept together. Dean/Castiel, a slash pairing, would not be, not even if they were playing on the subtext of the long, lingering stares, complaints about violation of personal space, BFF status, and jealousy/curiosity from Castiel regarding Dean/Anna.

Which as an explanation makes no sense to me. Gen to my mind is without ANY explicit exploration of pairings. At most a background mention where it's not a main focal point of the POV character.

And yeah, I really think that slash tends to come in most when there aren't well developed women on the show. I watched BSSM for years and slash there was highly marginalized but you had plenty of het and femslash. Same thing for Buffy - F/F and F/M were both pretty popular, but it wasn't really until Spike crossed series and landed on Angel that I saw an explosion in the slashdom. Go figure - Angel season five had few well developed female characters. Just Fred and Harmony, really, if I'm remembering right. And even TPTB were calling Angel/Spike the season's true love story.