Fan fiction, slash/het and general musings about romance (long)

[pigwidgeon37]

Ebony wrote:

<snip>
>We were talking about what a mature teen/adult writer can "get away 
>with" in a fic without the audience getting squicked.  We both came 
>to the conclusion that slash writers can get away with a whole lot 
>more than your average het writer.

>I quote Al with his permission:  "I think the way straight romance 
is 
>perceived when written explicitly - people take it to be like a 
>Barbara Cartland story or a trashy romance because of long term 
>association.  Whereas gay romance is more cutting edge and 
>contemporary - a la Armistead Maupin et autres."


I think the problem is that het romance is so loaded with clichés 
because it has a history of roughly 2500 years, whereas slash is 
relatively young. People's ( and here I mean those who read a lot and 
have their own reading history, including both trash and world 
literature) perception is just sharpened by having gone through the 
whole range of possibilities the term "romance" includes.
Then there's the fact that some clichés simply don't work for slash: 
Take f.ex. the old "Strong man vs. weak woman" pattern: In a 
Sirius/Severus context you wouldn't be tempted to use it (or would 
you???), that means that nausea-inducing images like "he took her 
into his strong arms" or "he silenced her with a kiss" aren't 
possible (what a relief).
And of course, it's always a question of quality, difficult as it may 
be to define it. You gave the examples of Barb and R.J.Anderson, who 
have very different writing styles and also different ratings. Barb's 
sex scenes are more explicit, true, but to describe them, the 
words "cliché" or "trash" or "sappy" are the very last to come to my 
mind. Of course, when Harry and hermione have sex for the first time 
in "HP and the Psychic Serpent", it's steamy, but then sex *is* 
steamy (or at least it should be), there's no way past it. But the 
author doesn't use any worn-out and trampled-on clichés and that's 
why it comes over as adult, yes, but never as trashy.
Take the love letter Severus writes in "If We Survive": It's 
wonderful, it's romantic, I'd barter my own grandmother to get such a 
love letter. 
But I think that nowadays, many people have a very strange perception 
of everything that falls into the category of "romantic": On the one 
hand, they desperately want it, as much as they can get, but on the 
other, they're so afraid of being regarded as uncool or hopelessly 
immature, that they push it away. 

Same goes (IMHO) for more or less explicit sex scenes: I really don't 
buy that, once people see "SLASH, rated NC-17" written in big, fat 
letters at the beginning of a story, they don't know what expects 
them (I myself being the only exception, for I'm no native speaker 
and simply didn't know what "slash" meant- well, I found out soon 
enough and liked it a lot). If they read it all the same and 
afterwards give the author a good bashing, they're not being honest 
with themselves. They punish the author because they feel guilty of 
having secretly enjoyed what they read.  

Of course, some of the texts are awful, but then they are always good 
for a laugh: yesterday, I skimmed through ffnet and found a fanfic- 
of course I won't give neither author nor title, above all because I 
forgot them- containing the memorable words "the bottle had gone limp 
in his hand". I loved it. ( and it was not a rhetoric figure, that 
was clearly visible from the rest). But the mere existence of badly 
written texts doesn't jeopardize the genre per se, as the existence 
of bad Italian restaurants doesn't mean automatically that all 
Italian restaurants and Italian cuisine are trash: You'll just be a 
little more prudent in your choice of restaurants. You might also 
choose never to visit an Italian restaurant again, but then you'll 
deprive yourself of a lot of pleasure.

Sorry this got so long, hope it's more or less understandable- but 
what can you expect at 6 a.m.?

Susanna/pigwidgeon37