Stray thoughts of the evening

[bluedalahorse]

Here are my stray thoughts, in a bulleted list:

•  I think I’d like to do more beta reading for fanfiction. Not spelling and grammar check (I’m bad at those) but helping people with story structure and development. I love writing my own stories but it’s just as magical to play midwife to someone else’s. Maybe this is something I can seek out more.
• I have this half-formed post in the back of my head about how it feels like meta in fandom used to be something that fed into the creative process, but now it doesn’t feel like that as much anymore. Maybe I’ll find the words for it and maybe I won’t.
• I have entirely too many grades to do over the next 72 hours.
• It is better to be Here than There, but nonetheless, missing people sucks. This could be a theme of multiple chapters of my life.
• Missing people sucks but eggplant and lebne spread on rice cakes doesn’t. At least there’s eggplant and lebne spread.

Good night, Dreamwidth. Sleep well!

Comments

[pepperbar]

I would definitely be interested in your thoughts on meta and how it does or doesn't breed creativity, if you ever get the spoons to articulate them!

[bluedalahorse]

Hello, fellow refugee from the rest of the internet! Nice to meet you. I’d be happy to share some of my thoughts, especially since I am in Full Procrastination Mode right now and in denial about going back to work on Tuesday. Apologies if this gets rambly or personal.

So I feel like my best experiences with meta have involved fans being willing to look at things with a critical eye, but also being willing to look at meta as a generative exercise that kind of… encourages the creation of more fanwork and discussion. For instance, I remember getting pulled into the feminist side of superhero comics fandom on livejournal around the time that comics was still dominated by older white fanboy types, and boy did we end up exploring gender in our fics and meta.

I also remember the earliest days of BBC Sherlock fandom on tumblr (yes, I know, and in my defense I bailed before the conspiracy theory stuff took over) and somehow I found a group of people that just kind of… liked to go deep and get excited about writing in general, not just sticking with tropes and one pairing? Like, a lot of us had gotten initially pulled in by Johnlock, but the discussions we were having led people to be like “ah, what the hell, I’ll write sherlolly this week, let’s try it out, so and so’s post about them got my brain turning” or “what if I write a fic subverting the Hurt/Comfort trope” and there was a lot of like. Exploration of canon and fanon and such. And experimentation. I remember one particularly memorable week or two where people got talking about how sex gets written, and how so often there’s a “script” where everything’s supposed to be building to penetration and climax. So lots of people in our group decided they’d challenge themselves to write sex scenes, slash and het and femmeslash, that didn’t follow the standard script. We were having such good discussions and so much fun! I was too shy to write something like that then, but over the last few years I’ve been writing a longfic with sex scenes, and to this day I think about how to play with and subvert “scripts” when it comes to sex and romance.

Meanwhile, my worst experiences with meta and analysis… so I could talk generally about social policing and purity culture and flattening of story/characters in fandom spaces, but I feel like that debate is often fraught, and a specific example might make my point better.

Around 2021 I got into a show on Netflix that has some pretty complex characterization—and ultimately it’s a show that deals with cycles of trauma and abuse, and coming of age, and how people break free of the institutions that are holding them back. (This is, as it happens, extremely not what the show is advertised to be about, and marketers would like you to believe it is an angsty queer teen romance. Which it also is, but… with that other stuff thrown in there.) I would also say that this is a show where you are asked to understand all the characters, even when their actions disgust or upset you. Nor does the show rely on the legal system or traditional modes of authority for catharsis.

I was not present in the online fandom for first year or so of loving this show, and having a lot of great discussions with my friend heliza24, which then ended up fueling a longfic that we are still writing. We decided to join a portion of the online fandom after the second season aired to see if we could make friends and talk more to our readers.

So, to be clear, there are some people with some awesome thoughts in this fandom, and there were still great discussions to be had and friendships to be made. But I would say the prevailing tendency on the particular platform we were on was to like… use analysis to rank the characters in order from most to least virtuous, and always interpret the “good” characters as doing the right things, and always interpret the “evil” characters as doing the wrong things. Moreover, the main pairing of the show was talked about by a lot of fans in superlative, glowing terms, as a model love story everyone should aspire to, even if the pairing is interesting because both of the people involved in it are imperfect and have stuff to deal with. Often people would not acknowledge the internal conflicts between these characters, and only saw them as unfairly persecuted by external forces. And when you tried to push back at that current in the analysis, people always pushed back at you and tried to flatten and smooth the characters over again. People also weren’t as receptive to other pairings or characters, or other parts of the story. It wasn’t everyone in the fandom, but it was enough people, and it made it a challenging environment for those of us who wanted to explore things beyond an idealized version of this main pairing.

Anyway that’s kind of a tl;dr story but… I don’t love it when meta is there to flatten characters into who is good and who is evil (I cannot stress enough how much this show wasn’t about good and evil) and which pairings are the most perfect and worthy of discussion, and what love stories are “moral” to write about and which aren’t. Because it just creates an environment where like… people feel like they have fewer options for what to explore. I saw a lot of instances of people who wrote rarepairs getting discouraged to finish fics, and people wanting to say “good” things about the “bad” characters but only being able to say so in secret discord messages.

(But maybe I’m just bitter because my main ship consisted of the two characters most people deemed the most evil in the show. Who knows.)

I might have some smarter thoughts about this later. But feel free to respond to any, all, or none of it! I hope you’re having a good day.

[pepperbar]

Ohh wow, this is great. I'm so glad I caught you at just the right time for this to come out.

I'm right there with you on how the meta discourse has definitely become more focused on . . . I dunno what to call it, moral absolutism?

I love those morally grey characters. I love talking about how they became 'evil' and whether or not I can understand the emotional logic that led them down their path of darkness.

I also love leaning into the darkside of a character. I mean, you can't beat a good redemption arc, but one of my favourite things I've ever written was eight chapters of 'this canon character is not a good person in canon and he has absolutely been manipulating this other canon character the whole time' and not justifying it or redeeming it but just letting it be the creepy behaviour that it was but all from the creepy POV, where he justifies it to himself in terms of ends/means, not morality. Good characterization isn't about being morally good, it's about being interesting and consistent, and maybe taking things to a logical conclusion that canon is afraid to visit.

Tangent: There's a movie in which two characters, a pair of siblings, went through the exact same traumatic event as children and had diametrically opposed reactions to it, to the point that one of the siblings is the out-and-out villain of the piece. It's very 'there but for the grace of god' and although I'm not *in* that fandom I can very much imagine the discourse of good and bad happening around those two characters, even though both reactions make perfect sense to me as a consumer of the media.

I'm not a fan of the way fandom today is turning into an echo chamber either, 'my ship is the One True Ship and I don't even want to discuss what else might be interesting or supported by other subtext or even just hotter for a brief second'.

I do very much like the idea of challenging oneself to deliberately subvert a trope - writing what you love is like making comfort food, but it's good to try some other cuisine once in a while, right? (currently my challenge to myself on one of my long-fics is to write a classic harlequin romance, but hey, a challenge is a challenge).

All of which is my very long-winded way of saying thank you for your insights, and I'd love to talk more.

[bluedalahorse]

Yeah, moral absolutism is definitely a phrase we can use! I think I’ve heard some people talk about moral purity or purity culture, but I think people hear the word “purity” and end up having Strong Feelings about it and it inflames the discussion more instead of getting anywhere. It’s frustrating.

As it happens, I’m currently in an MFA program in writing for children and young adults, and this whole issue of like… character morality, and how people respond to it, has played a big role in my graduate research. I’ve made the argument that teens need messy and imperfect characters in their fiction, and that this is important because teens know the world is complex and will increasingly call bullshit on worldbuilding or characters who are too morally clean.

Incidentally, my research has encouraged me to think not just about how to write complex villains who still do bad stuff, but also about what steps the narrative takes to “punish” a villain or antagonist and bring the reader catharsis. I’ve also thought about the other end of the spectrum, and how we can reinvent the redemption arc for our current time period.

In a way I’m in an opposite place than you, because I think a lot of my fanfic writing focuses on two morally dubious teenagers (one being much more morally dubious than the other, but both of them being incredibly complex, and neither of them being 100% villains because the show is not a show with polarized heroes and villains) and how to pull them out of the mess that they’re in. So I guess I’m more on the “redemption arc” side of things, which means pushing against the current of my fandom, a bit.

The thing is, it’s not so much that my fandom wants to write my faves as villains, it’s that they want to write them as flattened in some way. Whether that means “redeeming” one character by ignoring her complexity and infantilizing her and having her ignore her own needs, or “villainizing” the other by making him just such an obvious villain he might be twirling a black cloak in an 1800s melodrama, tying helpless maidens to train tracks. So I think you and I are aligned in that we just want to write characters for their complexity, and dive deep into their motivations and such. I get the impression that people in my fandom find flattening characters as somehow… emotionally safer or something… but ugh. It’s so boring actually!

I love the sound of that sibling story. Always a great way to see parallel narratives!

Ugh, One True Ships and echo chambers. I’ve always been too much of a multishipper for that! And writing a classic Harlequin romance sounds like fun.

I think one thing I wish from fandom today is like… just an acknowledgement that we all have different sources of fun. For some people that might be writing evil characters. For some of us that’s writing our favorite tropes, but some of us are mostly here to turn tropes upside down. There can be lots of different ways of enjoying oneself in writing and I wish the nature of fandom discourse didn’t always have so many people (or at least myself) on the defensive about what I like.