1) Heterosexual romance/erotica and gay fiction/erotica are publishing categories. Gen isn't. People don't go into bookstores and think, "I'll pick up the latest gen novel." So they don't tend to think in those terms in fandom.
2) There's a lotlotlot of what we would call gen in the literary/media world. There's less of what we would call het. There's very little indeed of what we could slash, at least in terms of the types of stories that are popular with slashers. So people are writing the types of stories they can't get enough of from the pro writers.
3) Nobody loves gen. *Sniff*. Honestly, it discourages the heck out of me, because I'm a friendship fiction writer (as well as a slash writer), and to me friendship is just as exciting a topic as romance, but I just can't persuade my slasher friends in the fanfic world to get as excited about friendship fiction as I am.
I did have the major triumph of writing a friendship story that the editor of a slash zine liked so much that she promptly changed her submission guidelines to accept friendship fiction. So there's hope.
Reasons mentioned above that I don't think apply to the type of genfic I write:
1) "It's too hard to plot." No, it isn't. "A meets B, A loses B, A gets B back" is a typical friendship plot.
2) "It's not about pair-bonding between two characters, which is what fans look for in fanfic." Yes, it is. Friendship fiction can be a pair-bonding story; it just doesn't involve sexual attraction. There are blood brother stories, there are protagonist-and-sidekick stories, there are romantic friendship stories, and if anyone doesn't believe that these are pair bondings, they should go look at the canon that's being slashed.
Holmes and Watson are pair-bonded, no question about it. It's precisely because they are that slashers find it so exciting to explore what would happen if the two were sexually attracted to each other. So why not take a couple of characters who aren't pair-bonded in the original - say, two characters who have casual sex together but don't have deep feelings for each other - and explore what would happen if they ended up in a deep, deep friendship?
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2007-07-01 06:09 pm (UTC)1) Heterosexual romance/erotica and gay fiction/erotica are publishing categories. Gen isn't. People don't go into bookstores and think, "I'll pick up the latest gen novel." So they don't tend to think in those terms in fandom.
2) There's a lotlotlot of what we would call gen in the literary/media world. There's less of what we would call het. There's very little indeed of what we could slash, at least in terms of the types of stories that are popular with slashers. So people are writing the types of stories they can't get enough of from the pro writers.
3) Nobody loves gen. *Sniff*. Honestly, it discourages the heck out of me, because I'm a friendship fiction writer (as well as a slash writer), and to me friendship is just as exciting a topic as romance, but I just can't persuade my slasher friends in the fanfic world to get as excited about friendship fiction as I am.
I did have the major triumph of writing a friendship story that the editor of a slash zine liked so much that she promptly changed her submission guidelines to accept friendship fiction. So there's hope.
Reasons mentioned above that I don't think apply to the type of genfic I write:
1) "It's too hard to plot." No, it isn't. "A meets B, A loses B, A gets B back" is a typical friendship plot.
2) "It's not about pair-bonding between two characters, which is what fans look for in fanfic." Yes, it is. Friendship fiction can be a pair-bonding story; it just doesn't involve sexual attraction. There are blood brother stories, there are protagonist-and-sidekick stories, there are romantic friendship stories, and if anyone doesn't believe that these are pair bondings, they should go look at the canon that's being slashed.
Holmes and Watson are pair-bonded, no question about it. It's precisely because they are that slashers find it so exciting to explore what would happen if the two were sexually attracted to each other. So why not take a couple of characters who aren't pair-bonded in the original - say, two characters who have casual sex together but don't have deep feelings for each other - and explore what would happen if they ended up in a deep, deep friendship?