Why so little genfic?

[author_by_night]

Disclaimer: Entry inspired by a secret on the fandomsecrets community.

Something I've noticed in almost all of the fandoms I'm in or know of -  Heroes, Harry Potter, Wicked the book, Wicked the musical, Rent, Pirates of the Carribean, Supernatural - is that there's a huge emphasis on romance. Actually, often smutty romance, at  that. Meanwhile, in all of those fandoms, save Pirates of the Carribean, the themes of friendship and/or family seem just as important, but they are not given the same amount of screentime. Well, I don't really know if that's the case with Supernatural, but gazing through the comms, it certainly seems to be the case. Also admittedly, Rent is clearly about romantic love, but there's still themes of friendship there too. (Mimi and Angel, Joanne and Mark - a friendship that probably wouldn't normally happen, all things considered - and Mark and Roger.)

I don't have a problem with people's shipping preferences - to each his/her own, right? If you want to write Petrellicest or Wincest, more power to you. Same with if you want to ship Remus/Sirius ( a ship I can see on some level anyway), Harry/Hermione, or Will/Jack. 

But I have  a general question - why is it that in these fandoms, non-romantic relationships, canon or not, do not generally get equal writing time? Even I have to admit that my entrance into the HP fandom came with musings about whether or not it'd be Harry/Hermione or Hermione/Ron, if Remus/Sirius was plausible, etc. I only became a genfic person later on. And even then, I still shipped Remus/Tonks (which wasn't canon at the time) and Ron/Hermione. 

So what is it about romance and smutfics that gains so much more popularity, and why do people see the need to put canon friends and siblings in romantic and/or smutty situations?

Discuss. :)

Comments

[gileonnen.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I think it's not that smutfics are more popular--it's just that they're more common. Some of my most popular stories (Mysticism, Laws of Probability, Bureau of Loopholes, The Last Supper) have been gen, while my fade-to-black romance and my single out-and-out smut have been either unpopular or middling-popular. (Admittedly, when I was trying to re-enter the Pirates fandom with genfic, things were a little shakier--I got as many reads, judging by the number of times I saw them get bookmarked, but I got fewer reviews.)

As to why smutfic is so popularly written, which I think is your main quandary--as opposed to whether or not smutfic is more popularly reviewed--I suspect it has something to do with the recreational nature of the fanfic endeavor. People who are writing and reading fanfiction are not doing it for profit, and in fact, they're afraid of being sued if they tried. This puts a heavy limit on the potential readership, but it simultaneously removes the necessity of creating a 'mainstream' work of fiction. One might just as well ask why fanfiction lends itself so much to vignettes as opposed to novel-length fics; it's because production of the work is meant as much to please the author as to please the audience--if not more. Fanfic writers, not bound down by what sort of story 'sells,' are free to write out-and-out kinky smut in a way that they never could were they writing for the mainstream media; they are free to write a drabble, if a drabble's all they feel like writing. I suspect that we see so very much smut here because people who write fanfiction for recreational purposes simply enjoy writing it, or enjoy the idea of writing it, and have no real reason not to. Likewise, people who enjoy reading smutfic do so not because they actively prefer it to gen (we've noted above that this isn't necessarily the case), but because they are likewise experiencing liberation from the gen of the mainstream media. They can't get this kind of eloquent, character-driven smut anywhere else, and so they're pleased to find it here.

Put shortly, therefore, fanfiction allows people to both produce and consume unconventional works suited to non-mainstream tastes. Smutfics are less like mainstream than other fics, catering to the desires of readers and writers alike, and so they're fanfic's 'special province,' in a way.

And proportionately, people probably have dirtier minds than you do, miss. I'm sorry; that's just how it is. =(

[author-by-night.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, I remember your old fics.
But - and I hope you don't mind me
saying this - you wrote them a very
long time ago, and since then, I think fandom has changed in that respect. Of course, that could just be me. I didn't even know what LJ was back then, and I really only left ff.n for better other sites when it turned into something the cat brought in and all the authors I read fled for their lives, if they already
hadn't. ;) But my point is, I think fandom is a lot more focused on romance and smut than it was in, say, 2002.

[gileonnen.livejournal.com]

But Mysticism and Laws of Probability were more recent--2003-04-ish, if I recall correctly, and they were all on LJ. And my still more recent (2006) gen fics, also on LJ, received approximately the same number of favorites/bookmarks/reviews. I'm not sure you're observing a fandom culture change, and I'm also unsure that you're witnessing a change at all. I came into fandom already shell-shocked by how much smut I'd found; the quantity seems to me to be proportionately the same.

[author-by-night.livejournal.com]

Probably just has to do with where in fandom I've been, then. :)

[rahirah]

(here from metafandom)

I've been in fandom since the early 80s, and trust me, smut has always been with us. It's just that in the Olden Days, it was sold in adult-only fanzines that you had to know the secret password to get hold of. And that's just the het smut; to find the slash or the kinky stuff you had to really prove you were trustworthy to be admitted into the inner circle.

And it does vary from fandom to fandom. ElfQuest fandom, where I hung out for a long time, was very gen-oriented. But even there, the most common type of story for first-time writers to attempt was the Recognition story (basically this telepathic mate-or-die thing.)

I don't think a good romance or smutfic is easier to write than a good genfic, but they're certainly easier to plot. And plot is something that a lot of fan writers are afraid of tackling, or don't quite know how to handle. With romance, it's all laid out for you: A meets B, A loses B, A gets B back, fade to black (or to smut.) Which is also a large part of the reason why romance is so popular, in mainstream publishing as well as fanfic: it's a comfort read.

That said, I've also found that well-done gen, or romances with strong gen subplots, or gen with strong romance subplots, are very popular with readers. I get as much feedback (sometimes more) for my adventure or comedy fics as I do for my romances.

[purple-ladybug1.livejournal.com]

This is why I read comments before replying. Your second paragraph more eloquently states my opinion on the matter. In fandom we can indulge in what we cannot read or write in RL.

And as someone else stated, we enjoy what is different than our RLs. I enjoy genfic, but I'm living a genfic, so there's only so much I care to read. On the other hand, I'm part of this tiny population of people saving themselves for marriage, so I enjoy smutfic because it's not gonna happen in RL for another three to eight years (I hope I get married by then...)