v-s.net v0.6

Wednesday, 12:14 pm in Entertainment

I decided yesterday that my bugbear in fanfic is a simple thing. There are a lot of things that I don’t like – everything from bad writing to RPS – but there’s only one thing that really gets my back up enough for me to bother to sit down and write a vehement log post about it. It’s a common beast, popping up in every fandom and on even ship, in badfic and in good. A simple thing, yet one so fundamentally disbelief-shattering that once I find it I can’t help my fingers twitching over Ctrl+W. What’s this scourge, you wonder? This destroyer of fic? This apocalypse of disbelief?

Milky Romantic Nonsense.

If you’ve read fic, you know what I’m talking about. It’s that part of the story – usually halfway through or just before the end – when the UST has been resolved and the obligatory sex scene is looming or just passed. When our two protagonists are gazing dreamily into each others’ eyes and the curtains are about to go down on a lifetime of shippy bliss and then, quite suddenly, it hits.

Milky Romantic Monsense.

Don’t get me wrong; I loves me a good romance fic. I devour sap like some starving, sap-eating beast. But that’s not what I’m talking about. A fic can be romantic and touching without MRN and really, it’s all down to the delivery. Because MRN is spoken – it’s a symptom of dialogue (albeit occasionally internal dialogue) – and it only affects a very specific sub-set of characters.

It’s not just about the words. It’s not just about loudly and frequently profession undying love or making queasy statements about how Character X has “always loved” Character Y but been too terrified to admit it. You can do all those things, and on some characters that’s completely, well, in-character. But on others it isn’t, and there always seems to be an inverse ratio, here; the less likely a character is to start sprouting MRN in canon, the more likely they are to do it in fic.

I was thinking about this when I came to the realisation that MRN isn’t simply a symptom of bad writing. It’s a product of the whole slash (fandom?) aesthetic. Even when MRN doesn’t crop up, the resulting scenarios are quite often functionally similar; boy meets boy, boy secretly lusts after boy, boy is convinced some personality trait of his makes him unlovable and angsts about it, boy discovers boy does love him after all, everyone lives happily ever after. It’s only the competence of the execution that softens the realisation. It’s so prevalent and so under-the-radar that I didn’t even consciously realise it until I read this post the other day. In a nutshell, giandujakiss is talking about the difference between fanfic romance and mainstream romance. Fanfic, she says – whether het or slash – fetishises not only the power of the sexually ‘submissive’ partner but the whole concept of male vulnerability.

When you think about it like that, the distinction is so obvious.

Don’t take my word for it? Go back and re-read almost any fanfic and I swear to you this will be true to the point that the exceptions to it only emphasise the rule. It’s the whole point of UST, which is often the most emphasised element of fic, even over and above the resolution (the Japanese are the most acutely aware of this, which is why most shoujo stories end when the hookup finally happens).

And this is where we get back to MRN, because the more controlled and powerful a (usually male) character is, the more enjoyment is derived from displaying his inner vulnerabilities. Most of these stories unfold by having that character initially regard his affections for another as a ‘weakness’; at the end of the story the perception morphs into a realisation that this emotional vulnerability is actually a strength when shared with the object of his reciprocal desire. This might not be a particularly revolutionary revelation apart from this one statement:

Fandom is a female space.

That’s not to say there are no guys in fandom, only that the momentum behind the fen is female-driven. Most of the authors, artists and creators are women and they produce content for female audiences. The reviewers are women. The editors are women. The fanzine publishers are – you guessed it – women. More than that, for a lot of women the fandom is their ‘safe place’; somewhere they can express themselves without fear of (male) ridicule. Of being branded a freak or a slut. And maybe that’s why so much of the fen revolves around sex and relationships, because there are so few places where women can discuss these issues without male interference. The guys that are around learn not to ridicule their female fellows for their desires, and in return they’re usually tolerated.

So, I ask myself, what makes the fen’s aesthetic different from that of other ‘female spaces’ like, say, your aforementioned romance novels or Dolly magazine? Interesting question, not sure if I have a decent answer for it other than a gut feeling (after all, I read one and not the other and there’s gotta be a reason for that). Maybe it’s that ‘traditional’ female spaces in literature are those which have been given to us by men; they’re dictated by what men ‘expect’ us to like, the bits men don’t want (q.v. non-existence of a gaming magazine targeted at women, for example). The fen is different because it steals something from a male-dominated space and remakes it in a female image. It’s the thrill of, “If we ruled the world, this is how it would be.”

And it’s interesting that a genre that is almost universally defined by its rejection of male expectations for women has essentially produced from itself a female expectation of men. Or at least a model of masculinity that is idealised by women, and it’s a glass darkly compared to the male-idealised model of the same thing; prizing emotional and physical strength, independence, desire, vulnerability and confidence. It’s assertive… but it’s not aggressive.

Because my challenge for the month is to relate everything back to Superman, I’m going to do that here. Remember when Superman Returns came out and there was that kerfuffle when Bryan Singer made some comment about the titular character being seen through the eyes of a woman? I always found this comment extremely odd, and more than a little bit patronizing. Sure, the film was packed with mancandy but anyone who thinks this is the exclusive product of a gay director obviously hasn’t read the comics recently. No matter what angle I look at the Superman-Lois-Clark non-euclidean love triangle from, there’s no way I can interpret this as being “from a woman’s perspective” and, honestly, the main reason why I – and a lot of female fen – find the whole relationship distasteful is because it paints women in such a bad light. It reminds me of that 70’s Superman story where said character is under the impression that he has to chose one persona to live in. He spends a week as “only Superman” and a week as “only Clark” in order to sort the problem out; during Clarkweek, he drops his Clark Kenting¹ and, well, quite frankly acts like a dick. The net result of this is that Lois is infatuated, as expressed by her sudden desire to drop around randomly and cook him dinner. Not only does this story, I think, pretty much encapsulate everything I don’t like about ‘traditional’ Clois but quite frankly scares me because, obviously, there are men out there who think that this is the kind of behavior that women find appealing.

And this is where the fen is interesting, because the male characterisations it produces – ones we assume by default are appealing to women because that’s who they’re both by and for – are worlds away from this. Sure, we’re not in the 1970’s any more but I’m not at all convinced that – middle-class intellectuals aside – common perceptions of masculinity, and therefore by default what women find desirable, have moved on very much.

So this is what the fen being a ‘female space’ means to me. The ubiquitous nature of MRN is nothing more than a backlash against ‘manly man’ stereotypes which women find inadequate. And while I’d never be so hypocritical to assert that men should be validating their identities based on female expectations any more than the reverse should be true…

It’s still an interesting observation.

1. This is back in the days where Superman is assumed to be the ‘real’ personality and Clark is a disguise. How vogue this interpretation is at any one time tends to depend on the author, and is currently somewhat out of fashion (or at least de-emphasised, since Lois and Clark have been married in the comics since the 90s). ^

• Tags » acafen, everything in life relates to superman, fandom, fanfic