I think that’s why we’re seeing so much fragmentation in this discussion, because a lot of people see slash as “our space” in a very unique way, and having that challenged by the people who in some ways forced us out of “their space” is not fun, even if the criticism is potentially valid. $0.02

http://linkspam.dreamwidth.org/21188.html

Popular het fandoms/couples, from The X-Files to Twilight, tend to attract a lot of fans who are younger or newer to fandom or less invested in it as part of their identity. Because it’s more likely to be about a relationship that’s explicitly romantic to begin with, you can wind up pulling in a lot more fans, who write a lot more fic, a lot of which is bad, just by the law of averages. There’s no sense that by writing Bella/Edward, you’re joining or participating in ‘het fandom’ or that you necessarily have anything in common with someone writing Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley, except that you both like to write. When you lose interest in Twilight, you may just wander right on out again.

With slash, there’s more of a sense that what people are doing is non-mainstream and that it may look weird or ridiculous to heteronormative eyes, which I think fosters stronger community bonds. For a lot of people, it’s an expression of their sexuality or identity. Fans often think of themselves as slashers and feel like they belong to a larger slash fandom, above and beyond whatever canon or pairing they’re into at the moment. Most of the fans I know who were into slash 10 years ago are still into slash, just in a different fandom; most (but not all) of the fans I know who were into het 10 years ago drifted away when their primary fandom became less active.

Now these are all horrible anecdotal generalizations – I found fandom via mainstream het and I’m still here, and plenty of people are interested in both. But I think to some extent, the perception of the two communities is affected by their different levels of cohesion and the way they do or don’t retain the same people, who become recognizable names and thus increase the perceived cachet of the community.

(I’ll stop before I start illustrating weak vs. strong fannish bonds in Photoshop.)

Another good series is “Twelve Kingdoms” by Fuyumi Ono. It’s a fantasy set in a world where, basically, both men’s options and women’s options are in some ways heavily restricted. However, options are restricted by role (i.e. a king can be either female or male, but the same restrictions apply). The restrictions that the characters accept as normal bug me, but the author is pretty even-handed in doling them out.

For that particular problem, I think the fanfic authors are actually writing about the more interesting characters, and they just happen to be male more often than not. (For another angle on that, consider all of the mpreg, or male pregnancy, stories. Why write male characters pregnant? Couldn’t it be because the male characters are being used as stand-ins for female fans who can’t equate themselves with patheticly nondescript female characters?)

Wait, that’s not misogyny how? I can see dropping the internalized part, but let’s put the blame right smack dab on the patriarchy on that one.

If we’re talking Anime I would second the Seiri No Moribito, the bits I’ve seen anyway, as an awesome female lead. Dennō Coil is another really good one with Amasawa being this complete kick ass hacker. Even Aoi Hana, a yuri anime based off of the manga, was all women character full of personality even if the whole show was ridiculously sweet.

X-Files, my first fandom of choice, was rather the same. There is pretty much precisely one interesting female character, so doing femslash within the existing character set is really a stretch.

I think the ‘lambdafail’ debate is a little silly – I mean, aside from the degeneration into the question of whether straight women writing m/m erotica/slash is objectifying/appropriating/tokenising/fetishising (and whether it’s a problem if it is, necessarily), the actual seed of the problem doesn’t seem to me to be anything to do with what the award itself does.

Namely, do they say anywhere that all women writing m/m fiction are disqualified, or just straight women? One of these things is not like the other. I can’t find it saying anywhere on the site that women writing m/m fiction are no longer able to qualify, only that the writing should be queer, and the writer also needs to self-identify as queer – they even specifically say that your self-identification is what they go on, not some arbitrary concept – but I can’t see where it says that you must be writing the ‘same type of queer’ as you are personally in your fiction or whatever…

I wonder if we’d be having this debate if they were getting submissions from straight dudes writing books with chicks together in them. Oh John Ringo no.

I haven’t read around this much yet, so I realise I may be repeating something someone else has said/asked/answered/addressed elsewhere, sorry if I am, but this was my instant thought.