Meta: Girlslash OTPs
May. 24th, 2008 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alixtiiOkay, I'm still thinking about ![[livejournal.com profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
femslash08 and related topics. One of the arguments I've made more than once in this journal is that femslash is more different than m/m slash than one might at first think, they each have their own histories (each within the greater history of media fandom, of course), tropes, conventions, and expectations. Some of these are fairly easy to make like the different role of genderswap or mpreg vs. fpreg. One "difference" that has never been quite so easy to demonstrate, however, has been my claim that femslash fandom is less OTP-oriented than m/m slash fandom. To me, girlslash is something one finds hiding in the interstices of a canon--and indeed, it's one of the things I really love about it. We manage to find the really interesting points of connection in canon, those that would be impossible to find if we weren't already actively searching, in a type of search which just isn't necessary if one is interested in male characters.
The exceptions are obvious: Law and Order, Xena: Warrior Princess, Wicked (although the RPF wing of such isn't nearly as OTP-oriented as it once was, as more and more actors take over the roles of Galinda and Elphaba), possibly Star Trek: Voyager. I always think of these fandoms being set up "like boyslash fandoms"; think of the way Xena, textually speaking, parallels a Starsky&Hutch or Due South--or, more obviously in its format. (People sometimes want to add BtVS, with Buffy/Faith, to the list of femslash OTPS, but I don't buy it--in my experience, Buffy femslash fandom embraces rarepairs like an embracing thing embraces an embraced thing with a vengeance.)
And there's a spattering of smaller (Yuletide-sized, but showing up onfemslash_today with fair consistency nonetheless), mostly film, fandoms where activity, such as it is, is almost exclusively centered around an OTP: Devil Wears Prada, Ice Princess, D.E.B.S.
This last one has always astounded me as to just how little is written outside the pairing of Amy/Lucy. How is it that in a canon with rampant general female homosociality like D.E.B.S. has that general homosociality has so largely been ignored in favor of the single canonical OTP? Why are such wonderful female characters as the other D.E.B.S.--Max, Dominique, and my personal favorite, Janet--or Anne and Zoey from Ice Princess passed over? We do not have so many awesome female characters in this world that we can afford to squander them.
But so there are these canons with these highly cathective female/female relationships, and these tend to be OTP-centric. Which makes sense, I guess. (Bring It On does, I believe, have a decent amount of fic involving other characters such as Isis and Big Red, despite having this sort of cathective relationship at its core.)
Within the bigger picture, however, it may still be true--it still feels true to me, although my experience is limited--that girlslash isn't as OTP-heavy as m/m. After all, in order to have the sort of intense same-sex relationship which is a staple of the big m/m fandoms, a canon needs to, as a prerequisite, pass the Bechdel test--still not something that is always easy even in our day and age. Of the canons which do have well-developed female characters, most tend to be ensemble shows (or films or books). And they tend not to be genre shows: I can name shows which haved focused on pairs of sisters, but I think the very idea of a show about two sisters who travel the country hunting demons, with a very limited recurring cast, is still unthinkable even in this post-Buffy world. So Xena is still very much the exception
A quick look atfemslash_today confirms this suspicion: while the OTP fandoms provide steady content and cannot be discounted, most femslash still comes from shows which are ensemble and/or genre in character: Battlestar Galactica, the Stargates (and the fic I'm looking at isn't Sam/Janet--I don't know who Janet is at all and only a vague sense of who Sam is, but I know this is sometimes brought up as a potential OTP), Doctor Who, The West Wing, House, Veronica Mars, Buffy, and so forth.
And yet I look atfemslash08 and think about what I might offer--and the knowledge that if I'm assigned D.E.B.S., it won't be Janet/Max, and if I'm assigned Ice Princess, it won't be Zoey/Ann.
femslash08 and related topics. One of the arguments I've made more than once in this journal is that femslash is more different than m/m slash than one might at first think, they each have their own histories (each within the greater history of media fandom, of course), tropes, conventions, and expectations. Some of these are fairly easy to make like the different role of genderswap or mpreg vs. fpreg. One "difference" that has never been quite so easy to demonstrate, however, has been my claim that femslash fandom is less OTP-oriented than m/m slash fandom. To me, girlslash is something one finds hiding in the interstices of a canon--and indeed, it's one of the things I really love about it. We manage to find the really interesting points of connection in canon, those that would be impossible to find if we weren't already actively searching, in a type of search which just isn't necessary if one is interested in male characters.The exceptions are obvious: Law and Order, Xena: Warrior Princess, Wicked (although the RPF wing of such isn't nearly as OTP-oriented as it once was, as more and more actors take over the roles of Galinda and Elphaba), possibly Star Trek: Voyager. I always think of these fandoms being set up "like boyslash fandoms"; think of the way Xena, textually speaking, parallels a Starsky&Hutch or Due South--or, more obviously in its format. (People sometimes want to add BtVS, with Buffy/Faith, to the list of femslash OTPS, but I don't buy it--in my experience, Buffy femslash fandom embraces rarepairs like an embracing thing embraces an embraced thing with a vengeance.)
And there's a spattering of smaller (Yuletide-sized, but showing up on
femslash_today with fair consistency nonetheless), mostly film, fandoms where activity, such as it is, is almost exclusively centered around an OTP: Devil Wears Prada, Ice Princess, D.E.B.S.This last one has always astounded me as to just how little is written outside the pairing of Amy/Lucy. How is it that in a canon with rampant general female homosociality like D.E.B.S. has that general homosociality has so largely been ignored in favor of the single canonical OTP? Why are such wonderful female characters as the other D.E.B.S.--Max, Dominique, and my personal favorite, Janet--or Anne and Zoey from Ice Princess passed over? We do not have so many awesome female characters in this world that we can afford to squander them.
But so there are these canons with these highly cathective female/female relationships, and these tend to be OTP-centric. Which makes sense, I guess. (Bring It On does, I believe, have a decent amount of fic involving other characters such as Isis and Big Red, despite having this sort of cathective relationship at its core.)
Within the bigger picture, however, it may still be true--it still feels true to me, although my experience is limited--that girlslash isn't as OTP-heavy as m/m. After all, in order to have the sort of intense same-sex relationship which is a staple of the big m/m fandoms, a canon needs to, as a prerequisite, pass the Bechdel test--still not something that is always easy even in our day and age. Of the canons which do have well-developed female characters, most tend to be ensemble shows (or films or books). And they tend not to be genre shows: I can name shows which haved focused on pairs of sisters, but I think the very idea of a show about two sisters who travel the country hunting demons, with a very limited recurring cast, is still unthinkable even in this post-Buffy world. So Xena is still very much the exception
A quick look at
femslash_today confirms this suspicion: while the OTP fandoms provide steady content and cannot be discounted, most femslash still comes from shows which are ensemble and/or genre in character: Battlestar Galactica, the Stargates (and the fic I'm looking at isn't Sam/Janet--I don't know who Janet is at all and only a vague sense of who Sam is, but I know this is sometimes brought up as a potential OTP), Doctor Who, The West Wing, House, Veronica Mars, Buffy, and so forth.And yet I look at
femslash08 and think about what I might offer--and the knowledge that if I'm assigned D.E.B.S., it won't be Janet/Max, and if I'm assigned Ice Princess, it won't be Zoey/Ann.![[identity profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Why doesn't this show exist? WHY? With the female equivalent of Jeffery Dean Morgan as their mother? WHY?
Also, there is Charmed, which despite being a bit of a tacky BtVS knockoff (as Joss is fond of pointing out) is genre, is female-centered, and is about three very slashy sisters.
(Okay, I can't help myself, I'm off to do data analysis on Femslash07. In the meantime, I've been thinking about this too...)
Part of what strikes me is that femslash fandom identifies itself in a different way. "Boyslash" is a back-derivation; boyslashers in the dS/McShep/Wincest trajectory have a tendency to see their fandom as Fandom, proper. I think panfandom (and metafandom) tend towards boyslash (or boy-centric gen) as they default; femslash is always presenting itself as Other (hence "Fuck You She's Awesome," Femslash Annual, femslash_today). (Leaving aside for the moment the peculiar intersecting Minis community that I'd like to believe is at the core of Buffyverse fandom). There's an assumed boy(slash) default that means boyslash fandom doesn't exist as an entity the way girlslash fandom (objectively, in communities and memes and fests) does.
Although. I had been thinking that femslash allies itself with boyslash [in slash-only contexts like Secret Slasha) and with het (in female-centric endeavors) and stands alone, but that het/boyslash never align in this way and that boyslash-only spaces don't exist in the same way. But then I see things like boys-only RPGs that make me want to spit nails and think, well, those spaces do exist. They just suck. (obvs. maleslashminis is not part of the problem.)
Stargates (and the fic I'm looking at isn't Sam/Janet--I don't know who Janet is at all and only a vague sense of who Sam is, but I know this is sometimes brought up as a potential OTP)
I do think that when I was active in Gatedom, three or four years ago, Sam/Janet was an OTP very much modeled on the boyslash and het OTPs in the fandom. There also weren't any other recurring female characters for seven years of canon; now there are, in both shows (so I understand). Too, though, SG-1 fandom itself has undergone a major change with serious upheaval in the cast; since I've moved on, there's been a shift away from pairing wars (het vs. boyslash) and towards the obvious solution (ot3/4/many), and away from OTP towards a more multishipptional awareness. Compelling new characters (and an influx of Farscape fans) will do that. If only, if only, I'd gotten into Gate a few years later, I might still be living there.
(no subject)
You got me. I know I'd be in front of my television show every week to watch it. Or even The Adventures of Dean and Samantha Winchester--indeed, there are ways that a het sibling relationship would hit my kinks even better. *whistles at tSCC*
Also, there is Charmed, which despite being a bit of a tacky BtVS knockoff (as Joss is fond of pointing out) is genre, is female-centered, and is about three very slashy sisters.
Ooh, that's a good example of which I didn't think, and it raises the question of why I haven't seen more Charmed femslash, say linked on femslash_today. I followed a BtVS/Charmed crossover RPG back when BtVS was still on television, though.
I think panfandom (and metafandom) tend towards boyslash (or boy-centric gen) as they default; femslash is always presenting itself as Other (hence "Fuck You She's Awesome," Femslash Annual, femslash_today). (Leaving aside for the moment the peculiar intersecting Minis community that I'd like to believe is at the core of Buffyverse fandom).
Well, you know I agree with you on this point.
There's an assumed boy(slash) default that means boyslash fandom doesn't exist as an entity the way girlslash fandom (objectively, in communities and memes and fests) does.
Ooh, that's a fascinating claim: by both being and not being slash, femslash actually manages to be constitutive of a more stable identity than boyslash. *ponders, and attempts to theorize*
there's been a shift [. . .] towards a more multishipptional awareness
And below
(no subject)
If femslash shies away from OTP, is it a thing like popslash or bandom where individuals can enjoy reading in a mix and match way, but may have one (or five) relationship groupings they tend to enjoy? So that what you are seeing isn't so much that femslash fans don't have preferred pairings as that femslash fandoms tend to avoid the McShep that ate fandom problem?
Or, is what you are saying that femslash fandoms tend to have a One True Character, on to which various femslash pairings are attached, so that all femslash fandoms look like scullyslash, in the way that most melslash fandoms look like K/S?
Or do you mean something else entirely?
(no subject)
Pretty much, yes. Some people prefer Buffy/Faith, and some prefer Buffy/Willow, but then I'll write random (or not so random if you know me) things like Amy/Illyria or Jenny/Drusilla (although I clearly have a personal OTC in many if not most of my fandoms: Dawn in Buffy, River in Firefly, etc.). Buffy/Faith is clearly the most popular Buffy femslash pairing (I think?).
There was a community of Willow/Tara monoshippers while the show was on the air, I'm told.
So that what you are seeing isn't so much that femslash fans don't have preferred pairings as that femslash fandoms tend to avoid the McShep that ate fandom problem?
Well, femslash fandoms either tend to avoid the McShep problem or else have it much worse.
Note that these are tentative thoughts--these are things I want to say but am not quite sure I can.
(no subject)
The WillTara YahooGroup (then on Onelist) was founded when Willow/Tara was still subtext (late january 2000, A New Man had just aired) and had a huge membership. The Kitten Board is still around.
The BuffyNFaith YahooGroup was created in march 1999, SapphicSlayer in august 1999 and BuffyLovesWillow in november 1999.
(no subject)
Back when the Girls Dormitory HP femslash archive was at its height (so far as I know it's gone now) I was reading just about everything on it. And you know, I don't think there were any pairings I didn't like. I skipped that one Umbridge/Ginny one because I found the idea of it creepy, but other than that I read everything about equally. Maybe it's because femslash is so rare that I don't get picky about it? I'm not sure.
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I'd be interested to find out.
It also seems like canons that focus on romantic two-girl friendships between the female leads (or the lead and a sidekick) would be more OTP-centric than series where the female homosocial affection is more spread out.
Yeah, that seems to be the inescapable conclusion. But of course, at least in the West, canons with two female leads, not to mention romantic friendships, are--with the exception of Xena--"girly" canons not designed for general appeal.
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I'm pretty sure this is why, despite being pretty much only attracted to women and preferring shows with strong women, etc, I just don't do much femslash. If I don't have an OTP to follow and read about, I get bored, honestly. I generally want to read heaps of stories about a connection between two specific people, and really have no desire to read stories about all sorts of different people. And the few f/f pairings that I really enjoy and could be really into don't have much (or any) of a fic following that I've found, so I've just never really gotten into femslash.
Huh.
(no subject)
I would say that's more a function of the format than of the genre because think of the way Xena, textually speaking, parallels a Starsky&Hutch or Due South--or, more obviously in its format.
If there were a female equivalent of Due South, Sentinel, etc. you would *drown* in f/f OTP femslash. That's why Xena became so huge in the first place. People were starved for that kind of f/f pairing dynamic.
(no subject)
If there were a female equivalent of Due South, Sentinel, etc. you would *drown* in f/f OTP femslash.
No doubt. But there can't be, not in our culture--especially when one looks at their closest equivalents, "girly" fandoms like Devil Wears Prada. And I don't think genre can be discussed apart from cultural context; satire in ancient Rome was not the same thing as satire in the modern world.
*here from metafandom*
via metafandom
I think this just goes to show that even something that feels as small as the femslash community can contain a lot of variety. I'm really interested in why some characters/shows generate huge (relatively) followings and others don't. It makes sense with Xena and Stargate. You simply don't have a lot of options. But you would think that a show like Grey's Anatomy, with so many female characters, would have something for everyone and therefore produce huge amounts of fic. Of course, it may have. I haven't really gone out looking. The pairings are varied, but the amount is small.
And I'm going to stop rambling in your journal now.
(no subject)
But yeah, I must confess I, an also-femslash-writer, haven't even looked around for femslash, too OTP-focused already. *g*
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what's certain, from what I can tell, is that the ensemble-based mode isn't nearly as common in the world of boyslash. the OTPs remain the historical core of the femslash tradition, though, even as the landscape is diversifying (with Buffy and West Wing at the pre-LJ vanguard). I'm especially sensitive to that because it's SO not MY thing (J/7 notwithstanding), but doing all this work on femslash I have to be careful to hold the
(no subject)
the OTPs remain the historical core of the femslash tradition, though,
How did this work? It still seems to me that the ensemble-approach sits more comfortably within the traditional boyslashing communities--after all, there's not much meaningful basis upon which to discriminate between Uhura/Rand and Uhura/Chapel. Did the "historical core of the femslash tradition" develop completely separately from the boyslashing tradition? Prior to Buffy and Xena and not only the mainstreaming of femslash they represented (or so the story is usually told) but also their considerable effect on what types of media got produced, what types of texts would be able to support OTP-based femslash fandoms?
(no subject)
None. (Well, maybe Cagney & Lacey but I don't know of any major fanfic activity with regard to that show.) That's why people say Xena was for f/f what Star Trek was for m/m. It's not just that femslash became a mainstream genre within the fanfic community, they invented the whole homoerotic fanfiction thing again. And yes, that one developed completely separately from the m/m slash tradition. Most people had never even heard of slash and that was after they had already been two or three years in the fandom. F/f was called Alt and if the discussions somehow got to the 'What about m/m?' part the usual assumption was that m/m was written by gay men, of bad quality and just like the stuff at Nifty. F/f on the other hand was novel length OTP romance with soulmates, soulbonds and reincarnations because their love could never die. When X/G authors migrated to other fandoms, they took that kind of approach first to Star Trek Voyager (J/7), BtVS (W/T), ER (K/K) and I think there was a British prison show (Bad Girls?). In Star Trek Voyager and BtVS they met slash and the rest is history.
I think it all depends on how you define "historical core of the femslash tradition".
(no subject)
Henry Jenkins discusses Blake's 7 and ST:TNG femslash (although Jenkins doesn't use that term, calling it "lesbian slash") and Wikipedia tells me that the first ST:TOS femslash story was written in 1977.
If we put the birth of contemporary femslash with Xena, then I think it becomes hard to account for the way XWP still functions as an outlier, with few of its conventions following through to either the ensemble-based or the OTP=-based ways of doing femslash as I see them practiced in media fandom today. (Or am I just missing something?)
And if Xena represents the birth of OTP-based femslash, and BtVS and tWW the introduction of ensemble-based, then the claim that the OTP-based method is older doesn't seem to be quite as impressive anymore (although I suppose the two years between Xena and Buffy is an eternity in internet time).
(no subject)
I also agree with
but maybe my "separate strands" theory is a fairer assessment of the history than trying to hierarchize. I take back "core"!
(no subject)
I'm thinking we may have to draw some distinctions between girlslash ensembles that exist as smaller subsets of huge slash/het/gen/everything fandoms, almost inevitably by virtue of their size (Buffy, Harry Potter, Stargates); girlslash ensembles that are interwoven with more minor but active ensemble fandoms (West Wing, Grey's Anatomy, Battlestar Galactica); and girlslash ensembles that constitute a fandom in and of themselves, by virtue of the very rare shows that support this (Women's Murder Club; Desperate Housewives; Bad Girls) -- that last set has their OTPs but also see a variety of other pairings.
(no subject)
I think the simple reason why there is so little femmeslash in comparison is that few shows lend themselves to OTP-orientation. Ensemble shows sure have female characters, but often, there is nothing in canon to even remotely make the f/f relationship plausible. This means less shipping. In the rare cases where two women are shown to be very close, they usually are already considered an OTP.
Buffy femslash fandom embraces rarepairs like an embracing thing embraces an embraced thing with a vengeance
Nowadays, maybe, but think back to the time it actually aired, particularly until Tara(Willow/Tara was the f/f OTP in that fandom, no? How was it ever Willow/Faith?) got killed off invoking the Dead/Evil Lesbian Cliché.
The main reason there is no Willow/Tara anymore is that she's dead dead dead and, in the show, moved on to someone else. A lot of fans were unhappy with the later, and thus you got f/f all over - on top of many f/f fans dropping the show altogether.
In my limited experience, I usually find a lot of femslash when the shows already have OTPs(either canonical f/f to begin with, or very, very strong subtext), and hardly any when the shows have none - because shows where the characters really have no subtext seem to not attract femslash writers.
I'm the same - I'd not write femslash for random female characters, every story I wrote was either for canonical couples, or couples having very strong subtext, just like I treat my M/M.
But then, I'm not attached to many fandoms - a tv series here, an anime there. So maybe my perception is just skewed.
(no subject)
I'm not sure there's that little femslash, though. Sure there's less than het or m/m, and "why is there so little girlslash?" is a question that gets asked in my meta circles, but I'm not 100% convinced that the amount we have is out of proportion to the percentage of fandom attracted to women. And insofar as it is, there are a lot of other factors: e.g., women wanting to write about an experience that is not their own or which is privileged in ways their own is not, and the already entrenched institution of m/m acting as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Nowadays, maybe, but think back to the time it actually aired, particularly until Tara(Willow/Tara was the f/f OTP in that fandom, no? How was it ever Willow/Faith?) got killed off invoking the Dead/Evil Lesbian Cliché.
You'll find me recognizing the existence of Willow/Tara strand of Buffy 'shippers here in the comments (and volunteering the information myself, not responding to someone else). And it's my understanding that that strand isn't even dead per se--while arguably moribund, it's simply continued on websites apart from LJ and the conventions and practices one might consider to be the core of soi-disant "media fandom" as a cultural movement. Buffy/Faith is definitely the most popular f/f pairing nowadays, although I do know people who 'ship Willow/Faith.
(no subject)
I'm not sure what you mean by "subtext" here. Moving aside from Buffy as our example, it seems to be the case that, despite the comment that Serenity the ship seems to run on sexual tension, fandoms like Firefly or Harry Potter which have large girlslash components don't have deliberate UST in the sense that Hermione obviously wants to shag Luna (although Ari swears Kaylee/Inara is canon). What they do have, however, is a sort of pervasive sexualization (in FF because it is a Whedon show, in HP because it's about teenagers) and a postmodern sense of play. I'm not sure I would call these characteristics "subtext," but ensemble-girlslash fandoms do definitely tend to have them. And this is why it surprises me that D.E.B.S. fandom is comprised of monoshippers, because it has both of these elements in spades.