snowynight (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
snowynight) wrote2011-05-08 02:58 pm
snowynight) wrote2011-05-08 02:58 pm
Entry tags:
Where 're the femslash little black dress
Some anecdotes
I love Sherlock Holmes, so I can't resist the lure of the 2009 Sherlock Holmes film. It has Mary and Irene in a greater role than in the book, but the movie's never about them, never told in their POV. They pretty much respond to the action. I return from the cinema with a vague thought that I would like a gun-swinging Mary partnered with Irene in a steampunk Victorian London, but I don't really get the characters enough. Because the movie doesn't give me this.
When I watch the earlier season of Stargate: Atlantis, there are only two female favourite characters. They are shown as friends, and the fandom pretty much pair them as the spare. Later in the season there were more female characters introduced and filmed interaction between Teyla and them. While the amount of fic produced is not much as far as I know, Teyla launched several ships, Teyla/Kate, Teyla/Keller, Teyla/Sam. While the canon is not good enough, it at least gives a starting point to write and passes the Bechdel's test in some episodes.
My hypothesis about the lack of femslash little black dress is thus:
There're just not enough female characters. Even nowadays a show can be without one female major character. Supernatural, for example is a big offender.
When there are finally some, the writers often screw up on the female characters. The stories are often not about them, the story not told in their POV, they often go without agency or sacrificed for some dramatic effect. These combined don't encourage fans of female characters. When the show finally pass Bechdel's Test, there are usually no multiple female relationships, not to mention multiple female friendships.
And when there are such examples, people don't know about it.
In conclusion, with the current trend, we're less likely to see femslash little black dress.
I love Sherlock Holmes, so I can't resist the lure of the 2009 Sherlock Holmes film. It has Mary and Irene in a greater role than in the book, but the movie's never about them, never told in their POV. They pretty much respond to the action. I return from the cinema with a vague thought that I would like a gun-swinging Mary partnered with Irene in a steampunk Victorian London, but I don't really get the characters enough. Because the movie doesn't give me this.
When I watch the earlier season of Stargate: Atlantis, there are only two female favourite characters. They are shown as friends, and the fandom pretty much pair them as the spare. Later in the season there were more female characters introduced and filmed interaction between Teyla and them. While the amount of fic produced is not much as far as I know, Teyla launched several ships, Teyla/Kate, Teyla/Keller, Teyla/Sam. While the canon is not good enough, it at least gives a starting point to write and passes the Bechdel's test in some episodes.
My hypothesis about the lack of femslash little black dress is thus:
There're just not enough female characters. Even nowadays a show can be without one female major character. Supernatural, for example is a big offender.
When there are finally some, the writers often screw up on the female characters. The stories are often not about them, the story not told in their POV, they often go without agency or sacrificed for some dramatic effect. These combined don't encourage fans of female characters. When the show finally pass Bechdel's Test, there are usually no multiple female relationships, not to mention multiple female friendships.
And when there are such examples, people don't know about it.
In conclusion, with the current trend, we're less likely to see femslash little black dress.
no subject
Remember Lorne/Parrish and Stackhouse/Markham in SGA? They both got more fic than Teyla/Anyone. Yes, it would be better to have more well developed female characters, but we currently have lots of good ones, and we all know fandom will build a ship out of bugger all if the boys are pretty and it hits a trope they like (example: Arthur/Eames in Inception fandom).
My current fandoms are A-Team (which I'd have to bring a woman in from the TV show to slash with Charissa), Highlander (which has a couple of potential women to slash and one solid pairing, see icon), Hawaii Five-0 (which has one or two potential pairings), and Marvel Comics (which has three or four practically canon pairings). In the first three cases, femslash would take a bit of wrangling, but is totally doable, I've seen fans latch on to less plausible ships, in the last it's begging to be written for Misty/Colleen, Jess D/Carol, Natalia/Bobbi and Carol/Wanda (to name three off the top of my head).
So the question of why I don't write femslash in more then comment fic comes down to my own reasons for not doing so, not to a lack of opportunity or a variety of available pairings.
I find that, personally and I'm not speaking for anyone else, I don't write femslash because it's too close to home. I'm a queer woman. All the women I've dated have been in fandom. Do we have a lot in common with Misty and Colleen? Not really, no. However, it would feel to me like putting something of myself, perhaps something that I wouldn't want to share, and possible something about one of my partners that they don't want to share. Writing about male characters is safe, distanced, because my heart is horrible gender essentialist, and I can never feel like one of the boys is really me.
That is probably also an excuse for internalised misogyny.
no subject
no subject
... come to think of it, (tame, PG-13-rated) sex scenes are also easier to write when I'm not cowriting them with my significant other, which just adds a whole extra layer of "ack, no, this is too embarassing! I can't describe a sex act to her and then have her describe the character's reactions and the subsequent sex act to me and then type it up and post it on the internet! That's practically like having phone sex and then letting my flist read a transcript of it!"
That doesn't really affect writing all the parts of ship fic that aren't sex scenes, though. There, I just have a bad case of OTP-fixation.