Oh noes, not the Internet bullies!

[starlady]

H/t to corneredangel, here, for this:

Is writing fan fiction different from writing a tie-in? Yes and no. The risks I can take are. In a tie-in, I am much more constrained in terms of writing sex. But I am much less constrained in terms of writing politics. I can say things to the broader society about the issues of the day, about war and peace, about race and sex, that I could never say in fandom without starting firestorms of wank. It's no longer possible to discuss those things in fandom without tons of abusive comments, whatever one's position, because the issues are too controversial and the Internet bullies on all sides are too abusive. We are going places on those issues in the tie-ins that I certainly would not dare go in fan fics!

[…]

The good thing about the tie-in is the much broader audience. Internet fandom, and especially LiveJournal/Dreamwidth fandom, for all that it likes to think it's diverse, isn't so much. It tends to be highly educated women, and disproportionately American women from the Northeast and California. Its culture is very specific and out of touch with the majority of fans of the show, especially for something like Stargate: Atlantis. How many people in LJ SGA fandom are men who are active-duty military? How many are over 50? How many consider themselves Christian, or are from rural areas? If I want to talk to a broad audience, to talk to a truly mixed audience in terms of gender, race, age, and region, a tie-in will reach a far more diverse group of people than fan fic will. Fan fic skews to female, liberal, and young.

--Jo Graham (interviewed in Transformative Works & Cultures vol. 5)

I don't even want to know what she thinks she can't say in SGA fic, and you couldn't get me to read those tie-in novels if you paid me. And as for her implications about fandom, my instinctive response is that she is wrong doesn't know whereof she speaks. I don't think anyone in fandom has ever claimed that fans are in any kind of cultural majority--which makes it all the more important, I think, that we not give problematic oppressive bullshit a free pass.

Comments

[langwidere]

Well, I’m black and profoundly rural and only college-educated, so I guess I’m actually allowed to have an opinion here. Neat!

When I was a kid, I had a giant throbbing crush on Lt. Commander Data, and so I read lots of TNG tie-in novels and totally realized they were kind of awful and didn’t care. I have never read any others, before or since. (Canon is more than I can take in most instances, and so I retreat into the palliative refuge of fandom in order to allow my sensitive eyeballs time to repair themselves.)

I assume this woman is talking about the SGA fandom being so cruel and, like, narrow-mindedly sex-obsessed? Which, honestly, baffles the pants off of me. While I do agree that community-wide fandom criticism/discussions can sometimes turn into Random Issuegate for no reason (or else we wouldn’t have all those dedicated wank comms), the SGA fandom is possibly the most inclusive, welcoming place on the internets. I don’t like SGA very much — partially because I am not much fonder of cynical fake homoeroticism when it appears in domestic products than when it shows up in imports — but I’ve read gazillions of SGA fanfic, and I can tell this person definitively that she has no idea what she’s talking about. The SGA fandom is one of the only places where genderswitch and complicated!kidfic edge into the slash mainstream. There are all kinds of amazing examples of fan-writers who use SGA as a way to address important social issues like DADT, gay adoption, and even stuff like the casual cost of ordinary white/Western/human xenophobia. The pointlessness of war! The human price of technocratic social hierarchies! I read an AU fic a few months ago in which Rodney McKay was cast as an autistic violin genius, which dealt sensitively and (as far as I know) realistically with the problems he faced as a performer and a person. I read another really great SGA fanfic once in which Sheppard was transformed into an ex-Air Force transgendered woman — it made me cry! Some of the best short stories I’ve ever read, ever, have been SGA fic, and I say that with a face so straight you could use it to plumb corners. (That’s a rural-person reference to carpentry, for credibility’s sake.)

On the other hand, I had no idea I’d been blogging alongside a bunch of hard-hearted Marxist white-lady professors for the last ten years. Awesome!

[starlady]

Iknorite! Those DADT fics are basically an SGA genre in their own right, and the fic consistently does the show many better in exploring the implications of its own worldbuilding. Or at the completely opposite end of the Srs Bzns spectrum, this is the fandom where there is a "they're rainbows!" AU. Fandom = niche audience? Yes. That doesn't mean it's not engaged with "the issues of the day..."

...I read a lot of Star Trek novels before I really grasped the concept that not all books were good. And I mean a lot of Star Trek novels. Heck, Star Wars too.