If you stand in the middle of the crossroads, you get an unrivaled view down all the branches.
Until a lorry trundles over you.
One more post, to clarify (hah!) my conflicted and complicated feelings about the longlisting of an unfinished piece of fanfiction for the Tiptree award. And as my feelings are conflicted and complicated, I am going to make pro/con/meta lists.
Pro: (reasons why it's kind of cool that the story was longlisted)
- Well, it's fanfiction, listed for a major genre award, and that is hard to beat for values of "You can't make this up." Also, as a natural-born lumper and straddler of fences, I like it that the boundaries are blurring.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
badgerbag maintains that the listing is sparking discussion, and I can't argue that it has, as one of the discussors.- I have now read the fic in question, and that is surely valuable to my street cred in some circles.
Con: (reasons why I think it's a travesty that this particular story was longlisted)
- I think it tends toward reducing the credibility of the Tiptree Award. Which, like any right-thinking pervert, I covet for my very own.
- There is a rudeness element (see "meta," below.) Which becomes even more complicated, because as I see it, it's not exactly nice for people outside the, um CSI/HP noncon mpreg community (the Internet is for porn! the Internet is for porn! [the Internet is a strange and wonderful place]) to point out that the fic in question is not very good. But, the lack of perceived literary value is vital to the discussion of whether the longlisting of incomplete badfic, not to put too fine a point on it, is appropriate to a "literary" award. So, to me, the argument that literary quality is not an issue, genderbending is, doesn't hold water. Otherwise, we should be awarding Tiptrees to a significant fraction of the magnum opiates on alt.sex.stories.moderated.
- I understand that some people did find that the story had some value as an edgy discussion of gender roles. That seems a little petit bourgeois to me: "If it's shocking, it must be edgy and of value!"
(I don't mean to be dismissive, but if this is the edge, there are more people straddling the abyss than I realized.)
In the era of performance art, I guess I can't argue, but... Well, but. I'm going to argue anyway. Shocking does not always equal thoughtful (there is a difference between A Clockwork Orange and Saw II), and mistaking shock value for useful discussion is common, but... the story in question isn't all that shocking, even. Problematizing requires self-awareness, and while this fic is probably functional as a type example of crackfic--
Well. - Dangling modifiers. Just say no.
- I have now read the fic in question, and that is surely damaging to my street cred in some circles.
Meta: (cultural artifacts informing my feelings on the issue)
- This is a fantastic demonstration of one of the more interesting differences between the fanfic and profic communities. Specifically, the difference in public and private spheres, and how fluid it is. Throughout the fan side of the conversation, I read (over and over) a protective response--"It's just fanfic, and people (outside of the community) should not be pointing out how bad it is."
To which, of course, the typical response would be "but it's on the Internet for anybody to read! It's public! You can google it!"
Well, yes. And yet, no.
Fanfiction is never truly released, the way profiction ideally is. At some point, in other words, for me, the novel or the short story ceases to be my responsibility. I still love it, of course, and I'll keep its room for it for a while, but eventually a novel is going to go out, get an education, get a job, and maybe if I'm lucky start sending money home. At that point, on some real level, it's not just mine anymore. Hundreds or thousands of people who have never met me and who have nothing in common with me are going to read and judge that, and write bitchy Amazon reviews.
Some of my colleagues (*coughcoughmecoughcough*) sometimes have problems with the release and closure process. Some of us become suffocating mothers. God help us.
Most of us eventually shrug, go "okay, that went all right," and adopt another book to raise.
Fanfiction is not written in this expectation. It is written in the expectation of being enjoyed in an open-membership but tight-knit community, and the writer has an expectation of being included in the enjoyment and discussion. It is the difference, in other words, between throwing a fair on the high road, and a party in a back yard. Sure, you might be able to see what's going on from the street, but you're expected not to stare.
Nominating a fanfiction story for a literary award is, to my mind, the equivalent of somebody who doesn't live in the house where the party is going on sending invitations to everybody in town. The flowers are going to get tromped on, and the people who were wincing over Drunken Uncle Bob's bad behavior may still not want to see the entire town shouting "DANCE MONKEY DANCE" at the poor man.
- Mood:
late for work - Music:NPR
Profile
- matociquala
- it's a great life, if you don't weaken
- Elizabeth Bear Dot Com
Page Summary
- khriskin : (no subject) [+0]
- mrissa : (no subject) [+0]
- st_crispins : (no subject) [+4]
- coffeeandink : (no subject) [+4]
- bellatrys : It's badfic. Period. [+60]
- writeonly : Let's see what the judges have to say about it [+2]
- peake : (no subject) [+4]
- mekkavandexter : (no subject) [+16]
- cakmpls : (no subject) [+0]
- fidelioscabinet : (no subject) [+0]
- bonniers : (no subject) [+2]
- sartorias : (no subject) [+8]
- britgeekgrrl : (no subject) [+0]
- lnhammer : (no subject) [+5]
- nihilistic_kid : (no subject) [+1]
- bellatrys : I have to add [+9]
- rydra_wong : (no subject) [+4]
- faithhopetricks : (no subject) [+0]
- juliansinger : (no subject) [+3]
- rachelmanija : (no subject) [+1]
- matt_ruff : It appears I am the person responsible for this [+9]
- elynross : (no subject) [+1]
- feyandstrange : (no subject) [+5]
- kassrachel : (no subject) [+1]
- maestro23 : (no subject) [+1]
Comments
It didn't bother me to find out it was fanfic, or even that it was only average writing, but that it was unfinished fanfic. I know little-to-nothing about the Tiptree awards, but I'm not inclined to make the effort to track down the other winners unless I already know the authors. *shrugs*
I suspect that some of these avoidance will be viewed as statements in themselves, but I'm trying very hard.
I don't think it matters if something is written for money (however little) or not. New media is changing the way we create and define culture and art and the recent NY Times Sunday mag had a huge story on the future of books and the problems with current copyright.
So, to me, whether it's 'fanfic' (I mean, how do you define that anymore?) or not is irrelevant. Good writing is good writing. A lot of fanfic, as folks continually point out, is better than so-called pro writing these days.
What is relevant is that I'm hearing this was a BAD PIECE OF WRITING. Ungrammatical and unfinished and not even a good example of *anything*.
If that's true, then it seems to me the problem is with the Tiptree nominating process and someone should look into it.
There may be changes. Many people seem to feel that this was an abuse of the award.
And, yes, I know I've contributed to this myself. It's also complicated by the fact that few people in my circles take mpreg seriously -- it's the genre it's okay to mock, even if you read/write fanfic.
It's just - well, canon-raping, to put it bluntly. I don't get TV signals here so I can't really comment on the CSI canonicity part other than what I've heard on NPR or read on the net to get backstory, but when you have to take both characters completely OOC and the worlds they come from as well to make your story "work" - then no, it isn't fanfic. You've destroyed the original fandoms to make your own story, only you won't go the full distance and just write an original fic. ("What if the X-men were all cats? And what if they crashed into NYC and had to perform in a showing of Cats? That would be cool! And let's have the cast of NYPD Blue be part of it! Way cool! And there'll be another mutant that nobody knows about, and she'll have super powers, and be able to turn into a regular house-cat and be disguised, except that she's got purple eyes, and she'll join the X-Men and Sisko will fall in love with her and..." or -no, I can't bring myself to come up with a similar example for a "Dr. Who/Man from UNCLE/Gilligan's Island" crossover...)
It's not the gross OOC-ness, the creation of all new "customs" for the Wizarding World that exist only to provide a "slash without consent" scenario (featherless gods, I hate that euphemism - comes from the bodice rippers, natch), the implausibility of a very mundane US policeman being really part of the Wizarding World, the fact that crossovers are just about the hardest thing to do right, and usually pointless except that the author is a fan of both things, the related fact that nothing about the CSI guy's character from the show was as far as I can tell, brought into it except his looks - it's all of it, even before the clinching "he really wants to be raped because he's really a she underneath" squick of it. Then the endless chapters of angst and angst and but-she-really-likes-it (and hates herself for it natch) afternoon soap opera drivel, compounded - or saved? - by the fact that it isn't finished (see the recent Onion article about the computer committing suicide to save the world from an awful thesis). You could make a good case that the author has turned CSI-guy into her Mary-Gary Stu, even.
The only point I can give that story is the effort to make the MPREG setup halfway plausible. This is a vast improvement over the umpteen thousand fangirls who believe that you get pregnant in your stomach, and not just by swallowing a "fly" which is really a wizard or demigod in disguise.
But that doesn't by half make up for the rest. This is like those Aragorn/Frodo rapefics at Library of Moria.
The only times I've seen plausible and good MPREG was in Martha Wells' City of Bones, and also in the Flawed-But-Interesting™ film Enemy Mine.
As a proud fanficcer, I don't feel that a submission of bad HP-crossover slash is doing anything for our collective reputation.
-- David M.
-- David M.
1) Does the story conform to the same expectations as the other stories considered by the jury? In other words, are they looking for the same thing(s) in this story as they look for in all the others? Can a work that is incomplete and not intended for professional publication (or even for a wide readership) be validly considered alongside everything else in the running for the Award?
2) Is the story being judged by the same standards as all the others? (The fact that it is unfinished suggests it is not - would Air have won if it was missing a couple of chapters at the end?)
3) Is the story significantly better (by whatever standards of 'better' the jury is using) than all the other stories that were considered but not long-listed by the jury?
If the answer is 'yes' to all these questions, then I have no problem in principle to the story making the list (I reserve my right to disagree with the jury, as I reserve my right to disagree with the jury for any award). But if the answer is 'no' to any of the questions, then I feel the integrity of the Award has been compromised.
And if the story was long-listed not because of its inherent qualities but simply to make a point (about fanfic, or internet fiction or whatever) then that is a misuse of the Tiptree Award.
and I got nothing against no fanfic. I enjoy it, I've written it, but I would never, ever, ever suggest it should be submitted for a Neb.
I know I'm a weird ol' broad, but I find the concept of an edgy or shocking discussion of gender roles a bit hard to imagine. I probably should seek this out and read it, just to see what could possibly still qualify as such. Maybe it's that all my life when people have made male/female dichotomies (including some non-genitalia-related physical ones), I seem to have fallen on the male side more often than the female. Maybe it's that I don't have any strong gender ID myself. Maybe it's that, at 59, for about 55 years I've been reading anything I got my hands on. Maybe I'm world-weary. Probably I'm just old. But damn, I find that more and more people talk about anything being "edgy"--or about its having something shocking and revolutionary to say about gender roles--my response is "ho hum."
And I will [heart] you forever for the phrase "magnum opiates."
When you publish, or share, or whatever, you expect some sort of reaction--but different venues mean different audiences, and different expectations, both for writer and reader. Pulling out an incomplete, poorly done piece just to kick-start thinking and talking may have seemed like a good idea, but I think the juror might have done better to have shopped around a bit more, consulted people who were more knowledgeable about fanfic, especially the odder bits, and pulled out a piece that could stand the heat better--because then the discussion would have no choice but to face the gender issues involved, rather than deteriorating into "OMGICAN'TBELIEVETEHAWFULNESSMYEYESMYEYE
Shaking people up can be a very good thing to do*, but, like everything else, it pays to fight smart.
*And, if I understand it rightly, this is the point of the Tiptree.
I speculate: the Macho Pointer REGister? A special jpeg format for porn? Acronym for Many People Retching Entirely Grossly?
And it's a funny circumstance, because of course it's freely available to anybody on the internet. But I rather think the community mostly doesn't expect outsiders to notice or care. And they feel about us criticizing the fic about like SF writers tend to feel about literary critics making stupid assumptions about our genre.
Heh. Word. I didn't get very far in the fic, but far enough to recognize the writing wasn't as good as, and the story less interesting, than a significant fraction of ASSM posts.
---L.
that this is an extremely controversial statement within the fanfic community. Most of us don't actually care very much one way or the other about the opinions of mundanes, except on a case-by-case, personal business. We're already fen, that means we're used to being the butt of all kinds of bigoted jokes and treated like pariahs by otherwise-fellow-travelers who don't understand why using "Star Trek fan" or "Star Wars fan" as an explanation/synonym for other kinds of badness is as unacceptable as using female/gay as an insult. It's annoying but they're going to dismiss us anyway, their loss.
OTOH, some of us do believe that there *are* literary standards and that if you publish something, by posting it, that it ought to be at least semi-accessible to any reader (after all, we were all newbies once and had to come into it somehow - my gateway was Buffy-fic, including "When Hellmouths Collide") and at least *attempt* to be quality lit, or at least not provide the reader with the experience of grabbing a live wire by accident. And if the latter, then expect to be called on it, as you deserve.
OTOH, there are ficcers who emphatically think that any negative criticism is a "flame" and that no one has the right to offer anything but praise, praise, and more praise, and that "if you don't like it just don't read" They are often loud and obnoxious about this, which can be both horrifying and funny. (ie when they BEG for reviews PLEASEPLEASEPRETTYPLEASE, and then flip out when they get them. Or say things like "If you don't review I'll stop writing!!1!" and get "Oh wow, you promise?" responses from annoyed fellow fen.
Just as it was twenty five years ago, on paper.
I've also seen a more subtle point raised, involving insider/community knowledge.
As various people have pointed out, this fic is self-proclaimed "crackfic". While a contested term, this usually indicates that the author does not intend the fic to be taken wholly seriously, or is deliberately playing with a bizarre/silly premise. And it was written for a challenge, where creativity in meeting the terms of the challenge may be valued as well as quality.
Much fanfic does aspire to be "good writing", but there's also fic which is dashed off casually to entertain a few people with similar kinks and doesn't have pretensions to literary quality. Something like this could be compared to an in-joke chapbook photocopied and circulated round to friends in lieu of a Christmas card.
In other words, Drunken Uncle Bob may know that he's not the world's greatest dancer but still be having fun anyway, and it isn't fair to consider him in the context of a ballet award next to Baryshnikov.
And while his relatives and friends may discuss loudly among ourselves the fact that Bob's dancing makes us wish to remove our eyes with sporks, we also know that Bob isn't claiming to be Baryshnikov, so we're not going to slate him for pretension as well. Just really, really awful dancing.
We might feel somewhat differently if the person being judged by the wider world was Cousin Jim, who, though an amateur, genuinely aspires to be the best dancer he can be. And that applies whether Jim is actually any good, or also godawful.
Yes, that was the other thing that was truly bugging me about this -- the whole context in which the original fic was probably written, including this, just got dropped.
Nominating a fanfiction story for a literary award is, to my mind, the equivalent of somebody who doesn't live in the house where the party is going on sending invitations to everybody in town. The flowers are going to get tromped on, and the people who were wincing over Drunken Uncle Bob's bad behavior may still not want to see the entire town shouting "DANCE MONKEY DANCE" at the poor man.
Yes. Yes, exactly. This was what was bugging me about the whole thing.
1. I think the main thing is, if Badgerbag wanted to pick a 'fic to use as a "Fanfic can create interesting discussions of gender!" example, she shouldn't have picked an /unfinished/ one. That's just ethically unfair. (I also care about how it's mpreg, crackfic, humor and a /response/ to other 'fic, it's just the unfinished part is what primarily leaps out at me.)
2. The way Bagerbag phrased it in your comments section, it really did smack of the kind of other-izing that keeps happening to the queer and feminist communities (and to the fan communities). It smacked of condescension and 'ooh, look at the scuttling natives!'
3. I actually really /do/ think fandom, 'ficcers, and fanfiction in general has a lot to say about gender. This is not a good way to prove that; they have to get over being defensive about the other-izing and the scuttling natives part, first.
4. Being as I only read 'fic, I don't really participate in the online discussion anymore, I think I won't talk about your overall meta points here.
"This is not a good way to prove that; the way the choice was made, it frames the discussion so that folks first have to get over being defensive about the other-izing and the scuttling natives part, /then/ explain some of the local tropes, /then/ get into the fun and meaty discussions."
2. That's a great post.
3. I love that "venom cock" is a tag.
*g* I forsee, sadly, continued use.
My thoughts on the "Arcana" controversy can be found here.
I agree that posting the judges' comments on the short and long list picks would be extremely useful. One of the reasons I posted the long list myself was that I got tired of waiting for the official Tiptree website to do it. I'm going to try and add my own reviews of the works on the list over the weekend.
Is this a bad time to tell you how much I loved Set This House In Order?
Hell, this is a conversation within the fandom community, such as it is, whether anyone should point out how bad some fanfiction is. All right-thinking perverts, of course, think that this can be part of the fun. *g*
what bothers me here is that people are critiquing self-proclaimed unfinished crack!fic as though it were meant to be taken seriously in the first place, AND they are then assuming that everything else em brunson has written must be the same and are trashing her as a writer. not only is that an awfully unproductive use of criticism, but it leads to the sad fact that lots of people who might otherwise enjoy it will never read some of the wonderful stories em has written.
Amen, and bless you and thank you.
I used to be one of the editors of the only national/international bisexual magazine, back when we had one (and paper was affordable). Our stated editorial policy was that if somebody submitted something worth hearing, we should hear it, even if it was poorly written; we had contributors who weren't writers, weren't even English speakers, but who had something important to contribute to the community.
SO we accepted it - with the caveat that an editor would work with the author to make changes, clean it up, and get it up to a decent standard of English writing, *because* we wanted more people to read this great piece about bixesuals organizing a movement in Argentina, even if they couldn't read Spanish, or were the kind of people who would wince and turn the page at the first serious grammar error.
If the author was *not* okay with this - and most of them were (with the notable exception of the radical lesbian who refused to use capitalization because it was, um, partiarchal or something) - we worked diligently to make the piece better, more readable, while still communicating their vision. I like to think we did pretty well at that.
And, of course, we bent genders and broke them and stuck them back together the wrong way around with glue and made a mess of them. Lest anyone claim I lack gender street cred...
I love the idea of an award which recognizes authors for pioneering fiction work in gender. But I'd like to recognize *readable* and *good* genderbending work, of which there is plenty, and encourage folks with something good to say to learn to say it properly.
And in talking about fiction, we don't just have the basic rules of English: we have the basic rules of story, such as plot and structure and characterization. The nominated story fails this.
I had to put down the nominated story around chapter four; it was too bad for me to care. Knowing that it was incomplete besides only made it worse, but the characters were wooden, entirely outside of their characterizations as far as I could tell (being ignorant of CSI), and the whole thing being poorly written and constructed.
I have a bit of fanfic knowledge as well, and I've read a lot of better fanfic more deserving of literary or gender-bending recognition. I can't consider any category with entire fanfic sites devoted to it (such as 'mpreg') to be a great gender-breaking thing on its own, in any case; besides, it's been done even before we had net-fanfic.
If we give literature awards to things with no literary merit, not only do we fail to encourage literary merit, but we give the reading public the impression that "those sorts of people" can't write for beans. I object heavily to this.
(ALthough, dang, any discussion in which I can't decide to use the 'bisexual', 'potterfic', or 'grammar nazi' icons gets some kind of award right there.)
having gone and read the character bio on Wiki for CSI, they missed a lot of opportunities already there in the chara who canonically had been molested himself as a child, and was very passionate about consent and abuse issues for that reason, and instead just chose to turn 'him" into a pouty, weepy, angry (yet secretly yearning to be ravished) girl once the missing uterus was magicked back.
Because, you know, it's that wandering womb that makes us all hysterical!
Well-said. I've had several conversations with friends who don't quite "get" fanfiction and I wish I'd been able to articulate this point as well as you just did.
OT: In a merrier world, more original fiction would work this way too. The apparent choice between obscurity and endless frustration is one of the biggest things hanging me up as a writer.