I'm with Katie here. I think it's reasonably fair article, errors and all, with minimal condescension compared to most other articles on fanfiction. I just wish the emphasis wasn't quite *entirely* on erotic fanficion, because I'm personally more inclined to gen and frankly rather fed up with the 'if there's no sex in the story, what's the point?' contingent.

Still, a decent article.

a troublesome conflation

It's annoying, but it doesn't really surprise me. Entire fandoms are kept alive basically by the force of a pairing -- not necessarily explicit, pornographic sexuality, but usually a sexual relationship. (And, conversely, I can't think of any dead shows which are 'kept alive' by, say, a plethora of adventure stories, or vignettes.*) Especially where slash is concerned, although some het pairings have this quality too, one finds a lot of 'new' fans who got into the fandom based on the sex and/or romance stories, and may never have seen episodes at all, or not till after the consumption of a lot of romantic fanfic.

* I'm told there are manga fandoms that work this way, although that also may relate to the gender divide between TV fandoms and manga fandoms. I don't know enough about boy-dominated fandoms, except the general boy-orientation of Starfury maneuvering discussions back in the B5 days. In which no sex was even discussed, because everyone involved should be wearing a space suit anyway.

And look at the course of our conversations on these fannish boards. We talk about porn a lot, and about pairings. Not all of the major stories we discuss are about sex, and not all of the plot bunnies thrown around are about sex, but a great many of them are. Partly because a lot of non-sex fanfic ideas can be discussed as canon-speculation, and is assimilated into the flow of show-talk; sex, due to network restrictions, will never explicitly be show-talk. Partly I think that sex is something that gets notice when it's brought up.

We never did have contests for who would mention "apron" most often, but we did have porn-offs.

So it's a beginner's mistake the writer is making, conflating fanfic with porn (or allowing the conflation to be inferred). But, you know, I sometimes have a hard time coming up with 'classic', famous fanfic titles that don't have sex in them. Not all of them are about sex, but the vast majority do involve sex.

I agree with you Nutty. Nodding along to everything you said.

I understand that journalists play up the porn simply because sex sells.

t shrug

I suppose I have no room to talk. I write about boys in skirts.

You're right about some of the anime fandoms, Nutty. Although many of the 'dead' series are kept alive thanks to the force of an OTP, many series have endings in which certain threads are deliberately left open-ended. Then again, in Japan, you can write/illustrate your own fanfiction and sell it legally, even the slashy stuff. The production companies, bless 'em, look at it as a form of free advertising that helps to keep people buying videos and gew-gaws related to the late, lamented series.

Txgiving leftovers:

I must mention that now that I've started reading slash, I start looking for the slash in everything.

I just wish the emphasis wasn't quite *entirely* on erotic fanficion, because I'm personally more inclined to gen and frankly rather fed up with the 'if there's no sex in the story, what's the point?' contingent.

Hey, did you ever find any decent SG gen? I've been poking around, and God, there's a lot of dreck out there. (I mean, there's a lot of dreck everywhere, but I haven't tried just wading in blind in a while, and I'd forgotten.)

But, you know, I sometimes have a hard time coming up with 'classic', famous fanfic titles that don't have sex in them. Not all of them are about sex, but the vast majority do involve sex.

There's a significant difference between "plot which involves sex" and "plot whose point is to get to sex." Or, "screw the plot, bring us sex!" Which you know, of course.

I mean, I agree that the majority of fanfic is relationship-oriented, but I don't know a majority are sexually explicit. I'd guess probably not, but that's just a guess. And, well, pairing fanfic isn't usually what interests me personally so really they ought to serve my interests, dammit.

Oops, I had more to say but I'm on my parents' computer and my father has to use it. Sharing sucks. Must return to own apartment soon!

OK, I've spent the last four days re-reading the entire HP series, and it's whetted my appetite. I'm not looking for anything wildly sexual, unless it's set many years in the future, and even then anything former student/former teacher would be a whole world of squick for me. I'd be interested in events within the timeframe of the existing canon from other characters' POV as well as futurefics. And if we're talking pairings, Hermione has always been my favorite character (I'm boring and predictable that way), so I'd probably enjoy Hermione/Harry or Hermione/Ron.

t on edit--I've had a tiny plot bunny for a HP/BtVS crossover for the longest time, but I've yet to figure out a way to avoid a Hermione Sue.

My experience in my original fandom was that sex, when present, was explicit/detailed about 90% of the time. * I have seen many a discussion about how to write a sex scene without silliness, excessive boring terminology, or reality failure; I don't think I've ever seen a serious discussion about how a sex scene fits into a larger story, or whether it does.

* I am big with the footnotes today. I do recall that, in 1995 when I first started reading, there were stories published in chapters, whereby you could read chapters 1-2-3-4-5, or read 1-2-3a-4a-5 -- because the first sequence was rated PG-13, while the second was NC-17. I don't know, because the practice seems to have disappeared by the time I began corresponding with fannish authors, whether the PG-13 sequence was the "core", original story, and the NC-17 the adaptation, or vice versa. Basically, at that time, the explicitness in a story that involved sex was, well, optional.

I understand that journalists play up the porn simply because sex sells.

Well, yes. It sells to the journalist's sense of headline, and it sells to the newspaper reader's skimming eye -- the thing is, it also sells to the fanfic reader as much as to anyone else. I have friends who have openly admitted to 'advertising' their plot-oriented, arc-heavy long stories by, a few weeks prior to publication, putting out a few short smut pieces. The theory is that one drums up one's audience, brings one's name into the collective consciousness of the fandom at large by publishing something of visceral [read: unexamined] appeal, and can thereby induce more readers to take a chance on a longer story.

I think it's a cynical behavior, and not entirely fair to dedicated readers of erotica, plenty of whom certainly do critically examine the goods they consume. But the fanfic 'market' is, well, if not driven by sex, certainly prodded now and then by it. If there were no sex in fanfic, fanfic would still exist, but I bet its volume would be smaller by orders of magnitude.

Wrod, Nutty. And I say that as a writer of nothing more racy than PG-13 fic through my entire career. I expect I'd have been far more popular in XF if I had M & S making like bunnies as the world ended...

It's just... after a certain point, the smut begins to bore me. I've taken to skimming the obligatory erotica in long stories in order to get to the actual meat of it. There is such a thing as too much smut, and I know of more than one story that would have been great if the writer didn't feel obliged to insert an epilogue in which the characters finally got to do the dirty. ::sigh::

...and conversely, I've run across some very interesting sex scenes that would have been happier as intense PWPs rather than as interludes in longer stories.

I don't know -- I always sort of thought I was just wired wrong. When I want porn, I want full-on, get-down, gorilla fucking, with the barest minimum of engagement with my higher faculties. But most of the time, that's not really what I want from fanfic. I sort of tolerate it, more or less according to how well it's integrated into the larger psychological or plot-related events, but not often the thing I go out specifically seeking.

Like I said, wired wrong. Obviously, enough people are going out looking for and writing their own sexually explicit fanfic that it's the lion's share of what's published.