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.

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.)

I can poke around if you wish. Stargate, yes?

I've been rewatching Twin Peaks, and I can hardly believe I'm asking this but...does anyone know of any good Cooper/Truman slash?

A good gen Stargate story that someone (I've forgotten who) linked to over on the Due South thread:

The Midas Syndrome

It CAN be done. I haven't read any other stories by the same author, so I don't know if there are more as good as this out there.

Unfortunately, I'm the person who linked to that. Rheanna's fabulous, and I've read all three of her SG stories - she pretty much fits my fanfic tastes to a T. Alas, she doesn't appear to be writing any more in either SG or Angel.

Like I said, wired wrong.

If it helps, I'm wired the same way. Part of why I don't read a heck of a lot of fanfic.

I can poke around if you wish. Stargate, yes?

Ooh, thanks! Yes.

Thank you, Katie! I had kept the link but I knew going back over a couple hundred messages to find it would be more pain than I could handle.

I don't know of any, Angus, but I am laughing because I thought exactly the same thing when I rewatched last month!

Well, Sophia, I mean, yeah... a classic slash pairing if ever there was one!