BtVS/AtS fandom is very big.
Jun. 18th, 2004 03:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowscastIn this post, I ramble on variously about the bigness of this fandom, about kerfuffles, and about kinks and fetishes. It's more personal than general. Some of it may or may not stray into the realm of TMI.
This may not be news to any of you, but wow, BtVS/AtS fandom is very, very big.
See, this is a sort of shock to me because the fandoms I've been involved with previously were very, very small. It was possible to know every single person who wrote the pairings I was interested in. It was possible, over the course of a month or two, to read every single story featuring the pairings I was interested in (and these fandoms had little to no gen in them, so the concept of stories with no pairings at all is a new and intriguing concept to me).
I knew Buffyverse fandom was much bigger. This was an exciting prospect when I got started; yay, a fandom where the reading material won't dry up on me in a month or two! And, well, yeah, that's definitely a benefit. It's great, in fact. I think I sound like I'm about to start complaining about something, and I'm not really. It's just that I'm feeling a little lost in the vastness of Buffyverse fandom.
I'm realizing that there's so much Buffyverse fic out there—and so much new fic being posted every day— that there's no way I'll ever be able to read it all. Not even all the really good stuff. Not even all the really good stuff featuring my favorite characters. And that's awesome and wonderful, but also a little overwhelming, y'know? I keep feeling like I should be able to read it all. Heck, even to find it all—the Buffy folder of my Netscape bookmarks is almost too full to fit on one screen now, and nearly every day I run across new sites I want to bookmark.
Similarly, having just got into this LJ thing, I'm making connections with other fans and I keep wanting more! more! and at the same time, I'm intimidated by the numbers. I see people with flists in the three digits, and how can you possibly keep that many people straight? And then again, I start cruising around the journals of friends of friends, and I find myself wanting to Friend anyone who writes interesting posts about the Buffyverse in general and Spike in particular (because I am such a Spike whore), but I'm afraid of being swamped with more posts than I can read, more "friends" than I can keep track of.
On a related note...in the past day or two I've seen a few people making references to, um, excitement? kerfuffles? in the fandom community. And, again, the vastness—I missed the excitement. So I feel like I'm just kind of on the fringe, which is probably quite natural considering that I just got here while many others have been in the fandom for years, and met each other in person at cons and such. But still, nobody likes feeling out of the loop!
Near as I can determine, the kerfuffles in question happened on some LJ called something like "fandom hate," which I have gone looking for in curiosity but haven't been able to find (which is probably for the best in fact, since people saying mean things just makes me sad), and on the BBF list, which I do subscribe to but which I hadn't been reading.
I'm nomail on the BBF list; I picked that option from the start, since the list looked high-volume and my Yahoo mailbox was small. (It just got huge yesterday; yay, Yahoo!) I'd dropped by the list a few times to see what kind of things they talk about there, but I was holding off on getting into it or introducing myself until I felt like I'd got a handle on the fandom. Which, as I talked about above, I'm starting to realize I never will do! It's huge! It's vast! Anyway. I've dipped into the BBF archives to read some of what's there, but I felt like I needed to get more familiar with the fandom before getting involved with the list. How, for instance, to find fic that no one's already rec'ced? (I'm realizing now that that isn't a problem, since so much new fic appears regularly.)
My point here is that I pretty much missed the kerfuffle, but I went into the archives and read a sampling of messages so I think I've figured out what it was about. Someone posted a question about whether a particular story had het sex or just slash, but they asked the question in a way that sounded anti-slash, and people's hackles were raised, and there was much discussion. Heated discussion.
One thing that strikes me as funny or possibly ironic is that apparently the offensive thing about the question was the poster referred to slash as a "fetish." Other people took offense to this wording. It was said that "fetish" is a loaded and rather negative word; at least one poster called it a "dirty" word.
So, where the funny and ironic comes in (from my pov) is that I read all this just after I made an LJ post admitting to having a fetish myself, and posting a fic which had fetishy elements. Now I feel the need to talk about this at a bit more length—I guess being called "dirty" is disturbing on some level, even if it very patently wasn't directed at me.
First of all, slash is very definitely not a fetish. Leaving aside all the politics, a fetish by definition is the sexualization of something that's not normally considered sexual. Stories about people (or vampires) having sexual intercourse, no matter what gender those people (or vampires) are, are definitely sexual. So you can't have a slash fetish. It'd be like claiming to have, say, a breast fetish. (The Onion once did a joke piece on that concept: "Local man has breast fetish." I may be misquoting slightly, going from memory.)
Now, slash may indeed be called a "kink." Kink has a pretty broad definition in fandom; it's one of those nebulous terms like squick which we define through collective use, and everyone seems to be pretty comfortable with. In fact I think it pretty much is the antonym of squick! I saw some later messages on BBF suggesting that the kerfuffle could have been avoided if the original poster had used the word "kink" instead of "fetish," and yeah, that probably would have been a better word choice.
But about fetishes. I have one. I also have kinks, and there's a difference. I have a kink for Spike!torture, I have a kink for h/c fics, and I guess in a very broad sense I have a kink for slash. And I have a fetish for sneezing. See—a thing which isn't normally considered sexual, but which is sexual to me. I can also describe that as a kink, which makes it feel a little less...intimidating? alien? extreme? But yeah, it's a fetish.
It may surprise you to learn that there's a whole internet community of sneeze fetishists. The main bulletin board that I know of has over 900 registered members. I discovered this community about five years ago. I was really, really shy about the whole thing when I first found the community. It was years before I came out to anyone in real life about it. When I did, it was to my lover, and I was so scared of saying the words. I mean, it wasn't like I even wanted him to do anything related to the fetish. I just wanted him to know it was there, since it was an important part of my sexuality. And I was frikkin' terrified that he'd find it horrible and disgusting, or maybe just ridiculous. But he didn't. He was just like, "Oh, OK, that's neat."
So, gradually, I've been getting comfortable with the fact that I have a fetish. It helps that I hang with a pretty sexually and politically liberal crowd both in RL and online. But, actually, two posts ago when I posted that fic, "Sacrilege," and mentioned in the author notes that I wrote it to indulge my kink/fetish for sneezing? That was me coming out. That was the first time I've mentioned the fetish in an online community other than the specifically fetish-centric one.
In fact I wrote some fetish porn a few years ago, and it's archived online, and I used the same author nick for that as I do for my fanfic, and for years I've worried that someone will do a Google search for my fanfics and will stumble across the fetish stuff. I even considered changing my nick, but by the time the problem occurred to me I was already known in (my other) fandom by that nick, and it seemed overly paranoid ... but still. I worried.
So, yeah, I was really nervous about the reception of my "Sacrilege" post—which has turned out to be wonderfully positive. Thank you so much, everyone who commented on the story and didn't call me a freak! :)
Maybe I seem to be making a big deal of nothing. I mean, seriously, in the fic in question I have my main characters rape and kill a priest and then have gay and threeway vampire sex in a Catholic church while one of them chants the Lord's Prayer. And I'm worried people will think I'm a freak because one of the characters sneezes? But, well, all the violence and nasty religious stuff isn't my kink, it's just what happened when I put Spike, Angelus and Drusilla together. I mean, seriously, they're evil. Whereas the sneezing thing is a deep!dark!secret! I've been guarding since I was four years old. (Seriously. I used to get tingly-down-there feelings watching the Count sneeze on Sesame Street, not that I knew what those feelings were for another sixteen years, and dear god I've always had a thing for vampires, too, haven't I?)
In summary ... slash is not a fetish. But fetishes aren't inherently bad. They can be fun and cute. The end.
This may not be news to any of you, but wow, BtVS/AtS fandom is very, very big.
See, this is a sort of shock to me because the fandoms I've been involved with previously were very, very small. It was possible to know every single person who wrote the pairings I was interested in. It was possible, over the course of a month or two, to read every single story featuring the pairings I was interested in (and these fandoms had little to no gen in them, so the concept of stories with no pairings at all is a new and intriguing concept to me).
I knew Buffyverse fandom was much bigger. This was an exciting prospect when I got started; yay, a fandom where the reading material won't dry up on me in a month or two! And, well, yeah, that's definitely a benefit. It's great, in fact. I think I sound like I'm about to start complaining about something, and I'm not really. It's just that I'm feeling a little lost in the vastness of Buffyverse fandom.
I'm realizing that there's so much Buffyverse fic out there—and so much new fic being posted every day— that there's no way I'll ever be able to read it all. Not even all the really good stuff. Not even all the really good stuff featuring my favorite characters. And that's awesome and wonderful, but also a little overwhelming, y'know? I keep feeling like I should be able to read it all. Heck, even to find it all—the Buffy folder of my Netscape bookmarks is almost too full to fit on one screen now, and nearly every day I run across new sites I want to bookmark.
Similarly, having just got into this LJ thing, I'm making connections with other fans and I keep wanting more! more! and at the same time, I'm intimidated by the numbers. I see people with flists in the three digits, and how can you possibly keep that many people straight? And then again, I start cruising around the journals of friends of friends, and I find myself wanting to Friend anyone who writes interesting posts about the Buffyverse in general and Spike in particular (because I am such a Spike whore), but I'm afraid of being swamped with more posts than I can read, more "friends" than I can keep track of.
On a related note...in the past day or two I've seen a few people making references to, um, excitement? kerfuffles? in the fandom community. And, again, the vastness—I missed the excitement. So I feel like I'm just kind of on the fringe, which is probably quite natural considering that I just got here while many others have been in the fandom for years, and met each other in person at cons and such. But still, nobody likes feeling out of the loop!
Near as I can determine, the kerfuffles in question happened on some LJ called something like "fandom hate," which I have gone looking for in curiosity but haven't been able to find (which is probably for the best in fact, since people saying mean things just makes me sad), and on the BBF list, which I do subscribe to but which I hadn't been reading.
I'm nomail on the BBF list; I picked that option from the start, since the list looked high-volume and my Yahoo mailbox was small. (It just got huge yesterday; yay, Yahoo!) I'd dropped by the list a few times to see what kind of things they talk about there, but I was holding off on getting into it or introducing myself until I felt like I'd got a handle on the fandom. Which, as I talked about above, I'm starting to realize I never will do! It's huge! It's vast! Anyway. I've dipped into the BBF archives to read some of what's there, but I felt like I needed to get more familiar with the fandom before getting involved with the list. How, for instance, to find fic that no one's already rec'ced? (I'm realizing now that that isn't a problem, since so much new fic appears regularly.)
My point here is that I pretty much missed the kerfuffle, but I went into the archives and read a sampling of messages so I think I've figured out what it was about. Someone posted a question about whether a particular story had het sex or just slash, but they asked the question in a way that sounded anti-slash, and people's hackles were raised, and there was much discussion. Heated discussion.
One thing that strikes me as funny or possibly ironic is that apparently the offensive thing about the question was the poster referred to slash as a "fetish." Other people took offense to this wording. It was said that "fetish" is a loaded and rather negative word; at least one poster called it a "dirty" word.
So, where the funny and ironic comes in (from my pov) is that I read all this just after I made an LJ post admitting to having a fetish myself, and posting a fic which had fetishy elements. Now I feel the need to talk about this at a bit more length—I guess being called "dirty" is disturbing on some level, even if it very patently wasn't directed at me.
First of all, slash is very definitely not a fetish. Leaving aside all the politics, a fetish by definition is the sexualization of something that's not normally considered sexual. Stories about people (or vampires) having sexual intercourse, no matter what gender those people (or vampires) are, are definitely sexual. So you can't have a slash fetish. It'd be like claiming to have, say, a breast fetish. (The Onion once did a joke piece on that concept: "Local man has breast fetish." I may be misquoting slightly, going from memory.)
Now, slash may indeed be called a "kink." Kink has a pretty broad definition in fandom; it's one of those nebulous terms like squick which we define through collective use, and everyone seems to be pretty comfortable with. In fact I think it pretty much is the antonym of squick! I saw some later messages on BBF suggesting that the kerfuffle could have been avoided if the original poster had used the word "kink" instead of "fetish," and yeah, that probably would have been a better word choice.
But about fetishes. I have one. I also have kinks, and there's a difference. I have a kink for Spike!torture, I have a kink for h/c fics, and I guess in a very broad sense I have a kink for slash. And I have a fetish for sneezing. See—a thing which isn't normally considered sexual, but which is sexual to me. I can also describe that as a kink, which makes it feel a little less...intimidating? alien? extreme? But yeah, it's a fetish.
It may surprise you to learn that there's a whole internet community of sneeze fetishists. The main bulletin board that I know of has over 900 registered members. I discovered this community about five years ago. I was really, really shy about the whole thing when I first found the community. It was years before I came out to anyone in real life about it. When I did, it was to my lover, and I was so scared of saying the words. I mean, it wasn't like I even wanted him to do anything related to the fetish. I just wanted him to know it was there, since it was an important part of my sexuality. And I was frikkin' terrified that he'd find it horrible and disgusting, or maybe just ridiculous. But he didn't. He was just like, "Oh, OK, that's neat."
So, gradually, I've been getting comfortable with the fact that I have a fetish. It helps that I hang with a pretty sexually and politically liberal crowd both in RL and online. But, actually, two posts ago when I posted that fic, "Sacrilege," and mentioned in the author notes that I wrote it to indulge my kink/fetish for sneezing? That was me coming out. That was the first time I've mentioned the fetish in an online community other than the specifically fetish-centric one.
In fact I wrote some fetish porn a few years ago, and it's archived online, and I used the same author nick for that as I do for my fanfic, and for years I've worried that someone will do a Google search for my fanfics and will stumble across the fetish stuff. I even considered changing my nick, but by the time the problem occurred to me I was already known in (my other) fandom by that nick, and it seemed overly paranoid ... but still. I worried.
So, yeah, I was really nervous about the reception of my "Sacrilege" post—which has turned out to be wonderfully positive. Thank you so much, everyone who commented on the story and didn't call me a freak! :)
Maybe I seem to be making a big deal of nothing. I mean, seriously, in the fic in question I have my main characters rape and kill a priest and then have gay and threeway vampire sex in a Catholic church while one of them chants the Lord's Prayer. And I'm worried people will think I'm a freak because one of the characters sneezes? But, well, all the violence and nasty religious stuff isn't my kink, it's just what happened when I put Spike, Angelus and Drusilla together. I mean, seriously, they're evil. Whereas the sneezing thing is a deep!dark!secret! I've been guarding since I was four years old. (Seriously. I used to get tingly-down-there feelings watching the Count sneeze on Sesame Street, not that I knew what those feelings were for another sixteen years, and dear god I've always had a thing for vampires, too, haven't I?)
In summary ... slash is not a fetish. But fetishes aren't inherently bad. They can be fun and cute. The end.
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Date: 2004-06-22 06:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-23 06:31 pm (UTC)