I spent last weekend at a sci-fi convention, basically going to as many slash panels as I can. What have I learnt? That I am nothing at all like the typical slasher. >.<
I was most surprised with the way people seemed quite happy to jump from one ship to the next, without any real thought other than ‘oh yeah, those characters would be hot together’. The question was asked if anyone present had only ever had one ship, and I was the only person to raise my hand. I suppose Holmes/Watson is my ‘one true pairing’ as they put it, which I guess makes me a feeble slasher. I mean, I’ve read plenty of other pairings, but most of them I simply can’t believe in. There are some good Jeeves/Wooster stories, for example, but I just can’t actually see it happening. It feels wrong and slightly strange. I say this with the full-awareness that someone somewhere (i.e. my husband, in the kitchen) is saying ‘but Holmes/Watson? That’s wrong and slightly strange!’
There definitely seemed to a lot of ‘kink’ involved, as well. I got the impression that slash was a kind of addictive pornography for some these people, and that they had to write stranger and stranger stuff to still get a hit from it. It was mentioned that rps was basically underground a couple of years ago, but now it is lot easier to find. I shall probably tread on someone’s toes when I say this, but person I find rps very offensive, and almost a form of abuse. Perhaps this is because someone wrote and published rps on their website about me once; it’s not really a very nice feeling. Recently Stephen Fry had a chuckle over twitter about some Fry/Laurie Jonathon Ross had read him on his show – so I suppose some people don’t worry about it so much, but still.
Today I was doing a long and laborious screening at work, which allowed me to have a good old think about slash, my fic, and why I write it when I don’t really fit in (seriously, please don’t ask for the list of slash tropes I hate, I’d be here all night). It occurred to me that actually a lot of the plotty bits of Smoke <3s are quite a lot like another fanfic I wrote six years ago – even though this is Holmes slash, and that was Final Fantasy VII gen. It occurred to me that maybe I have my own tropes that I keep regurgitating, and maybe just like the fanfic writers, I need to keep taking them to further and further extremes. One trope of mine is a fallen priest. Another is biopunk ‘they control our DNA!’ drama. I like monsters, and blood, and psychedelia. I also like taboo love, or sexual dysfunction, often combined with fallen priestery. One NaNo I wrote was about a monk who brought about armageddon by having sex with Goddess he was supposed to be venerating. A story I wrote when I was seventeen was all about undead decaying dragons. The last story I completed ended with a sex rite which burned everyone to death.
So why am I writing all this? I don’t know, but maybe because I want to remind myself that I’m not ‘better’ than other people because I don’t write hard-core porn. I might gloss over the details of sex, and switch to waving corn etc, but actually, the way I portray relationships isn’t really that great. But hey, maybe that counter-balances all the fluff, magical first time sex, and enduring one true love fic out there.
Heh.
Back to the tentacles for me.
