Re Shane & Lisa discussion:
I'm saying that people should know that slash is only a small part of a vast amount of fanfic of varying quality.
Slash--part of this complete breakfast!
Lisa:
The whole
fighting-the-Federation business is, as far as I'm concerned, just there to give them an excuse to bicker, and get into situations, and get each other out of situations, and generally demonstrate the character dynamics, which are what I'm watching for.
Shane: That _is_ politics, actually.
We ought not to muddle "politics" in the sense of control of nation-states with "the personal is the political."
Lisa:
A
story which is just a sex scene I'll usually pass by, since sex per se is something I don't find terribly interesting.
Shane:
If you don't find sex interesting, why read slash?
Not one of your best, Shane, you must be tired. Lisa said "sex per se"-- which leaves open the possibility of an interesting story where the sex scenes exist in a context that makes them worthwhile reading. My own test is whether the scene would work just as well if you changed "Blake and Avon" to "Kirk and Spock" or "Bodie and Doyle"--if it does, then there's nothing there but the smut. (...not that that's a BAD thing...)
But if they're presenting two characters in a gay relationship, then they _are_ writing about my lifestyle. I'm a gay man in a gay relationship.
Hence
my concern. If somebody, say, wrote a story about a Muslim character which totally misrepresented Islam, would you say to Muslims who objected: "Oh, they weren't writing about _your_ religion"?
Maybe, if the story were about Islam in the 30th century, with nine centuries of changes. In fact it sounds kind of interesting just to speculate how Islam would be altered by that time span.
Lisa:
Most slash is concerned with the relationship between two, very specific, characters, not with "lifestyles", gay or otherwise.
Shane:
Um, sorry, but relationships between two characters _are_ their lifestyle.
But the question is whose lifestyle. Not all gay men in England in 2001 act the same way, and I suppose that all gay men in the Federation in the Second Calendar will act the same way--what kinds of gender roles and identities are available, and how individuals react to them, seem to me to be very interesting areas of inquiry.
-(Y)
"I do not see why it should be necessary to become irrational to prove that I care, or indeed why it should be necessary to prove it at all"