Why is SGA fandom so segregated?

[trinityofone]

lavvyan! I got your package! Thank you so much, it's gorgeous. (To curious parties: it's a piece of papyrus with the Ancient Egyptian calendar on it.) Actually, the tube it came in is gorgeous, too. But I really want to try to get it framed. And this Treed Murray poster, which I keep saying I should treat myself to. (Hey, I have a new apartment and a new office to decorate here!) There has to be a cheap frame shop in existence somewhere...right?

I am incredibly, incredibly tired today. I was exhausted yesterday, and couldn't even make it through The Daily Show before I crashed. This is bad. I thought I was adjusting to my new work schedule, but I guess I'm not. Is there any way to train yourself to need less sleep?

One thing that has almost kept me energized has been the response to the SGA Bulwer-Lytton Contest. There are so many awesome and hysterical entries, it's going to be killer to choose. So I think I'll pick my--15? Is that how many entries an LJ poll allows?--my 15 or so favorites and let people vote on the Grand Prize Winner. Unless anybody has wild objections, I'll put that up tomorrow.

Like I said, the response has been incredible, and I've seen some new names (by which I mean: people I don't know, even by association, not "people who don't usually comment here"), which is always cool. But--and please correct me if I'm wrong--I still seem to be attracting mostly McKay/Sheppard people, or at least mostly slash people. Which in general makes sense, because hey, I write McKay/Sheppard, I talk about McKay/Sheppard, most of my friends are into McKay/Sheppard. As far as I'm concerned, McKay/Sheppard is for yay.

BUT. I like other pairings, too (my other fandom interest could possibly be described as McKay/women), and I think at least a little cross-pairing pollination is to be encouraged. My last fandom was BtVS/AtS, and it was wild, man. I mean, I started out a Spuffy shipper (Shut up! Their love was pure snarky and hot! At least before it became canon, anyway) but I liked the slash a lot (Buffydom was where I really grew to be comfortable with slash) and I wrote and read some of pretty much everything. It was all mixed.

Why is SGA so much more segregated? I mean, I don't think this is entirely a bad thing--I don't want my flist flooded with Sheppard/Weir stories, and I doubt the Sheppard/Weir shippers want a gazillion McKay/Sheppard stories on their friends pages, either. But is it just me, or is it extremely hard to organize activities that include all sides of fandom? Take reel_sga. The response to that has been great...but as pairings go, not very diverse. In terms of my personal reading habits, that's fine, but I had kind of hoped that there'd be more pairings represented. And maybe there still will be. That would be cool.

(Speaking of one nice bit of pairing diversity, I really loved this reel_sga entry: McKay/Ford art by deani_bean. It's the tie thing. That's awesome, and that transcends OTP-loyalty [and I say this as someone who is mockably OTPish at times]. Which is cool, no?)

Anyway, the Bulwer-Lytton thing is different, because of course it is not pairing-centric: it's mostly about mocking style and usage, although certain tropes have been fun to mock, too. It's about bad writing, but it's also about amusing and clever writing, and seeing what you can do in the space of a sentence. That's something everybody can appreciate, right?

So I guess what I'm wondering is, where are the het shippers? (Again, please correct me if they're around and I've just been too dumb to notice.) And I just don't mean, why aren't they here, responding to this--what is here is awesome, and I'm not like, demanding more people participate, omg. I just mean, I've been in this fandom for almost a year now--how have we managed not to interact at all? Of course, part of this may be me--I'm certainly not trolling john_elizabeth, because why would I want to? So I'm also not saying, "Sheppard/Weir peeps! Why aren't you over at mckay_sheppard? We've got a hot tub, come hang out!" Because seriously, why would they want to? But the fact that there's little-to-no crossover is just astonishing to me.

Maybe it's just that we have a situation that's more like X-Files fandom than Buffydom. Back in the old days, I was rabid about MSR, and I just didn't go anywhere near the slash. (Or Scully/Skinner, or whatever else there was.) I can't remember very well, but I think I was actively afraid of those unfamiliar corners of the net, and that included any of the projects "those people" may have been involved in. Of course, I think this may have had MUCH more to do with the fact that I was 14 than with my shipping preferences, but could there possibly be some connection? What I'd like to know is, do most people on the het end of fandom see even a name associated with slash and immediately go, "Avoid! Avoid! Avoid!"? Which, I hasten to say, would be totally their right. But I realize, I don't even know anyone over there that I could ask.

I'm not saying that there needs to be some sort of cross-ship dialogue, because I think those things tend to end in angry glaring at best. Possibly, just ignoring each other is the best way to avoid conflict, and I'm all for avoiding conflict. I'm just surprised there isn't some sort of neutral zone, some shaded area at the center of the Giant Venn Diagram of Fandom Life. Why do you think that is?

Comments

sheppard/teyla versus sheppard/elizabeth

[ms-maree.livejournal.com]

I don't know about the slash/non-slash divide, but I've certainly seen some quite heated sheppard/teyla and sheppard/elizabeth division.

'Conversion' seemed to create quite the spat, with some sheppard/elizabeth folk pointing out that Teyla was practically raped by Shep, so therefore the sheppard/teyla pairing is made invalid by canon.

Personally, this is why I support a ship that will never be canon, or even hinted at as semi-canon by TPTB, because I do forsee them driving those who ship Sheppard with Weir and Teyla absolutely and completely insane.

add to this

[ms-maree.livejournal.com]

Damn, I wish you could edit posts in LJ.

I always think of something else to add after the fact.

But getting aside from the het ship wars (which mark my words, will be HUGE over the next few seasons, I can smell major kerfuffle) I would like to see more slash pairings other then McShep. Personally I have a yen for McKay/Zelenka, and I like McShep, but sometimes I wish that McKay/Zelenka could get a bit of the popularity ya know?

But I acknowledge, that as a person who rarely writes, that I have very little cause to complain. But I'll put it out there anyway.

Re: sheppard/teyla versus sheppard/elizabeth

[mcbeckla.livejournal.com]

Tell me about it! I hate ship wars so now I support no canon ship on Atlantis!

Re: sheppard/teyla versus sheppard/elizabeth

[ms-maree.livejournal.com]

This show is asking for a major ship war. The Weir/Sheppard/Teyla triangle will be foist on us and then well, watch the poverbial hit the fan.

I'm hoping not, but dude, this is basic trope for this type of storyline, and would be consistent with the writers history.

Re: sheppard/teyla versus sheppard/elizabeth

[mcbeckla.livejournal.com]

Totally is. The PTB (a) can't do ship anyway and (b) handling a three-way arc even if done well will cause apocalyptic trouble, so put the two together...

Which is a shame because multi-shipping is so much fun!

Re: sheppard/teyla versus sheppard/elizabeth

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

I'm clinging, *clinging* to the hope that TPTB learned their lesson from various 'ship wars in SG-1, and will take a strict NoRoMo attitude in canon. The fact that none of the major characters have kissed each other while in their right minds is a frail reed for me to cling to, but cling I do.

The chances are, though, that McShep will be the Last Pairing Standing 5 years from now, after TPTB have mucked up the major het ships. Let's just hope I'm wrong.

[llorelei.livejournal.com]

Hee! I always seem to stumble upon random similar comments from you. But I still don't understand WHY writers and creators should care about/learn from a small group of people on the internetz involved in 'shipping kerfuffles.

It's not what their shows are about.

[mcbeckla.livejournal.com]

Hmmm.. Stargate is my first real experience of internet fandom, before then any fandom experience I'd had was of the old fashioned sort when you spoke to people face to face and factions were less apparent.

Then I dropped out of active fandom, I liked Buffy too but didn't join in the fandom. I like Buffy/Angel and Buffy/Spike but wasn't aware there were ship wars going on with them (apparently they were)

Then I joined the Stargate fandom and realised that there was a huge split between het and slash, but I knew someone on the "slash side" from old BSG email days so I got to know her.

Then SGA started. Oy vey. First of all there's one thing that gets my goat, and that's people with no tolerance for other's point of view, so any rabid fan is a big no-no for me. If you're really stick in your own little pit of fanwank and are totally unable to see out of it, then I normally won't bother with you. If you're aggressive about it, I won't like you. I don't believe in sticking to one area of fandom, mainly because I get bored and like to talk to new people, especially if they have quite a different point of view/perception. So I hope my flist is quite diverse, although it's probably dominated by S/W shippers, as I used to be one!

Having said that I did join the McShep community to see what it was like, but not really having an affinity for slash, and it being all about fanfic, I unjoined again. I'm not really interested in reading slash it has to be said, although I would be interested in reading about people who write slash if you know what I mean.

Also I've heard that there is a lot of Weir-hate in the slash world (correct me if I'm wrong) and again, I can't be bothered with that. I don't like Sheppard that much, but I don't waste my time banging on about it.

I think it's just about gravitation, you naturally gravitate towards those who share the same interests, but that shouldn't preclude you from (a) speaking to others and (b) appreciating that they have a different point of view from you.

[wychwood]

I keep going back and rewriting this and it's been staring at me for about four hours. So now I'm giving up and you can have my thinks at this point. It is quite likely it makes no sense and/or is internally contradictory. I just can't quite bear to delete it.

Wow! Reading the comments here is certainly interesting! *g*

To echo most other people: I think that the het/slash divide is quite normal for fandom. If anything, I'd say that it's actually getting less as time goes on - from what I've heard, in most fandoms ten years ago it would have been almost unthinkable for someone to write both het and slash fic, whereas these days you find a lot of people who've written a mixture, or who have a secondary OTP from the other side of the divide, or who are straightforwardly "bitextual". Most of the instances of this that I've seen have involved people who primarily identify as slashers, though - I mean, I'm not aware of having read much in the way of "slash fic by people who normally write het".

Anyway - in fandom people generally seem to hang out in their "safe spaces". Meta is often about characterisation and other such thorny issues, and that often includes a certain amount of pairing-related stuff. So if you're reading meta written by other-pairing-people, then you risk going outside your safe space.

I think it may be the case that meta is actually more common in slash areas of fandom than in het areas. Certainly that's the impression I have from a couple of years spent reading metafandom, which had an extremely wide reach - I would be very surprised to find that there's a huge het meta community out there which doesn't come into contact with metafandom at all. There certainly is meta written about het and by het fans, but I think the *majority* comes from people who would identify primarily as slashers. (Btw, this is linked on metafandom; I don't know if you read that :))

The reason for this *may* be that slash fans *on average* have been around in fandom longer and are more aware of that kind of examination of shows. It seems to me that a lot of slash fans discover slash *after* they discover fandom; it's still something of a niche activity. Therefore it seems likely that people see het in the shows they watch, then discover fandom, and later learn about slash. Often slashers seem to have had an initial phase of "euwww!", too, before getting into it. This would suggest that on average slash fans may have been involved in fannish activities for longer than het fans (on average). If we posit that people are more likely to write meta if they have seen other people writing meta, and that you are more likely to see meta the longer you are involved in fandom, and if the trend I suggest above is valid, then perhaps that would be enough to create a meta-writing culture in parts of slash fandom? And once that sort of disparity arose, it might be self-perpetuating; one side of fandom doesn't see much meta so it doesn't write as much, the other side sees it and writes it. Outsiders who are interested in meta would be drawn more to the slash side, too.

It's also possible that meta appeals to some of the same sort of people that slash does. Het traditionally seems to have depended on canon; people ship the pairings they see, and often the pairings that they think TPTB intend them to see. The sorts of ship wars you get are usually about "what will happen on the show", I think. Certainly that's what I saw with Archer/T'Pol and Trip/T'Pol back in Enterprise, and most of the Ron/Hermione, Harry/Hermione, Harry/Ginny war in Harry Potter seemed to be about what was going to be canon. In SGA you're looking at Elizabeth/John and John/Teyla for that sort of thing, I suspect.

cont...

[wychwood]

cont.

This may also be why slashers and unusual-het-pairing fans are more likely to cross over. Rodney/Teyla, Lorne/Novak, Weir/Zelenka, John/Cadman - these probably aren't going to happen on the show. So in that sense it may be more of a "we think it's going to be canon" / "we're not expecting canon status" divide? Also, both of these instances are likely to involve a certain amount of deliberate subversion of canon - shipping a pairing that you believe TPTB are intending you to see is not the same as paying attention to a pairing that is clearly not intended. When people say, oh, that scene was so slashy, they are not generally saying, look at what the writers are doing.

And also, perhaps slashers are more likely to feel the *need* to meta, in that you get people asking "why slash?" in a way that you don't get "why het?". It's one of the eternal cycling meta topics.

Of course, once you *have* a pairing as dominant as John/Rodney, that's self-perpetuating anyway. People write McKay/Sheppard because that's what gets feedback / attention / etc - of course that isn't the only reason, but you do hear people talking about this a lot, that given the choice between a fic that two people will comment on and a fic that will get two *hundred* comments? People will tend to write the one that most people want to read.

[dejla.livejournal.com]

I don't really think that's true. It seems to me that metafandom is almost exclusively about slash, and as a gen/het/plot fan, I'm not particularly interested in discussion about slash. I remain subbed to metafandom, but nine times out of ten, I don't bother to read much of it.

I find for the most part that slashers tend to be more vocal and more focused on explaining why they write what they write, and that may be why there isn't a lot of het discussion.

And most of the writers I know don't write what people "want to read" -- they write what they want to write. If someone doesn't want to read it -- well, I'm used to that. I still write for myself, I suppose.

[wisdomeagle]

Here from metafandom.

I'm mostly not involved in the SGA fandom because I'm more than half a season behind on canon, but:

I came from SG-1 fandom, which, in my experience, was not a totally segregated het vs slash fandom (though I see lots of people had different experiences.) On LJ, it seemed to me, SG-1 fandom was just opening up to OT3 and multi-ship; I myself was a multishipper, and I was making friends with people who shipped the opposite of the way I shipped and started to write them giftfics and so on. The ficathons I participated in were mostly open-to-all-pairings: Flash fic and stargate_santa (both of which became SG1+SGA communitites when SGA started.) I was a McKay fan right away and read... what I could find, of SGA fic, lots of which was McShep, and I was ok with that, though I never liked Sheppard. I became a McKay/Weir OTPer around the first mid-season haitus, but, as before, I was friends with McSheppers (whom I know from Jack/Daniel fandom) and sparky people as well, and I wrote giftfics, and I ran a McKay ficathon that was open to all pairings, and so at first, my experience of the fandom was that it was non-segregated... but then it got more, and more, and more McShep-centric, and I retreated to my corner. And then retreated straight out of the fandom, into, well, the Jossverse. Because while I have no issues with the show (except that I haven't seen the last half season), I'm just incompatible with the fandom.

[samdonne.livejournal.com]

I don't get the sense that segregation is SGA-specific, in the same way that it isn't a fandom-specific phenomenon, either.

As a matter of fact, models built for the purpose of social network analysis of job segregation between externally-defined groups could, with some tweaking, be applied to pairing segregation of fannish groups: dynamic interaction leads to polarization, and inbreeding bias within groups results in segregation equilibrium down the line. If you're interested, googling "social network analysis and segregation" will likely yield a few papers of relevance.

I've noted here and there that LJ is singled out as a culprit of acute segregation, but intuitively I would argue the opposite. Friends and friendsfriends are likely to blur divides based on preference, and lead to exposure to new, unsought interests. Cross-pollination is more likely to occur in an LJ context, than within the "physically"-segregated environment of mailing lists. Perhaps this feeling of acute segregation on LJ is a visibility effect. Via Friends and Friendsfriends, one is exposed to the existence of other pairing-based communities, if not to their content, and to the existence of competing discourses, which are hard to ignore; if fandoms were mailing list-based only, you could plausibly remain unaware of the very existence of a John/Teyla list, and of John/Teyla fans. Segregation would not be any less in effect, but you wouldn't have to see it.

I wonder whether LJ is more likely to generate "free agents", than other forums.

Of course, a possible response to fandom segregation would be a form of affirmative action, but the social and human cost here is in no way similar in scale or nature to that of racial or social segregation, so why would the community wish to go through the effort? Why would it have to?

Perhaps it is only the very structure of the next generation of fannish forums that will encourage more cross-pollination, just as LJ facilitates fandom-hopping.

I'm not certain how atypical my own experience is. In the first flush of a new fandom, I tend to read everything. But much like Jack O'Neill can only have Fruit Loops for breakfast so many times before he goes batshit crazy, I can only read so much romance, so much McKay/Sheppard, so much crackfic, so much aliens-make-them-do-it, so much any-one-thing, before I run for the hills (another fandom), or go in desperate search of non-boring, non-edgeless, non-sexless gen (my particular definition of gen includes sex, because people have sex, generally, but it doesn't include pairing, which is a separate concept).

As I found myself with less and less time to read due to professional constraints, I expected my fanfic requirements to become more escapist, but in fact I have grown to ask of fanfiction what I ask of fiction, period, and that is personal relevance, as well as entertainment; pairing-based fiction, as it turns out (though with a few exceptions), is personally irrelevant to me.

I may very well be self-segregating, as my concept of fannish activity becomes antithetical with most of fandom experience, but I persevere in making my own fun.

[dejla.livejournal.com]

I can't comment on the fandom in general because I am for the most part uninvolved, nothing but a lurker, and I hang out where I find things that interest me.

Well, I don't read SGA slash. I also don't care for Rodney McKay, so I skip stories that focus on him. There's no point in jumping on me about it -- I don't see slash in SGA and I'm not interested in reading it. But I feel that way about most fandom. There are very few fandoms where I see any possibility of slash, and so it doesn't interest me, and I skip over it. I did recently leave a supposedly-gen/het list where the new listmod decided it was okay for people to discuss slash. If it's a gen/het list, I don't want to have slash discussed, thanks. There are many slash options out there. Use them.

On the other hand, I'm indifferent to what other people do. They want to read, write, discuss slash -- fine! Many different opinions, many different stories. All the better.

I've just barely begun to tolerate Rodney in aired SGA, so I still don't care to read about it except as he's on the periphery.

[miera-c.livejournal.com]

Why is SGA so much more segregated? I mean, I don't think this is entirely a bad thing--I don't want my flist flooded with Sheppard/Weir stories, and I doubt the Sheppard/Weir shippers want a gazillion McKay/Sheppard stories on their friends pages, either. But is it just me, or is it extremely hard to organize activities that include all sides of fandom?

I think you pretty much answered your own question with those first two sentences right there.

I'd also say from my limited observations that those of us who dislike or grew rapidly sick of Sheppard/McKay fic felt so overwhelmed by the overtaking of every wide-open community (flashfic, reel_sga, etc.) by fans of that pairing that we all skittered off into other places (lostcityfound & notmcshep, for example) and pairing-specific communities where we would be safe.

I'd also point out that lostcityfound which is just under 1 year old is (to the best of my knowledge at least) the most active gen and het (all pairings) community in SGA.

[ender24]

I am not into SGA fandom, but from my observations in SV clex fandom, its pretty much the same there, so I dont think, its something to do with SGA itsself.

In SV, I think, there are really places where het shippers never ever have heard of clex, and lots of clex flisters , I am sure, dont even know, where to look or have ever seen clana or whatever het boards...

[clairshadows.livejournal.com]

I see SGA as segregated but my experience within the fandom has been the opposite. I came across mainly from 'The Sentinel' which has gen and slash but no het at all and while I'll dip my toes into the fandoms of my favourite authors the authors themselves tended to stay strictly slash across the fandoms, but here in SGA while I don't look for het some of the authors I love have written them. frostfire has written a teyla centric het story, speranza started writing het for west wing and again a teyla centric story, julad wrote a ford/OFC story and I'm fairly sure synechdochic has included a het pairing within one of her mcshep stories. I've also found from stargate het recommendations from only het writers is written differently than slash the sex scenes and the partner dynamics are far different, far more than just gender would provide and you can see this if you read a het story by a primarily slash writer. I can't properly define it, but I know I enjoy both the het and the slash from slash authors, but find it harder to read het from just het authors.

[tielan]

Er. Hey. I'm late to this discussion (as usual).

Honestly? I came to SGA from SG-1 where there was a strong, clear het element (Sam/Jack, whether a fan liked it or not) and, for the most part, the het side of fandom was quite clearly defined, even if the slash side of fandom was bigger.

For the most part, there was open war between the het and slash sections of SG-1, partly because of the fiasco with Daniel's leaving in S5, and partly because the PTB bias of SG1 was so strongly in favour of Sam/Jack, while the PTB are openly playing the field in SGA.

As such, most het fen who've come across from SGA - largely Shep/Weir fans now - are still very exclusively "one ship and no others unless it compliments it". So Shep/McKay is totally a no-no for most fans, and, by and large, slash is looked down upon by most hardcore het fans.

My personal thing about SGA and fandom is mostly that I'm a fan of both the least-favourite character in fandom (Teyla) as well as the least-favourite pairing in fandom (Shep/Teyla) - most other characters are neutral, most other pairings are neutral. So I find that segregates me off to one side from the get-go. Bigotry is alive and well in fandom in the form of assumption of intelligence or personal value based on what pairing one likes - anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something!

I guess one reason that there's no neutral zone (although I'd label the sga_newsletter and sga_flashfic as the closest zones to 'neutral', even if they have a strong Shep/McKay angle - the whole fandom has a strong Shep/McKay angle) is because SGA is so pairing-pregnant.

My perception of SGA and SGA fandom is that pairing is so pervasive, so inextricable from the way we see the characters - even in their general interaction with each other (not necessarily relationship oriented) - that any discourse or discussion of something as innocuous as an episode of the show turns into a squeefest over who said what to whom and which characters' comments or actions can be interpreted with maximum innuendo.

What I'm trying to say (with more words than I need to) is that even a generic discussion about Atlantis stuff is pairing-oriented. And, as you noted above, pairing-oriented discussions rarely go well.

I guess I, personally, have an interesting range of people on my flist and on the sub-flist that I view. Few of them like the pairings or characters that I prefer, but they're interesting people, which is why I read their LJs. Some do irritate me more than others, I tend to skip their posts and their fic.

Why didn't I join in with the Bulwer-Lytton contest? Hm. I could think of tawdry, dreadful, purple-prose, run-on sentences with bad similes and dodgy metaphors, but I was at work at the time. Hence, there was no chance to post them.

Then there's the issue that the longer you wait with a meme like that, the less likely people are to actually read it, and the more 'set' in a particular style and direction it becomes.

I did suggest an 'SGA Bulwer Lytton Ficathon' though: get an opening line, write a fic!

[sweetvalleyslut.livejournal.com]

Aww. You think that Teyla's the least-liked character in fandom? I know that she gets quite a bit of hate from the Sheppard/Weir people, and I run into a lot of complaints about her on TWOP (she's overly sexualized, she's boring, yadda yadda), but I feel like she gets a fair amount of love in the slash/het community, by which I mean, people who like both.

Maybe it's just my own personal bias, since I adore Teyla, and a lot of my favorite SGA stories are ones that involve her (including a couple of yours, BTW). I wish more people would write her, and write her well, but I think the situation is improving.

[tielan]

I run into a lot of complaints about her on TWOP (she's overly sexualized, she's boring, yadda yadda)

Yeah, those seem to be the main complaints. "Pointless" and "alien babe" seems to be all anyone really gives a shit about in Teyla's case.

I have noticed that things are changing a little - although I suspect that the fondness by slashers will last only as long as Shep never takes an overt interest in her and she never takes an interest back.

You did go check out the teylafen
Teylaficathon entries? There were a variety of stories and a lot of them were utterly brilliant.

[sweetvalleyslut.livejournal.com]

I haven't had a chance to go through them all yet, but I surely shall.

[tagore.livejournal.com]

Hi there -- just a random stranger passing through. I don't really have anything to say about het/slash segregation except to reiterate what most have already said on this thread; it's pretty much standard operating procedure for most fandoms.

What is sort of bemusing is the railing against McShep and its fandom-swallowing properties. From my perspective as a newbie, it seems like you can find tons of alternate SGA slash pairings and het pairings without lifting a finger. My guess is that things used to be a lot more one sided, but it sure doesn't seem so (to me anyway) now. I don't get it.

What I would be interested in is a (lies, damn lies and) statistical study of the number of primarily het-pairing writers who dabble in slash vs. the number of slashers who also write some het. I have a feeling that the numbers would skew heavily toward the slashers writing het direction.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Coming most recently from the Harry Potter fandom I have to say I don't find the SGA fandom balkanized at all. I think it's fairly common for one pairing to dominated a fandom early on and then see pairings expand. I do that as a writer myself: write one pairing for a while and then slowly fan out.

Icarus