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

[plsteward.livejournal.com]

SGA's not that bad, but now that I think of it from what I've seem most of tthee fandom is via lj whch provides for a bit more eclecticness on my part as opposed to the mailing lists & group-thingys that my other fandoms seemed to be based out of. On those you pretty much had to adhere to the list rules (#1 was usually don't talk about things that break brains, aka any ships that are not the listmod's OTP.) Because of that & the time it took to play in just one pool, I never got much exposure past the pairings that my buds were into. Someone above (I'm too lazy to go back & find out who) said that SGA isn't as bad as SG1, which is so true. There are several sects, the Sam/Jack-ers, the Jack/Daniel-ers, the "Season 5 never happened & I don't wanna contemplate a world with out Daniel- lalalala- not listening."-ers, the anything with sex folks, & the anything good folk (the last three could care less about ship, but they all seem to be at odds at various times.) I was brought into the fandom by J/D fans, but I thank god I figured out the cliques & found good writers, but I still tend to vere towards J/D because for some reason S/J hurts me (I think I was brainwashed, but then again, I've never been too fond of het.)

Now my other fandoms are not segragated at all, but they are small or well, like DrWho which has a bisexual canon with a huge following of all ages. I think the size matters in such matters as shipper wars, in small fandoms the mods don't want to risk the infighting & getting a bad rep, so they try to stop the drama & invite everyone to share nicely. In the bigger fandoms, the mods don't need to worry because if 20 or more get alienated in a group of 300 or more, it's no big deal.

Another issue with both SG fandoms is the lack of a cohiesive & comprehencive user-friendly archive. There seems to be just the two main ones, Heliopolis & Area52, but no mixed archive. A majority of the fans seem to be older & distaining of ff.net which was the primary archive for my past fandoms, which doesn't have a switch to tune out the slash or gen, that means for people who are just searching on ff.net they might end up with a great slash fic which makes them want more when they previously thought only het or gen was good, or vice versa. On the more controled archives which are segragated into the three separate websites, if a person searches for fic, they will only find the fic they are used to.

All in all, it leads to the fandom being fragmented, but still it isn't that bad. You were just spoiled with BtVS, or maybe that's "shown how fandom should work".