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

[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.

[dejla.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I should really have put this answer to the question you answered, since I think I jumbled the two posts.