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

[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.