Meta: Fandom - Slash - Incest - Wincest...
Mar. 3rd, 2008 02:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
on_verraFrom my old ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
psycholibrarian account, reposted to LJ by request on 1 May 2008, because people WANTS it. :)
Entry backdated to original post date, with 50+ comments imported as 27 screen caps (click on image links to view).
Oh boy. I've finally gone and done it. I have committed meta. Long meta. Das Über-meta. Meta in which I talk about... *drumroll please*... Wincest!
I need to include some basic "Intro to Fan Fic" blah blah for some readers, so it's gonna take me a while to get to the Wincest. Please bear with me, you eager, in-the-know slash-type people ;D
Before I get started:
*General Meta-Statement Alert*
I am NOT going to go into a whole giant critical discourse on fanfic or fandom at large and all the different issues that they raise. No matter how tempting. That would take dozens of Ph.D. theses, at least, on top of the work that already exists! Besides, it's all being discussed by people far more erudite than myself. And also, as I said in a recent post about fandom and academics, I tend to take issue with "acafans" who study their own fandoms with little-to-no way around their own lack of objectivity.
[ETA: I don't mean all acafans, obviously! I'm more aca than fan, myself! It's just, there's so much grey area here, and I don't want to end up waxing hypocritical.]
I am NOT going to talk directly about my own personal experiences or how it comes into play in my literary tastes, etc. (though I'm sure some stuff will invariably come out anyway, like it does). We've all got our own issues through which we read the world. But in the interests of disclosure and context, I will mention once here that I am a feminist with a fairly substantial academic background of gender studies and queer theory, and all-together, over a decade's worth of fandom experience in some form or other. That is ALL part of the lens through which I read the world.
Hopefully, I'll never again have to brag about my qualifications, such as they are. That was just for new people :D
*End Alert*
That said, I AM going to have to include basic simplified fandom, uh, fun facts, peppered throughout, for the benefit of any non-fannish folks on my f-list who wanna read this post too. :D
So here we go.
Fanfiction (or Fan fiction, fanfic, or "fic") – "fiction typically created by admirers of an existing commercial media property that uses, typically without explicit copyright permission, its characters and concepts," (as found on Wiktionary, 2007) – has existed for decades, at least! As long as the modern mass media, really. But its visibility and participation have increased exponentially with the growth of the Internet, and I might add with the popularity of LiveJournal and its imitators (some of which are specially geared towards fandom, like JournalFen, and which saw a massive influx of former LJ members following LJ's infamous "StrikeThrough" debacle in 2007). Fanfic is very broad, of course, but the kind that always gets the most press? Slash.
What is slash?. Click that link for one of my favorite fan-produced explanations thus far (thebratqueen, 2003).
You can also check out Pairings, wave theory, interpretive communities (Torch, akaflambeau, 2007) for a rather interesting quasi-history of slash structure.
There's also some fascinating insight into the whole gendered "men like porn/women like slash" issue here:
Some late night reflections on slash, gay men, gender, etc. (Lawrence Schimel, akadesayunoencama, 2004).
Allow me to quote from Schimel (who is a man! OMG! *g*) to whet your appetites: "One of the curious things about slash – as opposed to traditional erotica – is that it is a communal activity." This is both a cause AND an effect, I think, of the communal appeal of sites like LJ and of fandom at large.
I would also make a case for the relevance of contemporary "female" tendencies to behave more communally, to bond over shared interests, to enjoy pleasing or impressing others, and to be more open about sexuality, sexual desire and fantasy. Put that all together within a fandom... and you get slash. Slash slash slashy slash of every kind imaginable and unimaginable.
I don't write any, because I can't write fiction worth a crap, but I've sure read a lot of it. But then, you probably have too, or you wouldn't be reading this ;D
Okay... so you get slash. And although the term can now include female/female pairings (often called "femslash") and male/female pairings (usually called "het"), plain old "slash" mostly and traditionally refers to male/male pairings.
And although there are, of course, male slash writers out there (some of whom I read regularly!) most slash is still basically written by and for female fans. Some people even read slash and/or gen fic when they don't even read/watch the parent text! Another way that fandom communities and "fanon" take on lives of their own. The theories and explanations about all this stuff are WAY too numerous and complex for me to address here, so do your own digging.
But at least, here are a couple more fun and brilliant links on a couple of specific important subtopics that often come up Click 'em!
Fandom and Male Privilege (2005), in whichcereta discusses the idea of fandom as "female space," one of the only such spaces created by and (generally? hopefully?) left for women to control and play around in, without privileged male controlling interference. Most female fans would say that men are happily allowed, but must not redirect discussion over to things that are not interesting to the group. (Well actually, no one should do this, regardless of gender. It's just bad manners!)
Sexuality and slash fandom (2007), in whichthe_shoshanna discusses the evolution of slash over the last couple of decades, and how sexuality and sexual openness among slash writers has comes into play.
And finally...
Abbreviated Meta: WNGWJLEO (2007), in whichmakesmewannadie discusses the common 'We're Not Gay, We Just Love Each Other!' trope in slash, "how it functions as narrative device and what it says about queer identity and sexual identification" and how it has begun to be replaced by another, similar , and arguably more problematic trope, that functions "without addressing queerness or sexual identification much at all."
It is indeed a fine, fine thing that same-sex attraction itself is not seen as the barrier it once was. It is evidence that homophobia, while by no means eradicated, that's for sure, has dissipated enough that gender itself is no longer seen as an automatic barrier to sex and/or love. Especially among the media-savvy, liberal women that constitute a large part of fandom. The catch, for better or for worse, is that those who once reveled in the "homosexual-taboo-shattering" aspect of slash are now looking for new taboos to break.
In the real world, we've got quite wonderful, visible activism taking on remaining barriers like prejudice against the transgendered, for example. In slash, we've got damn near infinite possibility and opportunity to take on remaining barriers, and also...rather more unusual ones.
So...
I'm going to talk now about a particular theme that's been cropping up in slash more and more and more in the past couple of years. That theme is... incest.
*Another General Meta-Statement Alert*
I am NOT going to talk about parent/child incest, which I believe is just wrong. That gets into a whole mess of wrong – what with issues of child molestation and vast power imbalances regardless of the participants' ages, etc., etc., etc. Parent/child incest is something that I have little interest in exploring, in real life or in fiction, beyond the hope that I posses some sort of objective understanding for why it occurs, and feel sympathy for anyone in real life who was molested by their parents or guardians, or by older sibling during childhood or early adolescence, when that sibling was old enough to know better.
Can and/or should people explore this stuff in fiction and fanfic? Sure! Absolutely! I've even read a couple of fics in which it was actually plausible (largely via undertones if not activity). But I could never feel comfortable condoning those writings in which parent/child incest is looked upon as positive, or in which child abuse is looked upon as titillating. Well, I never say never so who knows? Perhaps someday I'll make an exception. But I highly doubt it.
*End Alert*
So what AM I talking about? Consensual incest between adult siblings, or teen siblings close enough in age so as not to constitute clear-cut child molestation.
Fiction about this has certainly existed for a long time, but it's become more and more ubiquitous with the growth of fandom and slash. In some circles, it's even become a given, with no explanation necessary. Such stories would be, say, "third or fourth wave" according to Wave Theory (see again Torch, 2007).
In certain fandoms – most obviously I'd cite Harry Potter, Heroes, and Supernatural – one can easily find any number of stories by any number of writers, from those with immense talent to those with none, about canonical characters hookin' up – characters who happen to be brothers.
There is some heterosexual sibling incest slash (for example in Harry Potter and also in Firefly for sure), and I'm quite certain that sibling femslash exists, though I've never personally read any and can't think of any that I might want to read. Sibling slash is largely confined to brothers. This is surely, simply, a logical extension of the prevalence of male/maleness that is slash in general, but there are most certainly other factors at play as well.
Here I come to the point where my over-education always gets me. The point where I give up and cancel whole LJ posts, delete entire Word documents, or toss wadded-up notepaper into the basket. Because after reading a million wonderful books and articles and LJ posts about something, I feel like there are no new insights I can possibly have. But today? Today I am determined to soldier on!
There are a few more particular reasons why a slash fan would be into brocest. And I mean, pretty obvious ones. The ones that I'll call the Big Three:
1) "No matter whether their canonical relationship is brotherly, these characters/actors are way hot and I want to envision them getting together!"
2) "Those guys are showing some major subtext between them! They practically beg to be slashed!"
3) "I've got a brocest kink already, and these guys give me a great excuse to air it out!"
Then there's also:
4) "Wouldn't it be hilarious if they found themselves hooked-up somehow?"
This can actually generate some of the best, snappiest fic around (for within fandom circles, to be funny is FTW! ;D)
To some extent, and rather less obvious to anyone who hasn't spent enough time in interactive fandom, or is simply not savvy enough to recognize when fandom becomes a quasi-media property in itself, there is a certain amount of:
5) "Everything else has been written already, so I need to come up with a new angle for my writings or no one will be interested in my stories... Aha! Eureka! Incest fic!"
This happens when being original is seen as FTW! – sometimes, sometimes at the expense of being, you know, good. (Actually, come to think of it, this happens with any kind of fiction. Or non-fiction, even. :P )
I don't have much else to say about #s 4 and 5 here, and I don't want to commit accidental wank. So I'll get back to my Big Three.
Now here's where my rambling starts to get more subjective. My own personal meta stamp, if you will.
Regarding #1:
I obviously can't tell anyone who they should or shouldn't find attractive – and of course, actors on television tend to be more attractive than average people! Plus characters in books tend to be attractive in readers' imaginations. So please go forth, be merry, and drool over whomever you like!
The #1 line of reasoning also results in a lot of actor-inspired RPS (Real Person Slash), which is especially popular among those who like the idea of certain actors together but may not be able to (or may not want to) get over the problematic nature of incest fic. In fact, as I understand it, although RPS existed in RP-based fandoms for a long time, there's been a substantial increase in RPS (and even in RPF, Real Person Fic in general, not just slash) since the premieres of, say, Supernatural (in 2005) and Heroes (in 2006), with people churning out stories featuring Jared/Jensen or Adrian/Milo – the actors who play brothers Sam & Dean and Nathan & Peter on these shows, respectively.
I am almost never interested in RPS. There's the occasional exception, but for my personal taste, the best fanfic is still the kind that taps into the same essential world that exists in a fictional canon, and expands upon it. Just as all participatory fandom can serve to both extend and enhance fans' enjoyment and understanding of canon, the whole point of fanfic in the first place is to play around in worlds that we like so much that we want to stay in them above and beyond the canon. Anything else just becomes... about something else.
So for me, even if the characters get a little bit OOC - or if the story is purely about two people sitting in a room, with no larger external plot going on as there would be in canon - the basic internal logic/world of the canonical parent text should remain. Even if it's solely through back story, tone, or dialogue.
RPS is necessarily unable to follow that ideal, because these actors (or musicians, or ballplayers, or whatever your poison!) are real people about whom we fans know next to nothing. Even the celebrities who reveal more of themselves than others, in these our tabloid-obsessed times, really don't reveal much. Any "canonical world" into which we read slash can only be a fan construct. That's fine – people have been fantasizing about celebrities for as long as celebrity has existed! But one must acknowledge the fact that a fictional media property contains a universe unto itself, and all of the canon text lies within that given universe (possible exceptions being extracultural references and in-jokes, like we see a lot in Joss Whedon's work; and sometimes authorial information that's not officially in canon, like when J.K. Rowling reveals extracanonical character info in her interviews... and the fans' heads go boom ;D).
We know far more about fictional worlds and characters than we can know about the real lives of their actors simply because of what information is presented or available to us. I myself am most interested in the characters that I've come to love in the parent text, and so that's who I look for in slash.
Granted, I've read some pretty amazing fanfic that's so far removed from the canon that it could practically be considered original work, having like, nothing in common with canon besides the characters' names, but that's another thing entirely! There is also the stuff that might fall under #4, as the "Comedic Pairing" trope can, again, result in some pretty damn amazing fan-produced fic in the right hands.
(I also remember, back in high school, having a very detailed and awesome fantasy about a couple of guys I knew secretly hooking up with each other. So what was that, like, my own personal RPS, about people that I actually knew? Heh! But I digress...)
Shameless Plug Side Note:
Check out Fans, Producers, and when Real Person Fic actually becomes about Real People (by my own Real Person friend Xiaochang Li!, 2008), posted via the Convergence Culture Consortium blog (C3) at MIT. Some very thinky thoughts - proving incendiary to some rather defensive RPF fans - from the woman who is to be blamed for getting me hooked on some of this grand Fandom Meta stuff in the first place – and who has been doing the "I Told You So" Point-and-Laugh thing in my face ever since. ;D (Incidentally, we first met via my very first online fandom back in the late '90s.)
Regarding #2:
I cannot and will not attempt to tell other people how to interpret any possible text or subtext in any given show/movie/book/whatever. People are going to see what they want to see. We can all have big discussions and disagreements about it, and that's a lot of fun! But to assume that your interpretation is the only, or the best? That is some serious bullshit fan-wankage.
Like for example, I just don't see any slashiness between the brothers Peter and Nathan Petrelli on Heroes. I know a lot of fans who are are all "Oh but they are always touching each other's faces gently, and how about the lingering glances, and the OH they're hot and they love each other so much!!!" and that is a totally valid interpretation. But to me, watching the show from the very beginning, it just seemed like close brotherly love. Once the Heroes fandom started rolling around in Slash, it just seemed like the actors and producers quickly got in on the joke and started pandering to the fandom. Plus the characters are about 10 years apart in age, and have spent a lot of time, separately, out in the real world if not estranged, and that makes for some unrealistic slash to me.
I did try to read some Petrellicest for a while. Believe me, really I did, but it just never rang true for me and I gave up. Besides, I wasn't that into the actual show to start with. So to me that brief interest was more like...
#3:
Which... alright, I have to cop to it: Hello, my name is Alysa, and I have a major brocest kink.
Ever since I got my dirty 15-year-old paws, lordy knows how, on Tom Hardy (Gordon Hoban)'s Green Hotel Stories (Omnium Pub, 1987). And probably even way before then.
That said, it doesn't mean I will glom onto a brocest slash fandom just because it's got brocest. If that were the case, I'd still be reading Petrellicest!
So I'm obviously a discerning pervert (heh!), but the fact remains: I am deeply attracted to the concept of sibling incest in general. I myself am an only child. Perhaps if I had actual siblings, maybe then I wouldn't have the kink! Perhaps I'd say what most people say: "No way! I couldn't imagine thinking of brothers/sisters that way! I've got my own brother/sister and that's just GROSS! Ack Ick Yuck! Must run away now!"
Most people can make an objective judgment regarding the physical attractiveness of their own siblings, of either gender, that's completely independent of their own sexual orientation. But that is clearly not the same thing as being personally attracted to one's siblings! (And for the record, I have never been even remotely attracted to anyone in my family at all, be they close or distant.)
Now, it's nothing new that the idea that two sisters getting it on is fodder for typical heterosexual male fantasy, especially if the sisters are twins. Some infamous buxom blond lady twins have even made careers out of this, although that seems driven by pure financial opportunism trumping all other concerns. Which is kind of disturbing in and of itself, but that's another story.
One could assume that this simply comes from the combination of two stereotypical heterosexual male explanations: "Lesbianism is hot because the more women you get to ogle at once, the better, and because you can see yourself joining in"; and sisters in particular are hot "because they evoke the spirit of competition over a guy, and because there's a freaky taboo!" – and as I implied earlier, taboo-breaking tends to be, well, sexy, or at least easily sexualized. Ah, taboos, how we love thee. *G*
I'm obliged to reference at least one more great LJ post that touches on some of this:
As threatened... a longish post about four years in slash fandom (2007), in which another Real Person friend of mine (heh),linaerys, discusses the frequently-raised critique that "it's sexist to like two men together just because they are men, as bad as men who prefer to watch lesbians," and posits that in slash [as opposed to most straight-up porn, I would add] things are WAY more complicated than that. It's more about "tweaking the characters." She also talks wonderfully about the whole barrier-breaking angle: "True love or lust overcoming barriers always adds sexiness as far as I'm concerned, and slash generally has that built right in." One might say that that goes tenfold for incest slash.
(I would also add that the "lesbian porn for men = male/male porn for women" argument, on a sexually basic level, only works on the thinnest of surfaces, for, generally speaking, men and women - regardless of sexual orientation - do tend to have notoriously different ideas about the nature of erotica, about what is hot, and why. But anyway... )
So, okay, if the idea of watching two siblings get it on is kinda hot – why not one's OWN siblings?
Some proponents of might say (and I have seen this pretty much verbatim in incest slash stories a few times): "Growing up, you're expected to rely on your family for love and support, nurture, safety, protection and understanding. But then you hit puberty and you're suddenly expected to look elsewhere when it comes to your sexuality? Why?!?"
But that is really stupid reasoning. Aside from the fact that it creates a very slippery slope that could allow for the putting of equal blame on a child as on a parent in truly heinous molestation cases, it also negates, well, pretty much all standing theories of "healthy development."
As I understand it (someone correct me if I'm wrong?) – normal, healthy mental and emotional development involve a long and complex process of differentiating oneself from one's family, and of interacting with the rest of society – that is, with other people who are not your family! It's not "suddenly" at all. It's the long process of growing up to be a normal adjusted person. Regardless of what one considers "normal," few would argue that "normal" should include serious incestuous attachments.
In fact, in certain documented cases of incest (as with other types of supposedly deviant sexual behavior) it is posited that circumstances of unnatural social isolation lead people to turn to each other for sexual love (or just for sex). But those circumstances? Not normal or healthy in any sense of the words.
There’s also a fairly well-documented phenomenon called "Genetic Sexual Attraction" (GSA) where reunited family members who have not grown up together (most often because a child was given up for adoption), who have never met each other until adulthood, often have a very strong, even sexual attraction to each other. I don't know much about this phenomenon, but it does raise interesting questions and make another kind of case for strong feelings of familial connection being psychologically conflated with feelings of attraction.
For more on that, take a look at:
META: GSA and Heroes (Sinope, akaeponis, 2007) which nicely raises the question of heterosexual GSA possibilities on the show Heroes. (Which, I might add, has a whole 'nother dimension now that the actors who play newly-discovered uncle and niece on the show are now dating in real life!)
I find the GSA phenomenon kinda excusable, but if I ever met a real pair of adult siblings who actually grew up together and were also sleeping together? Hmmm. No matter the fact that this still appeals to me on some deeply strange psychosexual level (and once again I point out that I am an only child!), I have to say, to be perfectly honest with myself, I would probably be pretty squicked out. Not necessarily by the sex itself, but, well...
Consenting, well-adjusted, or reasonably well-adjusted adults should be able to do whatever they want in their sex lives, (barring, mayhaps, uncontrolled poppin'-out of genetically fuggered-up children!), but I couldn't help but be concerned about their upbringing and wary about their resultant mental and emotional fitness. And I certainly imagine that I'd be horrified to learn that my OWN adult children were sleeping with each other – what would it say about my parenting if I fostered an environment that produced that? Whoa, I can't even go there. Wow.
But again I must point out for the non-informed... say it with me now:
Fiction is NOT Reality.
All of which brings me to... of course... my current primary fandom.
(If you're interested, in addition to my recent post on fandom and academics mentioned near the beginning of this post, you can also click here, to read about my own fandom trajectory from the late 1990s up until now, which I posted just last week in comments oncereta's LJ prompt for people to talk about their fandoms, past and present. Neat stuff. Worth a look, all responses.)
I'm into, or am at least all caught up on, quite a number of large-fandom-having canon texts/media properties. I may not talk about them that much, but that doesn't mean I don't go all fangirly about them on my own time. There are even some more that I haven't yet seen at all, but perhaps want to try out, such as the show SGA. (No, I have still never seen it. So sue me. ;D)
I also still manage (somehow?!) to maintain passionate but "purely academic" interest in some canon texts without ever dabbling into online fandom at all! (Hell to the O to my very own, fairly popular Academic Buffy Studies & Whedonverse Bibliography! *blows on knuckles*)
Finally, as some of you may have noticed, I have gotten really into Supernatural (SPN).
Why? Well, when it first premiered in 2005, I liked the idea of a pair of squabbling brothers out on the road fighting evil, to a soundtrack of kick-ass classic rock. And it happened to be on right after Gilmore Girls which I quite liked, so it was convenient to watch both. But I best love texts that have million different readings and hooks, and quite frankly I didn't find SPN had that kind of appeal. As a jaded horror movie fan, I found most of the "monsters-of-the-week" were really predictable and trite, and I didn't there wasn't much else to read into. Also, I did not find the show's larger "myth-arc" engaging enough, up to that point, for me to follow when the network (then still the WB) switched the line-up around about halfway through the season. I didn't have TV access on the show's new night, and I didn't try to look for it at other times or through other means.
After another year or so, I remember being really surprised upon hearing that SPN was still in production. I just figured, "Eh, people will watch any show that's got hot actors regardless of its other qualities or lack thereof, ho-hum." But then I started hearing Really Good Things about how the show and the characters had progressed. So I got my hands on the DVDs of seasons 1 and 2, and got myself all caught up for season 3. And how!
I rememberyourlibrarian saying that a lot of really good writers, many of whom had made names for themselves in other fandoms, had since migrated over to SPN, and I wanted to check that out.
I also like to be proven wrong about TV shows, and oh boy was I wrong! SPN is the first fandom that's got me proudly adding fannish strangers to my LJ f-list. I have found that this fandom has a notably high ratio of Smart People, and I like to flatter myself that I can be counted as one of them.
Mind you, this all went down after, like, a year or so of my spending an ever-increasing amount of time lurking around reading meta, fic, and wank reports in other fandoms, so it wasn't as sudden a move for me to seek out some of this stuff for SPN as it once might have been. Especially when I heard that a lot of people were writing slash.
So, what does this mean to me? It means that SPN slash hits on, like, all of my Big Three reasons for supporting a brocest slash pairing. This freakin' PWNS me. It allows me to indulge in my brocest kink, but first and foremost, I find that a slash reading is supported and encouraged by the canon.
This is not, of course, my ONLY interest in fandom or in canon (SPN or otherwise), but it's kinda my favorite one. I'm pretty much, at all times, preoccupied more with issues of sex, sexuality, and gender than with any other issues (duh!), so why should it be any different with this?
Here are a couple of relevant links just for fun (though they're both kinda out-of-date now):
NewbieGuide entry on SPN fandom (submitted byscribewraith, 2006), which is just what it says. It collects links on lotsa different aspects of the fandom, not just fic or slash.
and
The Sam/Dean 'Ship Manifesto (submitted byslytherinblack, 2005), which is a basic outline of why slashers like to put these two characters together. The characters have both evolved muchly since the beginning – in ways that makes them even slashier! \0/
In my opinion, Sam and Dean Winchester, as opposed to, say, the Petrelli brothers or the majority of incestuous slash pairings out there, really do have infinitely more slash potential within the canonical parent text. For one thing, I find there to be plenty of subtext in the way they interact with one another on screen, which leaves plenty of room for interpretation and expansion. For another, their unique back story allows for us to leap to some pretty weighty assumptions or conclusions, if we so choose.
Like, it makes sense to me that their intense co-dependence, grounded in their gonzo childhood and long-time isolation from the normal world, would produce an intense, confusing and consuming love, which might then turn physical. Especially in light of their prior attempts at relationships with outsiders turning out so tragically. And there is certainly something capital-R Romantic about these guys' epic journey and love, even if one only sees it as platonic.
I can quite clearly see this dynamic being explored both in slash that has them reaching for each other as adults in the present day real-time of the show AND in slash that imagines them experimenting as adolescents (Wee!cest! Heh!), which tends to invoke the "jealousy" and "hero worship" tropes a lot (both of which are common tropes between siblings IRL, too).
It should be noted that some of this stuff has to do with the basic "supernatural" elements of the show's universe. This also goes for many other significant fandoms of course!
Sci-fi, fantasy, and horror genre canon texts dabbling in the supernatural always seem to attract a certain kind of fandom (and I mean that as a compliment to both the genres and the fans :D). You have supernatural forces functioning as allegory and whatnot, and forcing characters and fans alike to confront deeper issues. You have supernatural forces pushing characters together via the need to maintain secrecy from other people. You have supernatural forces quite literally pushing characters together via spells, or exposure to weird substances, or body-switching or what have you. And just as it does for the authors/auteurs of the parent texts themselves, this gives slashers room to play with essentially limitless scenarios.
See? What with all of this AND the cool premise and the snappy dialogue and the increasingly good plots and storytelling and episode construction? SPN seriously PWNS me. Especially Dean. Dean Winchester owns my soul.
It doesn't hurt that I find the actor Jensen Ackles a particularly fine specimen of manhood (insert lascivious smirk here *g*), but I know nothing real of him, nor will I ever – it was always "Dean Winchester" that lured me in. Further proof is that I do not always find Ackles as devastatingly attractive in other roles. Some roles yes, others no. (Same thing with most actors, too! Except obviously a certain one, who is always devastating. I mean, obviously. Just... always. And some of you know exactly who I'm talking about. But again I digress... ;D)
And so you see, this is why I am a big big fan of Wincest. Of Sam/Dean. Of S/D slash. Whatever you want to call it.
Fucked-up anti-heroes. Doomed brothers-in-arms who have only each other... in arms.
Ummmm.... that's hot.
ETA: Like, NO ONE in fandom is even going to see this post because no one has ever heard of me and I'm too nervous to post it in communities. But this is all part of a larger process for me, a sort of belated "coming out" into fandom, if you will. So if you read and enjoy, pretty please pass it on!
I've done enough lurking and for once I don't want to be squeeing in a bubble anymore. I want to be contributing something meaningful to a larger community here. :D
[Many thanks to you brilliant fannish people who are so much fun in addition to being all thinky. You know who you are. *G*]
psycholibrarian account, reposted to LJ by request on 1 May 2008, because people WANTS it. :)Entry backdated to original post date, with 50+ comments imported as 27 screen caps (click on image links to view).
Oh boy. I've finally gone and done it. I have committed meta. Long meta. Das Über-meta. Meta in which I talk about... *drumroll please*... Wincest!
I need to include some basic "Intro to Fan Fic" blah blah for some readers, so it's gonna take me a while to get to the Wincest. Please bear with me, you eager, in-the-know slash-type people ;D
Before I get started:
*General Meta-Statement Alert*
I am NOT going to go into a whole giant critical discourse on fanfic or fandom at large and all the different issues that they raise. No matter how tempting. That would take dozens of Ph.D. theses, at least, on top of the work that already exists! Besides, it's all being discussed by people far more erudite than myself. And also, as I said in a recent post about fandom and academics, I tend to take issue with "acafans" who study their own fandoms with little-to-no way around their own lack of objectivity.
[ETA: I don't mean all acafans, obviously! I'm more aca than fan, myself! It's just, there's so much grey area here, and I don't want to end up waxing hypocritical.]
I am NOT going to talk directly about my own personal experiences or how it comes into play in my literary tastes, etc. (though I'm sure some stuff will invariably come out anyway, like it does). We've all got our own issues through which we read the world. But in the interests of disclosure and context, I will mention once here that I am a feminist with a fairly substantial academic background of gender studies and queer theory, and all-together, over a decade's worth of fandom experience in some form or other. That is ALL part of the lens through which I read the world.
Hopefully, I'll never again have to brag about my qualifications, such as they are. That was just for new people :D
*End Alert*
That said, I AM going to have to include basic simplified fandom, uh, fun facts, peppered throughout, for the benefit of any non-fannish folks on my f-list who wanna read this post too. :D
So here we go.
Fanfiction (or Fan fiction, fanfic, or "fic") – "fiction typically created by admirers of an existing commercial media property that uses, typically without explicit copyright permission, its characters and concepts," (as found on Wiktionary, 2007) – has existed for decades, at least! As long as the modern mass media, really. But its visibility and participation have increased exponentially with the growth of the Internet, and I might add with the popularity of LiveJournal and its imitators (some of which are specially geared towards fandom, like JournalFen, and which saw a massive influx of former LJ members following LJ's infamous "StrikeThrough" debacle in 2007). Fanfic is very broad, of course, but the kind that always gets the most press? Slash.
What is slash?. Click that link for one of my favorite fan-produced explanations thus far (
thebratqueen, 2003). You can also check out Pairings, wave theory, interpretive communities (Torch, aka
flambeau, 2007) for a rather interesting quasi-history of slash structure. There's also some fascinating insight into the whole gendered "men like porn/women like slash" issue here:
Some late night reflections on slash, gay men, gender, etc. (Lawrence Schimel, aka
desayunoencama, 2004). Allow me to quote from Schimel (who is a man! OMG! *g*) to whet your appetites: "One of the curious things about slash – as opposed to traditional erotica – is that it is a communal activity." This is both a cause AND an effect, I think, of the communal appeal of sites like LJ and of fandom at large.
I would also make a case for the relevance of contemporary "female" tendencies to behave more communally, to bond over shared interests, to enjoy pleasing or impressing others, and to be more open about sexuality, sexual desire and fantasy. Put that all together within a fandom... and you get slash. Slash slash slashy slash of every kind imaginable and unimaginable.
I don't write any, because I can't write fiction worth a crap, but I've sure read a lot of it. But then, you probably have too, or you wouldn't be reading this ;D
Okay... so you get slash. And although the term can now include female/female pairings (often called "femslash") and male/female pairings (usually called "het"), plain old "slash" mostly and traditionally refers to male/male pairings.
And although there are, of course, male slash writers out there (some of whom I read regularly!) most slash is still basically written by and for female fans. Some people even read slash and/or gen fic when they don't even read/watch the parent text! Another way that fandom communities and "fanon" take on lives of their own. The theories and explanations about all this stuff are WAY too numerous and complex for me to address here, so do your own digging.
But at least, here are a couple more fun and brilliant links on a couple of specific important subtopics that often come up Click 'em!
Fandom and Male Privilege (2005), in which
cereta discusses the idea of fandom as "female space," one of the only such spaces created by and (generally? hopefully?) left for women to control and play around in, without privileged male controlling interference. Most female fans would say that men are happily allowed, but must not redirect discussion over to things that are not interesting to the group. (Well actually, no one should do this, regardless of gender. It's just bad manners!)Sexuality and slash fandom (2007), in which
the_shoshanna discusses the evolution of slash over the last couple of decades, and how sexuality and sexual openness among slash writers has comes into play. And finally...
Abbreviated Meta: WNGWJLEO (2007), in which
makesmewannadie discusses the common 'We're Not Gay, We Just Love Each Other!' trope in slash, "how it functions as narrative device and what it says about queer identity and sexual identification" and how it has begun to be replaced by another, similar , and arguably more problematic trope, that functions "without addressing queerness or sexual identification much at all."It is indeed a fine, fine thing that same-sex attraction itself is not seen as the barrier it once was. It is evidence that homophobia, while by no means eradicated, that's for sure, has dissipated enough that gender itself is no longer seen as an automatic barrier to sex and/or love. Especially among the media-savvy, liberal women that constitute a large part of fandom. The catch, for better or for worse, is that those who once reveled in the "homosexual-taboo-shattering" aspect of slash are now looking for new taboos to break.
In the real world, we've got quite wonderful, visible activism taking on remaining barriers like prejudice against the transgendered, for example. In slash, we've got damn near infinite possibility and opportunity to take on remaining barriers, and also...rather more unusual ones.
So...
I'm going to talk now about a particular theme that's been cropping up in slash more and more and more in the past couple of years. That theme is... incest.
*Another General Meta-Statement Alert*
I am NOT going to talk about parent/child incest, which I believe is just wrong. That gets into a whole mess of wrong – what with issues of child molestation and vast power imbalances regardless of the participants' ages, etc., etc., etc. Parent/child incest is something that I have little interest in exploring, in real life or in fiction, beyond the hope that I posses some sort of objective understanding for why it occurs, and feel sympathy for anyone in real life who was molested by their parents or guardians, or by older sibling during childhood or early adolescence, when that sibling was old enough to know better.
Can and/or should people explore this stuff in fiction and fanfic? Sure! Absolutely! I've even read a couple of fics in which it was actually plausible (largely via undertones if not activity). But I could never feel comfortable condoning those writings in which parent/child incest is looked upon as positive, or in which child abuse is looked upon as titillating. Well, I never say never so who knows? Perhaps someday I'll make an exception. But I highly doubt it.
*End Alert*
So what AM I talking about? Consensual incest between adult siblings, or teen siblings close enough in age so as not to constitute clear-cut child molestation.
Fiction about this has certainly existed for a long time, but it's become more and more ubiquitous with the growth of fandom and slash. In some circles, it's even become a given, with no explanation necessary. Such stories would be, say, "third or fourth wave" according to Wave Theory (see again Torch, 2007).
In certain fandoms – most obviously I'd cite Harry Potter, Heroes, and Supernatural – one can easily find any number of stories by any number of writers, from those with immense talent to those with none, about canonical characters hookin' up – characters who happen to be brothers.
There is some heterosexual sibling incest slash (for example in Harry Potter and also in Firefly for sure), and I'm quite certain that sibling femslash exists, though I've never personally read any and can't think of any that I might want to read. Sibling slash is largely confined to brothers. This is surely, simply, a logical extension of the prevalence of male/maleness that is slash in general, but there are most certainly other factors at play as well.
Here I come to the point where my over-education always gets me. The point where I give up and cancel whole LJ posts, delete entire Word documents, or toss wadded-up notepaper into the basket. Because after reading a million wonderful books and articles and LJ posts about something, I feel like there are no new insights I can possibly have. But today? Today I am determined to soldier on!
There are a few more particular reasons why a slash fan would be into brocest. And I mean, pretty obvious ones. The ones that I'll call the Big Three:
1) "No matter whether their canonical relationship is brotherly, these characters/actors are way hot and I want to envision them getting together!"
2) "Those guys are showing some major subtext between them! They practically beg to be slashed!"
3) "I've got a brocest kink already, and these guys give me a great excuse to air it out!"
Then there's also:
4) "Wouldn't it be hilarious if they found themselves hooked-up somehow?"
This can actually generate some of the best, snappiest fic around (for within fandom circles, to be funny is FTW! ;D)
To some extent, and rather less obvious to anyone who hasn't spent enough time in interactive fandom, or is simply not savvy enough to recognize when fandom becomes a quasi-media property in itself, there is a certain amount of:
5) "Everything else has been written already, so I need to come up with a new angle for my writings or no one will be interested in my stories... Aha! Eureka! Incest fic!"
This happens when being original is seen as FTW! – sometimes, sometimes at the expense of being, you know, good. (Actually, come to think of it, this happens with any kind of fiction. Or non-fiction, even. :P )
I don't have much else to say about #s 4 and 5 here, and I don't want to commit accidental wank. So I'll get back to my Big Three.
Now here's where my rambling starts to get more subjective. My own personal meta stamp, if you will.
Regarding #1:
I obviously can't tell anyone who they should or shouldn't find attractive – and of course, actors on television tend to be more attractive than average people! Plus characters in books tend to be attractive in readers' imaginations. So please go forth, be merry, and drool over whomever you like!
The #1 line of reasoning also results in a lot of actor-inspired RPS (Real Person Slash), which is especially popular among those who like the idea of certain actors together but may not be able to (or may not want to) get over the problematic nature of incest fic. In fact, as I understand it, although RPS existed in RP-based fandoms for a long time, there's been a substantial increase in RPS (and even in RPF, Real Person Fic in general, not just slash) since the premieres of, say, Supernatural (in 2005) and Heroes (in 2006), with people churning out stories featuring Jared/Jensen or Adrian/Milo – the actors who play brothers Sam & Dean and Nathan & Peter on these shows, respectively.
I am almost never interested in RPS. There's the occasional exception, but for my personal taste, the best fanfic is still the kind that taps into the same essential world that exists in a fictional canon, and expands upon it. Just as all participatory fandom can serve to both extend and enhance fans' enjoyment and understanding of canon, the whole point of fanfic in the first place is to play around in worlds that we like so much that we want to stay in them above and beyond the canon. Anything else just becomes... about something else.
So for me, even if the characters get a little bit OOC - or if the story is purely about two people sitting in a room, with no larger external plot going on as there would be in canon - the basic internal logic/world of the canonical parent text should remain. Even if it's solely through back story, tone, or dialogue.
RPS is necessarily unable to follow that ideal, because these actors (or musicians, or ballplayers, or whatever your poison!) are real people about whom we fans know next to nothing. Even the celebrities who reveal more of themselves than others, in these our tabloid-obsessed times, really don't reveal much. Any "canonical world" into which we read slash can only be a fan construct. That's fine – people have been fantasizing about celebrities for as long as celebrity has existed! But one must acknowledge the fact that a fictional media property contains a universe unto itself, and all of the canon text lies within that given universe (possible exceptions being extracultural references and in-jokes, like we see a lot in Joss Whedon's work; and sometimes authorial information that's not officially in canon, like when J.K. Rowling reveals extracanonical character info in her interviews... and the fans' heads go boom ;D).
We know far more about fictional worlds and characters than we can know about the real lives of their actors simply because of what information is presented or available to us. I myself am most interested in the characters that I've come to love in the parent text, and so that's who I look for in slash.
Granted, I've read some pretty amazing fanfic that's so far removed from the canon that it could practically be considered original work, having like, nothing in common with canon besides the characters' names, but that's another thing entirely! There is also the stuff that might fall under #4, as the "Comedic Pairing" trope can, again, result in some pretty damn amazing fan-produced fic in the right hands.
(I also remember, back in high school, having a very detailed and awesome fantasy about a couple of guys I knew secretly hooking up with each other. So what was that, like, my own personal RPS, about people that I actually knew? Heh! But I digress...)
Check out Fans, Producers, and when Real Person Fic actually becomes about Real People (by my own Real Person friend Xiaochang Li!, 2008), posted via the Convergence Culture Consortium blog (C3) at MIT. Some very thinky thoughts - proving incendiary to some rather defensive RPF fans - from the woman who is to be blamed for getting me hooked on some of this grand Fandom Meta stuff in the first place – and who has been doing the "I Told You So" Point-and-Laugh thing in my face ever since. ;D (Incidentally, we first met via my very first online fandom back in the late '90s.)
Regarding #2:
I cannot and will not attempt to tell other people how to interpret any possible text or subtext in any given show/movie/book/whatever. People are going to see what they want to see. We can all have big discussions and disagreements about it, and that's a lot of fun! But to assume that your interpretation is the only, or the best? That is some serious bullshit fan-wankage.
Like for example, I just don't see any slashiness between the brothers Peter and Nathan Petrelli on Heroes. I know a lot of fans who are are all "Oh but they are always touching each other's faces gently, and how about the lingering glances, and the OH they're hot and they love each other so much!!!" and that is a totally valid interpretation. But to me, watching the show from the very beginning, it just seemed like close brotherly love. Once the Heroes fandom started rolling around in Slash, it just seemed like the actors and producers quickly got in on the joke and started pandering to the fandom. Plus the characters are about 10 years apart in age, and have spent a lot of time, separately, out in the real world if not estranged, and that makes for some unrealistic slash to me.
I did try to read some Petrellicest for a while. Believe me, really I did, but it just never rang true for me and I gave up. Besides, I wasn't that into the actual show to start with. So to me that brief interest was more like...
#3:
Which... alright, I have to cop to it: Hello, my name is Alysa, and I have a major brocest kink.
Ever since I got my dirty 15-year-old paws, lordy knows how, on Tom Hardy (Gordon Hoban)'s Green Hotel Stories (Omnium Pub, 1987). And probably even way before then.
That said, it doesn't mean I will glom onto a brocest slash fandom just because it's got brocest. If that were the case, I'd still be reading Petrellicest!
So I'm obviously a discerning pervert (heh!), but the fact remains: I am deeply attracted to the concept of sibling incest in general. I myself am an only child. Perhaps if I had actual siblings, maybe then I wouldn't have the kink! Perhaps I'd say what most people say: "No way! I couldn't imagine thinking of brothers/sisters that way! I've got my own brother/sister and that's just GROSS! Ack Ick Yuck! Must run away now!"
Most people can make an objective judgment regarding the physical attractiveness of their own siblings, of either gender, that's completely independent of their own sexual orientation. But that is clearly not the same thing as being personally attracted to one's siblings! (And for the record, I have never been even remotely attracted to anyone in my family at all, be they close or distant.)
Now, it's nothing new that the idea that two sisters getting it on is fodder for typical heterosexual male fantasy, especially if the sisters are twins. Some infamous buxom blond lady twins have even made careers out of this, although that seems driven by pure financial opportunism trumping all other concerns. Which is kind of disturbing in and of itself, but that's another story.
One could assume that this simply comes from the combination of two stereotypical heterosexual male explanations: "Lesbianism is hot because the more women you get to ogle at once, the better, and because you can see yourself joining in"; and sisters in particular are hot "because they evoke the spirit of competition over a guy, and because there's a freaky taboo!" – and as I implied earlier, taboo-breaking tends to be, well, sexy, or at least easily sexualized. Ah, taboos, how we love thee. *G*
I'm obliged to reference at least one more great LJ post that touches on some of this:
As threatened... a longish post about four years in slash fandom (2007), in which another Real Person friend of mine (heh),
linaerys, discusses the frequently-raised critique that "it's sexist to like two men together just because they are men, as bad as men who prefer to watch lesbians," and posits that in slash [as opposed to most straight-up porn, I would add] things are WAY more complicated than that. It's more about "tweaking the characters." She also talks wonderfully about the whole barrier-breaking angle: "True love or lust overcoming barriers always adds sexiness as far as I'm concerned, and slash generally has that built right in." One might say that that goes tenfold for incest slash. (I would also add that the "lesbian porn for men = male/male porn for women" argument, on a sexually basic level, only works on the thinnest of surfaces, for, generally speaking, men and women - regardless of sexual orientation - do tend to have notoriously different ideas about the nature of erotica, about what is hot, and why. But anyway... )
So, okay, if the idea of watching two siblings get it on is kinda hot – why not one's OWN siblings?
Some proponents of might say (and I have seen this pretty much verbatim in incest slash stories a few times): "Growing up, you're expected to rely on your family for love and support, nurture, safety, protection and understanding. But then you hit puberty and you're suddenly expected to look elsewhere when it comes to your sexuality? Why?!?"
But that is really stupid reasoning. Aside from the fact that it creates a very slippery slope that could allow for the putting of equal blame on a child as on a parent in truly heinous molestation cases, it also negates, well, pretty much all standing theories of "healthy development."
As I understand it (someone correct me if I'm wrong?) – normal, healthy mental and emotional development involve a long and complex process of differentiating oneself from one's family, and of interacting with the rest of society – that is, with other people who are not your family! It's not "suddenly" at all. It's the long process of growing up to be a normal adjusted person. Regardless of what one considers "normal," few would argue that "normal" should include serious incestuous attachments.
In fact, in certain documented cases of incest (as with other types of supposedly deviant sexual behavior) it is posited that circumstances of unnatural social isolation lead people to turn to each other for sexual love (or just for sex). But those circumstances? Not normal or healthy in any sense of the words.
There’s also a fairly well-documented phenomenon called "Genetic Sexual Attraction" (GSA) where reunited family members who have not grown up together (most often because a child was given up for adoption), who have never met each other until adulthood, often have a very strong, even sexual attraction to each other. I don't know much about this phenomenon, but it does raise interesting questions and make another kind of case for strong feelings of familial connection being psychologically conflated with feelings of attraction.
For more on that, take a look at:
META: GSA and Heroes (Sinope, aka
eponis, 2007) which nicely raises the question of heterosexual GSA possibilities on the show Heroes. (Which, I might add, has a whole 'nother dimension now that the actors who play newly-discovered uncle and niece on the show are now dating in real life!)I find the GSA phenomenon kinda excusable, but if I ever met a real pair of adult siblings who actually grew up together and were also sleeping together? Hmmm. No matter the fact that this still appeals to me on some deeply strange psychosexual level (and once again I point out that I am an only child!), I have to say, to be perfectly honest with myself, I would probably be pretty squicked out. Not necessarily by the sex itself, but, well...
Consenting, well-adjusted, or reasonably well-adjusted adults should be able to do whatever they want in their sex lives, (barring, mayhaps, uncontrolled poppin'-out of genetically fuggered-up children!), but I couldn't help but be concerned about their upbringing and wary about their resultant mental and emotional fitness. And I certainly imagine that I'd be horrified to learn that my OWN adult children were sleeping with each other – what would it say about my parenting if I fostered an environment that produced that? Whoa, I can't even go there. Wow.
But again I must point out for the non-informed... say it with me now:
Fiction is NOT Reality.
All of which brings me to... of course... my current primary fandom.
(If you're interested, in addition to my recent post on fandom and academics mentioned near the beginning of this post, you can also click here, to read about my own fandom trajectory from the late 1990s up until now, which I posted just last week in comments on
cereta's LJ prompt for people to talk about their fandoms, past and present. Neat stuff. Worth a look, all responses.) I'm into, or am at least all caught up on, quite a number of large-fandom-having canon texts/media properties. I may not talk about them that much, but that doesn't mean I don't go all fangirly about them on my own time. There are even some more that I haven't yet seen at all, but perhaps want to try out, such as the show SGA. (No, I have still never seen it. So sue me. ;D)
I also still manage (somehow?!) to maintain passionate but "purely academic" interest in some canon texts without ever dabbling into online fandom at all! (Hell to the O to my very own, fairly popular Academic Buffy Studies & Whedonverse Bibliography! *blows on knuckles*)
Finally, as some of you may have noticed, I have gotten really into Supernatural (SPN).
Why? Well, when it first premiered in 2005, I liked the idea of a pair of squabbling brothers out on the road fighting evil, to a soundtrack of kick-ass classic rock. And it happened to be on right after Gilmore Girls which I quite liked, so it was convenient to watch both. But I best love texts that have million different readings and hooks, and quite frankly I didn't find SPN had that kind of appeal. As a jaded horror movie fan, I found most of the "monsters-of-the-week" were really predictable and trite, and I didn't there wasn't much else to read into. Also, I did not find the show's larger "myth-arc" engaging enough, up to that point, for me to follow when the network (then still the WB) switched the line-up around about halfway through the season. I didn't have TV access on the show's new night, and I didn't try to look for it at other times or through other means.
After another year or so, I remember being really surprised upon hearing that SPN was still in production. I just figured, "Eh, people will watch any show that's got hot actors regardless of its other qualities or lack thereof, ho-hum." But then I started hearing Really Good Things about how the show and the characters had progressed. So I got my hands on the DVDs of seasons 1 and 2, and got myself all caught up for season 3. And how!
I remember
yourlibrarian saying that a lot of really good writers, many of whom had made names for themselves in other fandoms, had since migrated over to SPN, and I wanted to check that out. I also like to be proven wrong about TV shows, and oh boy was I wrong! SPN is the first fandom that's got me proudly adding fannish strangers to my LJ f-list. I have found that this fandom has a notably high ratio of Smart People, and I like to flatter myself that I can be counted as one of them.
Mind you, this all went down after, like, a year or so of my spending an ever-increasing amount of time lurking around reading meta, fic, and wank reports in other fandoms, so it wasn't as sudden a move for me to seek out some of this stuff for SPN as it once might have been. Especially when I heard that a lot of people were writing slash.
So, what does this mean to me? It means that SPN slash hits on, like, all of my Big Three reasons for supporting a brocest slash pairing. This freakin' PWNS me. It allows me to indulge in my brocest kink, but first and foremost, I find that a slash reading is supported and encouraged by the canon.
This is not, of course, my ONLY interest in fandom or in canon (SPN or otherwise), but it's kinda my favorite one. I'm pretty much, at all times, preoccupied more with issues of sex, sexuality, and gender than with any other issues (duh!), so why should it be any different with this?
Here are a couple of relevant links just for fun (though they're both kinda out-of-date now):
NewbieGuide entry on SPN fandom (submitted by
scribewraith, 2006), which is just what it says. It collects links on lotsa different aspects of the fandom, not just fic or slash. and
The Sam/Dean 'Ship Manifesto (submitted by
slytherinblack, 2005), which is a basic outline of why slashers like to put these two characters together. The characters have both evolved muchly since the beginning – in ways that makes them even slashier! \0/In my opinion, Sam and Dean Winchester, as opposed to, say, the Petrelli brothers or the majority of incestuous slash pairings out there, really do have infinitely more slash potential within the canonical parent text. For one thing, I find there to be plenty of subtext in the way they interact with one another on screen, which leaves plenty of room for interpretation and expansion. For another, their unique back story allows for us to leap to some pretty weighty assumptions or conclusions, if we so choose.
Like, it makes sense to me that their intense co-dependence, grounded in their gonzo childhood and long-time isolation from the normal world, would produce an intense, confusing and consuming love, which might then turn physical. Especially in light of their prior attempts at relationships with outsiders turning out so tragically. And there is certainly something capital-R Romantic about these guys' epic journey and love, even if one only sees it as platonic.
I can quite clearly see this dynamic being explored both in slash that has them reaching for each other as adults in the present day real-time of the show AND in slash that imagines them experimenting as adolescents (Wee!cest! Heh!), which tends to invoke the "jealousy" and "hero worship" tropes a lot (both of which are common tropes between siblings IRL, too).
It should be noted that some of this stuff has to do with the basic "supernatural" elements of the show's universe. This also goes for many other significant fandoms of course!
Sci-fi, fantasy, and horror genre canon texts dabbling in the supernatural always seem to attract a certain kind of fandom (and I mean that as a compliment to both the genres and the fans :D). You have supernatural forces functioning as allegory and whatnot, and forcing characters and fans alike to confront deeper issues. You have supernatural forces pushing characters together via the need to maintain secrecy from other people. You have supernatural forces quite literally pushing characters together via spells, or exposure to weird substances, or body-switching or what have you. And just as it does for the authors/auteurs of the parent texts themselves, this gives slashers room to play with essentially limitless scenarios.
See? What with all of this AND the cool premise and the snappy dialogue and the increasingly good plots and storytelling and episode construction? SPN seriously PWNS me. Especially Dean. Dean Winchester owns my soul.
It doesn't hurt that I find the actor Jensen Ackles a particularly fine specimen of manhood (insert lascivious smirk here *g*), but I know nothing real of him, nor will I ever – it was always "Dean Winchester" that lured me in. Further proof is that I do not always find Ackles as devastatingly attractive in other roles. Some roles yes, others no. (Same thing with most actors, too! Except obviously a certain one, who is always devastating. I mean, obviously. Just... always. And some of you know exactly who I'm talking about. But again I digress... ;D)
And so you see, this is why I am a big big fan of Wincest. Of Sam/Dean. Of S/D slash. Whatever you want to call it.
Fucked-up anti-heroes. Doomed brothers-in-arms who have only each other... in arms.
Ummmm.... that's hot.
ETA: Like, NO ONE in fandom is even going to see this post because no one has ever heard of me and I'm too nervous to post it in communities. But this is all part of a larger process for me, a sort of belated "coming out" into fandom, if you will. So if you read and enjoy, pretty please pass it on!
I've done enough lurking and for once I don't want to be squeeing in a bubble anymore. I want to be contributing something meaningful to a larger community here. :D
[Many thanks to you brilliant fannish people who are so much fun in addition to being all thinky. You know who you are. *G*]
