Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

With the conclusion of AAA and the ASC Awards, a new fanfic year starts for me. In the course of the past month and a half, I’ve been reading reams of fanfic, including almost all the VOY fic posted to ASC this year, some TOS, TNG and MIS (miscellaneous Star Trek works not necessarily associated with a show), and at least the beginning of every non-smut story in AAA. Now that the feedbacking frenzy and AAA voting are over, I have time to write again.

Reading and evaluating all that fic, even if it’s only for a 1-2-3 vote in AAA, is a lot of work, so it’s insulting when someone like the person Rocky blogged about accuses you of having voted for your friends or otherwise unjustly ignored his latest masterpiece. It’s also discouraging to see minions and sockpuppets trying to undermine the voting process.

One thing that doesn’t bother me is losing. I didn’t place in AAA, but I read some memorable stories (all by other people who didn’t place, but that’s another kettle of fish). I don’t know what the results are for ASC, but I’m not going to be Best Author or anything of the sort and that’s fine with me. I figure I’m a writer’s writer - that is, other writers seem to appreciate my writing more than the average reader does. That means fewer votes, but they’re more precious to me.

I love all the feedback, of course, and I never object to a nice graphic, but the biggest benefit of Awards season for me is reading other people’s fic that I’ve been putting off all year. I used to read and write only VOY, but gradually bites of TNG, TOS and MIS have been added to my menu. (ENT has been banned because no matter how good it is, it still reminds me of the show. Brrr.) And it’s that foray into reading TOS that brought you…

Khan filk! Sometime before Awards I’d thought of writing a Ceti Alpha V story, but, like many stories I thought of last year, I never actually wrote it. Then I read Rabble Rouser’s “Weeds” and started thinking again about my idea of Ceti Alpha V. I’ve always found that an overdose of other people’s fic gives the muse more ideas.

So my fanfic resolution is to write more TOS, possibly even involving some bridge crew - but that’s a stretch for me. I’m a Khan fan first and foremost.

This one’s for Jerie, though Seema’s to blame for the title. You can hear the tune at Slushbuzzz’s Midi Madness.

Title:   Raj of Rage
Original: "Turn the Page" by Bob Seger

On a long and lonesome journey
In the Bot'ny Bay
You've been sleeping out the decades
Driftin' through the Milky Way.
You've been dreamin' of the nation
Or the world you ruled just yesterday...

But your dreams will soon be memories
Of deeds that others rue;
When you wake another century
Will strive to conquer you,
And you come this close to dying
But you know your trip is through.

Say...
I am Khan - entertain me for
I am Khan - new to your age.
I was Singh - Sikh conquistador,
I was Singh - Raj of Rage.

Then you wake up on the Enterprise
Wary of your fame,
And you see their dull suspicion
As you tell them half your name;
You pretend they could be different,
But mankind is still the same.

Most times you can fool them all
Other times you can't -
Still the same old question,
Are you a monster or a man?
And you find your kind outnumbered -
You have to make a stand.

I am Khan - entertain me for
I am Khan - new to your age.
I was Singh - Sikh conquistador,
I was Singh - Raj of Rage.

Study their schematics -
You're two hundred years behind;
Technical advances pose
No challenge to your mind.
As you plan to seize this starship,
Take the woman that you find.

Make a new beginning;
As you struggle to survive
Watch a red star dawning wrathful over
Ceti Alpha Five -
This earth a howling wilderness
And yet you're still alive.

Ah...
I am Khan - entertain me for
I am Khan - new to your age.
I was Singh - Sikh conquistador,
I was Singh - Raj of Rage.

I am Khan - entertain me for
I am Khan - new to your age.
I was Singh - Sikh conquistador,
I was Singh - Raj of Rage.

I’m going through a Khan phase.

Filk:       What Man is This?
Original:  What Child is This? by William Chatterton Dix (1865)
Tune:  Greensleeves

What Man is this, who laid to rest,
In cryofreeze is sleeping?
Whom Marla eyes with anxious sighs
While redshirts watch are keeping? 

This is Khan Noonien Singh
Whom redshirts guard unwavering.
James Kirk will strand him in
The Ceti Alpha system.

Why wakes he from his cold repose,
Two hundred years a-drifting?
Doth Starfleet fear this pioneer,
One-handed McCoy lifting?

So bring him manuals technical,
Your vessel wants his scrutiny.
Eugenic men will rule again,
If Marla aids his mutiny.

This is Khan Noonien Singh,
Whom redshirts guard unwavering.
James Kirk will strand him in
The Ceti Alpha system,
  The Ceti Alpha system.

Lori told me about the title meme, though her own response was lost in the ether. I did see Liz and Rocky’s answers. I’ve never had much trouble assigning titles, but most of them fall into a few large, uninteresting categories:

Abstract Nouns: Assimilation, Ambassador, Colony, Hiatus, Lethe, Lurking, Taboo; Ship in a Bottle, Preliminary Debriefings, Home Front, Holodeck Safety Protocols

Concrete Nouns: The Author, The Dance, The Museum; The Bottle of Bajoran Blue Wine: A PADD Story, The Efficiency Expert, A Maquis Holiday; Jade’s Drabble, Mushroom Soup, Beta Energy, Haiku for Anne

Other Fragments: Choose Life, Like This, Logic Dictates, Thrive, Tertiary

Now those are all servicable titles, right up there with real-life titles like The Hobbit and Memory. You don’t find too many artsy, obscure titles on the bookshelves - publishers tend to go with short, strong and memorable. On the other hand, a Trek writer has the example of Shakespearean quotes used for TOS titles and the temptation to reuse good titles from Trek past:

Literary Quotations: To Perish in that Howling Infinite (Moby Dick), Once More Unto the Breach (Henry V), Honey-Dew (Kubla Khan), Video Meliora Proboque (Ovid: “Video meliora proboque; Deteriora sequor” - I see the better way and I approve of it; I follow the worse.), Sans Ailes (Byron: “L’Amitie’ est L’Amour Sans Ailes” - Friendship is Love without his wings!)

Song Quotations: Take it on the Run (REO Speedwagon), The Wrong Emotion (REO Speedwagon), Every Word I Said (REO Speedwagon), A Light Beyond (Art Garfunkle), Than Fade Away (Neil Young), and about 70 filked filk titles which I won’t include here

Episode Names: Mirror, Mirror; Borg Error (a coda to Human Error), Au Naturel (a coda to Natural Law)

The Borg title classification above leaves only a few titles creative (or uncreative) enough to need explaining:

The Dance (Tunkai), one of a ream of Voyager stories called “The Dance.” The title was one of the requirements of the “The Dance” J/C contest for which this story was written. I gave my “The Dance” a subtitle from the story’s linguistic history of Tsunkatse to distinguish it from the other hundred stories of the same title.

The ChetSev Series is a nickname that eventually made it onto the website. JetC stands for Janeway et Chakotay, so I coined “ChetSev” as a joke to stand for Chakotay and Seven. Since it took too long to say “my series of episode additions to C/7 episodes” every time, I ended up making it the official series title.

One Line, Two Dimples was a short response to a challenge to write the same scene two ways, from the producers’ and fans’ perspectives. To TPTB, Robert Beltran has one line and he can’t get it right. To the fans he has…two dimples.

The Lamne’rau is Romulan for “the Borg.”

What’s Left of Her is a relevant Janeway quote from Unimatrix Zero. The story itself is an AU coda to UMZ.

If Ayn Rand Wrote ST:VOY is a response to the If My Aunt from Minnesota wrote Star Trek challenge.

The Unity of the Multiverse is a quote from near the end of the story, but I believe the title came before that section of dialogue. This one is my favorite title, for its techno-poetry.

Marriage is Irrelevant is one of Seven of Nine’s lines in the story. Otherwise, she was not a major character.

DQ Babes in the Mirror-Mirror Universe was intended to be as campy as the title implies, but the muse undermined it in production. I loved the title so I kept it.

Janeway: The Musical! (Filk of La Mancha) was inspired (as a title) by Jim Wright’s review of the episode “Muse,” which he nicknamed, “B’Elanna: The Musical!” The subtitle makes it clearer which musical is being filked.

Seven of Borg is analogous to Locutus of Borg. Seven of Nine is already Borgy, but I needed a title that said “over the top with Borg.”

148 is the number of days that Buffy was dead (the second time). At least one other fic uses that number in the title.

The Silent Movie of the Soul is another Buffy title. I’m pretty sure the story involves an actual silent movie, but the ponderous title style seems more appropriate for Buffy fic than Trek.

I just finished voting in the ASC Awards. The following filk was written in two parts as feedback votes for Penny.

The Ballad of Penny Proctor
(was: The Ballad of Davey Crockett)

Came out of nowhere back in Season Six,
Finest writer of a J/C fix
Wrote up a storm ’cause she knew ev’ry trick,
Wolf and the Otter was an easy pick:
       Penny, Penny Proctor - Queen of the Trekiverse!

Staked out a story of a court martial -
To her dark XO had she been partial?
And while she was making it judicial,
Made herself a legend auspicial.
       Penny, Penny Proctor - Queen of the Trekiverse!

When she saw Endgame and a Human Err’
In her heart she swore to that season repair,
In her VS there would be no affair,
Except J/C’s - that’s her favorite pair.
       Penny, Penny Proctor - Queen of the Trekiverse!

They rewrote the season from Shattered on,
Makin’ sure the Borg wouldn’t get her don,
Fought off Cardassians - now they’re gone;
Who’s leadin’ the VS like a fandom Khan?
       Penny, Penny Proctor - Queen of the Trekiverse!

Janeway came home, her voyagin’ done,
And found that her trials had just begun;
Saw her XO beside her in the desert sun,
But at the Oasis they found only one.
       Penny, Penny Proctor - Queen of the Trekiverse!

Her fic is longest, and her fic is best
From the days of ENT to the DQ quest
She’s ahead of us all in writing with zest
Comin’ out on top of every contest
        Penny, Penny Proctor - Queen of the Trekiverse!
        Queen of the Trekiverse!

My lovely sister Veronica and I share a passion for epidemiology. She emailed me the following information yesterday:

we’re all going to die, we’re all going to die

SARS: 5.6% mortality
http://www.who.int/csr/sarscountry/2003_04_21/en/

Today’s SARS numbers are up, clocking in at 5.8% mortality. Yes, I’m a ghoul. If you’re a fellow pox or plague fan, I’d love to chat.

We all have other interests, like those college presidents and CEO’s who leave their lucrative positions to “pursue other interests.” Sometimes it seems that the praise, fame, and reams of fanmail just don’t outweigh the hassle anymore. Seema has been feeling the fandom annoyance, and Robert Beltran went so far as to name names after the controversial shutdown of the ORB.

Is there a point when fandom becomes just too inbred and you have to walk away? A time when all the joy has been sucked out of your show by vampire fans who dwell in the dark ages of Season 3? I’m voting in AAA now, and I have to wonder, is there a Last J/C Fic or will this fandom still be going on in 2103?

I’ve been tired of fandom for a while now, but I’ve learned to ignore the tiresome bits. Coming up with a new J/C plot is harder, though - I think they’ve all been done. At least I have the revisions to Colony to keep me occupied.

I can’t believe I mentioned Anakin Skywalker without linking to Weird Al’s video of The Saga Begins. The title of this entry is taken from that epic filk of “American Pie,” and it relates to the protests of HP fans that Harry is just a normal, average wizard. I’d be more willing to believe that if he weren’t a first-year Quiddich phenomenon. (Please pardon my spelling, if I’ve gotten it wrong - I find the HP books extraordinarily forgettable, even though I just read one a couple of weeks ago.) I’m not judging HP from the perspective of a student of canon but from an overall impression of its themes. Of course, people may differ on the themes they see in a text, which brings us back to…

…subtext. When I made my off-hand comment that I don’t believe in subtext, I didn’t realize I was playing a “get out of slash free” card. I’m not complaining, by any means. Seema, in between lewd comments about my dude Weird Al, gave me this link to AJ Hall’s thoughts on subtext and backstory. Caught between an RJ and an AJ, I asked Seema whether she believed in subtext. She said she didn’t believe in J/C subtext.

I’d mentioned exactly this example before - that Janeway/Chakotay fans see J/C subtext and Chakotay/Paris fans see C/P subtext, and rarely the twain end up meeting. While certainly something happens to the story in the readers’ minds, that something has very little to do with the story itself. Thus I’ve heard J/C fans raving about all the J/C subtext, and C/7 fans raving back that J/C is the most nauseating, unbelievable, and chemistry-less pairing known to Trek - there was never any such subtext. And that’s without even involving a slash pairing!

I’m not saying there isn’t more to a story than just the words themselves, but when you get into an aspect of characterization that people violently disagree about, such as J/C vs. C/7 or C/P, then the most likely explanation is that neither one is part of the shared world of canon. I’ve been down that fanon road before, and all slash looks like to me is another fanon’s rose-colored glasses - the odd thing being the use of “subtext” in place of “fanon.”

Since they were getting long, here are some responses to the last entry’s comments:

Scrollgirl said: I’m just not ready to say that, just because we don’t see it, it is therefore uncanonical.

The definition of canon is that which appears on-screen. Anything that doesn’t appear on-screen is not canon, for my purposes. (Jeri Taylor novels are not canon.) Anything we haven’t seen, such as a sexual orientation for which there is no evidence, is therefore non-canonical. I don’t think I used the term uncanonical, which is a bit stronger. If something contradicts the actual facts of canon, such as saying Tom is exclusively gay when in fact he had heterosexual relationships in canon, that would be counter-canonical.

I’m not saying you can’t make an attempt to found a non-canonical characterization in canon facts - just that it’s still non-canonical, and therefore not what I’m after in fanfic.

Caffey said: I certainly do believe in subtext or else the only VOY pairings I would care for and/or accept as valid (for lack of better term) were P/T and C/7.

I don’t care for P/T myself - they bore me. I do like some non-canon pairings, especially J/P and J/C, but that fondness is not based on subtext. Maybe because it isn’t, I rarely find J/P or J/C fic convincing, and so I don’t read much of it.

Fay said: What puzzles me still […] is what you would consider NOT to be non-canonical, short of copying out the scripts verbatim.

The example that comes immediately to mind is my fic 148, which is a Spike monologue based on the events of Bargaining and After Life. As far as I recall, there was nothing controversial about my characterization of Spike and I just followed along with the relevant canon events for the plot.

However, I never said that I don’t read non-canonical fic. What I don’t tend to read is fic with non-canonical characterizations. Non-canonical events are fine by me, in the form of parody, AU’s, and adventures that go beyond simple novelizations of canon events.

Katta said: There are, in general, the kind of ficcers who want “more of the same” [and] there are also the kind of ficcers who want a twist - they like what they see, but something is missing.

I certainly don’t mind more of the same, but I’m more interested in twists to the canon universe and situations (AU’s). I’m not interested in major twists to the canon characters (slash, angst, etc.).

eleanorb said: The divisions for readers […] are breaking down, at least in the eyes of SF readers who read far wider than the delimited genre and recognise the themes of SF whoever writes them and whatever it is listed as in the publishers catalogues.

I don’t see any such breakdown. While I mentioned that there are stories which are hard to classify, they’re the exception that prove the rule. A similar theme doesn’t make something sci-fi, because sci-fi isn’t identified by theme any more than mysteries or westerns or thrillers are. Mass-market genres are classified by plot - they are the bastions of plot in modern literature.

Previous links are in the previous post.

Fay has another essay, some of which I addressed in the comments, but not the question of my literary disinterest in slash.

First of all, for my purposes genres or subgenres are self-identifying subsets of fiction into which stories can be classified by any reasonably aware reader. When someone posts a slash story to a slash-only list, or otherwise marks a story with the classification “slash,” then it’s self-identified as slash. Most fanfiction readers will classify any story featuring a non-canonical homosexual relationship as slash. For the purpose of classification, it doesn’t matter that some stories are better than others, or that some are smuttier than others, or even that a few stories are more difficult to classify than the majority. People who want to read slash will look for fiction identified as slash in some way.

Consider, for example, the genre of science fiction. Sci-fi is a self-identifying genre, in that short stories are published in magazines that accept only science fiction, and that novels are published by sci-fi houses and/or marked “sci-fi” on the spine. Readers can identify sci-fi by content even without these clues. Most sci-fi readers will classify any story featuring futuristic science as science fiction. It doesn’t matter that certain stories fall in between sci-fi and fantasy, or in between sci-fi and thrillers - the classification is still useful for people who want to read sf, and equally useful for people who don’t.

Before the pulps, there was no genre of science fiction. If you wanted to talk about sci-fi, you would have to refer generally to, say, the works of Verne or Wells. Now we can look back and classify those pre-genre works into the genre; in fact, we can’t help classifying them. The days in which a sci-fi writer could pass for mainstream are over. Likewise, we can’t help classifying slash as slash. The genre will not go away anytime soon, and the label functions to tell people that this is a subgenre with certain known characteristics.

I have a literary reason for liking science fiction: I read sci-fi for the exploration of futures and the heroic plots. In general what I consider to have merit in fiction is the heroic and skill in the depiction of a world, whether a future world, a past one, a fantastic one, or a slightly altered version of our own (eg., in Ayn Rand). People might dismiss sci-fi for literary reasons as well: usually such critics feel that the antiheroic has more literary merit than the heroic, or they want more attention to character and less to plot and milieu. People also dislike sci-fi for non-literary reasons - they have a visceral dislike of the fantastic or of the heroic.

So, as I’ve said before, people can have a literary or a visceral disinterest in slash. I ruled out moral disapproval of non-smut slash because literary works (as opposed to erotica) are not usually judged on a moral basis. In any event, moral considerations are not literary ones, so for those who think they apply they can be lumped into the visceral dislikes.

Fanfic is about playing with canon or fanon. What you do with them is a matter or literary or visceral tastes. As with sf, my interest is in the universe and the heroic plot, and also in humor, especially at the expense of either canon or fanon. So I prefer AU stories (particularly numbers 3, 4, and 6 from the Borg AU Classification), adventures, parodies, and filk, all of which are closely based on canon characterizations, canon events, and/or the canon universe as a milieu. I don’t care for angst, fluff, or slash, all of which are based on altering canon characterizations. (In the case of Buffy, the show’s level of angst is tough to top so the real crimes against canon occur on the fluffy side.)

So I have a literary disinterest in slash, because I have a more general literary disinterest in non-canon characterizations. Someone else might have an opposite literary interest in tweaking canon characterizations - this might include slash but would not be restricted to it, there being so many other ways to alter the characters. That leaves the question, can someone have a literary interest in slash alone? I’m not going to say it isn’t possible, but the pro-slash factors people usually cite are not, on the face of them, literary in the sense I mean it. “Pretty boys” is clearly a visceral taste, and the interest in slashy subtext would have to be accompanied by comparable interest in other kinds of subtext to be a general literary interest. I don’t believe in subtext, myself, but I hear people go on at length about alleged J/C subtext in Voyager episodes, and it doesn’t seem to capture the attention of the C/P crowd.

So instead I attribute the interest in slash to modern sexual politics - the romanticization of friendship, a certain J/C author would, ironically, call it. (Ironically, because J/C is exactly the same phenomenon, right down to the alleged canon subtext - why can’t these two friends be just friends?) I would call it the homosexualization of romance - because the opposite gender is no longer “other” enough, and romance is no longer star-crossed enough, the way to recapture that old troubadour spirit is to complicate relationships by making them same-sex. This theory explains (to me) why one particular kind of alteration to canon characterizations, making them gay, is so much more popular than, say, making them Mormons, or gourmet chefs, or hermaphrodites.

None of the above is a comment on the quality of slash or on the right of slashers to slash. It’s just an explanation of what it means to have a literary disinterest in slash as a non-canonical genre, something that is frequently said to be impossible.

Once again, people are writing essays in my comments. One of them is easier to read here. The two previous entries which have attracted so much interest are The Morality of Reading and Agendae, but I’ll recap. In the first entry, I made an argument about why reading slash was not a moral issue in the way reading smut (of any orientation) could be - not even if the reader finds homosexuality itself immoral. I went over what being slashy says to me as a non-slasher. My second entry was directed not so much at the commenters but at some stupid remarks that were made at fandom_wank about my manifesto. I defined “gender politics” and fic agendas, and said that women writing gay male erotica was weird. My general point in all three entries is that people can dislike slash as a genre for literary, as opposed to moral or visceral, reasons.

So, on to the comments. There isn’t really a thread of argument in them, but they are interesting in their own right (and long), so I’ll address the bits that stood out. First and foremost is the “good for the gander” argument - that it’s not unusual for women to like m/m slash because it’s not unusual for men to like f/f pornography. However, men and women are different. Men fill the jails, and women fill the fanfic mailing lists. What men see in f/f videos is not, until proven otherwise, what women see in m/m fanfic. If you went out and polled a hundred non-fan men and women about their interest in homosexual erotica involving the opposite gender, you would not get the same results for both sexes. Mainstream women are not consuming m/m erotica in any appreciable numbers, while f/f pornography is a large part of the porn industry. So when I say that women writing m/m erotica is weird, and that the “pretty boys” explanation doesn’t explain anything, that’s what I’m basing my ideas of what’s unusual upon - the mainstream population. Why do slashers like pretty boys in such greater numbers than average women?

Likewise, the percentage of homosexuals in the population has been estimated at 1.5% for women and 3.5% for men. So in real life, one can assume that most people are not gay unless they indicate that they are, by word or deed, and be right most of the time. Likewise, in fiction one can assume that most characters are not gay, unless TPTB say otherwise. In fact, in most fanfictional universes there is no stigma attached to being gay, so there is even less reason to assume that a character who isn’t gay in canon is anything but heterosexual - especially since most characters are given heterosexual backgrounds in canon. For instance, every main and recurring character on Voyager except the Borg Queen was known to have had heterosexual relationships, many of which occurred on-screen. No homosexual relationships were ever mentioned or shown for any of them.

Nothing I’ve said implies that women should not or cannot write homosexual characters, or male characters, if they need to - say, if they’re writing about a canon Willow. The question is why slash writers “overpopulate” the fictional world with gay characters. Clearly, as I said, it’s not because the m/m writers are homosexual men, which would be the most obvious explanation.

By the way, by slash I mean the fanfiction self-identified as slash. Like science fiction, it’s a known and well-understood term in that sense, even if in my mind real sci-fi has more stringent requirements.

Fay said: If you are determined to believe that all slash is simply “weird” porn, or that it is all Harlequin-level writing, then I suppose you will continue to believe this whatever I say. In this you will be sorely mistaken, but perhaps it is more comfortable to cling to a preconception than it is to question its validity and risk having to reassess one’s stance.

I never said that all slash was weird porn or bad writing. I reassess my stance every time someone makes a logical argument against it. The most irritating thing about discussing slash is how it always comes back to the assumption that slash is somehow a challenge to the morality or “preconceptions” of everyone who’s not interested in it. Slash, as I’ve said before, is just another fanfic agenda. If you told me there was a wonderful subgenre out there where canon characters were suddenly Mormon, or handicapped, or axe-murderers, or gourmet chefs, I would find the existence of such a subgenre interesting, but not the fic.

Go ahead, start complaining about my preconceptions about Mormons.