Friday!

[yiskah]

It's been a long time since I did this, so I have no idea whether it will still work, but it is FRIDAY and so how about some anonymous comments?

Friends! Let it all out! Share your scandal, your angst, your exciting news! Tell the internet who you fancy! Tell us what you dreamed about last night, what you had for breakfast this morning, what you think of the new coalition Cabinet (if you're British), how sick you are of hearing about the UK election (if you're not).

Please do not be unpleasant about anyone who is likely to read this, or I will magically come through the internet and smack you.

OK GO. Hopefully I will not be left alone with the Japanese spammer...

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I know this is livejournal and thus I'm probably way way way in the minority but I have to say I find fanfiction pretty damn weird and creepy. Is it supposed to be funny or clever or arousing or what? Every time I scan through one of the stories (like the Cameron Clegg one someone did lately) I find myself getting slightly accidentally turned on too, which makes me hate myself.

[(Anonymous)]

I know what you mean. It only makes sense to me if I have a crush on one or more of the people / characters involved, when it's fun to imagine them doing something sexy. If the lead-up part is badly written or I don't care about the people, it's just creepy. I think in many cases, especially the recent Cameron / Clegg stuff, it's supposed to be creepy, like a cheesy horror film.

[(Anonymous)]

Thirded. I find it gross and creepy, particularly when it's about real people. Fictional characters, fine, though the underageness of HP fanfic makes me queasy too. But real-people fic is just intrusive and disrespectful, I think. I can't imagine how invaded and horrified I'd feel to find real-person fic about me on the net, so I couldn't possibly do it to someone else.

Also, there's something tiresomely class-informed about the Clegg/Cameron fic - something that fits into the Harry Potter craze too - that annoys me even more. Posh boys are witty and sexy, of course, in that Brideshead way. People like Gordon Brown and John Prescott and Diane Abbott and Eric Pickles, who have actually had to fight hard and long for political careers rather than have them thrown into their unwrinkled laps, are far too un-gilded for fantasy.

[(Anonymous)]

Hm, I think it's opposite. I mean, maybe someone is writing Clegg/Cameron slash in a way that's supposed to be genuinely sexy and play on the gilded-public-schoolboy gloss (eeuerch!), but I think it's much more mocking than that, and that's why the hard-working, less-"glamorous" MPs don't get it.

(Quotation marks because I have an impossibly hard time imagine either Clegg or Cameron as glamorous.)

What bugs me about the media nudging and giggling about "teeheehee, it's like they're a gay couple" is that it's exactly the same as "Clegg's a harlot, who's he going to get into bed with?" - it pretty much depends on there being no actual women or gay men around to mess up the metaphor.

[(Anonymous)]

Have to confess I haven't actually had the stomach to plough through the fanfic, so am willing to take your word for it that it's not actually teh sexy. Phew.

it pretty much depends on there being no actual women or gay men around to mess up the metaphor.

Well, exactly. And it perpetrates a view of gayness that's right back to Brideshead, all doomed rarefied male poshness in exotic locations. Just the way Theresa May would like it. Cos we all know that that's just camp fantasy, so gay people can't actually be real people who want real rights.

PS: REcaptcha asked me to type 'slimiest force' to prove I'm a human. Too perfect.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think I'd feel horrified or invaded if I found real-person fic about me on the net (not that this will ever happen) because the level of characterisation is normally equivalent to a crude cartoon at best. For a politician, I would imagine a good Steve Bell cartoon could feel a lot more personally affecting than some fic that happens to have their name in.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, all of this. Also there's far too much of a 'hoho! Posh boys are all into bumming really!' trop underpinning the Cameron Clegg thing AND (now I think about it) Harry Potter etc, which sigh. It's class porn as much as actual porn, lots of it - which I guess is quite revealing as to just how obsessed with class we still are, and how rubbish we often are at expressing our insecurities and concerns about it. It's like, 'they might have tons of money and a ridiulously disproportionate about of power and they might be running everything and we might be in awe of them to the point of actual genuflection even in spite of ourselves, but....I bet they do bumming!" Brilliant. And actually then allowing ourselves to get all caught up and turned on by the idea of that sort of thing, that's just conspiring even further with the awe and deference really isn't it? "You're so posh and clever even the blunt instruments (oh ho!) we use to mock you have us in thrall!"

Possibly I have overthought this.

[yiskah.livejournal.com]

This is the point at which I shall mention AGAIN the time that I found SPANKING PORN ABOUT MY FATHER* ON THE INTERNET. So yeah, I feel similarly about RPF.

*OK, technically a character my father played, but THAT DIDN'T MAKE IT ANY LESS HORRIFYING.

[(Anonymous)]

But then it's like 'oooh, teh gayness = horrorshow!" which I don't think is very cool. As I understand it the vast amount of slash etc is about homosexual pairings, which to my mind creates a bit of an uncomfortable exotification of gay sex. I know it's not real life and it doesn't ~really~ matter, but since to my mind it's not ok to take a gay character or celebrity etc and imagine/describe them in a striight pairing (i.e it's disprespectful to the reality/validity of their sexuality), how come it's more ok to do it the other way round?

[(Anonymous)]

That's an interesting angle, I'd not thought of that before. Although the widespread misunderstanding of the mechanics (and plumbing) of the situation is legendary.

[(Anonymous)]

"Slash" is definitionally about gay pairings, so, you know. Fanfiction as a whole is much larger. I think a lot of the complaints here are coming from being rather ill-informed about fanfiction in general.

[(Anonymous)]

Do you have to be well informed about a thing in order to not like it though? I think all (or at least most) of these comments are talking about the practice of taking real or fictional people that wouldn't usually have sex and then writing a scenario where they do rude things together, with the assumption being that a lot of the time the pairings are homosexual even though the characters are people are known to be non-homosexual. Whether it's called slash or fanfiction and whether the generalisations above hold for it all the time, I still think the questions and concerns people have about it are valid.

[(Anonymous)]

Um, where are you getting that from? Perhaps the terminology isn't always being used quite correctly, but the commenters seem quite clear in their descriptions of precisely what it is they don't like.