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I feel like this post is either a statement of the blindingly obvious or bound to offend everyone.
Maybe both!
Every so often I expound my Theory of How/Why (Sibling) Incest Pairings Are the New Slash to someone. It's something I more or less worked out while writing Missing Persons, particularly the stage of writing MP during which I, uh, stopped shipping Don and Charlie and started wishing they would date other people because that would be so much healthier for them.
/o\
So I have always had a somewhat sheepish and awkward relationship to my theory, and at this point I feel vaguely like incest ships are either totally routine or slightly passe, and so the theory is of no interest to anyone. Plus, I don't think I've ever explained the theory to anyone who did not seem to find it self-evident, so I began to assume that it was, in fact, self-evident for everyone.
But it occurs to me that a) that is probably the echo chamber of my particular end of fandom in action and b) regardless of its currency I have never written my theory down, and explaining it from scratch every time it comes up somewhere on the internets is sort of inefficient.
So, here. I will write it down. Probably at some length. With a long digression on what old slash things incest ships are the new version of. Please feel entirely free not to click.
Caveats: Any sweeping generalizations I make are just that, sweeping generalizations, and they will have many exceptions. My theory and all generalizations subsumed in it are based on my particular experience of slash fandom, c.2001-2010. In particular, the theory relates primarily to buddy or partner slash pairings and sibling incest pairings, probably particularly m/m sibling pairs. I'm sure people who are not me have written and read--and continue to write and read--the same pairings for entirely different reasons.
Way back in the Olden Days of slash, back in zine times, back when the foundational tropes and subgenres were forming from the still-molten collective-fangirl-consciousness, slash was transgressive. The portrayal of same-sex relationships was controversial in the culture in which our slash-writing foremothers lived--which is why they had to be written by fangirls, instead of appearing right there on TV.
And while it was entirely possible that Kirk and Spock, for instance, were living in a world beyond homophobia or binary sexual orientations, the writers and readers of slash did not. There was a perception of the nature of the relationship itself as an obstacle for the relationship to overcome, and slash writers built all the apparatus we know as venerable slash cliches to get over that hurdle: amnesia, altered states of consciousness, going undercover in a gay bar, huddling for warmth, hurt/comfort, bad guys making them do it, and of course the infamous We're Not Gay We Just Love Each Other.
It wasn't just that those devices persuaded the characters into the relationship or sexual activity. They persuaded the readers and writers, as well.
And slash writers weren't doing all that narrative work just to be outre in a plausible way. There's a specific and powerful emotional charge that comes along with the story of a relationship so overwhelming that it sweeps away societal expectations and sexual orientations in its path. And then too there's a particular kind of story that can be written from that place--a kind of maximum OTP, us-against-the-world story, in which the rest of the world can't even be allowed to know there is an us. These stories tend to be angsty but ultimately triumphant, and to have a kind of claustrophobic emotional intensity, and man, for the first five or six years I was in fandom I ate them up like CAKE.
But I noticed, as I went along, that they were getting harder to find. They were old school. We're Not Gay We Just Love Each Other became reviled as an expression of homophobia, and the trend moved toward embracing the characters' bisexuality as a perfectly normal and acceptable orientation. The barriers were dropping, and the enormous apparatus used to clear them was beginning to look outmoded and ridiculous. (NB: I am not referring to the status of gay people, or the ease of conducting gay relationships, in the actual world. I am talking about the resistance to the portrayal of gay relationships, specifically as perceived within the community of people writing slash, which for obvious reasons tends to be somewhat ahead of the societal curve on that point.)
And people [i.e. me] who were used to the high-octane charge of the us-against-the-world maximum-OTP claustrophobically intense angst stories looked around and said, "Well, no, it's great that they come out to all their friends and neighbors, get married, have a baby--I mean, really, that is great, of course it is--but, I don't know, it's just not very..."
It's not that you can't tell those dark, difficult stories about ordinary slash pairings anymore, but it's not built into the structure of the relationship itself. By the same token, back in zine days I'm sure it was possible not to write those difficult stories, but I think it must have been at least somewhat a conscious choice. The default was darker.
And then, you see, along came the Winchesters. The Eppes brothers. (The Tams, maybe, if that's not a different thing; they were never one of my big pairings and I'm not familiar with the fannish dynamics.) And all of a sudden the barriers were back up and all that complicated apparatus could be used again for its intended purpose. Certainly it was possible to write lighter stories for these pairings--I did it myself, but I always did it by consciously deciding to defer the darkness. But the attraction of the pairing was the difficulty built into it.
This is where the theory came from, when I was writing Missing Persons and started counting up slash cliches on my fingers. I think I probably hit everything except undercover in a gay bar by the time the story was finished, and possibly only because I wound up taking out the trip to Vegas and making it a different story. And I needed all those devices! I needed the amnesia, the hurt and comfort, the confined space, the single bed, the huddling against the cold, the bad guys making them do it.
Because if I used all of those devices, I could make the relationship make sense to myself and my readers--all of whom, I blithely assume, have a typically functioning taboo against sibling incest (I have four brothers and yes, yes, my taboo is working just fine, thanks). And if I could make them buy into the relationship then I could also make them buy into that crazily intense emotional experience, the us-against-the-world, the maximum-OTP which can never be broken. I could have that experience myself in writing the story.
People would say, when I got into writing Don/Charlie, or when Sam/Dean got big, that incest shippers were doing it just because slash wasn't transgressive enough for them anymore, because they wanted to cross a line. And I think that's true, in a way, but not the way they thought. I think it's true in the way where we're just getting back to our roots.
That is my theory, anyway.
[The rest of the story, for me, is that bandom came along, and with it the Way brothers. These are two fairly ordinary guys who have fought the kind of battles and demons that ordinary people fight, against substance abuse and mental health issues especially. The narrative they tell about themselves is one about emerging from that dark place into a world where they can be okay, and I got really, really invested in them being okay. Sober, even-keeled, and in healthy romantic relationships.
I didn't want to slash them with each other not so much because they're real people, but because I wanted more for them than the claustrophobic intensity of the incest OTP story. I wanted them to be in relationships they could announce onstage in front of a million screaming fans. I wanted them to have weddings and babies and sunshine. And then, retroactively, I wanted the same thing for all my other BSOs, too.
And that is why I say that bandom ruined me for incest.]
This entry is crossposted at http://dsudis.livejournal.com/557419.html.
Every so often I expound my Theory of How/Why (Sibling) Incest Pairings Are the New Slash to someone. It's something I more or less worked out while writing Missing Persons, particularly the stage of writing MP during which I, uh, stopped shipping Don and Charlie and started wishing they would date other people because that would be so much healthier for them.
/o\
So I have always had a somewhat sheepish and awkward relationship to my theory, and at this point I feel vaguely like incest ships are either totally routine or slightly passe, and so the theory is of no interest to anyone. Plus, I don't think I've ever explained the theory to anyone who did not seem to find it self-evident, so I began to assume that it was, in fact, self-evident for everyone.
But it occurs to me that a) that is probably the echo chamber of my particular end of fandom in action and b) regardless of its currency I have never written my theory down, and explaining it from scratch every time it comes up somewhere on the internets is sort of inefficient.
So, here. I will write it down. Probably at some length. With a long digression on what old slash things incest ships are the new version of. Please feel entirely free not to click.
Caveats: Any sweeping generalizations I make are just that, sweeping generalizations, and they will have many exceptions. My theory and all generalizations subsumed in it are based on my particular experience of slash fandom, c.2001-2010. In particular, the theory relates primarily to buddy or partner slash pairings and sibling incest pairings, probably particularly m/m sibling pairs. I'm sure people who are not me have written and read--and continue to write and read--the same pairings for entirely different reasons.
Way back in the Olden Days of slash, back in zine times, back when the foundational tropes and subgenres were forming from the still-molten collective-fangirl-consciousness, slash was transgressive. The portrayal of same-sex relationships was controversial in the culture in which our slash-writing foremothers lived--which is why they had to be written by fangirls, instead of appearing right there on TV.
And while it was entirely possible that Kirk and Spock, for instance, were living in a world beyond homophobia or binary sexual orientations, the writers and readers of slash did not. There was a perception of the nature of the relationship itself as an obstacle for the relationship to overcome, and slash writers built all the apparatus we know as venerable slash cliches to get over that hurdle: amnesia, altered states of consciousness, going undercover in a gay bar, huddling for warmth, hurt/comfort, bad guys making them do it, and of course the infamous We're Not Gay We Just Love Each Other.
It wasn't just that those devices persuaded the characters into the relationship or sexual activity. They persuaded the readers and writers, as well.
And slash writers weren't doing all that narrative work just to be outre in a plausible way. There's a specific and powerful emotional charge that comes along with the story of a relationship so overwhelming that it sweeps away societal expectations and sexual orientations in its path. And then too there's a particular kind of story that can be written from that place--a kind of maximum OTP, us-against-the-world story, in which the rest of the world can't even be allowed to know there is an us. These stories tend to be angsty but ultimately triumphant, and to have a kind of claustrophobic emotional intensity, and man, for the first five or six years I was in fandom I ate them up like CAKE.
But I noticed, as I went along, that they were getting harder to find. They were old school. We're Not Gay We Just Love Each Other became reviled as an expression of homophobia, and the trend moved toward embracing the characters' bisexuality as a perfectly normal and acceptable orientation. The barriers were dropping, and the enormous apparatus used to clear them was beginning to look outmoded and ridiculous. (NB: I am not referring to the status of gay people, or the ease of conducting gay relationships, in the actual world. I am talking about the resistance to the portrayal of gay relationships, specifically as perceived within the community of people writing slash, which for obvious reasons tends to be somewhat ahead of the societal curve on that point.)
And people [i.e. me] who were used to the high-octane charge of the us-against-the-world maximum-OTP claustrophobically intense angst stories looked around and said, "Well, no, it's great that they come out to all their friends and neighbors, get married, have a baby--I mean, really, that is great, of course it is--but, I don't know, it's just not very..."
It's not that you can't tell those dark, difficult stories about ordinary slash pairings anymore, but it's not built into the structure of the relationship itself. By the same token, back in zine days I'm sure it was possible not to write those difficult stories, but I think it must have been at least somewhat a conscious choice. The default was darker.
And then, you see, along came the Winchesters. The Eppes brothers. (The Tams, maybe, if that's not a different thing; they were never one of my big pairings and I'm not familiar with the fannish dynamics.) And all of a sudden the barriers were back up and all that complicated apparatus could be used again for its intended purpose. Certainly it was possible to write lighter stories for these pairings--I did it myself, but I always did it by consciously deciding to defer the darkness. But the attraction of the pairing was the difficulty built into it.
This is where the theory came from, when I was writing Missing Persons and started counting up slash cliches on my fingers. I think I probably hit everything except undercover in a gay bar by the time the story was finished, and possibly only because I wound up taking out the trip to Vegas and making it a different story. And I needed all those devices! I needed the amnesia, the hurt and comfort, the confined space, the single bed, the huddling against the cold, the bad guys making them do it.
Because if I used all of those devices, I could make the relationship make sense to myself and my readers--all of whom, I blithely assume, have a typically functioning taboo against sibling incest (I have four brothers and yes, yes, my taboo is working just fine, thanks). And if I could make them buy into the relationship then I could also make them buy into that crazily intense emotional experience, the us-against-the-world, the maximum-OTP which can never be broken. I could have that experience myself in writing the story.
People would say, when I got into writing Don/Charlie, or when Sam/Dean got big, that incest shippers were doing it just because slash wasn't transgressive enough for them anymore, because they wanted to cross a line. And I think that's true, in a way, but not the way they thought. I think it's true in the way where we're just getting back to our roots.
That is my theory, anyway.
[The rest of the story, for me, is that bandom came along, and with it the Way brothers. These are two fairly ordinary guys who have fought the kind of battles and demons that ordinary people fight, against substance abuse and mental health issues especially. The narrative they tell about themselves is one about emerging from that dark place into a world where they can be okay, and I got really, really invested in them being okay. Sober, even-keeled, and in healthy romantic relationships.
I didn't want to slash them with each other not so much because they're real people, but because I wanted more for them than the claustrophobic intensity of the incest OTP story. I wanted them to be in relationships they could announce onstage in front of a million screaming fans. I wanted them to have weddings and babies and sunshine. And then, retroactively, I wanted the same thing for all my other BSOs, too.
And that is why I say that bandom ruined me for incest.]
This entry is crossposted at http://dsudis.livejournal.com/557419.html.
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I like your theory: I think it's quite valid, and can even be mapped to het ships, really. Because Mulder/Scully, in particular, has many of those same barriers to acceptance, at least within the canon, and was often described as a slashy het ship. Although the M/S shippers didn't need to be convinced of the pairing the way you're describing, because there's nothing particularly transgressive in two coworkers of opposite sexes falling in love.
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Just looking at Supernatural the fandom itself went through phases with regard to incest. At first there were a lot of stories about Sam and Dean dealing with the idea of wanting to have an incestuous sexual relationship then stories about them getting over it quickly and dealing with the couple-aspect of it, then it almost got dull and people moved on to other ships. All that said I'm not even sure if Supernatural is a really well representative incest fandom because in the first season aside from Sam and Dean the only characters that got any development were John (also an incest ship and added parent/child issues), demon!Meg, and Bobby (older). Also, the show itself played up the idea of Sam and Dean being mistaken for a couple right from the first season which I think helped push fandom into taking the relationship into the incest angle. So I think in a way Supernatural is atypical of incest fandoms because of how limited the number of characters were.
Since I came into fandom through computer games and books I found the way nu-media fandom dealt with incest really interesting and different from how I'd experienced it previously. Many of those fandoms had canon incest and it was treated in a very black and white way as opposed to the more grey-area of the nu-media fandoms. Those old fandoms either treated it as a serious problem with it almost always committed by the "bad" guys or they treated it as a natural outgrowth of the characters.
the claustrophobic intensity of the incest OTP story This is a really excellent description. I agree with you about the Ways and wanting them to have better lives. At the same time, I am really good at compartmentalizing so I don't mind Waycest in the sense I see it as nothing but the character of the persona. However, looking at the Waycest I've read vs. other incest ships in other fandoms I can see really distinct differences between them which I think does come from the Waycest being RPF no matter how much I compartmentalize it.
Anyway, sorry for the ramble, and really interesting post.
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It is interesting to consider the possibility that Dean/Castiel got as big as it did, not only because people were relieved to find a non-incest slash pairing, but because people had already gotten much of what they wanted out of the incest pairing and were ready to move on. I mean, and because of the actual characters and their actual onscreen relationship, whatever.
And hey, thanks for rambling! It's good to see other people's thoughts on this.
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And having read some early Numb3rs meta about the change in Charlie's S1 characterisation to S2, I realised that I much preferred The narrative they tell about themselves [as being] one about emerging from that dark place into a world where they can be okay. Charlie/Amita was a triumph, in my eyes, of Charlie growing as a person, becoming fuller and stronger and wiser. And Don's journey has been much the same--I really like how his story ended in S6. Both of them come out of their shared experience more balanced as individuals.
For me, at least, I'd moved from wanting that claustraphobic maximum-OTP thing (Buffy/Angel, other forbidden pairings) to wanting relationships that get to have their place in the sun, so to speak. I wanted DADT repealed, I wanted coming out stories in which parents accepted their children's queer relationships. Even more than domesticity, I wanted community, where couples aren't just two against the world, but two within a larger group who shaped their own, welcoming society.
...of course, I'm also at the age where everyone around me is getting married and having babies, so that might be playing a role in my change in tastes ;)
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I mean, I went from writing Missing Persons, ode to the fucked up inescapable incestuous relationship, directly into writing a Torchwood story that was all about having a baby, being supported by your friends, building a family and a community and a life in the sunshine. So, yes.
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Yes, this!
And now I'm much less into the apocafic. Still read it occasionally, but now I go much more for the funny and hot side of the equation.
Re: Yes, this!
Re: Yes, this!
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My fannish happy places over the last decade (eep!) have been Star Trek (there are very few of us crammed together into a tin can in space, and no one outside our world truly understands it) Doctor Who (substitute 'police box' for 'tin can'), and Harry Potter (substitute 'hidden world in middle of generation-long civil war'). And I tend to go for siege stories and ark stories on top of that. Add in the complication of 'my partner is a Vulcan/an emo Time Lord/Severus Snape' and none of my pairings need any more obstacles.
(Huh. Now that I put it that way, it is very clear that I need to rewatch Blakes 7 one of these days.)
Of course, I also can't write the super-intense OTP stories to begin with, and I even have a hard time reading them in fandoms where I know the characters well-- I have to have some distance from the characters' flaws if I'm to convince myself that that sort of relationship will ever work.
Despite this, I consider myself an incorrigible romantic. Um. I contain multitudes?
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And then, hello, fandom. Heh. Finding a book in Barnes and Noble that was all "here's a happily ever after shmoopy romance but between two men or two women"? Pretty much impossible. Finding that on the internet, easy. And meanwhile, incest in fandoms is, um, different (and generally flipped from my impression of Heinlein in that sibcest is considered better than cross-gen; I don't know if I've ever seen a cross-gen fic that didn't come at it from an abuse standpoint). And I can buy that in the fiction aisle at Barnes and Noble. (Or, you know, in the history section.)
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(also, amusingly, i uncovered S1 of numb3rs today while cleaning out my desk. now i want to watch it and see what i think!)
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I'm glad this was enlightening for you! And, awww, S1. The good old days. :)
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OMG! Me too lol! I think for me it was the sheer horror in Mikeyways voice during that one interview where he talks about the fic someone sent him that featured in his words "me and Gerard having relations" I always feel so weird about reading Waycest after that. I still read Sam/Dean but not as religiously as I once did, and I really can't get down with the whole Jonas Brothers Nick/Joe thing it disturbs me.
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My personal taste is much more for communities and sunshine than uber-OTP fueled by claustrophobic confinement, BUT I love stories that talk about the different ways people know each other: when I was reading and writing Don/Charlie I did it from the viewpoint that even with all their other connections (very worthwhile connections at that), no one could know them quite the way they knew each other.
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I have definitely moved toward the communities and sunshine end of the spectrum. Actually, now that I think of it, I was reading a story recently that kind of really gets the peanut butter in my chocolate and ranges over both ends of the spectrum at once, because it involves characters who have shared an intense experience that can never be understood by anyone else, who have now left that experience behind and are using the relationship they forged in it to heal enough to enjoy sunshine and communities and babies and cookies.
*happysigh*
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I can more fully explain/describe/pimp any of these AUs on request. They're ... complicated. *g*
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(Anonymous) 2010-06-03 05:15 pm (UTC)(link)hit post too fast
Re: hit post too fast
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So Broken Wings is an AU off Season 9 of SG-1--Cameron Mitchell (mmmm Ben Browder) never made the full recovery necessary to return to active duty with the SGC, and while living in Colorado Springs and trying to decide what to do with the rest of his life, is approached by a young man with a business proposition.
The young man is JD Nielson, the teenaged clone of Jack O'Neill who showed up in Season 7, equipped with all of Jack's memories up to that point, believing himself to be Jack. He's taken a couple of years to find Zen and his own identity, and now he's ready to get on with things but needs someone who looks like a grownup to help him out.
Together they
fight crimeshare the kind of understanding that only veterans of the SGC can have with each other--the story deals a lot with the ongoing results of their respective traumas, Mitchell's primarily physical, JD's mostly emotional and psychological. The story also comes to focus on their interactions with Mitchell's large and loving extended family in North Carolina, which is where the sunshine and most of the babies and cookies come in. There's a lot of healing and coping and belonging and pretty much all of the things that constitute my fictional happy places.(Mezzanine posits that Cam Mitchell is Cammie Mitchell and draws Daniel Jackson into the mix; Gedulah branches further off of events in Mezzanine.)
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Daniel Jackson and an alternate Cameron Mitchell and a highly specific version of Jack O'Neill's young clone, all from Stargate SG-1, is the short answer. :)
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Anyway: your theory! It is excellent!
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(Anonymous) 2010-07-05 09:10 am (UTC)(link)no subject
(Anonymous) 2010-07-05 09:11 am (UTC)(link)no subject
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</crazy belated>
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