incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

When I gave my Mary Sue talk, it was at a quasi-academic conference in a session on fans and gender. One of my co-panelists was Olivia Mendoza, a student at Ithaca College; she gave a great presentation on genderswapping fanfic, focusing on the Rule 63 variant in Avengers fandom.

She's kindly put her slides up on Dropbox; take a look! And feel free to leave recommendations for your favorite fics on the topic as well as any comments. (I'll be dropping her a link to this post.)

I already recommended one of my favorites here, which swaps both the Sherlock versions of Holmes and Watson:

Boston Marriage (75193 words) by pendrecarc
Chapters: 11/11
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC) - Fandom
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/expensive violins, John Watson/OC
Characters: Ensemble Cast - Character
Additional Tags: Genderswap, Case Fic, Big Bang Challenge, Women Being Awesome, Bechdel Test Pass
Series: Part 1 of Suite for Strings and Steel
Summary: (see notes for warnings)

In which Jo Watson tries to take this therapy business into her own hands, London produces enough crimes of interest to satisfy even Sherlock Holmes, and the Bechdel test doesn't know what hit it. Game on.

I have more, but I really must be doing other things now, so. What about you all?

Here is the text of my Mary Sue talk! [ETA: for people coming here through outside links, this was given at a quasi-academic conference with a fifteen-minute limit.] It is mostly as I gave it except I skipped a couple of paragraphs for time. I do have slides but I'm not sure I'm going to bother, they were very text-heavy and not that interesting. (Edit: moved the links to the end of this post, since there were no comments on the links-only post and this way everything's all in one place.)

( the text of my talk )

( the links )

You know, the panel before this ended early, and while the last panel looked interesting, my neck and shoulders are screaming at me from spending most of the day bending over my netbook, and if I leave now, I can eat a leisurely dinner and then go see Iron Man 3 instead of bolting my food and fretting the whole way. So despite my guilt, I'm playing hooky.

If you were at the conference, say hi! I do have notes about my co-panelists' talks, which I will post, but maybe they'll put their slides or notes up somewhere. Stay tuned. Just not until tomorrow, probably.

Here's the conference program for Pippi to Ripley: The Female Figure in Fantasy and Science Fiction, being held at Ithaca College in NY on May 5. I'm giving a talk "An Introduction to Mary Sue and Her Critical Uses and Abuses," on a panel that also has a talk on Women in Refrigerators and on gender-swap fic, so I'm looking forward to it a lot. (Also, Tamora Pierce is the keynote speaker, which is cool.)

Question for you all: it seems to me that I don't see Mary Sues (or Gary Stus, if you prefer that terminology) in slash fic. First, of course, I see very few canon/OC slash pairings (people seem to do crossovers if they aren't feeling any of the canon dynamics). But the slant taken on canon male characters in slash seems to me to be geared toward making them objects not subjects, or to put it more concretely, woobiefication seems to be undertaken to make them suffer more prettily for the authors'/readers' aesthetic appreciation, not so that authors/readers can use them as placeholders for themselves. But this is just my impression and, of course, I don't write the stuff, so what do you all think?

(By the way, I had not noticed TV Tropes' opening quote when I picked this icon. Great minds, apparently.)

In May, I will be giving a 15-minute talk based on the following abstract, which is not the most elegant thing I ever wrote but which does get the idea across, I hope.

An Introduction to Mary Sue and Her Critical Uses and Abuses

“Mary Sue” was coined in the 1970s by a Star Trek fanfic writer to criticize fanfic characters who were improbably wonderful authorial self-insertions (e.g., she’s the youngest Captain in the history of Starfleet, she has amethyst eyes, and every character is hopelessly in love with her). Since then the term has become common among other groups of science fiction and fantasy fans, who use it to refer to characters outside of fanfic, and has even spread into the mainstream media. Today, people use the term to mean anything from the original adolescent wish-fulfillment character who warps the entire story around her to any character who seems to resemble a female author. This talk gives a brief overview of Mary Sue’s history and multiple meanings, and then explores the ways in which she is a useful concept and the ways in which she is used to suppress women’s writing.

This is a mostly-academic conference, the first instance of which I blogged about two years ago, and so though it talks by default about "papers," I don't think I need to have a formal paper written, just a presentation. Which is good, because reading prewritten remarks in a useful and interesting way is not a skill I have.

I will probably be running drafts by y'all closer to, but if there's anything you think might be a bit of a less-common take on the topic, feel free.

The next set of recs, only eight stories this time. The prefatory notes to my first post still apply.

( Steve-centric stories )

Next up: Natasha and others.

I linked to this in a non-public post and the response indicates that it needs wider dissemination:

Treatment for Shock (1095 words) by Dira Sudis
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Mark Pierre Vorkosigan, Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, Armsman Roic
Summary: CyroBurn epilogue story, major spoilers!

When someone did move, at long last, it was Roic.

She has some other gen Vorkosigan stories if you like that, and also a recent Avengers fix-it.

As I said in the booklog entry I just posted, when I recently re-read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, I got to the end and wanted to just roll around it in and never come out.

After I re-read the last third, I went looking for fic (yes, I have The Ladies of Grace Adieu, but I was hoping for scope and something new). I read everything in the Yuletide archives and AO3, and here's what I liked enough to recommend:

( four stories; descriptions contain some spoilers for JS&NM )

So one of the things I want to talk about at the WisCon "Fanfic 401" panel is marginalization of non-white characters; my principal recent example is Yusuf and Saito from Inception. [*]

And that reminds me of my response to Hawaii Five-0, specifically the fannish reaction that I've seen. I have not seen a single episode of this, though I have heard the occasional thing that makes it sound like I might like it. But, here's the thing, the principal cast consists of four people, as shown in this ridiculous promo image:

I see some fannish activity about this show from people who I keep an eye on for their fic in other fandoms. I will give you three guesses as to which two characters I see 99.95% of the energy focused on; the first two don't count.

And maybe that's not a reflection on the show (remember, haven't seen it). Maybe I'm getting a skewed view of the fandom from the random bits I happen to see. But I truly cannot motivate myself to watch this show where every goddamn reference to it makes me say to myself, "Seriously, fandom? Four team members and you pick the two white guys again?!"

(And, I admit, this isn't helped by one of them being Scott Caan (far right), because, seriously?)

Before commenting, please note: as the title says, I am ranting. If you can honestly tell me that the fandom isn't actually all about the white guys (hell, I won't even demand 50%, just a sizable chunk), go ahead and show your work. But I really don't want to hear explanations, justifications, or defenses. You, personally, reading this? Your reasons for being interested in one character/relationship more than another are your own, they're for you to be happy with or not, and I'm not going to give you a gold star or the Magical Minority Fairy seal of approval or whatever, so please keep them to yourself. I'm talking about my own reaction to the apparent aggregate fannish reaction, which is: very tired.

[*] Sadly Sherlock has only one non-white character in its principal cast, and she is not only nasty but gets slut-shamed (well done, show!), so I cannot justly blame her marginalization in fic on fandom alone. (Note, however, that I have not seen that many fics attempting to reclaim her character.) Leverage fandom, at least back when I read it, might be a little bit better about this—Hardison being a geek helps—though I continue to look very side-eyed at the prevalence of Eliot/Nate in this regard. Of course my principal comparison, as the main post suggests, is SGA . . . and that is a topic that will not fit in the bounds of this footnote.

Because in the last 48 hours I have beta-read somewhere over 40K words (two Yuletide stories and three chapters in Chad's new book) and I find it just so satisfying.

Fortunately for our household income, I can get my editing fix through stuff like what I've just done and won't be tempted to chuck law for the publishing industry. (And someday I may be good enough and fortunate enough to have my job duties include editing, too.)

Meanwhile, best wishes to everyone still working on their Yuletide stories!

Panel report one of two. Description:

Fanfiction is being produced online at a rate of millions of words per month. Fanfiction can expand on a shorter work, change a work’s themes, or even attempt to “fix” things the author is felt to have done “wrong” (e.g., provide a backstory to explain otherwise undermotivated behavior). These dynamics are not unheard of outside of Internet fandom communities—Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway attempts to “fix” James Joyce’s Ulysses (which itself retells Homer’s Odyssey). In what ways can fanfiction be a valuable part of the criticism of a text? Can it appeal as criticism to readers outside the fanfiction community? If so, how can they find the most interesting works?

Victoria Janssen (L), Alaya Dawn Johnson, Erin Kissane, Ken Schneyer, Cecilia Tan.

( important note about pseudonymity )

( panel notes )

( a very very short reading list )