romance

Speaking of PaNick, I read this story by Kel and I liked it. I kept expecting it to turn dark and horrible, but really it's sweet and romantic and I liked it.

And then I was thinking about the word "romantic," and the word "romanticized," and fanfic and women, and I was being all vaguely hard-core feminist (can you be vaguely hard-core anything? I bet if it can be done, I'm the one who can do it) about how romantic comedies and romance novels are supposedly girl things, even though every scientific study ever done and all your anecdotal evidence (go ahead, think it through) supports the idea that men fall much harder and much faster into romantic love than women do. But still, right? Romantic stories are things that women write for other women to read, and they put them in a different section of Borders from the Literary Fiction, which may also be romantic, but we don't call it that, and people win awards for it, particularly men, and then they make movies that win Oscars, like the English Patient and Cold Mountain. Which is all well and good.

And then there's us. I always imagine that, somehow, the whole world is one giant Borders, and everyone is trying to figure out what shelf they belong on, and we're all like, Hey, I'm magical realism, not fantasy! and Why don't we send that guy over to the war thrillers where he belongs? and No, I'm about all kinds of relationships, not just romance! And stuff like that. One of my favorite things about popslash is how elastic it's been in incorporating things into the genre -- in almost no conceivable way is Paris/Nick or Justin/Britney slash, being neither same-sex nor non-canonical, but nobody would think of complaining that certain kinds of stories with those pairings as the focus get announced at Shinyandnew. Because popslash is a genre with a particular ethos, not with stringent requirements for content. I could write a 2000k Christina/Trace epic, and I guarantee you people would call it popslash. I like that.

What I'm saying here is that -- surprise! -- slash is a genre of fiction, or in this case fanfiction, and like all genres, there's a core of stuff that's very definable and recognizable, and then it moves out toward the fringes of the genre where things are more iconoclastic. I'm not willing to publish yet on what the ethos of slash is, except that it isn't anything as simple as I once would have said, as evidenced by the fact that PaNick can be popslash, but certain explicitly queer fanfic at, say, the Nifty archive I would personally not call slash.

Where am I going with this? No fucking clue -- should I have mentioned that up front? I've just been thinking lately about all my fandoms over the last seven or so years, and how many times the ethos of the fandom, the center around which we all congregate, is the romanticization of the characters, the way we lavish our affection on them, from the small jumps required to turn basically sweet-natured Blair into Angel!Blair from on high, to the massive amounts of collective fan energy invested in retooling Krycek or Spike into classicaly Byronic romantic heroes. There's a certain way of writing that makes events seem grander and more meaningful then in real life they perhaps are, and at the same time that glorifies the detailed and domestic, one's personal emotions and needs and wants, that *romanticizes* the bare outline of a story, and it's what slash writers do very well. Frequently it involves one degree or another of shading down the things we don't like and shading up the things we do, not unlike the way we actually think about people we love.

Because, you know, come on, Paris Hilton? There's no evidence that she has any compassion, any honor, any desire to benefit anyone but herself, any sense of her own impact, any ability to weigh off consequences and take responsibility. There's no evidence at all that she knows or cares anything about the real world, about anyone but herself and the people who directly contribute to her own happiness. All of these popstars, these are people who drop tens of thousands of dollars on a single piece of jewelry, who waste enough money to pay a family's power bill for a year on making sure they have the hotel suite with the crystal chandelier and not the glass one, who stash six hundred pairs of shoes and then feel good about themselves for giving three hundred away in a world where other people work three jobs and hope the cops show up when you dial 911. I'm supposed to admire these children? I'm supposed to *love* them, to cherish the way that Lance lets his secret boyfriend carry his moppy little dogs from gig to gig for him, and then votes for the same party that wants to amend the US Constitution to make sure we don't ever get around to thinking about maybe giving gay people their civil rights?

But I do, some of the time, love them. While I'm writing about them, I do, because I write them in a certain way, a little more thoughtful than they probably are, a little more genuine, a little more confused. I write them trying harder to get through life than I think they really are. Even when I'm feeling the Gritty Realism (tm), I romanticize their problems, their struggles, to give them greater weight and depth than just some fucking rich kid who's all woe is me, my life is so hard. I do that because I don't want to read about their bloated, competitive, soulless, consumptive, defensive little lives. I want, in one sense or another, a romance, a story about one or another kind of love.

And I'm not saying that's totally untrue, or that they're incapable of love or whatever. I'm saying that I write the way I write because it produces a story that I like and not becasue I think it mimics reality exactly, and I would go out on a limb to say that most writers would say the same thing.

So I like Kel's Paris Hilton story, and not in spite of the fact that I think it's a romanticized portrayal of Paris Hilton. That's why I like it. All of fanfic, the whole reason I'm here to begin with, is that I think source material is great, but I'm not content to leave it alone. It's not a make-over, it's a make-better, darling. We're just tzjujing reality a little bit, romanticizing it if you like, and I think it's sad that some people think that's ipso facto a failing of the genre. It's the entire reason I love it.