Thinking about the spn newsletter

[thuviaptarth]

[ETA 4/3 9:59pm: I've heavily edited this post to separate out the general discussion of fandom and fantasy space from a specific question of the SPN newsletter; it was thoughtless of me to associate the two.

[This post is public because I did want to get the opinions of fans not on my flist. However, it is not a request itself, and it is not directed at the maintainers of the spn newsletter, although I'm aware some of them may stumble across it; I am trying to figure out if a request is a good idea. A day later I'm inclining towards "not a good idea," but I dislike deleting posts; it feels like trying to cover up your mistakes, and I'd rather acknowledge having made them and move on.]

I've been wondering if it might help settle some nerves in Supernatural fandom for the newsletter to re-arrange the template to list gen stories before Sam/Dean.

I like this idea entirely apart from the recurrent arguments about the role of incest in fiction because it accords with my personal notions of categorization -- you do the gen, which is a subset of stories distinguished by its lack of or failure to focus on pairings, and then you do all the stories that belong to the category of pairing fic, broken down by significant pairings. It seems to me that this makes it easier for non-Wincest readers to cut off their reading when they reach the end of the category, instead of having to skip past the Sam/Dean (unless of course they're also looking for het or other), has a neutral effect on the subset of Sam/Dean slashers who also like gen (which seem to me to be a large percentage of fandom), and offers only a mild inconvenience to the Sam/Dean slashers who do not like gen, as they tend to be indifferent to gen rather than disturbed by it.

There's a lot of "seems" in there because I haven't done any kind of rigorous analysis of this (my life is sadly empty of pie charts), and because I haven't yet gone through the newsletter info/memories to see if this idea has already been proposed, discussed, and rejected. I don't want to re-hash old arguments, and I don't want to express this as a demand or an entitlement; I think the newsletter is a great fandom resource, put together by people who are doing great work for the fandom infrastructure, and I get a lot of good out of it as it is.

But I thought I'd throw it out there as a proposal and see what you guys think and whether you know of any previous fandom history affecting it that I might not be aware of.

[ETA 4/3: Other issues moved to a separate post.]

I'm going to be offline for most of today traveling and celebrating Passover, so I will probably not be able to respond to comments quickly.

Comments

[vaznetti]

Happy Passover!

I've been trying to niggle out some connections I feel but cannot easily articulate among recent fandom brangles about the harshing of squee, incest in Supernatural, race in SGA, fandom as a safe space, and what I see as the fairly complicated relationship of fantasy and reality.

I've been doing the same: there seems to me to be a clear line connecting the SPN and SGA wanks, and it's something to do with the way our RL experience shapes the worlds we create, and also how the worlds we create shape our understanding of our RL experiences. I'm a little cautious about moving past that, because I think that there are some implications to this which will make a lot of people uncomfortable.

I don't know anything about the arrangement of genres in the SPN newsletter; I think your proposal makes sense, but would prefer to leave the matter in the hands of the people who actually do all the work for it. I have a vague memory that the order used to vary, but that may be some other community.

[cofax7]

Your proposal re: the newsletter is one that I would support whole-heartedly, and if I felt that I was in the position to make that proposal without causing a ton of trouble (as a non-Wincester coming into this space and trying to get things changed to fit my own preferences), I might have. You however are in a position to do so, and I appreciate that you have.

And, in fact, I just appreciate you in general. I hope you had a lovely weekend; your name came up a few times yesterday, always with approbation and affection.


(Oh, for the days of the great LJ-vs-boards wank in Farscape fandom.)

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

You are, as I have often said, extraordinarily smart. Your noodling is better-formed and more articulate than almost any of the posts I have seen in the past week on any of these discussions.

What I feel like I'm seeing, a lot of the time, is an automatic defensiveness and fear at being asked to consider how we or what we've said appears to other people, a defensiveness that comes out of the fear that we're wrong, or the inherited shame and discomfort we feel about our positions of relative privilege or fantasies we ourselves may find problematic, or out of the startlement at being called on a sense of entitlement we didn't know we had and may not be read to confront.

This is so perfect, I want to tattoo it on my forehead. Except I'm guessing it wouldn't fit.

[loligo.livejournal.com]

I guess if I had to boil it down into a few sentences, I would say that fantasy is inevitable and it can be reactionary or it can be revolutionary and it can be other things entirely; that sometimes fantasy is entirely divorced from the real world, but sometimes it is not; and that, as responsible adults who seek to behave rightly by other people, when we publish our fantasies, our thoughts, our opinions, it behooves us to consider their impact on other people, even if we decide that the positive impact of expression for us outweighs the negative impact of the expression on other people. (plus the part that Laura already quoted)

You are a smart, smart, SMART woman, and fandom is lucky to have you.

[astolat]

Oh, dude. I couldn't care less what the order of the newsletter is, and I would prefer not to touch any of the various wanks with a fifty foot pole. But I have to stand up and say I think it is really rude to go hauling the people who are quietly doing the hard and tedious and incredibly generous fannish work of the newsletter into the middle of wank like this. You have no say in what order the newsletter goes, and neither do I, and neither does anyone else in the fandom who doesn't step up and do the work. They didn't sign up for the job of settling people's nerves.

[gloss]

I would say that fantasy is inevitable and it can be reactionary or it can be revolutionary and it can be other things entirely; that sometimes fantasy is entirely divorced from the real world, but sometimes it is not; and that, as responsible adults who seek to behave rightly by other people, when we publish our fantasies, our thoughts, our opinions, it behooves us to consider their impact on other people
In just doing your usual amazing noodling, you've expressed *exactly* the kinds of thoughts I've been trying to clarify - to myself and to others - for years. I want to thank you for that, *especially* for noting the step taken from fantasy to publication. This is an extraordinary generous intervention that gives me a lot of hope.

[destina.livejournal.com]

I've been wondering if it might help settle some nerves in Supernatural fandom for the newsletter to re-arrange the template to list gen stories before Sam/Dean

And truly, every time I've seen this pop up in comments, I've wondered what this would actually accomplish. Is the thinking that those who don't like Sam/Dean would not have to see that there are links for it, and thus be upset by the reminder of its existence? They know it exists; what harm is there in having to scroll past some links for it, which don't have any offensive aside from their simple existence? Let's just say for the sake of discussion that the Sam/Dean links are put last in the fiction grouping. What if people are reading on the main journal page - they'll have to scroll past them to go to the next entry, won't they? Or what if they want to click through the icon links - again with having to see those links.

I think this is no real solution, because it implies that by protecting people from seeing those links, they can somehow pretend the incest stories don't exist and their discomfort with what those links represent will be alleviated. And I'm pretty certain it won't. YMMV.

here via vee

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

You name us (i.e., metafandom) and we come :) [And I'm glad you already gave tacit permission to get linked, or I might have felt a bit less comfortable linking a multi-purpose post.]

FWIW on the newsletter, on SGA we have gen listed before het and slash, and I'm not even sure how we ended up like that (though our wanky suggestions tend to usually involve the complaint that McShep shouldn't be a separate category, bladibla...or the fact that we categorize at all, which is why we have an uncategorized section!), but it might have been in part to make sure to show that it's not just about the McShep (esp. as all compilers in the beginning were as far as I remember).

Otoh, I'm not sure a public post (esp. if we metafandom) will not be *more* rather than less pressure on the newsletter folks, though. By throwing it out there, they now have to either ignore popular opinion or follow it or...whereas just dropping them a line would have kept it out of the spotlight and put the ball firmly in their court...