If You Write It, They Will Come

[elspethdixon]

I've been pondering doing meta on this for a while, and finally decided to write down my observations/ponderings, prompted mostly by the recent waves of slash discussions and a few ship-rivalry style comments I've recently seen people make.

One of the things that been brought up tangentially in the discussions of waves of slash is the evolution of individual ships - from a new, rare pairing, where every fic has to do the leg work of justifying why these people are together, to a commonplace fanon concept, to the kind of over-arching dominant paradigm McShep has become in SGA fandom, where the pairing is so normativised (for lack of a better word) that people can seriously consider McShep fics to be gen (as a sometimes-gen-fan, I boggle at this; I suspect part of the issue there is a lack of understanding of what the term "gen" actually means, as with those people who think non-canonical het can be "slash").

People have been discussing the "how" of ship evolution, and I'm going to go on a slight tangent from this and discuss the "how" of ship formation and ship conversion (i.e. the process by which a pairing becomes accepted, and by which fans begin shipping it).

Obviously, a lot of popular ships are spawned by canon -- not for nothing is Amok Time known as the episode the started slash. Certain kinds of plot developments and character interactions in canon seem to naturally lead to slash, most especially "buddy cop" model-style relationships between two male protagonists. There are also, however, a host of popular ships that don't seem to have a screamingly obvious canonical basis - or a least, don't seem to have any more canon or subtextual support than other potential ships that get less attention, fic, and general love. There are even moderately popular pairings between characters who never actually meet in canon, ships that are entirely fanon, but no less beloved for all of that.

Why does this happen? In my admittedly not all-encompassing experience, it boils down to one basic rule:

If you write it, they will come.
(proviso to rule: unless your writing is really, really bad. If you know the difference between past and present tense and can spell the characters' names properly, you should be set.)

Fans generally acquire ships in one of three ways.

1) We acquire pairing preferences directly from canon because the characters are either obviously meant to be or obviously already getting it on. We watch the show or read the books and, based on the plot arcs, the chemistry between the characters, the kinds of relationships we like, and the moments when we the viewers exclaim aloud, "Oh My God, he's actually licking him. Surely they are doing teh sexx0rs," we decide to start shipping them (Okay, maybe the specific licking example only works for Starsky & Hutch, Gabrielle and Xena, or Picard and Q, but you get my point).

2) We get pairings from the source, but with assistance from fandom. Somehow, we miss the obviousness of two characters' meant-to-be-ness or raging lust for one another while watching the canon for the first time, but the moment we hear another fan mention the possibility it's all so obvious and we slap our foreheads and wonder how on earth we missed it. Ever had one of those moments when you see someone else commenting on the slashiness of a particular book/movie/show and suddenly all the canon details come pouring through your mind once again and you realize, "Oh my God, Robin Hood and Little John/Holmes and Watson/Hawkeye and BJ/[insert pairing here] are incredibly gay for one another"? (for me, at least, this tends to happen a lot with source canons I encountered before I knew about slash. I hear someone mentioning that slash exists for something I read or saw back in elementary school/middle school/high school, and the subtext suddenly seems so obvious in retrospect. Often I don't even need to be told which pair of characters are slashed. Just the conceptual pairing of the source canon and slash will do it).

3) Canon hasn't left us with any strong shipping preferences for a particular character yet (either because it we're just being introduced to the source canon, or because we have seen all or most of the canon but for whatever reason, no particular ship jumped out at us), but another fan or group of fans produces fanworks for a particular ship, and those fanworks convince us of the ship's overwhelming awesomeness (or at least introduce us to the concept and show us that we like it -- there are degrees of shipping preference, from having several pairings one mildly enjoys to die-hard, set-in-stone, the-characters-are-ooc-if-you-don't-include-this-ship OTPs).

The first two options are entirely dependant on our reading of the source text, and other fans have little role in them beyond mentioning ship possibilities to us and getting that "ping" reaction.

Ship-conversion via fanworks, however, happens all over the place in fandom, all the time. Among other things, it's one reason why ship manifestos exist. Vids, fic, art, meta -- all of it encourages our interest in a pairing. The more often we see a ship discussed, written about, drawn, etc., the more likely we are to check the pairing out. That said, not all fanwork is created equal in terms of functioning as ship conversion catalysts.

Speaking from personal experience, every single time I've been converted to a ship via fandom (generally for a show I'm still in the process of watching or for one of the many fandoms where I read the fic but haven't seen the source material or have only seen a couple of episodes, like Weiss Kreuz or Gundam Wing, or a source canon that I discover via fanfic and then go acquire and watch/read the canon for) it's been because of long, plotty ship fic. Sometimes even a single fic.

I was a Trowa/Quatre fan from the first episode of Gundam Wing I saw (until I was spoiled for the end of the series and for Endless waltz, I was actually convinced that the two of them would became canon before the end of the series), but it was Sunhawk's Ion and Roadtrip sagas that made me a Heero/Duo fan. Multiple megabytes of h/c and epic-length slashy angst.

For Weiss, it was BrightAngel's "To Hold the Hands I Love," followed by Yuki Scorpio's "When You Gonna Learn" and Marith's "Games." All long, all with an action/angst plot, and all with h/c. After that, my preferences were set.

For Naruto, I shipped Naruto/Sasuke after seeing about one episode and reading one volume of manga, such was the obviousness of their destined love, but it was "Blood of the Wolf" and "Butterfly in Reverse" that turned me on to Kakashi/Iruka (we're talking novel-length fics of several hundred pages, even if BiR is an unfinished WiP with serious over-the-top melodrama issues).

And so on and so forth. Are you seeing a theme here? (other than that I really like h/c and read a lot of anime fic for series that I've seen about three episodes apiece of?)

In my experience, both personally and through observation, the fic that draws people into a pairing tends to be long (50 pages and up), tends to have some plot or subplot in addition to the emotional plot arc of the romance (to give people not already sold on the ship a reason to read), and tends to be first time ship fic that shows its work -- the sort of thing I've seen referred to recently as "second wave slash." The most successful ship-conversion-catalysts are those wherein the characters realize their feelings for one another, acknowledge the obstacles to their relationship, and then overcome them. The reader gets to see the characters fall in love and convince themselves of the validity of the ship, and if the author is lucky, the reader will be sold on the ship in the process. The more canonical obstacles there are to the ship, the more set-up is generally needed (hence, Wincest fics apparently tending to fall more in the "show your work" camp while fic for some other, non-incestuous, slash pairings may fall closer to the "the pairing is fait accompli" camp). [see awesome diagram here for illustration - the kind of fic I'm talking about is the kind tiptoe39 describes as moving the characters' relationship from canonical point A to desired point B]

Sometimes said fics are NC-17, but they don't have to be. Pr0n is generally agreed to be a Good Thing in fandom, but fans do not live by pr0n alone. What hooks people into a ship is gaining emotional investment in it, and in the emotional investment stakes, one long fic can often be as good or better than a half-dozen short pwps.

To give an example based less on how my own personal preferences formed and more on general fannish behavior: a couple of authors writing good fic of decent length is how Sparrington got started.

I was in on the ground floor of PotC fandom (I joined pirategasm when CotBP had just hit theaters), and in the very early days of the fandom, everybody who didn't write Jack/MarySue het wrote some combination of Will, Jack, and Elizabeth, be it slash, het, or OT3. Then, people like firesignwriter and webcrowmancer wrote a handful of mid-length and long fics pairing Jack and Norrington, and fans slowly started to trickle in. Sparrington was/is a major ship in PotC fandom, but back in the summer of 2003, there were only about four people writing it. OT3 basically sprung fully-formed from the source canon, but Sparrington was built by fans - yet there were points back in PotCs heyday when more Sparrington showed up on pirategasm than OT3 or het fic (this was in the happy days before the more recent Jack/Elizabeth vs. Will/Elizabeth het shipwars that followed the second and third movies).

The same thing happened in Marvel comics fandom vis-à-vis Iron Man and Captain America. Steve/Tony is a relatively small pairing as slash pairings go, and I don't think it's very well known outside of Marvel comics fandom (which is a separate entity from movie-verse fandom, for the most part), but there are around 200 people on the pairing's one active comm, and over a dozen writers regularly producing fic. Last spring, there were approximately three people on the entire internet who shipped Steve and Tony, and no fic for the pairing whatsoever. None. Trust me. I looked. Then the first long Steve/Tony fic came out, and people gradually started joining the fandom (I say fandom, because prior to the formation of the Steve/Tony community there was also next to no Avengers fic and no Iron Man fic to speak of on LJ, so rather than creating a shippy sub-community inside a larger fandom, the fandom was essentially the ship. This was before the movie, obviously).

So, now that I've gone on and on with my "long first-time fics are what convert people to a pairing" theory and my entirely anecdotal evidence for it: Are there any pairings that you've become a fan of based on fic? And if so, was there a particular fic that made you "see the light?" (bonus points if the fic contains h/c and you can provide a link). Don't feel that you have to keep silent about it if it's not an objectively good fic, either. The Weiss fics I linked above, for example, are things I loved when I was 19 and haven't read in years, so they may be brilliant or they may be godawful (Sunhawk's 1x2x1 stuff, however, is gloriously epic h/c that I reread at least once a year).

Comments

[blktauna.insanejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

oops, you'd be right :)

My fandoms are small and old so I'm pleased to get what I get. (well not really but I am happy to see anything at all in some of them)

Do you really ignore anything that isn't over say 10,000 words?

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

On LJ, no, but when I browse on ff.net I tend to set the search parameters with a lower limit of 10,000 or even 20,000 or 40,000 (if it's a very large section, I always do at least one search for the very longest category first just out of hope and read those first if they're any good). When I'm looking for something to read outside my fandoms, I'm often looking for something I can read for general reading the way I'd read a novel (published novels with slash and hurt/comfort tend to be in short supply, and fic might not always be as well structured or well-edited, but emo slashy romance is my secret guilty pleasure).

[blktauna.insanejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

Ahh I don't use ff.net or read outside my fandoms. I think the culture is very different on ff.net than in other places. Makes sense the audience would be looking for different things or would be swayed by different things than say list culture or IJ or LJ culture.