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[circa_eve]

Several conversations I've had in the past few days have been marinating in my head and gotten me thinking about some trends I've seen in fandom and how they relate to that world outside of fandom.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

But won't people continue to look for the ships they want, regardless of gender? I mean, the main shipping war in Harry Potter fandom was between two straight relationships (Hermione/Harry vs Hermione/Ron) - the presence or absence of gay characters was irrelevant to that. Yaoi fandoms, where there are bucketloads of gay relationships, still have shipping wars. Torchwood does, too - I'm not really in the fandom, but it's a pretty big and creative fandom, and a vast amount of the fic is Jack/Ianto - a canon gay pairing.

[circa_eve]

I was never involved in that HP shipping war. I had an opinion, but not much beyond that. I have never been fandomly invested in a het ship, just slash and femslash. So the pairing wars I was into were purely fanonical. I knew that regardless of my opinion on Harry/Draco or Harry/Snape or Ron/Draco or Remus/Sirius or whatever, none of them were ever going to actually become canon, whereas everyone knew that at some point JK was probably going to go one way or the other with the H/R H/H war

[allegraconbrio]

I have not read any of the comments yet, because I was so excited by the post. I think you have just hit on one of my fanfic *things* when the canon is more obvious, I am not so interested in the fanfic. Even when it is not slash. When the show makes me cry or makes me awwww, or makes me like when I am watching I do not seek out fanfic

[angiepen]

[Here from metafandom. [wave]]

OK, see, we must be hanging out in completely different chunks of fandom -- with, like, an ocean between them -- because I don't see it this way at all. [bemused smile]

Torchwood, for example, isn't my main fandom and I only read around the edges, usually when someone on my Flist posts some recs. But even reading only a relatively small number of fics, I haven't run into anything that was just an episode tag. I have run into some really good Jack/Ianto fics, none of which are just riffs on what happened in this or that episode, and if there were more hours in the day I'd go looking for more of it

[circa_eve]

I'm really glad to get your perspective on this! I guess I have more authority issues with canon than you, and that makes it harder for me to get involved in creative fandoming when there is canon slash or femslash relationships

Here via metafandom

[pandorasblog]

I doubt that the presence of canon gay relationships will stop people writing slash, both about canon and non-canon ships. Admittedly, this is not a TV example, but I'm in Vampire Chronicles fandom, and as one icon memorably puts it, our canon *is* slash. There's a lot of writing about existing pairings, a lot about pairings that alllllmost happen in canon, a certain amount of het...

[mirabilelectu]

Personally I'm just a horribly shippy (though, oddly enough, not at all romantic) person by nature, so I'll usually find an OTP somewhere, het or slash.

(Possibly I'm also one of the very, very few people in Torchwood fandom who can't stand either Ianto or Gwen, or either of them with Jack, since for some reason I apparently can't not like him. Not that this really has anything to do with... anything. Ahem.)

I don't really think anything will happen besides that maybe people will finally stop posting those Why Slash?-manifestos. I.e., that slash will take its place right beside het and then we can have double the shipwars.

Possibly not that useful...