Meta: on "guilty pleasure" fanfic
month_of_meta is in its final week, and I've been wanting to write something else for it ... so this is a topic I was pondering today, and I figured I'd write something up. :D
I recently asked my flist for help brainstorming on the "sexual extortion" square of my h/c bingo card. All the input was quite helpful, but as I pondered the answers I got and the possible scenarios that people suggested, I realized that one of the problems I was having with writing any of them was that they simply felt too self-indulgent. Too much id, not enough story.
And this got me thinking about my fanfic reading and writing habits in general.
Do any of the rest of you have guilty-pleasure fanfic? The sort of thing you'll avidly read, but have trouble bringing yourself to comment on, because it's so self-indulgent that there's a part of you that just doesn't want to admit that you're actually reading it? Or where there are HUGE problems with it, and you KNOW it (ways in which it deviates terribly from your preferred characterization; plot holes you could drive a truck through; grammar and spelling issues galore) but you're reading it anyway just because of that one scene that hits your narrative kinks so hard? But you aren't quite willing to admit that you're reading it even to yourself, let alone the rest of fandom?
I'm positive that not everyone does this. I know some of you own your kinks better than I do (no "guilty" pleasures! It's all just pleasure!), and I'm fairly sure that there are those among you who just don't read fic that you don't consider good - that a narrative kink is not enough to get you to read a story that doesn't meet your standards otherwise. But I have a longstanding habit of lurking on guilty-pleasure fic; I'm aware that on some level this isn't fair to the authors (especially since certain kinks tend to get the silent treatment more than others, and not commenting on it is just going to result in less of it; I know this), and I swear this isn't meant to be a commentary on objective quality, but on some really deep level I just. can't. bring. myself. to admit that I'm reading some of this stuff. *g*
And when it comes to writing fic, there's a similar reluctance to write the deeply self-indulgent stuff. I've done a little of that, but not very often; mostly, even when I write id-satisfying h/c, I'm still making an effort to wrap it up in a neat package of plot and characterization, and make it function as a story as well as a fantasy. And I tend to pull back from going all the way where I'd go if it were only a fantasy, rather than something meant to be shared with others. I just don't feel comfortable if I push right to the edge of my fictive kinks. And the way it makes me feel is a similar kind of deep-down squirmy embarrassment as the feeling I get when I think about commenting on certain fics. It feels like I'm letting just a little too much of myself show.
It's not so much that I have difficulty admitting my kinks exist -- I think anyone who's been reading my fic for very long has picked up on some of the recurring themes *g* -- but I don't want to go ahead and write them if they're going to be more self-indulgence than actual story. There are a lot of fanfic scenarios that I spin out in my head, to pass the time when I'm falling asleep or on long car drives or whatever, that I'm never, ever going to write. I just don't want to. They're not really in character, or they don't really have a good plot surrounding them, or I don't want to do the research or I'm not really interested in figuring out how the characters ended up handcuffed in a dungeon of tortures or whatnot. They're just for my own fun. (I'm not talking specifically about sexual kinks -- actually, with me, they generally aren't. Though I think the boundaries are blurry.)
And the not-commenting-on-other-people's-fic thing ... it's not just "Ohgod, people are going to know that I enjoy this stuff", but also, possibly even MORE so: "Ohgod, people are going to think that I endorse this particular characterization", or "If I comment positively on this, am I tacitly admitting that I don't care about plot or spelling?" or problems of that nature. I mean, while it does come down to a sort of shallow social anxiety, it's a lot more complicated than just "I don't want people to know I'm into drowning as an h/c kink!" because, uh, I think it's pretty obvious from reading my fic what my kinks actually are. Well, most of them.
But the sexual-extortion prompt is basically putting me squarely into that territory. It's not that there aren't scenarios that appeal to me; it's that most of the scenarios that I want to write, I can't figure out how to write without stepping into places I'm not comfortable going outside the privacy of my own head.
I wonder if the anonymous kink memes might be a way of reducing this performance anxiety, shame, I'm not sure what you'd call it. I've never really been able to participate in them, though. I tried, back in SGA fandom, but I always ended up anon!failing -- I couldn't bring myself to post stories without admitting to them, which entirely defeated the purpose of the anonymousness as a mask to reduce anxiety. *g* But I expect this is the main reason why they exist. (Since I'm not a regular participant, I'd be interested to hear from people who do participate in them - what do you get out of it? Does it make you less inhibited? Do you 'fess up to your stories later?)
I might be more tempted to participate in kinkmemes in my current fandom (White Collar) except that there doesn't seem to be much overlap between the general fandom's kinks and my own kinks; generally speaking, there aren't any prompts I want to write. What lured me into the anon kinkmemes in SGA fandom is that there were a lot of prompts that I wanted to write - lots of gen kinks, h/c petting and the like. The White Collar kinkmeme seems to go more for power-dynamic stuff and evil!character kinks that simply are not interesting to me. (I'm not judging! Heaven knows I have no ground to stand on in judging others' kinks, and no desire to do so, either. It's just that, as a general rule, SGA fandom tended to play to my kinks and White Collar fandom doesn't.) Which is an interesting example, I guess, of how fandomwide kinks and personal kinks play off each other, influencing what people write, or don't write. I'm sure that some fandoms are much more supportive of certain kinks than others. I still vividly remember having one of my anime fics, an Inu-Yasha one, yanked from ff.net after someone complained about it for a very mild torture scene that I don't think would have raised any eyebrows at all in SGA fandom...
Anyway, I'd be interested in hearing from others! How do you navigate the gray areas between pleasure and shame and kink, narrative or otherwise? Or do you even have those boundaries?
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