I Say Things

…

Like all Slash Fans you’re far too shallow for your own good.

You gotta do deeper.

“He said as he threw a fit over girls throwing fits over porn.”

Already explained how I feel about slash pairings a little earlier.

But let me expand on that a bit.

I don’t care for slash pairings, m/m itself just fundamentally does not interest me.

But that being said, I strongly dislike the prevalence of it. It makes it very difficult to find pairings I actually enjoy.

I also particularly loathe the treatment that John has received. There’s really nothing about Gay!John that doesn’t make me want to beat someone to death with a baby seal.

His canonical orientation? Ignored, usually without even a token acknowledgement. His canonical love interests? Same fucking deal. His personality? Distorted into little more than a Yaoi Archetype.

And worst of all he is easily, by far the most popular “yaoi” character. The amount of content featuring him as gay outnumbers the amount of content featuring him with his CANONICAL SEXUAL ORIENTATION by a margin of over five to fucking one.

And all of this for some of the shallowest reasons imaginable.

Hmph.

Oh, I’ve also got it in my crazy head that the utter lack of material I actually enjoy is partially a result of the ridiculous popularity and ridiculously shitty quality of m/m material.

And really it’s both traits that make me so mad. If it was just a token amount of shitty quality material I’d easily and happily ignore it. If it was large amounts of well written material then suddenly all of the hot air wold be sucked out of me because I wouldn’t be able to rage about it and still feel good.

Hell in either case I’d probably try to organize some sort of het or pairing specific contest or rally……..

……..Note to self: Pursue this train of thought.

I actually generalize more than I should. When I’m referring to “Slash Fans”, I’m generally only referring to those fitting my previous dumbass definition, so “Most” of them. I’ll remember to prefix the term sometimes but there’s really no good term that’s more specific to what I mean, at least not any that’s worth using.

Fivetail avoids the entire thing pretty neatly though. She legitimately gives a shit which by itself would save her. The fact that she’s intelligent and a damn good writer is just icing on the erotic cake.

Definitely not.

Any character, or individual for that matter is composed of two distinct but equally important halves. Action and Motivation. Action is what a person does, while Motivation is why they do it. Very simple.

A heterosexual woman should understand how a heterosexual man should act, if not necessarily why he acts that way.

Which is normally good enough to get you at least into the realm of believability since action tends to be significantly more important than motivation in this respect.

So yes, a heterosexual woman should be able to portray a heterosexual man believably; it would be harder to do so in their perspective given some guess work is requisite, but it’s doable. At least if you’re trying.

But the problem here as you can easily guess is quite simple.

First of all Slash Fans pretty much unanimously don’t even try, so they’re fucked right out of the gate.

But second of all without a good understanding of MOTIVATION you cannot accurately portray ACTION in uncertain situations.

It’s a really self-evident truth that a heterosexual couple is different from a gay couple or a lesbian couple, compound this with the relative lack of exposure and you have something extremely difficult to do. From a proverbial “sitting position” at any rate.

God I hope I’m still making sense. I am tired.

I defined my use of the term once before, but I can’t even begin to imagine where that definition might be lurking now so I guess I’ll just draw it up from scratch.

I’ll put it simply. I don’t have a problem with slash. I don’t care for it, I don’t enjoy it, but I also don’t not-enjoy it. It is a null-factor for me. The vastness of the universe could not contain all of my don’t-give-a-fuck on the subject.

My problem is with the attitudes so distressingly common to “slash fans”.

I’m certain you’ve noticed these attitudes, or you would have if you’ve spent any time paying attention around these sort.

I could neatly encapsulate it all as simply “They’re stupid, shallow, obnoxious and vaguely self-deluded.”, but let’s dig in just a bit deeper shall we?

I previously posted these two images to help me describe why I dislike this particular group of people, borrowing other people’s words. The latter of the two is also technically about furries but pretty much everything said in it is precisely as valid.

I’ve previously described Slash Fanfiction as “Masturbatory”, because that neatly encapsulates the entirety of the mindset that goes into it. A slash fan is likely to rabidly defend their given pairing, often times making up insane and or wildly implausible reasons why it “should be canon” and often defending it as though it already is. If you actually get one to admit that it isn’t canon it will usually be reluctant and more importantly it will usually be accompanied with some form of absurd “but”, as in “BUT IT COULD BE!”

But despite the fact that they are absurdly devoted to and usually deluded about their wildly implausible pairing, or pairings as the case may be, they actually don’t seem to give a shit about the characters or the source material for that matter. Have you ever been talking to a slash fan who you are becoming convinced hasn’t actually read/watched the series in question and is just in it for the gays? Or seen a slash fan portray their OTP in a way that can at it’s most generous only be vaguely correlated to the characters it’s SUPPOSED to include.

That’s because a Slash Fan is almost guaranteed not to care about anything other than “the gays”, they’ll hardly pay attention to the actual story and they’ll just cherry pick or outright invent only the cutest personalities and traits for their adorable Seme and Uke pairing.

Follow this up with their actual Fanfiction which I can guarantee you will portray their OTP as nothing less than absolutely ideal and potentially the result of divine proclamation.

And you should thank your fucking stars if they put any actual effort into it at all. Because there is almost no chance of you getting a fic that is anything more than just an empty vehicle to deliver ultra idealized buttsex.>

And of course if you point any of this out. any of it they will do nothing but throw the most spoiled bitch-fit you can imagine. They will say and do anything to get you to stop “spoiling” their fantasies with inconvenient things like “reality”. They’ll call you a homophobe instantly and follow it up with the most absurd string of attacks conceivable.

This is the sort of person I am referring to when I talk about “Slash Fans”, perhaps not to this degree of obnoxiousness (I do indeed have a flair for the dramatic), but definitely this same sort of selfish, obnoxious and shallow mindset.

Oh you mean the masturbation scene that I deliberately made into a farce? The one where Vriska is masturbating because “Polygamy is just so damn hot”, and where I not only gave every part of the troll “experience” an absurd term but religiously used those very terms exclusively in such a way that made it all next to impossible to take seriously?

The lesbian sex scene was however decidedly sub-par, it did take place before the fic started to “grow up” as it were and it clearly caught a raw deal as a result.

I’m not “offended on behalf of the gays”. This is hardly the sort of rights issue I’d seek out to comment on and “the gays” can speak for and be offended on behalf of - themselves.

That being said I doubt it’s legitimately impossible for a man to write a convincing lesbian romance; or for a woman to write a convincing gay romance. But my point is it is significantly more difficult than a heterosexual romance or a romance including only one’s own gender.

Which is really my sole point. Being a woman and writing a convincing romance between gay men is really hard. It requires at the very least an awful lot of thought and effort.

But since slash fans as a rule never actually apply any thought or effort to what they do, it invariably turns out terrible; far more-so than if they had written a straight pairing or lesbian pairing.

I began writing Option 4 on a whim and I only began to take it even slightly seriously around chapter 12. Up until that point I didn’t even bother thinking past the chapter I was writing at the time.

Then there’s the fact that my editing process didn’t technically exist. I would literally just sit down with some ideas in my head, skip any sort of draft and bang out a whole chapter a few thousand words at a time.

And combine both of these with the fact that my “Mission Statement” for the story changed wildly over the course of writing it. Originally I was planning to end it around sixteen chapters and maybe 20,000 words? With the total being a fistful of sex scenes and a few chapters of dumb bullshit to justify and connect them to something resembling a “plot”.

And I should fucking hope it came off as being masturbatory given it began as and remains pornographic. Both in the sense of the sexual content and in the sense of the other random bullshit I threw in because I thought it was hilarious.

As for your more specific criticism of the characters being “watered down” and of John being a “Self-Insert”, well I have two responses.

1. “The characters are all watered down.”, actually I’ll give you this one. The characters were in fact simplified. Why? See the first three points. I was planning to go through it all like greased lightning but like most things involving grease I only got halfway through before I started slowing down.

2. “John was an obvious self-insert.” Nah.

The story tends to focus on John, and it does that for a reason.

First of all he’s the main character and focus of canon, it just makes sense to follow him around. However it’s also practical given his propensity for silly bullshit and my fondness for silly bullshit. In Chapter 11 he gets it in his head to “Woo” his new “girlfriends” and proceeds to annoy a bunch of people then alchemize up a bunch of bullshit. I couldn’t do that with Rose or Vriska or Kanaya or actually… maybe Vriska.

Still, the point is clear. John is a good character to follow around given what I intend to convey. See again: stupid bullshit.

Second of all, he is necessarily the focus point of the romance plot.

The thing about polygamous pairings with John is that they are actually shockingly easy to write. Particularly canonical pairs.

This is because John is a naturally passive actor in terms of Romance, very much so even. He isn’t there to do any wooing, he is there to be wooed.

Which means all you have to do is throw two active romantic actors on either side of him and find a way to introduce the idea of polygamy. Assauge some sore egos and you’re pretty much done.

This dynamic is a very simple solution to polygamy, however it only works with a single passive actor and multiple active actors pursuing them.

It wouldn’t work if the story revolved around Vriska, because if Kanaya wanted Vriska then John is very likely not to fight back regardless of his feelings, which means Vriska would have to pursue John to keep him in the game and this leaves Rose out in the middle of nowhere, plus this is all disregarding their canonical tendencies (Vriska principally pursuing John, Kanaya pursuing Rose, Rose being a wild-card, John being, again a passive actor).

In the end we just have a big complicated mess. So I just went with the easy solution, turned Rose toward John and let it unfold semi-naturally.

Trufax, this question lead to this statement.

[8:59:45 PM] Vexarian: Missles do not have vaginas Xero.

Hm… probably. I would rather like to finish but as-is it’s just sort of a mess. Canon moved in ways I didn’t account for at all leaving it sort of ramshackle, plus there’s plenty of rough spots in my writing, most notably the unintentional melodrama.

I’m still considering my options. I have a few available to me.

A. Ignore the mess and press on. So I’d follow my original plans and just write them out, trying to deal with the existing mess and the clumsy contrivances as best as I can.

B. Just the highlights. So I’d just run through my original plans without expanding on them and just move through a sort of highlights reel to finish off what I started.

C. Call it quits and release my plans. Basically I’d just straight up tell you what my dastardly plot was to begin with, maybe write a few more small scenes.

I’m also, independently of this considering writing something entirely new.

I’ve got an idea for a John/Vriska oneshot, but I’m also tempted to try and do a rewrite/remix of Option 4 called “Pranked by Paradoxical Polyamory”, or a wholly new but inspired-by fanfiction called “The Butterfly Effect”.

*Old Ask: Originally submitted 5-06

Yeah, that was fun while it lasted. Ended up getting really tripped up due to a bunch of different factors. Not the least of which was this very tumblr account and all of the massive, protracted arguments that spawned from it. But there were other factors, The Homestuck Shipping Olympics and all of it’s assorted and asinine bullshit for instance. Plus I really didn’t expect canon to move in the way it did moving up to and beyond the End of Act 5.

I’m honestly really disappointed that there are still so few polygamy stories.

You know for a while it was THE longest Homestuck Fanfiction in existence. That crown’s been pretty definitively taken from me now though. Option 4 is only about 60,000 words and by word-count the first page of AO3 runs from 140,000 to 80,000.