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snick_backupI was looking through my old recs for someone looking for het curtainfic, and discovered, rather to my surprise, that it's a category of fic I basically never rec. I read it sometimes - I'm pretty sure I have links stashed in my giant me-locked posts full of links - but apparently I never tell you guys about it.
I think this ties into a realization I've been having repeatedly recently, which is that while I ship primarily het ships, I'm... not a het shipper? Which is to say, just because I ship a lot of het ships doesn't mean I have much interest in Het: The Shipping Phenomenon (except as a phenomenon, because fandom trends and tastes never cease to fascinate me).
Someone asked me to do a "Spotlight on Het" post for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
spnroundtable a few months back, and while I can go on and on about RPF het ships - because the two things that tend to come up a whole lot in fic of tiny RPF pairings is crack and excellent women - I really had nothing to say about SPN het pairings as a general thing. I can talk about ones I like - Meg/Castiel, Sam/Amelia, Sam/Jo - and point to fics I like for those pairings, but then I am less likely to want to talk about, say, Dean/Lisa, where Lisa tends to function solely as someone for Dean to care about (which, to be fair, is her entire narrative function in canon, too), or about Dean/Jo, which, bewilderingly, seems to be composed almost entirely of curtainfic in which they both retire and have babies.
Moving beyond specific ships, though, hetfic in SPN has a hard time because the vast majority of the time, if you're giving the female character equal weight in the fic (which is really the only kind of het I want), then you're basically inventing the wheel. She's at an immediate disadvantage, because I have eight years of canon characterization for Dean or Sam, and I've seen the female character in maybe 3-5 episodes, depending on who I choose. In order to give her the same depth of characterization and motivations, you have to do that heavy lifting yourself. And after awhile, that becomes tiring.
For example, I feel like I've thought through and written about Jo enough that I can write her pretty handily with whoever I like, without starting from scratch. It helps that she got a fair bit of screentime over several seasons. When I moved onto to writing about Tamara/Sam, I had to work hard for that two-thousand word fic I ended up with. And if I moved on again to, say, Gwen Campbell, as I keep having ambitions of doing (basically I just want Gwen/RoboSam bondage of the "not sure if want" variety), I'd have to do all that work again. And it gets tiring, spending all that time to make sure that the woman isn't narratively overpowered by Winchesters.
"But that's because you keep writing minor characters," you say. Reader, when it comes to women on this show, they are all minor characters. Some are easier to work with then others - Meg and Jo have more screentime than most, and are also embroiled in the supernatural in their own right which keeps them from getting sidelined into domestic-only storylines. (Or so you'd expect, anyway.) Meg in particular also has the advantage of experiencing a fair bit of character growth and change in her years on the show and being at least tangentially involved with at least half the major plot arcs. When it comes to parity of development, Meg/Castiel has by far the most of any canonical ship, IMO, which is probably one of the reasons I like them. (Like Spike/Buffy, I'd point out - another "foe yay!" ship that was the richer for the secondary character being originally introduced for purposes other than that of love interest.) In general, though, to have that kind of parity with any het ship from this show, canonical or not, the writer has to work at it, and I don't blame people for not wanting to try.
Of course, many people don't seem to require that kind of parity. There's an awful lot of hetfic out there that might as well be Winchester/Random Girl, because canonical character or not, her entire purpose is to comfort him and dab his teary eyes. There's nothing wrong with fic that's about Dean, who happens to be in a relationship with a woman; there are plenty of good stories to tell there. They're just not to my taste anymore. I'm hungry for shippy fic where the two characters function as equals, in their relationship and in the narrative; where the woman has her own motivations and agenda and feelings; where she is not just an accessory to the guy's story.
Entirely aside from the difficulties of working with a canon as gender-skewed as this one, there is the fact that het fandom seems to work from completely different impulses than mine a lot of the time. For example, it turns out I actively dislike most domestic fic, not because I don't want my characters to have dishes and curtains and a safe haven from the world, but because domestic fic tends to bring with it weird ideals of "normal life," of marriage and children and suburbia, that, while fine and worthy things to aspire to for oneself, are an extremely poor fit for many of the het ships I care about, especially as Ideals. Jo Harvelle has zero interest in living a conventional civilian lifestyle, and while it's conceivable that she might end up there someday (assuming she doesn't get ripped apart by hellhounds in her mid-twenties), you'd have to do a heck of a lot of work to sell me on it. Meg/Castiel as the happy settling-down couple is hilarious (even though them finding their own peculiar form of easy stability is extremely appealing to me).
All of which is to say, I love female characters, and I love them interacting with male characters, and yet "I love het" isn't something I can say without a whole lot of reservations.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Comment here or there. (
DW replies)
I think this ties into a realization I've been having repeatedly recently, which is that while I ship primarily het ships, I'm... not a het shipper? Which is to say, just because I ship a lot of het ships doesn't mean I have much interest in Het: The Shipping Phenomenon (except as a phenomenon, because fandom trends and tastes never cease to fascinate me).
Someone asked me to do a "Spotlight on Het" post for
spnroundtable a few months back, and while I can go on and on about RPF het ships - because the two things that tend to come up a whole lot in fic of tiny RPF pairings is crack and excellent women - I really had nothing to say about SPN het pairings as a general thing. I can talk about ones I like - Meg/Castiel, Sam/Amelia, Sam/Jo - and point to fics I like for those pairings, but then I am less likely to want to talk about, say, Dean/Lisa, where Lisa tends to function solely as someone for Dean to care about (which, to be fair, is her entire narrative function in canon, too), or about Dean/Jo, which, bewilderingly, seems to be composed almost entirely of curtainfic in which they both retire and have babies.Moving beyond specific ships, though, hetfic in SPN has a hard time because the vast majority of the time, if you're giving the female character equal weight in the fic (which is really the only kind of het I want), then you're basically inventing the wheel. She's at an immediate disadvantage, because I have eight years of canon characterization for Dean or Sam, and I've seen the female character in maybe 3-5 episodes, depending on who I choose. In order to give her the same depth of characterization and motivations, you have to do that heavy lifting yourself. And after awhile, that becomes tiring.
For example, I feel like I've thought through and written about Jo enough that I can write her pretty handily with whoever I like, without starting from scratch. It helps that she got a fair bit of screentime over several seasons. When I moved onto to writing about Tamara/Sam, I had to work hard for that two-thousand word fic I ended up with. And if I moved on again to, say, Gwen Campbell, as I keep having ambitions of doing (basically I just want Gwen/RoboSam bondage of the "not sure if want" variety), I'd have to do all that work again. And it gets tiring, spending all that time to make sure that the woman isn't narratively overpowered by Winchesters.
"But that's because you keep writing minor characters," you say. Reader, when it comes to women on this show, they are all minor characters. Some are easier to work with then others - Meg and Jo have more screentime than most, and are also embroiled in the supernatural in their own right which keeps them from getting sidelined into domestic-only storylines. (Or so you'd expect, anyway.) Meg in particular also has the advantage of experiencing a fair bit of character growth and change in her years on the show and being at least tangentially involved with at least half the major plot arcs. When it comes to parity of development, Meg/Castiel has by far the most of any canonical ship, IMO, which is probably one of the reasons I like them. (Like Spike/Buffy, I'd point out - another "foe yay!" ship that was the richer for the secondary character being originally introduced for purposes other than that of love interest.) In general, though, to have that kind of parity with any het ship from this show, canonical or not, the writer has to work at it, and I don't blame people for not wanting to try.
Of course, many people don't seem to require that kind of parity. There's an awful lot of hetfic out there that might as well be Winchester/Random Girl, because canonical character or not, her entire purpose is to comfort him and dab his teary eyes. There's nothing wrong with fic that's about Dean, who happens to be in a relationship with a woman; there are plenty of good stories to tell there. They're just not to my taste anymore. I'm hungry for shippy fic where the two characters function as equals, in their relationship and in the narrative; where the woman has her own motivations and agenda and feelings; where she is not just an accessory to the guy's story.
Entirely aside from the difficulties of working with a canon as gender-skewed as this one, there is the fact that het fandom seems to work from completely different impulses than mine a lot of the time. For example, it turns out I actively dislike most domestic fic, not because I don't want my characters to have dishes and curtains and a safe haven from the world, but because domestic fic tends to bring with it weird ideals of "normal life," of marriage and children and suburbia, that, while fine and worthy things to aspire to for oneself, are an extremely poor fit for many of the het ships I care about, especially as Ideals. Jo Harvelle has zero interest in living a conventional civilian lifestyle, and while it's conceivable that she might end up there someday (assuming she doesn't get ripped apart by hellhounds in her mid-twenties), you'd have to do a heck of a lot of work to sell me on it. Meg/Castiel as the happy settling-down couple is hilarious (even though them finding their own peculiar form of easy stability is extremely appealing to me).
All of which is to say, I love female characters, and I love them interacting with male characters, and yet "I love het" isn't something I can say without a whole lot of reservations.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Comment here or there. (
