Good riddance daylight savings, and a question about media fandoms

[jlh]

Getting out of daylight savings is the awesomest. First, extra hours are always needed. Second, I woke up this morning at a little after 6, as usual, and it was starting to get light out! Friends, it should simply not be dark at 7am. Normal people get up at 7am.

So here's a question: Is there a media fandom, of reasonable size, where the source text does not have either (a) a lot of slash potential or (b) SF content?

Comments

[longtimegone]

Normal people get up at 7am.

I refuse to believe this. 8 or 9? Sure. : ))

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Schoolchildren. I mean, why do we want a lot of small children standing on a corner waiting for a bus in the dark? How does that save energy? And with elementary schools starting around 8 and secondary schools starting even earlier, that's what would happen. I mean, I did that? And it really sucked.

Anyway, if you have a commute of longer than 10 minutes—according to the Census, the average daily commute in the US in 03 was 25 minutes—then you're on the road by 8:30, add ten minutes to stop and get coffee/breakfast, add 20 for a wake up or shower, and you're at 8 if all you do in the morning is jump in the shower immediately and run out the door. But given all the people who go to the gym or run in the morning, or have to get their kids to school or daycare, plus the 50% whose commute is longer than the average, and you have plenty of people up at 7am.

Sorry, I just get so much shit for being a weirdo morning person that I can be a little defensive about it. It's just the way my internal clock works but I know it makes me old and uncool. (Well, that and not drinking coffee.)

[aegeus.livejournal.com]

Bad news then - next year they're extending DST by a total of four weeks, coming in three weeks earlier and ending a week later, in an effort to save energy. : /

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Seriously, that's eight months, so why don't they just move everyone's time zone? And how does this really save energy, when lights are such a small part of the current energy usage? Putting lights on the highway for the morning commute is as expensive as doing so for the evening commute, and only in the deep summer does DST make a real difference. Having most schoolchildren going to school in the dark for so many months doesn't make a lot of sense to me, either.

[wordplay.livejournal.com]

Here's another tidbit - my morning Starbucks was MUCH less full this Monday morning than in recent weeks. I don't know if everybody's running behind because they're not used to the changeover yet or if just the sun being up meant that many fewer people needed a jumpstart this morning.

Interesting question. I'll have to think on it. Do you have a hypothesis here or is this just a burning question?

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I was wondering because I was talking to Alex about HIMYM and I was thinking, I doubt there's piles of fic for that show. Not that most sitcoms gather really big fandoms, so that may be a misleading thing to say, but I was thinking about shows that have fandom buzz and shows that don't, and it seems like what online people want are good-looking emotionally closed off men living in an alternate universe who could secretly love each other.

Which only reminds me of the whole slash thing and why I feel so remote from it, and then THAT reminds me—did you ever have a chance to look at that link I sent you? I'm thinking probably not, as you're not really a go-backer. No worries, I was just wondering if my reaction was out of line or if theirs was.

[tropes.livejournal.com]

I've never really found Firefly slashable, but I suspect that I am in the minority.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think Joss creations are negative on A, but positive on B. I was actually thinking of Firefly and Buffy when I said, or sci-fi content.

[dramawench.livejournal.com]

I know there is some slashing there, but overall West Wing fandom is pretty het and there is a LOT of fic out there for it.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

The only person I knew in West Wing was a Sam-Josh type, so I wasn't really aware of the het. But there's one to put on the list! Thanks!

[annearchy.livejournal.com]

Some normal people get up at 6:00. But that's because work here starts more like 8:00 a.m. than 9.

And in answer to your fandom question-- probably not :))

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I'm actually getting tons of suggestions, which one could think of as a Big Damn Het Reading List.

[anna-maria.livejournal.com]

I think The Office US might qualify.

[dryope.livejournal.com]

I second that. It's far from having SF content and the shipping and fanfiction is all about the Jim/Pam, which isn't only het but mostly canon, too. It's almost absurd now that I think about it.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

Do you think there's also fic for The Office UK?

[dejla.livejournal.com]

I'm not normal, then.

And, IMHO, most source text doesn't. But I don't see slash in most source text.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

What I meant by "normal" was that I usually get up at six and I get a lot of teasing for that. But getting up at seven on a weekday is not looked upon as some horrifying leftover rural affectation, but what a lot of people with 9-5 jobs and a commute do. Many of the people I know don't have 9-5 jobs and would be nocturnal if they could get away with it, so I get a little defensive about liking to have daylight in the mornings. I like to be able to get up and have the sun shining.

From what I see around me, any source text that has more than one male character has slash potential. And certainly source texts that have a lot of males—which is a lot of television, particularly the police procedurals that are so popular now—have even more slash potential, and therefore generate slash. So I'm not really saying, the source is slashy. I'm saying that the source generates slash.

[thelana.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure whether they have any slash (they might) or what the percentage is, but I hear La Femme Nikita, Anita Blake (then again, this is fantasy/horror) and Prison Break are pretty het based.

[paradise-city.livejournal.com]

Aww, La Femme Nikita.

The only fandom that comes to mind is One Tree Hill, but I think that one's pretty small comparatively.

[amelia-eve.livejournal.com]

My first online fandom was Beverly Hills 90210, and in the circles I was in there was absolutely no slash, just snark. I mean, Brandon and Dylan do have major slash potential (or, heaven help us, Steve and David), but empirically I never saw it exploited. And though many of the premises of the show are highly improbable, it was not at all SF. I'd say the same is probably true of all the Darren Starr properties.

Also, I would like to join you in solidarity as a Morning Person. And I agree that we tend to get characterized as prissy and old-fashioned somehow. I'm really sick of all those Garfield cartoons, for instance. Of course, my dirty secret is afternoon naps.

(Here via Metafandom)

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Mostly my dirty secret is that I don't need a lot of sleep. While I do have a dip in the afternoon, I usually just pass out around midnight.

One genre that really doesn't show up on LJ that much is the continuing drama/soapish stuff. I always had this vague idea that more fic was written for shows that weren't about the emotional lives of the characters, as though that set up gave more space for often emotionally-driven fic. But perhaps that's another selection effect of the slash?

[zvi-likes-tv.livejournal.com]

The problem lies in defining 'of reasonable size', I think. I mean, how big and big in what dimension are you talking? Because there are fandoms that generate lots of talk and fandoms that generate lots of fic and fandoms that generate art or costumes or filk, but they aren't necessarily the same fandoms.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I was leaving it undefined on purpose, or really, letting the reader define it for themselves. I don't know; I guess I mean, "of more than two people" but I don't know that I even want to be that specific about it.

That said, I totally agree that fandoms generate different kinds of responses and I'm not sure that I want to limit that, either. There isn't anything specific I have in mind here; it's more, what will people come up with? Because it's mostly going to be things I didn't have in mind (hence the question) I wanted not to put any restrictions on the outcome.

[derringdo.livejournal.com]

I'm not in it personally, but I was under the impression Monk was light on slash.

There's also the decidedly slash-proof Master Ninja, which I refused to believe had a fandom until I found one site that archives fic for it and decided to watch it for myself. But there's enough Weird Ninja Stuff to possibly qualify it for the paranormal bracket. And even w/ me on board, it's still a pretty damn microscopic fandom.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I would think that Monk would have a lot of Monk/woman who takes care of him, or flashback Monk/Monk's dead wife. Makes sense. Ah, mysteries, the forgotten genre.

via metafandom

[mythdefied.livejournal.com]

Normal people get up at 7am.

No, no, you've got that a bit backwards, there. Normal people go to bed at 7am. 1 or 2 am is like, my noon, man.

[delurker.livejournal.com]

What about Grey's Anatomy?

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Again, here's where the way that fic was explained to me as a newbie comes back to bite me in the ass—or maybe things have changed, whichever—as I'd been under the impression that a soap-like show such as Grey's wouldn't generate fic/media fandom/meta/etc the way that genre, with its emphasis so decidedly away from the internal emotional lives of the characters, does. In other words, it doesn't leave as much room for the writer to fill in the feelings/romance/etc. So I wonder if it was that I was given a limited perspective, or if that's just actually changed?

[kattahj.livejournal.com]

I started out in the Young Riders fandom, which was fairly sizeable back then (1998-ish), but I don't know how it is now. Anyway, it had absolutely zero sci-fi content, and while the show itself was immensely slashable, the fanfic was almost entirely gen or low-rating het.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

That is really interesting. I wonder what circumstances drive those kinds of things, how fandoms tip over into slash or het when it isn't always about the actual casting?