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jlhThis cut is yours truly having finally gotten Very Grouchy Indeed. Consider yourself warned.
I hate being enough of a cliché to be pissed off at a quiz that says, "Do you want to be pissed off today?" but the more time passes the more pissed off I get. This really isn't about where I am now, in terms of my writing, but more about where I could ever hope to be.
Because let's face it: If I changed all the names in my story, a story that spends a lot of time in character development and relationships beyond romance, to make the slash pairing Harry/Draco, trumpets would sound and I would be given the keys to the kingdom. There are tons and tons of really great fics, not even in rare pairings, that you never fucking hear about. Are we in the wilderness?
Take, for example, the fic I'm usually on about: Of Linen. It's gorgeous. It's a masterwork. It should be read by everyone. And . . . it's Sirius/Remus. Which means it will never be elevated to the "sacred Parthenon" of fics, no matter how good it is.
Now, maybe this is because, as a wise woman told me, many H/D types read only H/D and recommend only H/D, keeping everyone in this permanent state of H/D. Not to cover ground already covered by others, but won't that make the fics really meta? I can say in my own writing that reading tons of S/R while I was writing EWFS informed the dynamics of Seamus/Dean, making it deeper and richer. I'm not saying that you need more than one ship in your fic, just that good ideas might come from unexpected places.
But this can't be all of it, surely. The S/R crowd have their own Y!group for heaven's sake. But I always get a sense from them that they read more than just what is on their list, and more importantly, they don't think that the SBRL group is the beginning and ending of HP slash. Nor do the folks over at POWSN. Oh, haven't seen those lists? That's interesting, since SBRL has 950 members and POWSN nearly 300. I wouldn't call that niche, really, particularly as HP Slash itself has around 1400 members.
All I'm saying is, if you ship only H/D, great. More power to you. Think that the Weasleys are a large redheaded family that appeared in a simultaneous mindfuck dream that Harry and Draco had whilst butt-fucking? Rock on. But please do not pretend, or deign to tell the rest of us, that H/D is the only slash pairing that matters, or worse yet, the only pairing that matters. If you don't want to read or write something else, don't. But what you aren't reading does still exist, can be quite good, and deserves to be read, recommended and spoken about.
I know that many of us, in the explosion of fics this spring and summer, have gotten really behind on new stuff and, feeling hopeless to catch up, just read our favorite pairings unless we get a recommendation from someone we trust. To that end, I'll be trying to do a lot more trumpeting of what I'm reading that I really love. Some of that will be H/D, to be sure, but a lot of it won't. Some of it will even be (gulp) het. Now, because of my own biases, I can't promise much action/adventure, and I avoid darkfics like the plague. But maybe what we need to do is open this place up a little bit, before we all end up eating our own young.
I hate being enough of a cliché to be pissed off at a quiz that says, "Do you want to be pissed off today?" but the more time passes the more pissed off I get. This really isn't about where I am now, in terms of my writing, but more about where I could ever hope to be.
Because let's face it: If I changed all the names in my story, a story that spends a lot of time in character development and relationships beyond romance, to make the slash pairing Harry/Draco, trumpets would sound and I would be given the keys to the kingdom. There are tons and tons of really great fics, not even in rare pairings, that you never fucking hear about. Are we in the wilderness?
Take, for example, the fic I'm usually on about: Of Linen. It's gorgeous. It's a masterwork. It should be read by everyone. And . . . it's Sirius/Remus. Which means it will never be elevated to the "sacred Parthenon" of fics, no matter how good it is.
Now, maybe this is because, as a wise woman told me, many H/D types read only H/D and recommend only H/D, keeping everyone in this permanent state of H/D. Not to cover ground already covered by others, but won't that make the fics really meta? I can say in my own writing that reading tons of S/R while I was writing EWFS informed the dynamics of Seamus/Dean, making it deeper and richer. I'm not saying that you need more than one ship in your fic, just that good ideas might come from unexpected places.
But this can't be all of it, surely. The S/R crowd have their own Y!group for heaven's sake. But I always get a sense from them that they read more than just what is on their list, and more importantly, they don't think that the SBRL group is the beginning and ending of HP slash. Nor do the folks over at POWSN. Oh, haven't seen those lists? That's interesting, since SBRL has 950 members and POWSN nearly 300. I wouldn't call that niche, really, particularly as HP Slash itself has around 1400 members.
All I'm saying is, if you ship only H/D, great. More power to you. Think that the Weasleys are a large redheaded family that appeared in a simultaneous mindfuck dream that Harry and Draco had whilst butt-fucking? Rock on. But please do not pretend, or deign to tell the rest of us, that H/D is the only slash pairing that matters, or worse yet, the only pairing that matters. If you don't want to read or write something else, don't. But what you aren't reading does still exist, can be quite good, and deserves to be read, recommended and spoken about.
I know that many of us, in the explosion of fics this spring and summer, have gotten really behind on new stuff and, feeling hopeless to catch up, just read our favorite pairings unless we get a recommendation from someone we trust. To that end, I'll be trying to do a lot more trumpeting of what I'm reading that I really love. Some of that will be H/D, to be sure, but a lot of it won't. Some of it will even be (gulp) het. Now, because of my own biases, I can't promise much action/adventure, and I avoid darkfics like the plague. But maybe what we need to do is open this place up a little bit, before we all end up eating our own young.
