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Ramblings Of An Asexual Fanfic Writer
*tilts head* This is mostly me musing about how my own personal sexual orientation (or at least my version of that particular orientation) affects how I view the shipping/pairing parts of writing fanfic. *frowns* Well, no. Writing fanfic in general, maybe, though it probably affects those parts more prominently, if only in the level of priority and type of attention I give to those parts of a fic.
First off. I am asexual. Only realised it relatively recently, mind you, but I'm quite happy with the designation. I'm not aromantic, however, but that's very very complicated, in that I'm not quite sure what the specific difference between romantic love and other types of love actually is, once you remove a sexual element. I do think love can be grouped into general types, such as familial, friendship, romantic, intellectual (loving an idea), etc, but I also think that the boundaries between those types are very fluid, and vary according to culture, society and individual. So does sexuality, of course, but ... I think it's that while what you have a sexual attraction to is hugely varied, the idea of sexual attraction itself is rather more defined? It has a relatively concrete physical manifestation, while 'love' as a concept is far more nebulous? Something like that, anyway. Makes things complicated.
Anyway. I've been thinking lately, how this might affect how I write things. How it might have been affecting how I wrote things for a long time, actually, before I ever heard the term 'asexual'. How it might influence how I've been seeing things, and therefore how I represent things in fic.
It's odd, but ... I don't usually write gen-fic. You'd think, as an asexual who's frankly never been all that interested in sex, I'd write things that don't involve it all that much. And I do have a slight tendancy to skip over it while reading fic on occasion - though funnily enough I do also read it a lot, and enjoy it in ways that have less to do with the act of sex, and more with the way it can convey emotion and status when done right. For example, while the act itself has little interest to me, D/S as a theme, as a reflection of the relative power and strength, and the differing types of strength a character can have, is fascinating to me, and can ping an emotional response, if not a physical one. Though, even still, I'm very very unlikely to read a fic marked PWP unless I trust the author, and know that there will be more involved than just the mechanics of an act that holds very little interest to me.
*tilts head* Anyway. Back to writing. And reading, I guess. But. I rarely write gen-fic in the sense of, say, a pure adventure story or something similar. I do write gen-fic as in character shots, or codas to canon, where the focus is on one character or plot point and I'm trying to develope it out or follow it to its logical conclusion (or one of its logical conclusions, anyway - logic has a funny way of being able to justify anything given enough time to do it over). I do also write big damn adventure stories, but they usually come with relationships inbuilt, for some reason. Perhaps that's just me being stereotypically female, and liking a little emotion with my explosions ...
Actually, though, that may be a point (not the stereotypical female, I mean, but the emotion-with-explosion thing). Because although I'm not sexual, I am romantic, and even when not involving the kind of love that I, traditionally, based on my culture and its expectations as well as my own, would view as romantic, I still enjoy strong emotional depth between characters in a variety of ways, so I enjoy building relationships, whether antagonistic, familial, romantic, professional ... all the human gamut, basically. I just don't usually add an onscreen element of sex to them, I guess.
Except ... sometimes I do. And over the course of my writing 'career', as such, the reasons for that have changed over time.
In the early days, way back in HP fandom, having been introduced to fanfiction for the first time ... it was because writing sexual relationships was what you did in fanfic. Which is sort of screwy, now that I think about it, because I would have been about fourteen at the time. Real life and fandom seem to have this inordinately strong emphasis on sex, you know that? I don't know what I got out of it, way back then, since I don't think sex had much attraction anyway at that stage, asexual or not. More, perhaps, a satisfaction of a sense of curiosity than any physical gratification, though I realise that's a very generalist assumption to come to. But for whatever reasons, writing shipping fic was what you did. Fic that focused almost exclusively on a romantic relationship, one that usually involved a sexual element because that's what relationships were supposed to have. Everyone knows romance comes with sex, people!
You could have slash or het flavours, too, either or, though for some reason slash, when I started writing, had acquired a reputation as being more 'mature' for some reason. Not because of any recognition of real world bias against gay relationships, I think, though I could be wrong. I seem to remember it being more the idea that people who wrote slash had to find more obscure hints for the relationship in canon, or something, and thus had to work harder to write a good fic. *tilts head* Maybe, but I think if that's true it would just have meant far more slash badfic than het badfic as people failed that challenge (keeping in mind beginner status), so I'm pretty sure any claims of one flavour or the other being inherantly better are ... rather suspect. Anyway.
Oddly enough, there were also a lot of gen-fics in the early days too, because of the old 'write what you know' thing. Besides. Relationships were really hard to portray with any skill for someone who'd never had one (not that that stopped a lot of people - honestly, some of the stuff I wrote back then ... *shudders* Necessary steps, yes, but reading some of it now is frankly painful). I did, even then, have this notion that there were all sorts of complicating factors in relationships that I didn't understand yet, and that gen-fic or friendship-fic was probably a safer bet if I was actually aiming for any degree of plausibility. Which is a sort of laughable aim in fanfic, really, a lot of the time, but I was always a rather pedantic kid.
Later on, as I started to develope, move fandoms and platforms, I started to write sexual relationships for different reasons. A lot of it was still the 'that's what you do' thing, though. Shipping fic is expected in fandom. Having ships is expected. I won't go near the OTP versus multishipping thing, by the way, though I will say that I don't see anything wrong with either approach so long as we're not getting to the levels of 'canon says this, it's the only thing you can write' (which seems a little silly anyway, because fanfic, people - if we only wrote what canon said, or decided our fics were canon because actual canon didn't make sense -tempting as that is sometimes, and yes, I have done it- we'd be writing something else entirely).
But I started becoming interested in ships/pairings, too. Properly, I mean. As in, the portrayal of relationships in fic started to have an emotional meaning to me. And sex came along with that because, as I said, everyone knows that romantic relationships automatically come with sex attached, because that's just the way things are. And I liked writing relationships, whether friendships or romantic, as part of my stories, so sex came along for the ride. And I researched it (mostly by reading other fanfics, admittedly, and given that I've still bugger all practical experience sometimes I can't help but wonder if I've some lingering ideas of what sex is meant to be that are really wrong) and I looked at what people seemed to enjoy about seeing it written, and tried to do my best with that. This was helped, I think, by my being a rather tactile person who takes a lot of comfort from physical closeness. Talking via touch is a concept I fully understand, it's just the odd fluidy bits that weird me out. So most of my fics tended to be heavy on the foreplay, and extremely low on the actual act.
That's ... a strong thread I've noticed in my fic, that now that I look at it could be strongly influenced by my asexuality. I'm very, very fond of touch, and physical intimacy, but not at all of the actual act (by which I mean anything involving exchange of fluids, really). The result is that I'm a champion of the 'fade-to-black' method of fic writing, and generally rely on lots of day-to-day small intimacies to convey a relationship. Which is unrealistic in itself, in some cases, where the society the fic is based in wouldn't allow for it ... I do try to be careful of that ...
A side note, I think that view also influences how I rate fic, too. I think I tend to rate slightly higher than normal (PG-13, usually, or equivalent) for any fic involving overt sexuality (or overt violence, really, so maybe I'm just sensitive that way), with the result that I tend to have a PG-13 baseline in fic, for things many people might consider largely inoffensive and undeserving of the rating?
I have written some relatively explicit fic, though. I have, in one instance, written explicit tentacle-porn (Babylon 5 setting, between two aliens designed for it, though), so it's not like I can claim that my writing is chaste. And it's not ... It's like the reasons I read it. The act can express some emotions or positions/status that is very hard to show otherwise, or at least translate to a general populace. This may be why I think shipping itself is so very popular, because when we see a deep emotional connection between some characters who in-universe are, for example, straight, or the wrong species, or not physical in the sense we are, we still want to show that emotional connection the clearest way our culture knows. For some reason, romance, or sex, seem to be viewed as the strongest expression of caring visible in day-to-day life. Or at least, the easiest shorthand expression thereof.
There are other bonds that are viewed as equally strong. The bonds of family, in particular, and the bonds of teammates/brothers-in-arms, where the depth of caring is expressed in the sheer level of effort expended to keep the other people in that bond safe, in one piece, and even happy. I tend to write a lot about the development of bonds like this, too, perhaps instead of the traditional shipping/romance type fics in some ways. It's an intense emotional bond that's acceptable to show as being without sex, so I like it.
Strangely, though, when those bonds show up in the fiction we write the fanfic on, they're very often turned into sexual/romantic relationships in fic. *tilts head again* I really do think sex, or at least physical intimacy, is the most kneejerk shorthand we have for emotional depth. Consequently, when we see physical intimacy that in our time/culture potentially comes with love and/or sexual relationships, perhaps we often tend to assume that love/sex automatically does come attached to it. Hence the myriad evidence for relationships where the characters in question, in-universe, would probably never see it. Or where those emotions exist, love or loyalty or obsessive connection (I'm fond of enemyships), that sex automatically comes attached too. There seems to be an idea that any emotion that deep must come with a physical manifestation, most usually expressed as sex in fic.
*long pause* Um. Possibly that's reading way, waaay too much into it. But ... see, without the attraction of sex in and of itself, it's only value to me in fic (and possibly in real life, though I've yet to meet anyone for whom I would be willing to go that far) is as an expression of emotion that other people will understand. Which makes me wonder if perhaps it's the same even for people for whom it does have its own inherant worth, and it's just harder in those instances to separate out the separate motivations when you don't have to?
Although, I need to point out that, since I am asexual, I have a lot of trouble thinking that someone would like it without having other motivations attached, which I realise is a bias in and of itself and there are people who genuinely enjoy no-strings sex for its own sake. It's just that that mindset is harder for me to understand, so it probably doesn't show up a lot when I write, and wouldn't be something I'd tend to read a lot.
On the other side, I'm also a romantic asexual. An omniromantic one, too, I think. I know there are some asexuals who are also aromantic, which ... is interesting. I can't see shipping fic as having much inherant attraction to such people, whether sex is attached or not, but I wonder if there are different degrees, or other types of love that they appreciate, or how important the varying types of relationship portrayed in fic would be for someone like that. Incidentally, if there are any in the audience, for this or any other viewpoint, feel free to enlighten me!
*muses* Actually, that word, 'omniromantic' ... I use that mostly because I've spent most of my childhood and on to adulthood reading an awful lot of sci-fi/fanstasy/etc, involving sentient/sapient beings of other species than human. I use that word because, even though I know intellectually that the likelihood of meeting any such being is probably slim, I don't really see a need to narrow my options emotionally since the physical is unlikely to be much of a concern for me. Which also means that fic-wise, I'm perfectly happy shipping such characters, even if an actual sexual relationship between them would be ... complicated. I'm curious how people who would consider relationships to need (or at least preferentially have) a physical element view such things. I know why I don't have a problem with it, given that sex is usually nowhere near an important consideration I have when looking at a potential relationship, but I do wonder what people for whom that would be a concern think.
*tilts head again* Actually, looking back up over the post, I wonder if I should maybe clarify that when I say 'shipping', I mean seeing those characters in an important/strong emotional relationship, not necessarily a sexual one. Generally speaking, for myself, I use the term 'pairing' to denote characters I see as potentially having sex. So, for example, while I may ship Holmes and Watson (who were all but married, to my mind), I don't actually pair them because Watson seemed straight and Holmes quite possibly asexual, so I have trouble with seeing them in a sexual relationship. Despite reading, writing, and enjoying fics where they are, because I seem to be just not that picky in that regard. I'll read and/or write almost anything, I'll just assign it varying levels of plausibility according to my own internal biases ...
Which, now that I look at it, is probably what most people do, to some degree or another. The only differences being what those internal biases are and to what degree they affect how we look at things. And I ... just seem to be addicted to trying to figure that out, at least with regards to myself. *grins, shakes head at self* My apologies for inflicting it on everyone else. Heh.
