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I can't manage any more of LEGENDS II, probably, though I may get around to the Diana Gabaldon story before I have to return the whole shebang to the library. It's starting to seem too much like work.
I am going to give away some plot points of Gabaldon's OUTLANDER and a manga called GRAVITATION below. I don't think they're the sort that will ruin the books. Oh, and I quote obscene Lord of the Rings porn. And recommend gay manga. And define terms which most of you already know. Generalize about slash despite not knowing all that much about it. Just take this as a Unified Field Warning.
Diana Gabaldon is the hugely bestselling author of a time travel/historical/fantasy series which began with OUTLANDER. If you read that, you'll see why it become a smash bestseller despite being a fairly weird cross-generic title which breaks the conventions of each genre of which it partakes. In addition to its more obvious virtues of humor, prose which isn't too hideous, likable and memorably unlikable characters, and a page-turning style, those pages you turn are soaked in some addictive substance. You WILL buy all the sequels, and you WILL devour them in a single Super Big Gulp, even if you don't respect yourself in the morning.
It's about a WWII nurse, Claire Beauchamp, who is married to a nice guy named Frank when she gets swooshed into 1700s (I think) Scotland, embroiled in local intrigue, and has to make a marriage of convenience with Jamie, a great hunk of a red-headed Scot who, if she wasn't married already, she'd have to confess that she finds attractive. What the hell. She shags him anyway: the marriage isn't legal if it isn't consummated. Then this evil bisexual pervert gets involved and does terrible things to Jamie and Claire must heal his wounds. And then there's the Battle of Culloden, and time-traveling Neanderthals, and the American Revolution, and... but that's in later books.
I'm not too sure about romance conventions as I don't read romances unless they're funny, which means I adore Georgette Heyer and Jennifer Crusie and haven't read much else. But I think that at the time of publication, it was unusual to have a historical romance in which the heroine is a) not a virgin, b) currently (and happily!) married, c) sleeps with the hero anyway, and the big manly hunk of a hero is a) a virgin, and b) has terrible things done to him by the evil bisexual pervert which normally, as far as I know, only happen to manly heroes in fanfic.
(I should note that Gabaldon does have sympathetic gay characters in later books. But I have to say, in the unfortunately populous gallery of fictional evil bisexual perverts, her evil bisexual pervert looms large.)
Which brings me to fanfic. (Original fiction illegally using copyright characters and written by fans, in case anyone doesn't know. If it's written legally, it's called media-tie ins or shared worlds.) Most of it, because it's unedited and unselected by professionals, is more sucky than you can believe even while reading it. "Legolas impaled himself on Aragorn's prick while Gimli came in his pants" (I did NOT make that up) is only the beginning.
I think there are two reasons why people read fanfic. One is to get more of the adventures of your favorite heroes. I like the X-Men, but there's only two movies, and frankly, a talented amateur can write better X-Men adventures than any of the current comics, as far as I can tell. (Some fanfic authors are so good that it surprises me that they haven't gone pro. But it can be extremely hard to find them.)
The other reason is to get certain types of stories which are difficult to find elsewhere. (Given where this is going, I hesitate to use the word "hard.") A lot of fanfic involves gay relationships, usually between male characters. This is called "slash." (There's an essay which I've never been able to find but which is apparently-- sorry-- seminal, called "Pass the Crisco, Spock.") Slash is usually written by women. I'm not going to try to explain why, except that nobody thinks it's weird if men like lesbian porn, so I'm not sure why women liking gay porn or relationship stories is weird.
A sub-genre of this is called "hurt-comfort," which also applies to stories in which the relationships are heterosexual. That's the story where one character is hurt, ill, raped, or emotionally wrecked, and the other one comforts him and generally has sex with him. I sometimes suspect, as Diana Wynne Jones suggested in her wonderful novel FIRE AND HEMLOCK, that at least fifty percent of all injuries to the torso of handsome heroes are motivated by the desire to get his shirt off. But there's an obvious emotional appeal as well: sex and nurturing combined in one package.
The "Jamie after his encounter with the evil bisexual pervert" constitutes a fifty-page and rather gruesome hurt-comfort scene. It gave me the creeps... and yet I read every word, re-read, and bought all the rest of the books.
The other thing that's appealing about fanfic goes hand in hand with its amateur status. It's emotional. It's about feelings and relationships and naked longings, all of which is positively embarassing to read if it's badly written, but if it's written well, it has some real power. You just don't see that kind of nakedness is much published fiction. At least, not in America.
Which brings me to manga. Also anime. I think the main thing that makes manga and anime appealing to me is that emotionality. American cartoons almost all seem winkingly ironic and artificial. The writers are so afraid of seeming geeky that they hold back any real feeling, or undercut it with a joke. (Because feeling, real feeling, is uncool. Sloppy teenage stuff, and who wants to be a teenager again?)
While manga and anime will also often throw jokes into emotional scenes, they less often have the sense that it's because the emotion is uncool. It feels more organic, as if _the characters_ need to break the tension. Obviously, this is not true for all manga and anime, but the emotionality of my favorite ones is much of what makes them my favorites. It's like fanfic, only done by skilled professionals and pre-edited so you don't have to wade through the slush to get to the good stuff.
Which brings me to GRAVITATION, a manga series by Maki Murakami. It's shounen-ai, which means boy love. This is a popular genre in Japan, especially with women. Its X-rated cousin is yaoi.
Shuichi is a goofy senior in high school with a band but no apparent talent. A page of his horrid lyrics blows out of his hand on a stormy night and is picked up by a handsome young romance novelist, Eiri Yuki. Yuki critiques the lyrics, insults Shuichi, and walks away. Shuichi is smitten. In a tangles series of events, Shuichi's band is scouted by a guy who is married to Yuki's sister, which hauls Shuichi into Yuki's screwed-up family dynamics, and then there's Shuichi's best friend who might be in love with him... Oh, and going by the ending of Volume I, if Volume II doesn't open with a hurt-comfort scene, I will eat it.
It's a complete soap opera, and a lot of the male characters look confusingly similar. But it's funny, sweet, and a believable portrayal of the frenzied emotions of high school, wanting to be an artist, dysfunctional relationships of all sorts, and first love. The kissing scenes are seriously sexy. It hits all the buttons of slash, but PG (so far) and with illustrations. I recommend it.
I'm not the first one to see a commonality between manga and fanfic. (Manga also has a large and accepted fanfic community.) This excellent essay tackles the same subject but with more of a focus on wish-fulfillment and Mary Sue:
http://www.aestheticism.com/visitors/editor/jeanne/shameless/index.htm
I am going to give away some plot points of Gabaldon's OUTLANDER and a manga called GRAVITATION below. I don't think they're the sort that will ruin the books. Oh, and I quote obscene Lord of the Rings porn. And recommend gay manga. And define terms which most of you already know. Generalize about slash despite not knowing all that much about it. Just take this as a Unified Field Warning.
Diana Gabaldon is the hugely bestselling author of a time travel/historical/fantasy series which began with OUTLANDER. If you read that, you'll see why it become a smash bestseller despite being a fairly weird cross-generic title which breaks the conventions of each genre of which it partakes. In addition to its more obvious virtues of humor, prose which isn't too hideous, likable and memorably unlikable characters, and a page-turning style, those pages you turn are soaked in some addictive substance. You WILL buy all the sequels, and you WILL devour them in a single Super Big Gulp, even if you don't respect yourself in the morning.
It's about a WWII nurse, Claire Beauchamp, who is married to a nice guy named Frank when she gets swooshed into 1700s (I think) Scotland, embroiled in local intrigue, and has to make a marriage of convenience with Jamie, a great hunk of a red-headed Scot who, if she wasn't married already, she'd have to confess that she finds attractive. What the hell. She shags him anyway: the marriage isn't legal if it isn't consummated. Then this evil bisexual pervert gets involved and does terrible things to Jamie and Claire must heal his wounds. And then there's the Battle of Culloden, and time-traveling Neanderthals, and the American Revolution, and... but that's in later books.
I'm not too sure about romance conventions as I don't read romances unless they're funny, which means I adore Georgette Heyer and Jennifer Crusie and haven't read much else. But I think that at the time of publication, it was unusual to have a historical romance in which the heroine is a) not a virgin, b) currently (and happily!) married, c) sleeps with the hero anyway, and the big manly hunk of a hero is a) a virgin, and b) has terrible things done to him by the evil bisexual pervert which normally, as far as I know, only happen to manly heroes in fanfic.
(I should note that Gabaldon does have sympathetic gay characters in later books. But I have to say, in the unfortunately populous gallery of fictional evil bisexual perverts, her evil bisexual pervert looms large.)
Which brings me to fanfic. (Original fiction illegally using copyright characters and written by fans, in case anyone doesn't know. If it's written legally, it's called media-tie ins or shared worlds.) Most of it, because it's unedited and unselected by professionals, is more sucky than you can believe even while reading it. "Legolas impaled himself on Aragorn's prick while Gimli came in his pants" (I did NOT make that up) is only the beginning.
I think there are two reasons why people read fanfic. One is to get more of the adventures of your favorite heroes. I like the X-Men, but there's only two movies, and frankly, a talented amateur can write better X-Men adventures than any of the current comics, as far as I can tell. (Some fanfic authors are so good that it surprises me that they haven't gone pro. But it can be extremely hard to find them.)
The other reason is to get certain types of stories which are difficult to find elsewhere. (Given where this is going, I hesitate to use the word "hard.") A lot of fanfic involves gay relationships, usually between male characters. This is called "slash." (There's an essay which I've never been able to find but which is apparently-- sorry-- seminal, called "Pass the Crisco, Spock.") Slash is usually written by women. I'm not going to try to explain why, except that nobody thinks it's weird if men like lesbian porn, so I'm not sure why women liking gay porn or relationship stories is weird.
A sub-genre of this is called "hurt-comfort," which also applies to stories in which the relationships are heterosexual. That's the story where one character is hurt, ill, raped, or emotionally wrecked, and the other one comforts him and generally has sex with him. I sometimes suspect, as Diana Wynne Jones suggested in her wonderful novel FIRE AND HEMLOCK, that at least fifty percent of all injuries to the torso of handsome heroes are motivated by the desire to get his shirt off. But there's an obvious emotional appeal as well: sex and nurturing combined in one package.
The "Jamie after his encounter with the evil bisexual pervert" constitutes a fifty-page and rather gruesome hurt-comfort scene. It gave me the creeps... and yet I read every word, re-read, and bought all the rest of the books.
The other thing that's appealing about fanfic goes hand in hand with its amateur status. It's emotional. It's about feelings and relationships and naked longings, all of which is positively embarassing to read if it's badly written, but if it's written well, it has some real power. You just don't see that kind of nakedness is much published fiction. At least, not in America.
Which brings me to manga. Also anime. I think the main thing that makes manga and anime appealing to me is that emotionality. American cartoons almost all seem winkingly ironic and artificial. The writers are so afraid of seeming geeky that they hold back any real feeling, or undercut it with a joke. (Because feeling, real feeling, is uncool. Sloppy teenage stuff, and who wants to be a teenager again?)
While manga and anime will also often throw jokes into emotional scenes, they less often have the sense that it's because the emotion is uncool. It feels more organic, as if _the characters_ need to break the tension. Obviously, this is not true for all manga and anime, but the emotionality of my favorite ones is much of what makes them my favorites. It's like fanfic, only done by skilled professionals and pre-edited so you don't have to wade through the slush to get to the good stuff.
Which brings me to GRAVITATION, a manga series by Maki Murakami. It's shounen-ai, which means boy love. This is a popular genre in Japan, especially with women. Its X-rated cousin is yaoi.
Shuichi is a goofy senior in high school with a band but no apparent talent. A page of his horrid lyrics blows out of his hand on a stormy night and is picked up by a handsome young romance novelist, Eiri Yuki. Yuki critiques the lyrics, insults Shuichi, and walks away. Shuichi is smitten. In a tangles series of events, Shuichi's band is scouted by a guy who is married to Yuki's sister, which hauls Shuichi into Yuki's screwed-up family dynamics, and then there's Shuichi's best friend who might be in love with him... Oh, and going by the ending of Volume I, if Volume II doesn't open with a hurt-comfort scene, I will eat it.
It's a complete soap opera, and a lot of the male characters look confusingly similar. But it's funny, sweet, and a believable portrayal of the frenzied emotions of high school, wanting to be an artist, dysfunctional relationships of all sorts, and first love. The kissing scenes are seriously sexy. It hits all the buttons of slash, but PG (so far) and with illustrations. I recommend it.
I'm not the first one to see a commonality between manga and fanfic. (Manga also has a large and accepted fanfic community.) This excellent essay tackles the same subject but with more of a focus on wish-fulfillment and Mary Sue:
http://www.aestheticism.com/visitors/editor/jeanne/shameless/index.htm