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galaxysoupPart The First: Pairings In Fandom
My hands-down biggest fandom participation effort ever was devoting several college years to Stargate SG-1. I lived it, I breathed it, I wrote at last count something like 35 stories for it - I even went to a convention and met Michael Shanks (very nice man, very blue eyes). I bottomed out somewhere at the beginning of season eight and have never really gone back, in large part because I was kind of traumatised by the, um, dedicated fervor of the shipper wars going on in fandom (to this day Sam/Jack stories make me shudder and back away, which is a shame because I really like both of the characters and I'm sure there are some very well-written stories out there. But I digress).
For some reason, and despite reading some very good fanfic about it, I never watched more than an episode or two of Stargate Atlantis until just recently, when I got a hold of it through Netflix. I made it almost all the way through the third season before losing interest and going on to other things, and on the train the other day I started wondering what it was about Atlantis that totally failed to capture my attention. I mean - it has fun characters, it takes place at least nominally in a universe which I thoroughly enjoyed, and there's a crapload of fanfic to read, which is always nice. So what was it?
And then it hit me: my favourite pairing in SG-1 was Jack/Daniel, which was one of the most popular pairings in the fandom - probably tied in popularity with the Sam/Jack het pairing, and definitely the most popular slash pairing. While there was of course a whole lot of nothing fic written, as well as a lot of straight-up porn, a huge percentage of the stories were thoughtful and well-written and increased my engagement in the series.
In SGA the most popular pairing is far and away John/Rodney, with any het pairing coming in a distant second. As in SG-1, there are a lot of very thoughtful and substantive fics written about it.
John/Rodney, to be perfectly frank, bores me. If I ship anyone on SGA, it's Radek/Ronon. Radek/Ronon. You want a totally obscure, unwritten pairing? Radek and Ronon are your men. Not only does no one ever write them, there are very few stories with either Radek or Ronon as main POV characters at all. While Radek does frequently appear in SGA stories he is usually a background character and generally just there to get John and Rodney together. And as for Ronon? Nobody writes Ronon. And I sympathise with that, I do - I had to spend some time writing Ronon for a challenge fic recently, and it was hard work. The writers on SGA don't seem to know what to do with him most of the time, which makes it hard for anyone looking to canon for inspiration.
Partly it may be because I came to SGA having read the fic first, and I thought it would be more of an ensemble show - there were so many background characters to play with, like Rodney's scientists or the gate technicians, and the premise of the show as a modern-day pioneer settlement seemed very interesting. In reading the fic I got to know a lot of the secondary characters which, when I watched the show, were simply not there. Miko Kusanagi, for example, is frequently mentioned in fanfic - rarely if ever as a main character, I grant you, but she's always there somewhere. In the show? She appears for maybe thirty seconds tops in the first season, and her scene's all about making fun of Rodney.
All right, so I'm getting a little diverted into bitching about SGA, which was not actually my intention when I started writing this. The point I was trying to make was this: if I buy into one of the popular pairings, I buy into most of the fanfic, and that keeps me watching the show. The one exception I have found for this (because you know there's always got to be one, just to wreck the curve) is Eureka. In Eureka, right from the start, I shipped Jack/Henry, which seemed so glaringly obvious to me that it was a bit of a shock to go online and find that not only was Jack/Nathan the most popular pairing, but Jack/Henry basically didn't even exist.
The other way in which Eureka wrecks the curve is that despite the fact that I don't read the fanfic I just keep on coming back to the show because a) it's well written, and b) I actually buy into the canon pairings.
Part The Second: Canon Pairings
All right, first off, you have to understand that I'm a terrible romantic... and by that, I mean that I am terrible at being romantic. My usual reaction to romantic pairings in source canon is somewhere along the spectrum of 'bored now' and 'it'll never work'. Nine times out of ten it feels forced and is obviously just there For Drama, which I find utterly uninteresting and which will even irritate make me to the point of making me actively angry (Grey's Anatomy and Smallville, I am looking at you. Buffy and Angel, you are on dangerous ground).
This is why I think fandom pairings are such a huge deal - an enourmous percentage of fic is focused on pairings, I think because it is a very basic tool in the fanfic kit. Most of my favourite stories have all started out with "But what if..." You can be really canon-specific with this (but what if Daniel had translated the Ancients' Repository before Jack stuck his head in that viewer thing?) or very general (but what if John never learned how to fly?) but "What if X and Y got together?" is a question that can be applied in any fandom, frequently without a hugely in-depth knowledge of the source canon.
The reason we do this, of course, is the freedom it affords. With canon pairings, you are stuck with whatever happens in the next episode. If Lana dumps Clark, then Lana dumps Clark. You can write as many get-back-together fics as you want, but you're still going to be stuck with the scene in the next episode where Lana tells Clark she hates his guts and wishes he would die in a fire.
Non-canon pairings, on the other hand, are by their very nature behind the scenes. You're already having to work around what's being said and seize on every tiny moment you can grab that shows your favourite characters looking at each other or being in the same room as each other or wearing similar shirts or whatever... so what do you care if Lana dumps Clark, when clearly he's been doing Lex the entire time anyway? The creativity is built-in - you're already having to outthink the show's creators, which let's face it is a good deal of fun, and at the same time the show's creators aren't even paying attention to the way your characters interact. It's genius! It's the perfect crime!
That having been said, of course, there are some shows where the canon pairings are totally worth getting behind. Off the top of my head - Peter/El on White Collar, Jack/Ianto on Torchwood, and Josh/Donna on West Wing.
Peter/El works because a) it's very matter-of-fact - they don't go on and on about their relationship and what it means because they already know it's there, and it's fine, and b) El has her own life, Peter has his, and they live together and love each other without being hyper-obsessed about each others' tiniest movements. It is, shock horror surprise, an actual working relationship.
Jack/Ianto works because for the most part it goes on offscreen. There is a scene where Ianto propositions Jack, and then nothing more is said until the season finale, when it's mentioned in passing. Later on they get more obvious about it, but that's mostly displayed in terms of physical affection until Children of Earth (which I am not counting because so many other things went wrong I think it is clear that Jack and Ianto's suddenly weird relationship dynamics were part of a bigger problem). Jack/Ianto is canon, but only barely. It's even difficult to tell if the scene where Ianto propositions Jack is the first time they've had any kind of sexually-based interaction or if it's just the first time we've seen it onscreen, and I think there may even be an entire subgenre of fics dedicated to just that question.
Josh/Donna works, I think, in large part because we get to see it evolve over time. It takes them seven freaking years to get to it, people - that's a lot of time in which the showrunners could build up a solid relationship and then capitalise on it. We got to see how Josh and Donna interacted as coworkers and friends and we could see every reason why they would work well together, and also why it had to take that long for them to actually make the leap. It was thoughtful and character-based and the payoff when they finally got together was so, so sweet.
In the end, it really all comes down to that old story-writing advice: show, don't tell. If you sit there and beat your audience over the head with THE RELATIONSHIP, they will take any way they can to prove you wrong. But if you hint at it, and leave it up to them to fill in the blanks, then not only is it more fun for them to fill in the blanks, it will keep them coming back to search for those little tidbits.
My hands-down biggest fandom participation effort ever was devoting several college years to Stargate SG-1. I lived it, I breathed it, I wrote at last count something like 35 stories for it - I even went to a convention and met Michael Shanks (very nice man, very blue eyes). I bottomed out somewhere at the beginning of season eight and have never really gone back, in large part because I was kind of traumatised by the, um, dedicated fervor of the shipper wars going on in fandom (to this day Sam/Jack stories make me shudder and back away, which is a shame because I really like both of the characters and I'm sure there are some very well-written stories out there. But I digress).
For some reason, and despite reading some very good fanfic about it, I never watched more than an episode or two of Stargate Atlantis until just recently, when I got a hold of it through Netflix. I made it almost all the way through the third season before losing interest and going on to other things, and on the train the other day I started wondering what it was about Atlantis that totally failed to capture my attention. I mean - it has fun characters, it takes place at least nominally in a universe which I thoroughly enjoyed, and there's a crapload of fanfic to read, which is always nice. So what was it?
And then it hit me: my favourite pairing in SG-1 was Jack/Daniel, which was one of the most popular pairings in the fandom - probably tied in popularity with the Sam/Jack het pairing, and definitely the most popular slash pairing. While there was of course a whole lot of nothing fic written, as well as a lot of straight-up porn, a huge percentage of the stories were thoughtful and well-written and increased my engagement in the series.
In SGA the most popular pairing is far and away John/Rodney, with any het pairing coming in a distant second. As in SG-1, there are a lot of very thoughtful and substantive fics written about it.
John/Rodney, to be perfectly frank, bores me. If I ship anyone on SGA, it's Radek/Ronon. Radek/Ronon. You want a totally obscure, unwritten pairing? Radek and Ronon are your men. Not only does no one ever write them, there are very few stories with either Radek or Ronon as main POV characters at all. While Radek does frequently appear in SGA stories he is usually a background character and generally just there to get John and Rodney together. And as for Ronon? Nobody writes Ronon. And I sympathise with that, I do - I had to spend some time writing Ronon for a challenge fic recently, and it was hard work. The writers on SGA don't seem to know what to do with him most of the time, which makes it hard for anyone looking to canon for inspiration.
Partly it may be because I came to SGA having read the fic first, and I thought it would be more of an ensemble show - there were so many background characters to play with, like Rodney's scientists or the gate technicians, and the premise of the show as a modern-day pioneer settlement seemed very interesting. In reading the fic I got to know a lot of the secondary characters which, when I watched the show, were simply not there. Miko Kusanagi, for example, is frequently mentioned in fanfic - rarely if ever as a main character, I grant you, but she's always there somewhere. In the show? She appears for maybe thirty seconds tops in the first season, and her scene's all about making fun of Rodney.
All right, so I'm getting a little diverted into bitching about SGA, which was not actually my intention when I started writing this. The point I was trying to make was this: if I buy into one of the popular pairings, I buy into most of the fanfic, and that keeps me watching the show. The one exception I have found for this (because you know there's always got to be one, just to wreck the curve) is Eureka. In Eureka, right from the start, I shipped Jack/Henry, which seemed so glaringly obvious to me that it was a bit of a shock to go online and find that not only was Jack/Nathan the most popular pairing, but Jack/Henry basically didn't even exist.
The other way in which Eureka wrecks the curve is that despite the fact that I don't read the fanfic I just keep on coming back to the show because a) it's well written, and b) I actually buy into the canon pairings.
Part The Second: Canon Pairings
All right, first off, you have to understand that I'm a terrible romantic... and by that, I mean that I am terrible at being romantic. My usual reaction to romantic pairings in source canon is somewhere along the spectrum of 'bored now' and 'it'll never work'. Nine times out of ten it feels forced and is obviously just there For Drama, which I find utterly uninteresting and which will even irritate make me to the point of making me actively angry (Grey's Anatomy and Smallville, I am looking at you. Buffy and Angel, you are on dangerous ground).
This is why I think fandom pairings are such a huge deal - an enourmous percentage of fic is focused on pairings, I think because it is a very basic tool in the fanfic kit. Most of my favourite stories have all started out with "But what if..." You can be really canon-specific with this (but what if Daniel had translated the Ancients' Repository before Jack stuck his head in that viewer thing?) or very general (but what if John never learned how to fly?) but "What if X and Y got together?" is a question that can be applied in any fandom, frequently without a hugely in-depth knowledge of the source canon.
The reason we do this, of course, is the freedom it affords. With canon pairings, you are stuck with whatever happens in the next episode. If Lana dumps Clark, then Lana dumps Clark. You can write as many get-back-together fics as you want, but you're still going to be stuck with the scene in the next episode where Lana tells Clark she hates his guts and wishes he would die in a fire.
Non-canon pairings, on the other hand, are by their very nature behind the scenes. You're already having to work around what's being said and seize on every tiny moment you can grab that shows your favourite characters looking at each other or being in the same room as each other or wearing similar shirts or whatever... so what do you care if Lana dumps Clark, when clearly he's been doing Lex the entire time anyway? The creativity is built-in - you're already having to outthink the show's creators, which let's face it is a good deal of fun, and at the same time the show's creators aren't even paying attention to the way your characters interact. It's genius! It's the perfect crime!
That having been said, of course, there are some shows where the canon pairings are totally worth getting behind. Off the top of my head - Peter/El on White Collar, Jack/Ianto on Torchwood, and Josh/Donna on West Wing.
Peter/El works because a) it's very matter-of-fact - they don't go on and on about their relationship and what it means because they already know it's there, and it's fine, and b) El has her own life, Peter has his, and they live together and love each other without being hyper-obsessed about each others' tiniest movements. It is, shock horror surprise, an actual working relationship.
Jack/Ianto works because for the most part it goes on offscreen. There is a scene where Ianto propositions Jack, and then nothing more is said until the season finale, when it's mentioned in passing. Later on they get more obvious about it, but that's mostly displayed in terms of physical affection until Children of Earth (which I am not counting because so many other things went wrong I think it is clear that Jack and Ianto's suddenly weird relationship dynamics were part of a bigger problem). Jack/Ianto is canon, but only barely. It's even difficult to tell if the scene where Ianto propositions Jack is the first time they've had any kind of sexually-based interaction or if it's just the first time we've seen it onscreen, and I think there may even be an entire subgenre of fics dedicated to just that question.
Josh/Donna works, I think, in large part because we get to see it evolve over time. It takes them seven freaking years to get to it, people - that's a lot of time in which the showrunners could build up a solid relationship and then capitalise on it. We got to see how Josh and Donna interacted as coworkers and friends and we could see every reason why they would work well together, and also why it had to take that long for them to actually make the leap. It was thoughtful and character-based and the payoff when they finally got together was so, so sweet.
In the end, it really all comes down to that old story-writing advice: show, don't tell. If you sit there and beat your audience over the head with THE RELATIONSHIP, they will take any way they can to prove you wrong. But if you hint at it, and leave it up to them to fill in the blanks, then not only is it more fun for them to fill in the blanks, it will keep them coming back to search for those little tidbits.
