More musings on fandom and fanfiction

[thepowerofdeath]

smallrobot commented on my post about SG-1 kink-fic saying

I sometimes go into a tag thinking something like, "This pairing and this concept make too much sense. I'm sure there will be lost of fics listed under the tag!", and end up with a few at best. I'm always so puzzled when it happens, but then I realise my view of the characters is just not shared by many other people in this respect.

And it got me thinking how we all see the characters so differently. Everyone in fandom watches the same show, the same episodes, the same stories, with the same characters but we all see them so differently. We all see their attributes and intentions a little differently, we react to different scenes in different ways.

Take Sam Carter in the SG-1 premiere for instance - the 'sex organs on the inside' speech: I know a lot of people (Amanda Tapping included) think it's very cringey but I think it's very typical attitude of a woman in a man's world in the mid-late 90s. I'm sure I've said similar things to old white men on dig sites in my time. I also think it's the moment she won Jack's respect - standing up for herself, matching their jibes, keeping up with them but still remaining (mostly)respectful of the chain of command. I also think Hammond was very amused in that scene.

Then we move into fandom. Even something as simple as which pairing/s we ship. A quick look at the stats on AO3 and there are 6336 Jack/Sam & 6211 Jack/Daniel. There's also 908 Daniel/Vala, 632 Sheppard/McKay, 607 Sam/Janet, 398 Mitchell/Sheppard, 371 Sam/Daniel, 354 Daniel/Sha're.

(There's a whole other train of thought in there brewing about how not just I refer to some characters by first name, and others by surname - why Jack and not O'Neill, or Mitchell and not Cameron when they're both military).

Even in those 6211 Jack/Daniel fics, the variations are multiple. 1090 established relationship vs 813 first time, for instance. Or 420 AU compared to 407 episode related. There's 1224 angst, 826 drama, 615 hurt/comfort, and 595 romance.

The most basic question of who's on top - ask 10 people, get 10 different answers.
Are they written as gay, 'only gay for you', bi, experimenting - ask 10 people, get 15 different answers
Throw kink into the equation, and then you ask 10 people, get 20 different answers.

I'm not well-versed at using AO3 enough to know how to drill down into what other tags are included in fics tagged with BDSM but I imagine there are even more variations than I've had hot dinners in the last 34 years.

Anyone who's been in fandom long enough has undoubtedly experienced the ~drama of 'ship wars' because god forbid anyone else see the characters in a different way! But I absolutely love how we all see the same thing completely differently - whether it's because we have different life experiences, different experiences of queer... or just plain different sexual fantasies.

Personally, I go for: Jack is bi; Daniel doesn't care about gender; and I don't really care who's on top in either vanilla or kink, both work for me and they're both super hot. There's something about the big powerful general on his knees for Daniel (also nicely cliché), but there's also something fun about Jack making Daniel, the linguist, lose his coherence.

And now I'm going to continue discovering more kinks I didn't know I had LOL

Comments

[smallrobot]

Very late comment, I've meant to comment on your post, but only getting around to now. ^^
I'm impressed my comment inspired so many thoughts! :D Your post, too, inspired many thoughts in me. *lol*

First of all, it always comes as a surprise to me that people fight over those things - the character's sexuality and pairings. I mean, who cares? If one doesn't like someone's view of characters, why not just move on? Maybe I was just lucky, but I rarely experienced this sort of thing in my fandoms, maybe because in 2000s and 2010s, slash/yaoi shippers didn't fight with each other so much, it was only the hetero shippers from what I remember. Right now, the fandom has a whole new subset of problems, but I haven't been a part of it for a long time, so I've been blissfully ignorant since 2019 or so.

What I also think is very interesting is how the audiences pick up the queer coding for characters purposefully left by the creators, and how the interpretation changes in various circumstances. For example, Neon Genesis Evangelion features a gay pairing which was meant that way. The director said he purposefully hired a whiter for the scenes who was famous for homoerotic subtexts. And yet, some people still deny that the relationship between the two characters (Shinji and Kaworu) was meant to be gay, and find all kinds of excuses that it's Not Gay™.

Another example: Hunter x Hunter. The artist wanted to make a story abour LGBT characters, but wasn't allowed to. So he made a basic adventure story, and inserted queer subtext here and there, very convincingly, so even though there are deniers, it's noticeably hard for them to deny the subtext. When one looks at both of those series, there is also the additional condition that Neon Genesis Evangelion has a lot of older neckbeard dudebro kind of fans who fuel the homophobia - so there's an additional, extratextual component to it which allows for the homophobic interpretation to be widespread.

When one looks at Stargate, I think it's interesting how many older women there are in this fandom. I've always envied it for the chill atmosphere, lol. At least from what I know from my wife, people are very relaxed and don't usually fight with each other. Your headcanons make a lot of sense, btw, and hope you have lots of fun in your discovery of fandom and self! ^^