As Slash Newbies

[riverfox]

Upon finding Slashfic, why do we first find the stories that tend to characterize Daniel as a teenage girl and Jack as his daddy? The corollary would be why are those characterizations predominant in our slash part of the fandom? Does this happen in Ship, too?

I expect that sort of thing when we're younger since we learn as we go, but for those of us who're older, it's a mystery. I've never been able to figure it out in the 14 years I've been writing slash.

Is this a Harlequin Romance thing perhaps? Do those of us who like those stories transfer that to slash? Or is this just a case of reading everything and whittling down our preferences over time? When I found slash, I read the sappier characterizations, but it didn't take long for me to gravitate to the more realistic representations. But it still begs the question: Why do we, as newbies, find the sappier, less accurate portrayals first?

What did you do when you found slash?

Comments

[freyasboy]

I don't know if this will help you get to the answer you want, but when I first started reading slash I read anything I could find, the longer the better, as there's more to get your teeth into in the longer ones. I must admit I read some of the ones you mention as well as much better ones where the characters are both on an equal footing. These are the ones I now prefer. I don't like weeping, whinging Daniel ones. He's not like that in canon, so why write him like that in fiction? There are some wonderful fics out there and some not so good ones, but the only way to tell is to read first, then either discard or keep to read again.

Chris xx

[ivorygates]

I have no idea why that happens, but it certainly happened to me. I wasn't at all hooked up to online fandom at the time, and I didn't even have an LJ, but I managed to find Area 52, and ended up reading acre upon acre of Woobie!Daniel fics. Usually involving jammies and Daddy!Jack. And...wow. I'm deeply impressed by my own stamina and endurance, yanno?

I think this type of dynamic is inevitable from beginning slash writers (you saw A LOT of it in Professionals fandom, as I recall), and also very often in the beginning days of a fandom. It's as if fanwriters are born with these types of fics already programmed into their brains, since there's no other explanation of how they can produce a 1950's-vintage Harlequin Romance pretty much spontaneously and very often without being IRL readers of Romance of any kind. But since I came into the fandom a good five years on, there's no real explanation of how I ended up only encountering this kind of story. I tended to gravitate toward <10K fics almost exclusively, and I still found myself immersed in it.

IDEK.