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merelydovelyTumblr helpfully directed me toward this wonderful article in the Paris Review stuffed with a visceral nostalgia for the heady early days of Wolfstar, back when we still believed JK Rowling understood her own characters as well as her readers did.
I'm a few years younger than the article's author, so it took me a little bit longer to get on the "close read" bandwagon, but this article struck a chord with me all the same. It really did feel, for a while, like Sirius/Lupin was where things were heading, and like we were all geniuses for seeing the signs.
And it felt that way all too often, didn't it? A few short years later, I was up to my eyeballs in meta for House M.D., convinced with all the zeal of a convert that surely the show was setting us up for House and Wilson to be together. It just made sense.
And then another couple years down the road for me it was BBC Merlin with Merthur, and Teen Wolf with Sterek, and Sherlock with Johnlock, and I eventually stopped really believing there would ever be any follow-through, but I never stopped being mad that these shows were actively trying to get me to do the legwork to create queer romance where there was none.
I'm the kind of fan who likes to exhaustively ground their shipping in canon hints, but I feel like these days I no longer have sufficient emotional patience for doing proper close readings of modern shows. Like, I still appreciate them when I see them, but I'm overall significantly less effortful about unearthing queer subtext in places that by all right should have queer text. Now I'm more likely to just go with "I like them together so they're queer because I said so," instead of trying to justify my ship with well-cataloged canon proofs.
This might explain why I've found a fandom home in the Les Misérables fandom, which is still arguing about gay subtext in a book written in the 1860s. And we still give Victor Hugo grief for not making things explicitly gayer, since that kind of story wasn't unheard of even then.
What's your immediate reaction to the article? Do you have any memory of those pre-Potterdammerüng days? What do you feel is gained by doing close reads of media that are unlikely to bear fruit?
The summer of 2003 was the summer of noticing. It was the summer I sat alone for hours in my mother’s parked car, blasting Queen’s “The Show Must Go On” (track 17 on my favorite CD) and luxuriating in body-racking sobs of grief for Sirius Black, sorrow for Remus Lupin, and ecstatic rapture that I’d noticed. We took to the internet, those of us who had noticed, and compared notes. Often these notes took the form of fan fiction, which I read ravenously, hungry not so much for erotica as for the full novelistic experience Rowling had invited us to imagine—a boarding-school romance turned wartime tragedy, Maurice meets Atonement by way of Animorphs.
I'm a few years younger than the article's author, so it took me a little bit longer to get on the "close read" bandwagon, but this article struck a chord with me all the same. It really did feel, for a while, like Sirius/Lupin was where things were heading, and like we were all geniuses for seeing the signs.
And it felt that way all too often, didn't it? A few short years later, I was up to my eyeballs in meta for House M.D., convinced with all the zeal of a convert that surely the show was setting us up for House and Wilson to be together. It just made sense.
And then another couple years down the road for me it was BBC Merlin with Merthur, and Teen Wolf with Sterek, and Sherlock with Johnlock, and I eventually stopped really believing there would ever be any follow-through, but I never stopped being mad that these shows were actively trying to get me to do the legwork to create queer romance where there was none.
I'm the kind of fan who likes to exhaustively ground their shipping in canon hints, but I feel like these days I no longer have sufficient emotional patience for doing proper close readings of modern shows. Like, I still appreciate them when I see them, but I'm overall significantly less effortful about unearthing queer subtext in places that by all right should have queer text. Now I'm more likely to just go with "I like them together so they're queer because I said so," instead of trying to justify my ship with well-cataloged canon proofs.
This might explain why I've found a fandom home in the Les Misérables fandom, which is still arguing about gay subtext in a book written in the 1860s. And we still give Victor Hugo grief for not making things explicitly gayer, since that kind of story wasn't unheard of even then.
What's your immediate reaction to the article? Do you have any memory of those pre-Potterdammerüng days? What do you feel is gained by doing close reads of media that are unlikely to bear fruit?
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Date: 2018-12-11 09:11 pm (UTC)That's actually the context of the term! Eve KS got sick of talking about repression and wanted to look for more forward-thinking and creative ways of queer reading. I'm not actually super fond of her late work, and sadly one of the ways it's been interpreted is as a hammer AGAINST talking about the, uh, sucky heteronormative wossnames of the past (in //, there's an article by Schultz called 'heterosexuality as a threat to medieval studies', which does take the logical stance that if homosexuality is a modern construct so is heterosexuality, but unfortunately does so by asserting that all these queer academics are just paranoid and they can't function without the bogeyman of heteronormativity). Tumblr wank is, as ever, just academic wank boiled down and five to twenty years late.
Wow, I really love that. That's exactly how I see it, I just hadn't heard it put that way quite yet.
:D:D I think i'm getting that from Henry Jenkins. And Farashasilver. And something someone wrote somewhere about medieval saints' cults.
So fandom can either be more dogmatic and concerned with the canon, or it can be more about coming together through the canon.
Right? Honestly I felt a huge disjunct open up between me and the fandom community around... around Age of Ultron, I think. I haven't enjoyed a sequel fandom since then. I've enjoyed sequels: but I have not enjoyed the bitter fighting amongst disappointed fans, the attacks of happy fans on the disappointed fans, the vitriolic denouncements of canon, et caetera et caetera.
I go into sequels hoping to feel feels, and to be given a bunch of new stuff I can use to communicate with people. I don't... go in hoping to see my ship validated? And if my fave character gets sidelined I deal with that by... writing more fic! Or finding ways to get from the current status of canon to my desired ship ending, finding new triads, etc.
I do have a suspicion that Tumblr as a platform made the negative / otp-ish responsess more visible to me. Back on LJ if I knew someone who, idek, mad stanned Kirk/McCoy and hated any canon that fed content to Kirk/Spock or Spock/Uhura shippers, they put their complaints under a cut and comiserated in their comment section with likeminded people, not in long reblog chains. We could stay good buddies because I also liked Kirk/McCoy, even though I didn't resent any alternatives! Whereas now I'm getting used to having to cull 50% of my tumblr friends from x fandom as the x-sequel comes out, because they will just harsh my squee.
*whistles* Getting to knooooow you, getting to feel freeeee and eeeeeeasy...
THE GLORIES OF LJ-STYLE SOCIAL MEDIA, TL;DR'ing like it's 2007!