On Tolerance
by Aratlithiel
February 17, 2004
Let’s get one thing
straight, first – we all read and/or write fanfic. That’s fanfic. Some of
us are more serious about it than others and rightfully so. Some of us are
better at it than others and some of us are here just for a distraction and a
bit of fun. Some of us use fanfic. as a way of honing skills - practicing for
the Big Leagues, maybe or even in refuge from them, in some cases. Some of us
have been in it for years and others are just discovering it.
But we still cannot escape the central point, which is the fact that we write
fanfic. Every one of us uses a world that someone else created and
characters that someone else’s sweat has borne. We all have different reasons
for it, but it doesn’t change the fact that we all still do it and none of us
are more justified in doing it than the next person.
My point? To put it bluntly, we are all in the same boat, like it or not, and
how dare any one of us cast aspersions on another for choosing which oar they
want to row or which aspect of our borrowed world they prefer to play with and
in what manner they do it. Shame on all of us. We are a snobbish, judgmental lot
and not a single one of us deserves to be.
You don’t like slash? Don’t read it. It’s as simple as that. Interspecies isn’t
your cup of tea? Pass it by and shut the fuck up about it. You find gen boring?
Find something else that gets your juices going. Het squicks you? OK, I don’t
quite understand that one but I’m not any more qualified to judge that opinion
than you are so if it’s that hard on your delicate sensibilities, skip it.
I cannot believe what I see in this community sometimes. Yes, there are
certainly some authors and characterizations I avoid and yes, I have privately
conferred with others of the same opinion and griped about it. But the keyword
there is ‘privately.’ I have never once called an author a disgrace to
the fandom (which is such an oxymoron I can’t even begin to wrap my mind around
it) or lambasted a fic. and personally attacked the author in a place that might
make it into the public eye. Not because I’m a coward and lack the conviction to
stand behind what I believe or what I’ve said, but because we’re talking about
people here and their feelings about pieces of their work that they’ve
spent just as much thought and effort on as any one of us has. And shame on me
if anything I might say, whether maliciously or just carelessly, stunts that
person’s expression of their talent and their growth as an author.
I missed a lot over the weekend because… Well, none of your business, why. But I
come back to find that friends have been publicly skewered for no better reason
than that their personal preference is not someone else’s. Or someone has a
personal site that contains fics. that not everyone finds to their taste. Or
that something one person has written squicks another. Or that, heaven forbid,
someone’s gone and read something they were disappointed in. And, sadly, this is
not the first time I’ve been witness to this sort of nonsense nor, even more
sadly, will it be the last. Hell, I’ve been victim to it so I do know whereof I
speak.
Let’s take a moment to think about this, shall we? Reading fanfic. costs you
absolutely nothing but the time you choose to put into it and whatever you pay
your internet provider. You don’t have to pay to read this stuff and these
authors owe you nothing. If you’ve lost an investment of the time that you’ve
put into reading a fic. you ended up not liking after all, too bad. YOU chose to
put that time into the reading of it – all the author did was write what spoke
to her and chose to share it with you. No one made you read it and shame on you
for kicking that author in the teeth for having shared it.
And while we’re thinking about things, let’s get a few things clear. Not a
single one of us can claim that what we write is any closer to Tolkien than the
next can so let’s just get off of that high-horse right now, shall we?
Everything that any one of us writes is AU by definition so let’s all just stop
pretending that we have a corner on Tolkien’s intentions.
Slash? AU. In every form. If you seriously believe that Tolkien intended for one
single second for Frodo and Sam to be lovers, you are very sadly mistaken and
know nothing about the man or his beliefs. Yes, Frodo and Sam is a great love
story in its purist form and I won’t say that if such characters existed in real
life that their love couldn’t someday have a physical outlet. But these are not
real life characters and any slash you see in Tolkien’s text has been put there
by your own wishful thinking. If someone else’s wishful thinking has an
interspecies or het bent, you’re not any more qualified to claim
‘misinterpretation’ than they are. So get over yourself already and quit telling
other authors how to interpret their own wishful thinking. You’re not any more
right than they are.
Book/Gen? AU. In every form. We write what we wish had happened and apply our
own emotions to the characters we use for our own purposes. Yes, Tolkien left
entire fields of text open to interpretation and there’s nothing wrong with
interpreting things according to your own beliefs. But he also did a lot of
explaining in peripheral materials and unless you were present while he
discussed all of his intentions and meanings and had the opportunity to question
him at length, just mind your own damn business and let others take their own
interpretations with them into their fic. If you don’t like someone’s
interpretation, write your own damn story and explain it as you see it.
Het? AU. In every form. If you don’t like it, you have your own reasons but have
no cause or right to judge others for spending time on it. How slash got to be
the norm and het got to be actually frowned upon and ‘squicky,’ I’ll never
understand – but that’s the order of things in this fandom and I accept it just
as I accept every other genre – with a very large grain of salt and a healthy
dose of suspension of disbelief. I have no right to judge anyone by their
preferences any more than you have a right to judge me for mine. The big
difference I’ve noted between het authors and slash authors is that every single
het author acknowledges that their work, regardless of correct canon, etc., is
AU while there are several slash authors who truly believe that slash is written
into Tolkien’s text…er…somewhere and if I don’t see it, it’s because I’m dense
or homophobic or any other number of insulting assumptions. And even some of
those who don’t believe that think of het as more AU than slash. O_o Are there
really degrees of AU? Isn’t that like saying one individual is more pregnant
than another? Obviously they’re reading a different book than I am but again –
that is their interpretation and I have no more right to judge them than I do
those who prefer Frodo as a waif who couldn’t have bungled his way out of the
Shire without Sam pointing out the direction.
OK, that’s my own, personal issue and I’ll spare you further dramatics…
I read and enjoy every one of these genres and I’m not the easiest person to
please when it comes to fic. I certainly don’t like everything I see and some
things do disgust me. But I keep my more acidic comments to myself except when
discussing things one-on-one with a friend as does most everyone but the few who
seem to think it’s fun to drag someone and their work into the lj limelight for
sport.
But, back to my point…
Hobbit/hobbit slash is no better than hobbit/big person slash and if you’re up
on a pedestal about it, you should get yourself down right now. Slash in general
is no better than het and if you say you avoid het because it’s not well
written, you’re kidding yourself. Yes, it’s few and far between and peppered
with teenaged authors and their pet Mary Sues…but so is slash. Sam has been
Mary-Sue-ized to death, in case I’m the only one who’s noticed. And I hate to
break it to you, but from what I’ve been able to observe in this fandom, het is
few and far between because even the best of it is sneered at. And don’t let’s
we het people get swelled heads here because het is no better than slash simply
because it’s supposedly the ‘natural order of things.’ Putting Frodo into bed
with a female is no more noble than putting him there with Sam and let’s just
admit that we do it because it’s what we want to see. And if you’re a gen author
and think you’re better than any of these others, you’ve got another thing
coming. We are all guilty of using and abusing these characters for our own ends
and the sooner we face up to that and accept that what we do does not make the
world rotate on its axis, the happier we’ll all be. Anyone who writes something
they could get prosecuted and sued for trying to publish has no room to cast
aspersions on someone else who does the same thing just because it’s a little
different than what you’d like to see.
Am I saying that we are all equal in talent and you have no right to dislike
something you don’t find entertaining? Of course not and if that’s what you’re
getting from this, you should just hit your back button now and unfriend me
because you haven’t been listening and I don’t think I want to waste time
explaining it to you. There are those whom I consider excellent authors in this
fandom and those I won’t waste my time on. But just because I, personally, don’t
like something does not make the person who wrote it perverted or wrong or
unworthy of the fans they have.
There are those who avoid me because of friends I’ve made, people I’ve
supported, things I’ve written and opinions I’ve shared and yeah, it can sting a
little when I’m judged as a person on things like that when I make an enormous
effort every single day not to judge others by such superficial means. But it
makes me absolutely furious when authors who are simply participating in the
community – just like every one of us – get drawn out and publicly lashed
because someone was stupid enough to waste their time on something that was free
in the first place and should have been considered a gift in the second. When
your Aunt Martha gifts you a horrid, puce sweater that’s three sizes too big
with one arm shorter than the other, do you ask her how she could have the nerve
to present you with something so horrid and how dare she give you something puce
when you prefer lavender and then tell her she's ugly, too? Or do you smile, say
thank you and tuck it into a drawer where you’ll never have to look at it again?
If you do the former, there’s something seriously wrong with you and God help
your Aunt Martha.
So let’s all just stop pretending that we’re more right than the next author and
let’s quit dragging others down for something we can avoid by simply paging down
or hitting the back button. We’re all supposedly adults here – do we really need
to be told, ‘don’t like, don’t read’? Do manners not apply on the internet? I
think we are all taking our own opinions just a little too seriously here. And I
hate to break it to you – not one of them has any more merit than the next.
And one more thing…
Please, I beg you – don’t leave the community because someone has applied their
own personal opinions or beliefs to something you’ve contributed. Don’t get
discouraged by someone who would be more than happy to be responsible for you
slinking away in defeat.
Yes, we all get disgusted with what sometimes goes on here – how could we not?
This is supposed to be fun and entertaining and even a learning experience and
somehow, every now and then, it turns into who can insult someone in the most
acidic, high-handed way possible. But how about if we let the careless
maliciousness of others speak more to their own lack of character than our
opinions of ourselves and our contributions? How about if we don’t let them tell
us what to think about ourselves and our own opinions? How about if we value the
opinions of those who really do care over those who are just trying to find
something interesting to say on their lj or in some forum or another? If their
lives are that boring that the only thing they have to talk about is your fic.,
good or bad, you’ve already won, anyway.