Interesting Excerpt on Fanfiction found during research!

“Media-Based Fan Fiction

Another genre, focusing on romantic/erotic relationships between male pairs, builds on both romances and male buddy stories. Noncommercial, media-based fan fiction centering around male-male relationships is written, privately circulated, and read almost entirely by women. Typically, two heterosexual buddies are drawn reluctanty into a homoerotic relationship based on their shared work. Their love is passionate, tender, egalitarian, and adventurous. It is unique in their community, not part of a homosexual subculture.

                The meaning of this genre to its audience is difficult to discover. Direct questioning of fan-writers elicits such answers as “I like men and if one is good, two is better” or less comprehensibly, “if one of them was a woman, there would be housework and who wants a hero washing socks?”

                Clever scholarly indirection, however, uncovers an interesting sidelight on the readers’ attitudes toward gender. This genre eschews female heroines. In fact, the fan community cautions new writers against creating a “Mary Sue,” a heroine wannabe who makes herself ridiculous by attempting too much: she is scornfully characterized as “saving the universe six times before breakfast.” Another tradition is that of the female minor character who “unfairly” thwarts a hero, as did T’Pring of Star Trek, whom some fans angrily characterize as a “bitch.”

                It would not be going too far to say that this woman’s genre, which is supported by a women’s community profoundly friendly to women, is actively hostile to female characters. Arguably, this genere gives women a chance to imagine having it all – adventures, status, primacy in hand-to-hand combat, and one true, egalitarian, all-satisfying love – precisely because it gives readers a chance to avoid thinking about women’s lives. Heroines are eschewed and villainesses jeered because the presence of female characters threatens the fantasy about egalitarian partners who are adventurous, technological overachievers. Women authors seem to find the “I want it all” fantasy impossibly daring for female characters; they project it onto male characters. Female images are there only to be transcended and left behind.”

Kray, Susan. “The Things Women Don’t Say.” Chapter 4, Science Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization, and the Academy”  

I found this and it made me really happy. I'd never thought about looking at fic this way, but I think it is very insightful. It makes me wonder what she was reading, who she was talking to, and when. :) Wish she would have told us what fandom she was referencing... they are all so different!! 

Also 21 Days till graduation...

"Waiting for the month of Come What May..."