Another thing. I think this always bothered me, but I didn't realize it for a long while. We have designations of "slash" and "gen", right? Het isn't often used. So anyway, "gen" means "normal". So "slash" must, by that definition, mean "abnormal". I see any story that features Starsky and Hutch loving one another AS "gen", because that's what it is. It is normal. It is general. That is what they do. They *love* one another. That is canon. What isn't canon is *how* they love one another, but that they love one another is canon. It's right there on the screen, and I invite anyone who's a fan to sit up and tell me that they don't.
I think this is the trouble that I've been having all along, and why I've kept myself out of the argument. To me, the reason that I like having things designated as "slash" or "het" or "gen" is that, sometimes (and in some fandoms), it boils down to what type of story I want to read at any particular time more than what the pairing is. This doesn't mostly happen in S&H, but it definitely does in, say, M*A*S*H: some days, I want to read about Hawkeye and BJ OR Hawkeye and Trapper having hot m/m sex. Some days, I want to read a Hawkeye-gets-married-and-has-a-kid fic, and I don't necessarily care who his partner is; I just want her to be female because it's (understandably, considering post-war would've been the mid-1950s) hard to find fic where Hawkeye is married and has a biological child...but not to/with a woman. And sometimes, I want to read true genfic: fic with no pairing, either about the ensemble or focusing on one character, but not involving romantic or sexual relationships of any kind. And I never saw that as treating same-sex relationships differently in any way, because I was treating them the same way as opposite-sex ones: I was separating stories containing either of them from stories containing neither, containing no relationships, and I wasn't placing more value on any of those categories. To me, it was no different from separating the comedies from the dramas from the sci-fi movies at the video store: I like all of them, but sometimes, I'm in the mood for one over the others, and I like to be able to easily find what I want.
BUT! But. Even before this conversation, as I got more heavily into a couple of fandoms where my OTP was m/f, I began realizing that--as you said--"gen" is often used where "het" is the proper designation. And not only is that horribly offensive, because--again, as you said--it implies that het is the norm, it also renders my entire argument above, the one that's been my thought process since I got into fandom, entirely useless. Because if searching for "gen" can't get me a differentiation between gen and get, then basically what I'm searching for is "slash" or "other"...and, since that's NOT what I want (like I said, sometimes I want hetfic, and sometimes I want genfic), it makes the entire system obsolete at best.
(And...I'm not continuing this in another comment, because--as usual--I am genetically incapable of saying anything in few than 4300 words, or however many it is that Livejournal gives you per comment. Which is sad when you consider that my longer story ever has been 1,000 and change.)
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timeasmymeasure
Butting into to other people's conversations again...
Date: 2010-07-04 05:49 am (UTC)I think this is the trouble that I've been having all along, and why I've kept myself out of the argument. To me, the reason that I like having things designated as "slash" or "het" or "gen" is that, sometimes (and in some fandoms), it boils down to what type of story I want to read at any particular time more than what the pairing is. This doesn't mostly happen in S&H, but it definitely does in, say, M*A*S*H: some days, I want to read about Hawkeye and BJ OR Hawkeye and Trapper having hot m/m sex. Some days, I want to read a Hawkeye-gets-married-and-has-a-kid fic, and I don't necessarily care who his partner is; I just want her to be female because it's (understandably, considering post-war would've been the mid-1950s) hard to find fic where Hawkeye is married and has a biological child...but not to/with a woman. And sometimes, I want to read true genfic: fic with no pairing, either about the ensemble or focusing on one character, but not involving romantic or sexual relationships of any kind. And I never saw that as treating same-sex relationships differently in any way, because I was treating them the same way as opposite-sex ones: I was separating stories containing either of them from stories containing neither, containing no relationships, and I wasn't placing more value on any of those categories. To me, it was no different from separating the comedies from the dramas from the sci-fi movies at the video store: I like all of them, but sometimes, I'm in the mood for one over the others, and I like to be able to easily find what I want.
BUT! But. Even before this conversation, as I got more heavily into a couple of fandoms where my OTP was m/f, I began realizing that--as you said--"gen" is often used where "het" is the proper designation. And not only is that horribly offensive, because--again, as you said--it implies that het is the norm, it also renders my entire argument above, the one that's been my thought process since I got into fandom, entirely useless. Because if searching for "gen" can't get me a differentiation between gen and get, then basically what I'm searching for is "slash" or "other"...and, since that's NOT what I want (like I said, sometimes I want hetfic, and sometimes I want genfic), it makes the entire system obsolete at best.
(And...I'm not continuing this in another comment, because--as usual--I am genetically incapable of saying anything in few than 4300 words, or however many it is that Livejournal gives you per comment. Which is sad when you consider that my longer story ever has been 1,000 and change.)