Fandom has always been sleazy; I just never paid any attention

[fpb]

IN one form or another, fandom has dominated my life. I started out in comics when I was sixteen, and since then I only left comics fandom to plunge right back into JKR fandom in the internet age - which, to us old-time dead tree users, is fandom on steroids.

One of the hardest things to endure when I came back has been the obsession with sex. It really struck me at the time of the 2006 World Cup, when I became aware that Livejournal hosted - or at least partly hosted - a kind of fandom who used real people - in particular, sportspeople - to project on them all kinds of graphic sexual fantasies. Let anyone take it ill if they want, but this strikes me as a revolting intrusion, appropriating the real lives of real people for no better reason than mental or physical masturbation. It is the coward's version of rape, snatching someone you only know by sight in order to force your ugly sexual obsessions on him or her. You might as well write slash about your own family, and it makes such things as Mark Chapman much more easy to understand.

Certainly, writers have always used real people. I do. But I never involved a real person in my stories - with the exception of Debbie Wallace, to whom I wanted to pay explicit homage - without moving them away from background and altering character and name. In most cases, I wanted to pay homage to people I regarded as heroic or otherwise great (one fic features my mother, Jack Kirby, and Hayao Miyazaki, among others); certainly not to indulge in sexual fantasies about them. And even so, I took measures to distance the imaginative figures from their real-life originals. I think that is what all sane writers do. When I wanted to use the sinewy but pretty face and figure of a (then) young female athlete, since retired, I sent her 600 years into the future, gave her super-powers, and made her the time-displaced daughter of Lord Camelot and the Silver Angel, trying to rescue a self-degraded mankind.

I can understand the desire to build fantasies on a particularly memorable face or presence; that is, after all, why playwrights and opera composers write parts for definite people. Several of Mozart and Verdi's best known parts were written for women they loved, and I strongly suspect that Joss Whedon has tweaked the character of Buffy to fit it to Sarah Michelle Gellar, and that is why her performance as Buffy is better than anything she has done before or since. The difference, however, is between writing a memorable part for a woman you know and perhaps love, and prostituting her image. It is not even really a matter of sex as such: I find the whole idea of putting words in real people's mouths embarrassing and dubious. It is as much as to ascribe views - something I hate when it is done to me, and that I would not do to anyone. Besides, as a historian, I have all too clear a notion of how hard it is to be sure of the motives even of people you know well. And of course, to burden them with your own fantasies is to that as murder after rape is to jaywalking.

But real-people fandom is only a feature of something I regard as a much bigger problem. In my first period as a fan, I used as much energy and resources as I could mobilize into an effort to become a professional cartoonist and promote my own comics characters - the Silver Angel, Lord Camelot, the Liberators, Minerva, and so on. I have since then come to be sincerely and bitterly grateful that I never succeeded and that the children of my imagination are still so obscure that nobody has even bothered to swipe them; because it has become clear that, whatever I did and whatever I said, if I had ever had even a moderate amount of success, nothing could have prevented some self-satisfied pervert somewhere from slashing the Silver Angel and her daughter, and then taking offence if I complained. The Silver Angel has been a part of my life since my teens. I cannot and will not let the bloody public run amok with her. Rather than do that, I will live and die unknown.

(I do, of course, value the opposite, and I have actually asked the great kennahijja to write stories about my characters. The touch of a genius in action on figures one loves is both beautiful and desirable. But that does not mean that I would allow figures that are part of my life to be raped for someone's foul fun.)

The absurd possessive sense of fans towards characters is a notorious enough issue; bad enough if the criticism of incompetent authors such as George Lucas is deserved, but grotesque beyond description when we are talking of first-rate writers such as JK Rowling. But at least the debates of Harmonians and others are carried out at a high level of intelligence and over serious issues. Where masturbatory fantasies become an issue, then I simply do not want to have any part in it.

I imagine that in some ways I have always been naive. I wonder how many fans will believe that I read Vampirella because I liked Archie Goodwin's stories. (And Tom Sutton's art, and Jose Gonzalez's, and all the excellent and exceptional artists that Jim Warren managed to get to work for him.) But it is the truth, and, in fact, going back to the early Vampis after decades, I found that not only was Goodwin the charming person I knew from convention meetings, but also the most literate and stylish writer before Steve Gerber and Alan Moore. His use of language was haunting, always amazingly apt and inventive, with every word invested with its full impact and value. It is hard to believe that he was writing comic books at the same time as Stan Lee and Roy Thomas.

I will not say that I did not read porn - apart from anything else, that would have been impossible in any comics market. But in my mind, there was - and still is, I guess - a very sharp dividing line between porn, hard or softcore, and ordinary comics (or cinema, TV, you name it). I simply did not conceive of that area of shadow in between, where porn penetrates and (to my mind) pollutes ordinary endeavour, which I now call sleaze. I could understand, for instance, Vampirella's ridiculous costume being an aid to sales; but then, until Warren's little empire was well on its way to collapsing, there was not actually a whole lot of sex or suggestion in the Vampirella stories themselves. (That was, I suppose, mainly thanks to the influence of Goodwin, who created a viable and interesting character, strong and sensitive, whose tradition lasted well beyond the couple of dozen stories he wrote. Goodwin essentially disregarded the sex element, writing a mix of romance, horror and superhero comic with his trademark excellent scripting, and I have never found any reason to be embarrassed at his work. And we might reflect on the fact that his Vampirella lasted for over a hundred issues, while none of the brutish, bloodied, perversely sexual reworkings of the character by Harris have managed more than twenty-two.)

Looking back, I simply reacted with hostility and denial to any manifestation of what I now see as a lasting and fairly pervasive presence of sleaze in comics fandom. Thus I hated and go on hating the character and world of Wonder Woman, and would not touch her with a barge pole. (A thermonuclear bomb, perhaps; a barge-pole would not be enough - not even if swung hard at her head.) I despised the bikini costumes that Dave Cockrum created for the girls of the Legion of Super-Heroes in the early seventies. And even as I was at the height of my admiration for the great Claremont-Byrne-Austin run of Uncanny X-Men, John Byrne's frequent bursts of outright lechery struck me as both irresponsible and damaging to the story. When you are reading a truly great saga of heroism, personal morality, terror, and the tragic temptation of immense power, you positively do not want to see an erect nipple on a picture of the main heroine in action, or see her draped in a costume drawn from the Histoire d'O movie. It was my very strong feeling that this kind of stuff actually damaged the story, drawing attention away from its real and driving content, and so was even commercially, let alone artistically, bloody stupid.

What I have now realized, and why I am writing, is that this sort of thing has been part of fandom from before I was involved, constantly affecting its social mores, and feeding into the talent pool. If John Byrne, among others, thought it entirely right and proper to deface the greatest work he will ever do with infantile sexual graffiti, it is because, long before he became professional (and John Byrne had a long background in early seventies fandom), he had been a part of a social milieu where sleaze was normal. Colleen Doran has chapter and verse on it (http://adistantsoil.com/2009/12/01/my-god-its-full-of-wank/), and her irate account of fannish ways is rather depressing. But what struck me was the interview she linked to, for the story of Heidi Saha; for the interview's subject was a woman costume maker (http://www.enjolrasworld.com/Richard%20Arndt/Angelique%20The%20Unconventional%20ComiCon%20Costumer.htm) who seems to have happily lent herself to the whole sleazy culture of convention costume shows, merrily going for every underdressed "heroine" part she could. (Who even remembers Marvel's character Satana?) And yet even she was struck and disgusted by the fandom exploitation of a then fourteen-year-old contemporary, Heidi Saha (http://mluebker.tripod.com/73_NYC.html for some photos), saying just enough of her story to make sure that it is understood to be horrible. Child abuse in public, with the partly witting cooperation of her own mother. Of course, in the early seventies child sexual abuse was not yet the issue it has become since, and indeed it was just stories such as poor Heidi's that were beginning to wake people to the evil of it; but the fact is that the whole Heidi Saha episode, short though it was, was a part of mainstream fandom, and people remember it to this day - and, says Doran, not always with disgust.

That is the point. I well remember the Heidi posters and artbook being advertised in the backs of dozens of Warren mags at the time. I vaguely wondered who she was supposed to be and why her posters were being hawked, since so far as I could see she was neither an actress nor any other kind of personality; and I also remember wondering about her age from the childlike features of her face. I was never motivated enough to find out. But what I have now found out, what struck me across the face like a wet fish, is that she was part of the same fandom where all my favourite comics were being promoted and indeed justly glorified. The costume show in which she came third featured two people dressed as Darkseid and Desaad - from Jack Kirby's unsurpassed masterpiece, New Gods - as winners. At the same time as the art of comics was reaching, through the thunder of the King's fierce genius, its towering peak, storming the heights of art with one of the greatest masterpieces of the century, at the same time and in the same space, it was producing bad imitations of strip tease joints. The sleaze, the ugly and complacent vulgarity at women's expense, the grotesque obsession with the underdressed - not even naked, underdressed - female body, the tendential rapist attitude held back only by cowardice, were an integral part, an ineliminable part, of the same social phenomenon whose growth was leading people to recognize comics as an artform. And they have not changed since; indeed, they are more rooted than ever.

A closing note: I mentioned the great Swabian writer who signs herself kennahijja, of all the great fanfic writers I could have, not only because I regard her as the greatest, but also to show that I have no objection to the use of sex, even of perverted sex, as such, in stories. I should be a damned hypocrite otherwise, since I have done it myself. Genius can do that and make it worthwhile, and besides kennahijja is, to anyone who knows her, a remarkably civilized, gentle, mature person, with a great deal of self-knowledge and some humour to go with her genius. The point is that if there is a possible polar opposite to the sleazy kind of fan, she is it. And sleaze is what I object to.

Comments

[shezan.livejournal.com]

I've always found that 90% of fanfic is dross, 5% is interesting, 3% is bloody good and 2% is better than the source material. There is some pretty shabby stuff out there (pornish and otherwise) but by and large, I've always found that fantasy (by which I mean here sexual fantasizing) writing, even of the more extreme variety, does not translate into actual similar or even remotely-inspired conduct. So it's pathetic? Most people's writing abilities, let alone interior life, is pretty pathetic.

That being said, just when I had decided I LOATHED any idea of RPF for pretty much the reasons you said, someone wrote the most amazing Peter O'Toole/Leni Riefenstahl fic, Black and White, Still. Which basically proved again that you can write absolutely ANYTHING, as long as you have the talent to go with it.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Thomas Mann wrote Lotte in Weimar. But you have to be Thomas Mann to do that sort of thing. And not all of us are. That being said, the original of Maria Pinto in Second Chance told me that she loved the story.

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

It's hard to find good fanfic on the internet. I got into fandom long enough ago that it was pre-internet, and everything I've written was published in fanzines. The big difference is that most fanzines were published by an actual editor, and you got to know who put out a good zine and who didn't. (And the ones who didn't frequently either started editing better, or didn't publish any more, since the word got around.) I kinda miss those days. Zines are still around, and I usually pick up a good one or two at MediaWest Con, but it's not like it used to be.

Edited to add: I agree that RPS sucks, it's right up(down?) there with MPREG and other dregs of fanfic

[shezan.livejournal.com]

My reaction to MPREG is instinctively yours - I find it yucky - but of course, there will be THE odd story that actually works. lexin actually wrote a couple of MPREGs that work.

[lou mougin (from livejournal.com)]

Very very true. I tried to hang on and fit into a fanfic group once upon a time, and most of the folks there (whom I met online) were great. But I had a problem with a lot of the fic...it just wasn't anything I could read. No action, for the most part, just romance, internalist ramblings, or slash. It really didn't have a heck of a lot to do with superhero stories, and I couldn't much comment on it for fear of hurting somebody. I hung on with the group for cameraderie, and they were often nice about reading my stories. But when you don't read or comment on theirs...what can you do?

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

I don't think a preoccupation with sex and sleaze is something particular to "fandom." We only remember, for the most part, the great poets and writers and artists of previous eras, but porn, sleaze, and Sturgeon's Law are not new phenomena in the modern age. We just haven't preserved a lot of Elizabethan RPF rapefics and ancient Greek porn. But we know it was there, and probably quite popular.

The Internet is the great leveling medium, though. That's what's new.

I've posted before about my own thoughts about using someone else's characters. I can hardly object to it, since I write fan fiction. I do believe that as a matter of courtesy and respect, you shouldn't use someone else's characters in a way the creator would object to, but I think that's more etiquette than legal or moral requirement. (The legality of fan fiction is actually still a bit of a murky area to begin with.)

I know that if Alexandra Quick were an original series about which fan fiction was being written, there would be all kinds of stories and pairings that would squick me (I already had one fan imply that Alexandra and her brother would be hot. :P) But if I were going to allow any fan fiction, I'd have to accept that most of it would be crap I'd hate. Which I think is the route Rowling took. I'm sure she knows there's all kinds of sleazy, horrific stuff out there, but she puts up with it for the sake of the sincere fans who are just trying to tell their own stories, however badly.

I totally don't get RPF, though, and I think it's pretty disrespectful to the people involved, especially when you are putting them in sexual situations with people with whom they almost certainly would have no desire to be with in real life.

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

The other element has been the culture of fandom specifically. For example, I can't really think of anywhere outside of anime fan-gatherings where yaoi paddles would be socially acceptable. (Well, perhaps BDSM clubs.)

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

Why did you make me Google that? Why???

[8bitbard.livejournal.com]

Hence why I avoid anime fandom despite liking a fair amount of anime.

[affablestranger.livejournal.com]

The 'sex obsessed' portion of fandom hit me in the face like a shovel when Doctor Who returned to screens a few years ago, and it got worse and worse when David Tennant took the role. To his credit, he seems to have taken what's been being done with his likeness in fanfics in stride, but I can't imagine what he really thinks of it. I know lots of fans, predominantly women, who go to... ahem... great lengths (and depths) in their fics about Doctor #10 and Rose, Martha, Sally Sparrow, or whomever.

It's kinda killed fandom for me, to an extent. Because I never thought of Doctor Who as "sexy". Ever. Yeah, I crushed on Nicola Bryant when I was a teenager, but it was a boyish crush, not a fetishization. That's what I think get me about it.

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

Part of it has to do, I think, with the way the writers of the new series have rather deliberately sexualized The Doctor. RTD's tenure has come to resemble nothing so much as bad fanfic, in every sense of the word, out to the limit of what he could get away with on what is ostensibly a children's program. With canon like that, is it any wonder?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

But it would not have been any different had he been as chaste as snow. When you have people slashing - and I am not, repeat not, joking - Calvin and Hobbes, the grotesque mania for the crotch really is unstoppable.

[affablestranger.livejournal.com]

True. RTD did sexy The Doctor up and contrive companions with love interest in him to cater to what I consider the lowest denominator of the viewing public and fandom.

[sanscouronne.livejournal.com]

This may be throwing the baby out with the bath water, but I renounced all fan fiction as abusive of the true spirit of the original since coming across the smutty stuff written for Harry Potter, but more especially, for Lord of the Rings.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It is throwing the baby out with the bath water, but you are under no obligation to read anyone's fics, including mine (though I would be flattered if you did). You have enough to think of anyway. And that is something that fandom, if it had a mind, would have to consider: how repulsive its ways would be to outsiders. My mother, who is a liberal of sorts and getting more liberal as she gets older, asked me what kind of perverts I'd found myself among and had trouble accepting that this was a bunch of regular mostly teen-age girls.

[sanscouronne.livejournal.com]

I do not know if it is fan fiction, but I LOVED your short story about Orpheus and Eurydice.
As for the HP fiction, I'm afraid that I am not well-versed enough in Harry Potter (having not read the last few books and skimming the previous ones) to appreciate your fan fiction.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

If fan fiction is fiction using someone else's characters, which seems the most defensible definition to me, it's pretty broad -- for example, the Aeneid, and possibly the Inferno, and the whole of Arthuriana[1]... Of course, it might matter for some whether the original author is living, recently dead, 1000 years dead and obscure, or outright Anonymous.

[1] Is Lancelot or Galahad someone's Gary Stu? An idealized character introduced into an existing work?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

No. Lancelot AND Galahad are two aspects - two persons, to use the language of Christian theology - of the supreme god of the Celts, Lug. I wrote a book some fifteen years ago to prove just that, which was published in Belgium in 1999.

[swordygardener.livejournal.com]

it really struck me at the time of the 2006 World Cup, when I became aware that Livejournal hosted - or at least partly hosted - a kind of fandom who used real people - in particular, sportspeople - to project on them all kinds of graphic sexual fantasies.

It really struck me at the time when I was ten, when I became aware that the world hosted - everywhere - a kind of fandom who used real people - in particular, actresses - to project on them all kinds of graphic sexual fantasies.

Pin-up pictures are so evil and perverted and all men having one should be put into prison.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

And you are under the impression that you have made some sort of point.

It's always good to check...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

This person is not only very foolish, but an obvious sockpuppet. Its LJ has only just been started and mentions no friends or interests. So it gets banned with a notice that, really, you should try something less pathetic.

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

That article about Angelique Trouvere brought back some way old memories for me. She was around years and years ago when I first got into Trek fandom. I'd never heard the story about Heidi Saha, though. Very sad.

Honestly, the scantily dressed women in the costume competition have been around forever at SF cons. I think it is an attention-getting thing on occasion, because you can be moderately good-looking at a con and still have every guy following you around. LOL sad but true. I'm not Heidi Klum by a long shot, but back in the day when I was I better shape than I am now, I hall-costumed as the chick from the Heavy Metal movie (can't remember now if she even had a name), costume borrowed from a friend, and yeah it was kind of fun to turn heads.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Well, that confirms my views. But you have to go even further back. One founding moment was when DC comics paid a psychologist named Charles Moulton Marsden to concentrate the whole imaginative world of the world war two pin-up in a character, and Moulton produced Wonder Woman, with her aggressive and deliberate overtones of bondage and lesbianism. The placing of Wonder Woman in the heroic context of the world of The BAtman and Superman may be seen as the matrix for everything that came later. The publishing industry had known and used the commercial appeal of softcore porn for longer than the United States had been an independent country; pornography effectively financed the transformation of publishing from an artisan trade into a corporate business. And it follows that an imaginative world that depends on capitalist publishing for its existence was almost doomed to involve a softcore element, however inappropriate.

Costumed girls at cons

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

There's a bitingly accurate treatment of this in Bimbos of the Death Sun (http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/b7827/?si=0). (Which is actually a pretty fun book -- don't let the title or the cover fool you, it's basically a murder mystery set at a con, with all sorts of in-jokes and references for sci-fi fans, especially con-goers.)

Personal anecdote for fpb: I once attended a con where Chris Claremont was one of the featured guests, and a friend of mine dressed as Illyana (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magik_%28comics%29) for the costume contest. She was a bit skeeved when Claremont followed her around afterwards.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

you can be moderately good-looking at a con and still have every guy following you around.
Comics cons in my time used to be pretty bad. Not only were they about 95% male, but I once took a gay friend of mine to one - this was the mid-nineties - and when we left, he turned and said "you are the most normal-looking person I have seen all day".