I have to disagree. A lot of people absolutely refuse to read het (like I presume people refuse to read slash, but I don't they are in the TW fandom). If 90% of the fic in a fandom is slash, then people might be shocked by a het story. Personally, I prefer slash, but I am not squicked by the evil het. If people are going to be offended by het, then I would want to warn them to pass on by.
However, the names should be enough, usually, so there should be no need of a het warning when you have pairing: Jack/Ianto/Gwen, for example.
I am re-thinking my stance on all of this, though.
But if you can see that it's Jack/Ianto/Gwen, would it be just as easy to see that a fic has "Ianto/Gwen" as a pairing, and would assume that the story would contain het, just as seeing "Jack/Ianto" as a pairing would lead you to assume the story has slash?
I've never liked the idea of warning people to "pass on by". Maybe I'm crazy in thinking that people can make up their own minds in what they want to read. There was a trend of fic containing non-J/I pairings telling J/I fans not to read it, and that bothered me. I love J/I, but I like other things too, and I'm willing to read them, but the author was telling me not to. Luckily, that trend seems to have passed. I think anyone is going to look at the pairings (and warnings in the case of kinkfic or fic containing excessive violence, for example) listed on a story and be able to determine for themselves if it's something they want to read.
I know it was defensive mechanism against receiving flames, but anyone who isn't just going to pass on a story with pairings they don't like and stop and flame is clearly not worth the minuscule time and effort it takes to type "if you don't like my pairing, don't read it".
No no no! Sorry, I expressed myself poorly there. I didn't mean to tell people "pass on by" - I meant that I would generally put the warning there AS A WAY to let people know what it was, so they could make the decision to skip the fic if it wasn't to their taste.
As you can see, I do think the pairing should be enough warning, too.
I understand what you are saying, because from a preferences standpoint I see why a note for het may be helpful to people. But from a meta standpoint, I pretty much refuse to give that kind of statement. Treating all sexual orientations equally in fandom means treating the notes/warnings equally for me, and that means there is no het note (just like in "straight" fandoms I wouldn't leave a slash-note). This inches the discussion into, 'who is the header for?' And quite possibly in fandom technically the header is for the reader as a source of information about the story. For me as a writer, the header is the space (like the blurb on a book) where I'm willing to give a certain amount of information to a) entice but b) leave it open enough. I will likely always err on the side of way too little information in headers because I don't believe in giving away that much about a story. As I said above, I'm not even a fan of having a / in there to denote ... something. A relationship? How is that defined? I'm not a fan of having gen be separate from pairing fic because it limits both. I'm anti-categorizations in short and I think it shows in my stance on het-warnings, among other things. I believe that there are stories that can be easily categorized (PWPs, for the most part). But anything that isn't a PWP... dude, murky waters there if you try to slap a header tgether that actually represents the story.
Again, I think part of it depends on targeting an audience and if you want to target a specific audience with your story and therefore have a header that suits their tastes (eg. a note abut het if they possibly don't like het). I get why, for example, someone writing a shit load of J/I would end up having a note and a more extensive header when suddenly Gwen pops up in a /-setting. But for people that write to broad tastes, in a variety of settings with different plot twists anyway in their stories, I then don't expect much of anything in terms of notes and warnings and just let the story sweep me up.
I know there is meta somewhere about the parallels and non-parallels between book blurbs and Fic headers (mostly in terms of consume and the internet being a faster medium and you wanting to know what you spend your 10 min reading rather than just starting a story and then realizing you hate it), and I probably prefer the blurbs to the headers.
Is this a pseudo-elitist-artsy "I want people to see my stories for themselves etc etc" stance? Quite possibly. I'm just speaking from experience that I find stries hard to categorize when they are not clear /-PWPs, and I feel the / descriptor limits a story.
That said, I drew this fairly OT from your comment, apologies.
I do understand you point (I think). It *is* rather ridiculous to try to "slap a header together" for a story that has any kind of depth to it (unlike mine, which are pretty much all PWP, so...).
On the other hand, if you want to, you can probably find a summary for most traditionally published fiction somewhere, no matter how complicated. I'm probably dating myself (not that way) here, but, for example, something like a Cliff's Notes version of War and Peace is what I mean. (Or, much more frightening, Ulysses.) So, really, if you didn't want to invest all that time in reading a book you would hate, you could read the summary. There seems to be a similar idea at Shelfari, which I never visit anymore, but I'm always getting "should I read this book" emails from them. Of course, this is what friends used to be for, before we had the Internet.
So, yeah, the header is there to give people an idea of what they can expect to find and what they can expect to spend their time on. I think a lot of people do use them that way. If a writer doesn't abide by the norms of a community, he or she may be overlooked or even condemned.
And here's another question. Is it a good thing to limit oneself to only a specific pairing, or a particular kink, or whatever? Maybe, maybe not. For me, personally, it's probably not a good thing. The headers let me feed my sometimes overwhelming obsession with very little effort, which is great. Except when it's not. Which is like, right now, when I've been on LJ all fucking day, rather than doing research or cleaning my sand-filled house, or something. Nonetheless, like with many other things, I continue to over-indulge.
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51stcenturyfox) wrote2009-04-13 07:51 pm
no subject
If 90% of the fic in a fandom is slash, then people might be shocked by a het story. Personally, I prefer slash, but I am not squicked by the evil het. If people are going to be offended by het, then I would want to warn them to pass on by.
However, the names should be enough, usually, so there should be no need of a het warning when you have pairing: Jack/Ianto/Gwen, for example.
I am re-thinking my stance on all of this, though.
no subject
I've never liked the idea of warning people to "pass on by". Maybe I'm crazy in thinking that people can make up their own minds in what they want to read. There was a trend of fic containing non-J/I pairings telling J/I fans not to read it, and that bothered me. I love J/I, but I like other things too, and I'm willing to read them, but the author was telling me not to. Luckily, that trend seems to have passed. I think anyone is going to look at the pairings (and warnings in the case of kinkfic or fic containing excessive violence, for example) listed on a story and be able to determine for themselves if it's something they want to read.
I know it was defensive mechanism against receiving flames, but anyone who isn't just going to pass on a story with pairings they don't like and stop and flame is clearly not worth the minuscule time and effort it takes to type "if you don't like my pairing, don't read it".
My bad
As you can see, I do think the pairing should be enough warning, too.
no subject
Again, I think part of it depends on targeting an audience and if you want to target a specific audience with your story and therefore have a header that suits their tastes (eg. a note abut het if they possibly don't like het). I get why, for example, someone writing a shit load of J/I would end up having a note and a more extensive header when suddenly Gwen pops up in a /-setting. But for people that write to broad tastes, in a variety of settings with different plot twists anyway in their stories, I then don't expect much of anything in terms of notes and warnings and just let the story sweep me up.
I know there is meta somewhere about the parallels and non-parallels between book blurbs and Fic headers (mostly in terms of consume and the internet being a faster medium and you wanting to know what you spend your 10 min reading rather than just starting a story and then realizing you hate it), and I probably prefer the blurbs to the headers.
Is this a pseudo-elitist-artsy "I want people to see my stories for themselves etc etc" stance? Quite possibly. I'm just speaking from experience that I find stries hard to categorize when they are not clear /-PWPs, and I feel the / descriptor limits a story.
That said, I drew this fairly OT from your comment, apologies.
no subject
I do understand you point (I think). It *is* rather ridiculous to try to "slap a header together" for a story that has any kind of depth to it (unlike mine, which are pretty much all PWP, so...).
On the other hand, if you want to, you can probably find a summary for most traditionally published fiction somewhere, no matter how complicated. I'm probably dating myself (not that way) here, but, for example, something like a Cliff's Notes version of War and Peace is what I mean. (Or, much more frightening, Ulysses.) So, really, if you didn't want to invest all that time in reading a book you would hate, you could read the summary. There seems to be a similar idea at Shelfari, which I never visit anymore, but I'm always getting "should I read this book" emails from them. Of course, this is what friends used to be for, before we had the Internet.
So, yeah, the header is there to give people an idea of what they can expect to find and what they can expect to spend their time on. I think a lot of people do use them that way. If a writer doesn't abide by the norms of a community, he or she may be overlooked or even condemned.
And here's another question. Is it a good thing to limit oneself to only a specific pairing, or a particular kink, or whatever? Maybe, maybe not. For me, personally, it's probably not a good thing. The headers let me feed my sometimes overwhelming obsession with very little effort, which is great. Except when it's not. Which is like, right now, when I've been on LJ all fucking day, rather than doing research or cleaning my sand-filled house, or something. Nonetheless, like with many other things, I continue to over-indulge.
And now my own OT apology.