shower thoughts on genfic and identity
Apr. 22nd, 2020 11:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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noyabeanslast night while in the shower it suddenly occurred to me that if I had encountered the existence of genfic and platonic ships then maybe I would not have been so miserable in my early fic-writing years.
up until I discovered haikyuu and started reading haikyuu fic (this was circa august/september 2016) I had never known that there were words for the content I wanted to read and write. gen fic. shippy gen. gen or pre-slash.
all my exposure to fiction and fanfic across all my fandoms up until that point had always portrayed romantic ships. the only ~non-shippy~ fics were often crack, or "team" fics, which were good, but not what I wanted to read. there were hardly any stories exploring the relationship between two characters without them ending up in a happily ever after, with roses and kisses and romantic whatevers.
my first exposure to fanfic was when I was 12 years old, and I wrote all sorts of fic in the years after - most of which I can't bring myself to look back at anymore, because they reek so painfully not just of a girl who didn't understand love, but of a girl who didn't want to write love but made herself write it because she thought that was what it meant to be "a good fic", because she thought "every fic has gotta have romance", because the wider fandom she'd interacted with seemed to want it, because everyone else was writing it.
I've always been fascinated by the ways characters interact with each other, and that translated even into my kpop days - I knew I didn't ship ship them the way some fans do, I just wanted to explore the kinds of friendships they must have built, the kind of meaning that those friendship held. and past the immaturity of my writing it's so clear that I still wrote them as a "ship" because that seemed to be the norm, because to a teenager who didn't know any better, who didn't have older fandom friends to set an example, writing love stories seemed to be the only way to explore a relationship, that the endgame of any relationship would have to be falling in love.
I entered animanga fandom only after I was already in university; at that point, I was only consuming whatever fic caught my eye, passively interacting with the fandom without ever being actually engaged. I was still writing ships as though they were romantic when I just. wanted to explore their dynamic. I have fics on ao3 that were tagged as "friendship" and "bromance" while using the / tag instead of &. (to be fair, it was before I understood the ao3 tagging system LMAO) it wasn't until half? a year later when I got into Haikyuu and started delving into HQ fic that I discovered the existence of shippy gen fic and it felt like, oh. so this is it. this is where all the pieces fall into place. this is what I've been looking for.
on a more personal tangent, I wondered yesterday if learning this earlier would have sparked me learning about the ace-aro spec way earlier than I ended up doing. I would have learnt so much more about myself so much earlier if I had known romance need not be the endgame for anything, instead of thinking that maybe I was too young, or maybe I just felt romance fics tropey, or maybe I was too shy and embarrassed about love.
anyway, this whole thought was brought to you by the reminder that in recent years, after learning that stories without romance exist!, I've found myself consciously avoiding books with synopses that hint at love - at two people on separate journeys and finding each other, whatever.
don't get me wrong, I've come to understand how love works, how romance can be giddying and delightful and painful and the whole spectrum of feeling. I love all my ships in both their platonic and romantic variants, but I want the world to know that relationships can form without ending up in love. that love can take many forms and it doesn't always have to be romantic. that shippy gen stories exist, that pre-slash stories exist, that good fic doesn't mean romance.
I want readers who were my age and dabbling in fiction and fandom to know that gen fics exist.
well, I say all that, as though I'm writing for them. I'm not, not really. this year (or rather, in the last couple of years) almost all of my fics have been on the shippy gen spectrum. I have been less interested in the kissing and handholding and awkward get-togethers (wait, this is in the wrong order) than I have been in exploring how characters deal with change and grow with each other. and it has been so liberating to know that I can write them, that people will read them. I can get my fill of romantic fic by reading, but I'll write all the platonic I want if nobody else is going to! and as I reread my timeskip series yesterday, all of which are genfic or shippy gen at best, I realised that I have never felt as free as I do right now :')
yes. well. this was a ramble. thank you for reading it anyway
also, I remember very clearly the fic that taught me the word "shippy gen", and I treasure it very deeply.
up until I discovered haikyuu and started reading haikyuu fic (this was circa august/september 2016) I had never known that there were words for the content I wanted to read and write. gen fic. shippy gen. gen or pre-slash.
all my exposure to fiction and fanfic across all my fandoms up until that point had always portrayed romantic ships. the only ~non-shippy~ fics were often crack, or "team" fics, which were good, but not what I wanted to read. there were hardly any stories exploring the relationship between two characters without them ending up in a happily ever after, with roses and kisses and romantic whatevers.
my first exposure to fanfic was when I was 12 years old, and I wrote all sorts of fic in the years after - most of which I can't bring myself to look back at anymore, because they reek so painfully not just of a girl who didn't understand love, but of a girl who didn't want to write love but made herself write it because she thought that was what it meant to be "a good fic", because she thought "every fic has gotta have romance", because the wider fandom she'd interacted with seemed to want it, because everyone else was writing it.
I've always been fascinated by the ways characters interact with each other, and that translated even into my kpop days - I knew I didn't ship ship them the way some fans do, I just wanted to explore the kinds of friendships they must have built, the kind of meaning that those friendship held. and past the immaturity of my writing it's so clear that I still wrote them as a "ship" because that seemed to be the norm, because to a teenager who didn't know any better, who didn't have older fandom friends to set an example, writing love stories seemed to be the only way to explore a relationship, that the endgame of any relationship would have to be falling in love.
I entered animanga fandom only after I was already in university; at that point, I was only consuming whatever fic caught my eye, passively interacting with the fandom without ever being actually engaged. I was still writing ships as though they were romantic when I just. wanted to explore their dynamic. I have fics on ao3 that were tagged as "friendship" and "bromance" while using the / tag instead of &. (to be fair, it was before I understood the ao3 tagging system LMAO) it wasn't until half? a year later when I got into Haikyuu and started delving into HQ fic that I discovered the existence of shippy gen fic and it felt like, oh. so this is it. this is where all the pieces fall into place. this is what I've been looking for.
on a more personal tangent, I wondered yesterday if learning this earlier would have sparked me learning about the ace-aro spec way earlier than I ended up doing. I would have learnt so much more about myself so much earlier if I had known romance need not be the endgame for anything, instead of thinking that maybe I was too young, or maybe I just felt romance fics tropey, or maybe I was too shy and embarrassed about love.
anyway, this whole thought was brought to you by the reminder that in recent years, after learning that stories without romance exist!, I've found myself consciously avoiding books with synopses that hint at love - at two people on separate journeys and finding each other, whatever.
don't get me wrong, I've come to understand how love works, how romance can be giddying and delightful and painful and the whole spectrum of feeling. I love all my ships in both their platonic and romantic variants, but I want the world to know that relationships can form without ending up in love. that love can take many forms and it doesn't always have to be romantic. that shippy gen stories exist, that pre-slash stories exist, that good fic doesn't mean romance.
I want readers who were my age and dabbling in fiction and fandom to know that gen fics exist.
well, I say all that, as though I'm writing for them. I'm not, not really. this year (or rather, in the last couple of years) almost all of my fics have been on the shippy gen spectrum. I have been less interested in the kissing and handholding and awkward get-togethers (wait, this is in the wrong order) than I have been in exploring how characters deal with change and grow with each other. and it has been so liberating to know that I can write them, that people will read them. I can get my fill of romantic fic by reading, but I'll write all the platonic I want if nobody else is going to! and as I reread my timeskip series yesterday, all of which are genfic or shippy gen at best, I realised that I have never felt as free as I do right now :')
yes. well. this was a ramble. thank you for reading it anyway
also, I remember very clearly the fic that taught me the word "shippy gen", and I treasure it very deeply.
