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Fandom, Ageism, Racism and Random Musings
Apr. 3rd, 2023 10:34 am
I was talking with my spouse about tastes in porn the other night (as you do), and I mentioned that I’m currently writing a threesome fic. “Oh, which three?” he asked.
“The original three,” I said. “Michael, Fiona and Sam. Almost all the Burn Notice poly fics are those three.”
And my spouse, who has never sat down to watch an episode of Burn Notice, but has been absorbing more than he probably ever wanted to know through months of chronic exposure, said, “Huh. Well, I’m glad they let Sam in, I thought it would have been Jesse.”
And then we got into a half hour long discussion about ageism in fandom and racism in fandom, and who the fangirls consider conventionally attractive enough to be fuckable, and all the ways the writing can influence that. (It gets harder to dismiss Sam as too old to have a sex life when he’s canonically shagging his way through half the Miami country club set. And there’s the history with those three, going back years before the show even started, which creates a dynamic that can’t be replicated with Jesse.)
But it got me reflecting again, and I’ve always been puzzled by the ageism thing, even back before I got to be middle aged myself. Around the year 2000 when The West Wing was the latest big fandom, I found a fantastic slash fic with Leo McGarry and Lord John Marbury. It was so funny and snarky, and totally in character and yes, it was hot. So I was reccing this fic and getting the reaction, ‘Ewww! Old people sex! I don’t want to read that, I don’t need those images in my head!’ And I was all 0_0 But the fic! It’s so well written! Why will nobody love it? (A couple of people did read it and come around, so kudos to the writer for achieving that XD)
It varies so much with the fandom too. Any fandom that skews older tends to have less ageism (no surprise there). There was never a shortage of sex for middle aged, bald Picard in TNG fics, a show that came with a lot of women who’d been fans of the 60s Trek. In the Hannibal fandom, up until a couple of years ago I would have said that there was no ageism there at all, given the preponderance of opinion that circa 50-year-old Mads Mikkelsen is a definitive DILF. But apparently the Hannibal fans over on twitter found some idiots who were willing to overlook the gaslighting, manipulation and stabbing in that relationship, but thought a ten year age gap was beyond the pale. Honestly? The whole show is about this utterly obsessive, screwed up relationship between these two men – if you find the basic concept of it repellant, why are you even here??
And then there’s the racism issue, which I’ll admit I spent many years in fandom living in complete ignorance of. Part of that is because a lot of the early fandoms I wrote for were So Very White (Due South had one minor Black male character) or anime fandoms, where characters might have been nominally Japanese, but looked about as Japanese as I do. The place I really ran into the racism hard was in Hannibal. The number of people who would happily ship Hannibal and Will, despite the above-mentioned gaslighting, manipulation and stabbing, but who thought Jack Crawford was practically Satan because he talked Will into doing an unpleasant job and got angry and yelled a few times – that was quite an eye-opener. The justifications they would come up with for it were fun too – ‘It’s workplace abuse! Jack’s in a position of power!’ Hmmm, but Hannibal's in a position of power and committing medical malpractice, and having a frustrated boss shouting at you is hardly worse than the drugging and the stabbing, really, is it? So why do you find the shouting Black man so much more offensive than the serial killing white guy?
And honestly, I don’t have anywhere I’m really going with all of this, other than just to vomit out what I’ve been pondering over, and to say that we fans can be strange, and shallow. And blind, sometimes. So very blind.
“The original three,” I said. “Michael, Fiona and Sam. Almost all the Burn Notice poly fics are those three.”
And my spouse, who has never sat down to watch an episode of Burn Notice, but has been absorbing more than he probably ever wanted to know through months of chronic exposure, said, “Huh. Well, I’m glad they let Sam in, I thought it would have been Jesse.”
And then we got into a half hour long discussion about ageism in fandom and racism in fandom, and who the fangirls consider conventionally attractive enough to be fuckable, and all the ways the writing can influence that. (It gets harder to dismiss Sam as too old to have a sex life when he’s canonically shagging his way through half the Miami country club set. And there’s the history with those three, going back years before the show even started, which creates a dynamic that can’t be replicated with Jesse.)
But it got me reflecting again, and I’ve always been puzzled by the ageism thing, even back before I got to be middle aged myself. Around the year 2000 when The West Wing was the latest big fandom, I found a fantastic slash fic with Leo McGarry and Lord John Marbury. It was so funny and snarky, and totally in character and yes, it was hot. So I was reccing this fic and getting the reaction, ‘Ewww! Old people sex! I don’t want to read that, I don’t need those images in my head!’ And I was all 0_0 But the fic! It’s so well written! Why will nobody love it? (A couple of people did read it and come around, so kudos to the writer for achieving that XD)
It varies so much with the fandom too. Any fandom that skews older tends to have less ageism (no surprise there). There was never a shortage of sex for middle aged, bald Picard in TNG fics, a show that came with a lot of women who’d been fans of the 60s Trek. In the Hannibal fandom, up until a couple of years ago I would have said that there was no ageism there at all, given the preponderance of opinion that circa 50-year-old Mads Mikkelsen is a definitive DILF. But apparently the Hannibal fans over on twitter found some idiots who were willing to overlook the gaslighting, manipulation and stabbing in that relationship, but thought a ten year age gap was beyond the pale. Honestly? The whole show is about this utterly obsessive, screwed up relationship between these two men – if you find the basic concept of it repellant, why are you even here??
And then there’s the racism issue, which I’ll admit I spent many years in fandom living in complete ignorance of. Part of that is because a lot of the early fandoms I wrote for were So Very White (Due South had one minor Black male character) or anime fandoms, where characters might have been nominally Japanese, but looked about as Japanese as I do. The place I really ran into the racism hard was in Hannibal. The number of people who would happily ship Hannibal and Will, despite the above-mentioned gaslighting, manipulation and stabbing, but who thought Jack Crawford was practically Satan because he talked Will into doing an unpleasant job and got angry and yelled a few times – that was quite an eye-opener. The justifications they would come up with for it were fun too – ‘It’s workplace abuse! Jack’s in a position of power!’ Hmmm, but Hannibal's in a position of power and committing medical malpractice, and having a frustrated boss shouting at you is hardly worse than the drugging and the stabbing, really, is it? So why do you find the shouting Black man so much more offensive than the serial killing white guy?
And honestly, I don’t have anywhere I’m really going with all of this, other than just to vomit out what I’ve been pondering over, and to say that we fans can be strange, and shallow. And blind, sometimes. So very blind.
