what are your thoughts on gen

[melannen]

1. To the several people on my flist who have been reading Riddle-Master and/or the Perilous Gard, two of my all-time favorite formative fantasies: They're so good, aren't they?? Also I mostly read DW on my phone lately so I lost your posts before I could comment on them but I want to say: yes, I agree.

2. Panel suggestions for this year's con.txt convention close today. If you would like a say on what is discussed at this year's con.txt, get your submissions in now! They still have a very low number so you're at risk of far too many of mine getting in. (you don't have to agree to run them just because you suggest them, btw.)

3. A thing I did not suggest as a panel but I keep thinking about lately so I'm going to just dump my thoughts here:

Has anyone else noticed that it seems like non-romance-focused fic is getting a lot more attention lately? Like when I started in fandom, and for many years after, it was axiomatic that almost nobody reads gen. But as you may have noticed I sometimes like to play around with AO3 stats and I keep noticing that it seems like there are more and more & ships and no-relationship fics ranking toward the top. So here are some not-well-thought out points on the question of "why is non-romance fic getting more prominence lately?"

• It's not, you're just in fandoms that mean you're seeing it more.
  
  TBF in the last few years I have been reading a lot of AtLA and MCYT fic, and both of those are massive fandoms that have been leaning even more heavily gen than anything else on AO3. But the fact that two of the biggest fandoms of the past couple years are heavily gen says something on its own. And looking at stats, of 86 fics with >25000 kudos posted more than five years ago, 6 of them were gen; of 83 fics with >25000 kudos posted more recently, 24 were gen. So I think there really is something here in an increase of readership for gen fic on AO3.



• Gen has always been huge; it's just that the gen community has finally made a home on AO3.
  
  I think it's inarguable that gen has always been huge, but for a long period of fandom, gen fans and ship fans moved in very different spaces, and AO3 was definitely founded by ship fans and heavily dominated by them for a long time. But AO3 has slowly been gathering people in, and there are now several generations of fans whose entire fandom experience has been on AO3, and several very large fandoms that have never had a significant fanfic presence anywhere else, so it may be that what we're seeing with more gen is AO3 starting to reflect fandom as a whole better than it used to.



• AO3 users have finally discovered the & tag, which has made gen-about-relationships way more discoverable, and opened up a new category of not-romance-but-relationship-focused fic that has always been hard to find before.
  
  I blame the increased use of the & tag on MCYT fandom, because for several years they were the most active fandom on AO3 but basically had completely unusable fandom tags; you could not filter on fandom tags to find the MCYT fic you wanted to read; so people get used to heavily using the & tags instead of fandom tags to mean "this is the set of characters we're writing about". RPF-adjacent fandoms and creator-owned fandoms have always set a bit uncomfortably in AO3's tag-definitions system, but MCYT was particularly bad, and also the largest one to have a not-super-ship-focused fandom, which meant they couldn't fall back on / tags. And once a critical mass of writers on AO3 (spreading out from mcyt) realized how useful the & tags were, they suddenly became even more useful. Now I can suddenly get a reasonable number of results when I search for A&B! Now I suddenly don't have to tag A/B preship in order to get people who like A & B's dynamic together to read my fic, because people are also looking at the & tag! And that meant that people who liked fic about A & B's dynamic but didn't particularly need it to be romantic could find each other much more easily, instead of just searching on character tags and hoping for the best, and another way of doing fandom, centered on non-shippy ships, started to grow.



• The growth in fandom puritanism means that people who might have previously shipped a pair are now only doing them as gen.
  
  A lot of the current large fandoms that have a lot of & ships have many popular sets of characters that would be "problematic" by modern standards if they were / (teenagers in canon, small age gap, rpf, sort-of-family-ish, power imbalance, fill in the blank here.) If everyone is interested in two characters' dynamic together but is afraid if you ship them you will be ostracized, then fic that focuses on the dynamic but keeps it safely non-ship is going to become more popular to read, write, and rec. (And as a corollary: as there's a growing group of young fans who are vocally uncomfortable with certain types of shipping, there's also a growing group of people who have aged up with internet fandom who are perfectly OK with shipping anything in theory but as they got older no longer *want* to look at younger characters in that way, even though they still like fandoms with young characters.)



• There are more canon ships that do the things fandom wants, so people who want that gravitate to those fandoms.
  
  When I started in fanfic fandom, a large part of why we shipped noncanon pairings is that there were no canon pairings like the ones we shipped. There are now a much broader variety of canon pairings people can ship (I now 'ship several explicitly canon 'ships that include ships and have active fandoms, even, I don't have to wistfully think about Kirk/Enterprise or re-read The Ship Who Searched!) If the people who want that kind of pairing just go to the fandoms where they're canon (and canon m/m fandoms often have very little fic that doesn't ship m/m), there's less motivation to take canon dynamics in other fandoms and make them explicitly shippy, so there's more energy to explore the non-shippy canon dynamics.
  
  ETA: with the addition that in some ways we're getting *less* really intense non-shippy (non-queerbaity) relationships in mainstream media than we did in the 90's, partly *because* of the increased availability of queer possibilities, so maybe people who want foreground intense friendship are more likely to have to turn to fic.



• Fandom has come full circle around the kind of stories it's for
  
  Sometimes lately I feel like I'm stuck in four different periods of fandom, each a generation apart: on Thursdays I travel back in time to 1968 Trek watch parties with Galactic Journey; they also lured me into joining an APA that was founded in 1937; I spend most of the rest of my time in MCYT fandom, which is sort of the most 2020s of 2020s fandoms; except that I started fandom in the late '90s and all my comfort fandoms and deep-down ideas of what fandom is come from then.
  
  And it sort of feels like: the late 1930s fans were just coming up with the whole idea of a "fanwriter". What if we wrote and published stories ourselves about whatever we wanted not what there was a market for? And then in the late 60s they were starting to ask, the way these two characters act would be romantic if it was a man and a woman, what if we explored that? And in the 90s it was starting to be, hey, *any* characters can be written as romantic/sexual with each other, because they *would* be treated as romantic if they were m/f leads! What kind of stories can we tell if we go there? And I feel like now the new generation is come full circle to asking, hey, what if there was a really intense relationship that *wasn't* romantic? what would that even look like, what stories could we tell?
  
  
• There's been a growing understanding in the queer-adjacent community that dividing relationships into romantic-sexual(important) and other relationships (unimportant) is reductive and unhealthy, and that's reflected in queer-adjacent fans being more interested in other kinds of relationships
  
  Because the thing that strikes me about a lot of the really popular "gen" is that it's not gen in the sense that I was used to seeing gen in the 90's - "more of" canon sort of plotty adventure stuff - most of it is fic that is very intensely focused on character relationships, they're just friendships or family or found family or mentorship or team or platonic lifemates instead of romance. Like I feel like we started to see this explictly in the ~2012 era when both Homestuck fic and Avenger's Tower fic were huge - they often did have some kind of "ship" that ended up filed under / on AO3 but the real focus of the story was often other kinds of relationship. And we're starting to see that more with canon ships too, in some of the newer fandoms, that have gone past queercoding and queerbaiting to something more like 'does it matter if it's queer? they love each other.'



• People are hungry for any kind of real relationship in these isolating late capitalist days, the way they used to only be hungry for romance.
  
  Young people in particular, but also basically everybody since 2020, has been so isolated, and our world generally so socially broken, that the idea of "what if I had a friend I could just. spend time with. in person. whenever I wanted. and I knew they would still be there for me no matter what" has become almost as much an unattainable dream for many, many people as "what if a handsome billionaire swept me off my feet". And so people are writing and reading fic about it the way they used to only write about unattainable romances, just to remind themselves what it would be like.

Anyway that's all very raw braindump and may be completely wrong, anybody else have any thoughts on this?

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

All of this makes perfect sense to me. However, I am very out of touch with trends on AO3 or in new fandoms specifically. The incredible onrush of fans and the public nature of fanfic is still quite surprising to me; I came into m/m slash fandom around 2002 with a very different set of norms. Thank you for the update; am learning!

I am one who just read Riddlemaster! Glad to know you loved it too.

[melannen]

I started around the same time you have but I have sort of made an effort to occasionally keep up with trends! (it's how I fell into mcyt.)

I don't know if what I'm saying here is actually accurate but it's subjectively what I've been seeing.

Riddle-Master was super formative for me! I should really do a re-read.