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what are your thoughts on gen
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?"
Anyway that's all very raw braindump and may be completely wrong, anybody else have any thoughts on this?
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?
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I also feel like I've seen a HUGE trend of parentally focused fics over the past few years (specifically usually men being surrogate fathers for main characters), for example in my main fandom (My Hero Academia) there's a lot of fic involving various heroes/teachers like Aizawa or All Might becoming father figures and taking care of or even adopting students. In other fandoms I've passed by I see a lot of similar things happening, like in Stranger Things I think there's a teen dude who becomes a father/babysitter-type to a lot of the main elementary-aged kids, or Tony becoming a surrogate father to Peter in some MCU fics, or in The Owl House traumatized kids getting basically adopted by another character's mother or other cool adult figures... I don't think I know enough fandoms to pin it down (those examples aside from MHA are what I've seen from a distance, I'm not in those fandoms so maybe I'm misinterpreting fan cocepts I've passed by), but I feel like adoption fics (whether legal or just emotional) seem to satisfy a very particular desire distinct from typical shipping desires, but no less potent.
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The most apt BNHA canon description I have ever read... 😂
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I was reading melannen's post and thinking "yeah, I *do* use & tags for searching now, that wasn't possible years ago because no one used them" and the last & tag I clicked on was "Lan Qiren & Wei Wuxian". For non-MDZS/Untamed fans, Lan Qiren essentially ends up as Wei Wuxian's father-in-law against his will. There's a lot of fic interested in the post-canon situation and how they might find common ground, but there are also a lot of AUs where LQR *doesn't* fixate on how WWX is a disruptive student and a bad influence, but takes on a parental/good teacher role when WWX is a kid or teenager. It's a whole subgenre!
Interestingly, I'm not sure I'd have pegged most of those LQR & WWX stories as "gen", because there's usually Wei Wuxian/Lan Wangji happening as well. But the & tag indicates to me, as a reader, that the platonic relationship is at least going to *share focus* with the main pairing. Sometimes the romance is so far in the background that it seems silly to categorize it as pairing fic; sure, Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji are having an Epic Romance, but what the story is *interested* in is whether or not Lan Qiren can get over his preconceptions (and his trauma) and appreciate his gremlin son-in-law-to-be for who he is.
The old categories don't cleanly explain the kind of fic that's out there, and maybe that's another sign of things changing. Slash and gen don't need to be quarantined from each other, stories don't need to "pick a side" between slash and het, etc.
And I am definitely hoping that the trend of giving lots of time/space/story focus to intense platonic relationships continues to grow! Long live the & tag!
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Of course I don't think this is a universal designation (and some gen-lovers might screech at a fic with any romantic relationship not being marked with a romantic category, even if the romance is not the central point), but I find it useful. I try and search a lot of femslash in BNHA which is abysmal to search, but I've noticed with "common side F/F ships", some people WILL pretty clearly tag the category as just M/M instead of M/M + F/F, so even tho both pairings appear in the relationship tags it's clear at a glance which relationship will be the focus (and I can narrow down easier with an "include F/F" search that then excludes those M/M-exclusively focused fics). I find that helpful for me at least.
On the other extreme end there are the people who tag literally all the categories but then don't even tag any relationships that could apply to... like they're tagging for traces of nuts and not even saying what nuts there might be traces of. Grinds my gears when searching the F/F category in general and there are huge fics that don't have a single F/F ship mentioned in tags/description, but unfortunately I don't get to define everyone's tagging conventions XD.
Sorry to go off on tagging nitpicks, but I do ultimately think it's a good thing that AO3 lets you tag multiple categories, and that the "&" tag exists to clearly delineate and search for specific platonic pairings, and that ppl are actually using the & tags!! Makes it much easier to find those specific flavors