Shipping the Velvet

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Shipping the Velvet
Slash Fandom, Convergence, and why you should
care about Harry Potter M-Preg.
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What will not happen in the next 110 minutes

• Justification of Slash (in this panel, slash
  justifies itself!)
• Debate about whether slash is about feminism,
  queerness, misogyny, or your (secretly pervy) mom
• Ship debates
• Discussion of why people write slash

What will happen in the next 110 minutes

• Overview of the evolution of slash
• Discussion of fanfic in participatory
  (convergence) culture.
• Overview of media / academic reactions to slash
  and fanfic
• (and the increasingly blurry lines between
  creators and consumers of canon and fanon)
• Applying all this to HP slash (the fun part)
• InterActivist audience participation.

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I'm always going to hold a true disappointment
that Jo chose not to write in a gay couple (R/S
was the natural choice). - Alixandra, 3/8/07

She could have changed lives.
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Evolution of Slash

• Slash fandom mentality ? general fandom mentality
  (FBG 58)
• Debate that used to belong to slash v/s het has
  moved to the purvey of fringe genres.
• What Catherine Tosenberger calls the subcultural
  coding of incest, chan, m-preg, and other kinks

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• Changing reactions to slash media, academic,
  creator/producer
• Crossovers between fandom/professional borders
• Fan/Creator dynamics

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Authorial Reactions to Fanon Dangerous liaisons?

• Anne Rice
• Robin Hobb At the extreme low end of the
  spectrum, fan fiction becomes personal
  masturbation fantasy at the less extreme end,
  the fan writer simply changes something in the
  writers world. The intent of the author is
  ignored.
• Lee Goldberg

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There was once a conjurer who boasted that he had
become god-like. One god happened to overhear,
and challenged him to a contest. Can you do
this? the god asked, scooping up a handful of
dirt and making it into a bird. They watched the
bird fly away. Sure, said the conjure-man,
and reached down for a handful of raw material.
Hey, said god. Use your own dirt. Props to
any writer who can make a story fly. None of us
use our own dirt. - Patrick Nielsen Hayden
If ever I do something like that, please shoot
me. - Neil Gaiman
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Reader Interpretation

• If several fans of my books got together and had
  a good old time speculating on my characters'
  sexual peccadillos, or if students in a lit class
  did an essay dissecting my characters' psyches,
  these would generally be seen as perfectly all
  right even though their views on my character
  radically differed from my own, and they were in
  fact presenting those views to others and
  possibly changing the way others saw my story. I
  frankly don't see fan fiction as that different
  from the scenarios I just listed.
• - Shadow82

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Reader Interpretation Reader Activity

• No reader ever truly reads the book the author
  wrote no reader ever visualizes exactly what the
  author visualized as he or she pounded the keys.
  The divergences may be trivial or they may be
  huge, but they're there and they're an intrinsic
  part of an interactive entertainment medium.
• Readers aren't worshippers they're paying
  customers of an entertainment product that
  depends on its interactivity for its power to
  compel and fascinate. The only right way to read
  a book is one that suits the reader the only
  right way to visualize a book's contents is the
  way that best gives the reader pleasure.
• - Scott Lynch

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Naomi Novik I do think that for all of us who
write fanfiction, its about falling in love
with characters.  In fact with my own work, the
way that I sort of knew that I had a fun idea was
that I felt the same sort of pleasure, the same
desire to write about my own characters, about
Laurence and Temeraire, as I felt about writing
fan fiction, because of course with fan fiction
its done for love because you cant do it for
money.
Blurring Lines Fans and Creators Engaging in the
same Spaces
Doris Egan When we write the laws of the
universe do a one-eighty, and all these things
are good. By which I mean that whatever pleases
you, whatever excites you, whatever you obsess
about, whatever glittery thing holds your
interest, whether it's some complicated and spiky
relationship between two characters or the last
days of the American Civil War or the
possibilities involved in Schrodinger's cat --
this is your lawful subject matter. Do not
complain to me, "But what interests me is an
obscure political event from 1899. And it's been
made clear to me that nobody else in the world
finds it exciting," because I will say,
"Congratulations." Do not complain, "I want to
write slash professionally, and there's just no
market for that," because I will say, "Good for
you!" Do not sigh and say that you want to write
a romance, and a billion romances have come
before, so what is there new to say? For I will
pat you on the back and offer you a celebratory
drink.
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I find it both very cool and professionally
useful to pick apart the elements of a successful
novel and then reassemble them or add to them or
experiment with changing this or that element in
order to see what effects can be produced by such
alterations. If I write Potter fic, it is not
because I hope that J. K. Rowling will read it
and appreciate the tribute. If I write Potter
fic, it is to explore how Rowling's rules of
magic work, or perhaps to tinker with what
difference her point-of-view choice makes in the
story, or to extend her ideas about prejudice,
nationalism, politics, and leadership in ways
that she will not and cannot in a popular
young-adult series. - Conversant
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End part one 5-minute break!
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It was during that first mammoth session that I
met the shippers, and it was a most extraordinary
thing. I had no idea there was this huge
underworld seething beneath me. - J.K.R.
Shipping versus Slashing Or, why is this panel
called Shipping the Velvet?
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Remus/Sirius versus Remus/Tonks Tonks as
Interloper
I don't see any non-Sirius medium between
Remus and Tonks it seems like Remus and Tonks
have nothing in common but Sirius, that they are
two characters brought together only by Sirius'
death. Which is fine and dandy usually, but when
you want to have a pairing, I can't see it
happening. Sooner or later, they are going to
stop mourning Sirius, and then what
happens?Plus, I think it only makes the case
for Sirius and Remus stronger. - Creativepseudo

• This is not a genuine romance.
• - Shaggy

I have never yet seen any reasonable explanation
as to why we should care about Remus and Tonks'
love life. Even if JKR is trying to say that
love brings hope and light into the world, she
fails, because she ignores all the things working
against the hope and light. Ignoring and
dismissing darkness is not the same thing as
having hope. - Ignipes
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My faith was solidified when J.K. told us we
shouldnt like him. And now I have finally been
proven correct. We werent supposed to like him
because he was supposed to be a big surprise. -
Bloodyrose82, 7/17/05
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