Pairing labels

[bluflamingo]

So, I'm sitting here, all ready to draw up a header for the fic I've just finished, and I've got a problem. My header for fic in my journal includes, amongst other things, the pairing, or the main character(s) in a gen piece, because I personally like to know who I'm going to be reading about in a story and so assume other people like to as well.

This is the problem, however: there's a very brief, non-explicit sex scene in this story. It's maybe a couple of hundred words out of a fic that's over 5 1/2 thousand, and while it's an important part of the story, the story isn't about the pairing, the relationship, or sex/romance in any way. Even the sex isn't about those things, it's about comfort between two friends. The story is about John's relationship with his father who's just died.

So, the answer is probably It's your journal, it's your story, label it however you damn well please (or a more polite version thereof) but I'm curious to know how you'd label this in terms of pairings. I want to label it John-centric gen, which it is, but I think if I saw that, I'd be kind of surprised to see a sex scene later on. That said, if I saw a story labelled with a pairing, I'd expect the other half of the pairing to be around more.

Help me - my brain is no longer up to these kinds of complex and vital decisions!

Comments

[thepouncer.livejournal.com]

I wrote a Teyla story that I considered gen, but there was an allusion to a night she spent with an original character in the story. Which, like yours, was totally not the point of the story! I labeled it "incidental het, Teyla/m", because people can be very taken aback to come upon a relationship in a story labelled gen. But I feel like that story is gen, really.

It's so tough, sometimes, to decide how to label, but I feel like they're important to help people filter what they do and don't want to read.

[auburnnothenna.livejournal.com]

I like thepouncer's suggestion, actually, or you might consider labelling something like adult or mature gen. Or use the ratings system and say something like R-rated Gen. No one would be surprised to see a sex scene in an R rated action film, after all. When this sort of thing starts making me crazy, I tend to strip everything off and just list characters and rating and call it, *gasp* fiction. I don't expect a book cover to tell me everyone the protagonist sleeps with in the story, whether its integral to the plot or not.

[bluflamingo.livejournal.com]

Incidental slash could work, thanks!

I feel like they're important to help people filter what they do and don't want to read

Exactly - I know I use them all the time to find what I want to read, which is why I'm wondering how to do this one.

[bluflamingo.livejournal.com]

I don't expect a book cover to tell me everyone the protagonist sleeps with in the story, whether its integral to the plot or not

That's true, actually - I never really thought about it before, but I guess we're more interested in seeing the characters we like in fanfic than in original stories, so it matters more? I don't know.

That said, maybe a combination of the two will work: R-rated John-centric gen, incidental pairing.

That pretty much covers all the bases :)

[zvi-likes-tv.livejournal.com]

Perhaps if you listed the pairings but then also made specific note that that it's not slash or not het (whichever applies.) Or you could call it Grog or Bob, but very few people would know what that means.

I wouldn't call it gen, because there are some gen fans who get really ticked off if anything with noncanonical pairings in it is labeled gen.

[bluflamingo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's why I'm struggling - because it really is gen in its soul (or whatever equivalent stories have!) but it has this one sex scene, which technically makes it a slash story, except that it isn't. But I don't want to, as you say, tick off someone who doesn't want noncanon pairings in their gen fic, which is fair enough. I'd expect my gen fic to be sex free.

Though I have to ask - Grog and Bob?!?

[zvi-likes-tv.livejournal.com]

There was a big discussion in March of 06 re: the SGA story Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose and whether it was slash or gen (it was John/Rodney, but John had been dead for years at the time the story started, and it was about Rodney and WHAT THEY -- The whole command staff -- DID ON ATLANTIS.) Another one in March of 07 on gen in general. And in one of these discussions, I was introduced to the term, which, honestly, I think was created in a different discussion.

I think alixtii may have come up with Grog, to mean groiny gen. And Grog has some unpleasant cognate in German, so Bob was an alternative to Grog, as a sort of neutral placeholder.

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

Like thepouncer, I'd suggest "Incidental slash, John/X." In my fannish experience, the existance of a sex scene, brief or not, canon pairing or not, makes a fic, if not definitively het or slash, very much not gen (gen meaning "something with no sexual or romantic content,"
i.e. "something I can read on a public library computer without worrying that someone will look over my shoulder and see a sex scene").

[bluflamingo.livejournal.com]

I remember the discussion (vaguely) - thanks for explaining!

[bluflamingo.livejournal.com]

I know - it's just that I want to leap around and say but it *is* gen... just with a sex scene, which obviously doesn't really work. As you say, anything that would be blocked by internet nanny software probably can't be gen, as a rule.

What if it's a fade to black, though - they kiss and then it's the next scene, or the next day or whatever. I mean, it could be read on a public computer, no problem, but does that make it gen (I'm really curious, not trying to be difficult).

Words are problematic :(

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

As you say, anything that would be blocked by internet nanny software probably can't be gen, as a rule.

Buffy gets a mammogram?

And the role of (extreme) violence here is problematic as well.

Which is really agreeing with you, I guess, while thinking out loud.

[bluflamingo.livejournal.com]

True. We had it in a school I was working at, and it was happy for me to read East of the Sun, West of the Moon, which is sexually gen but has quite a bit of violence and death. It wasn't happy for me to answer comments on Sign Language that I wrote, in which John lies in a hopsital bed and waits to be fixed - maybe because it mentions an explosion?! So maybe it's not such a great gen rule, actually, or at least not all that reliable.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

As you say, words are problematic.

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

IMO, no. It's not the actual explicitness of the sex that makes something het or slash (or both) as opposed to gen, but the fact that the protagonist is having the sex/is in the relationship. I mean, if fade-to-black sex can be counted as gen, then by extension only NC-17 or R-rated fic can be slash, and there are a lot of slashers (and het writers) who would take exception to the notion that their stories are gen rather than het/slash simply because they aren't porny enough.

I mean, I just finished co-writing a very long, plotty comics fic that contains a slash romance as one of its central themes, but has no explicit sex. I'd argue that the fact that the sex involves fades-to-black, that the relationship is part of a larger action plot, and that there's het relationships present as well (all arguements I've seen towards why slash fics should be classified as gen) doesn't lessen its "slashiness." It's still a story where one guy sleeps with another guy.

*grins* and I can assure you, in the eyes of gen fans on ff.net, two pages on non-explicit m/m sex in the midst of two-hundred pages of plot sure as hell make something slash. It was slash, period, because we had, zomg, "made Captain America gay."

[bluflamingo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that sounds logical. I guess I'm stuck on the idea of the label coming from what the story's about - I've written fade to black slash that I wouldn't think of labelling gen because the story's about the relationship, for example.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

*grins* and I can assure you, in the eyes of gen fans on ff.net, two pages on non-explicit m/m sex in the midst of two-hundred pages of plot sure as hell make something slash. It was slash, period, because we had, zomg, "made Captain America gay."

And that's the enlightened perspective one is supposed to cater to?

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

I wasn't saying that. What I was trying (in-articulatly) to argue was that a) any sexual or romantic relationship on the part of the main character makes a fic Not Gen, b) as both a writer of gen fic and a writer of PG to PG-13 rated slash, I find the idea that fics without onscreen sex are gen to be problematic, and c) to most gen fans, nothing with m/m content (or, to be fair, m/f content, or f/f content) is really gen.

I think the question to ask before labeling something gen is not, "is this slashy enough to be slash," but "would a gen fan call this gen, or consider it slash/het/ship." Otherwise, there's a risk of co-opting the label (just as fans who insist that "slash" can mean "any non-canon pairing" have tried to co-opt the term slash for het fics).

The guy who left me the ff.net review, who was actually pretty polite for all that he was fundamentally misguided re: Cap and Iron Man's sexuality (Tony Stark is about as straight as the Grecian coastline), mostly objected not to the content per se, but to the fact that the slash showed up five chapters into a fic he had assumed to be gen (my fault, I labeled it m/m instead of "slash," and he wasn't familiar with the label).

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

John-centric with incidental John/X, I guess. I would avoid using the word gen altogether.

[ceteramisto.livejournal.com]

I agree with the poster above me. Calling John centric or John character piece lets readers know who the story is about and incidental John/X let's readers know who John's involved with and that the relationship is not the center of the story. Anything else the reader needs to know can come in the summary.

[thelana.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm stuck on the idea of the label coming from what the story's about

But to me that's not really what Gen is. To me there's slash, there's het and there's Gen which is neither slash or het (and then there's unlucky people who have both slash and het in their fic who will probably get a headache).

It seems odd to me when somebody says they want to label something Gen just because it has an action plot. If labels are for what the story is about, wouldn't the label then be "plotfic" or "adventurefic"? Or like in your case "Charactefic" or "Character Exploration Fic"?

I just don't feel that slash/het are interchangable with "romance" or even just interchangable with "relationship fic". To me slash/het/gen is more like an attribute that can be added to any type of story.

[thelana.livejournal.com]

I think Gen can easily be NC17. For example a fic that includes torture or childhood abuse or like you said, graphic violence. (it's just the boneheadedness of the American rating system that things that have sex gets labeled NC17 so much easier than things that have violence. I'm quite a violence shy person so I would rank something that has very bloody violence or deals with very dark materials (rape, abuse, drungs) NC17 rather quickly)

[bluflamingo.livejournal.com]

That's interesting, I don't think I'd ever realy thought about it like that, with slash/het/gen being one attribute of any story. I agree they're definitely not interchangeable with romance, but I think I'd expect slash/het to be primarily about the relationship in some way. Your way makes a lot of sense though.

[bluflamingo.livejournal.com]

True - that seems to cover everything I want to say and be least likely to accidentally mislead someone.

[bluflamingo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that seems safest, and least likely to accidentally mislead someone.

[thelana.livejournal.com]

I do think that my definition probably isn't even the most popular or most widespread one, but it's the one that makes the most sense to me.

Me thinks that so much of fic that gets written is about shippy (romance, relationship) stuff rather than action and plot so most people don't even bother to identify the genres like adventurefic anymore (like the way you would have horror/thriller/sci-fi/law genres in real life).