(no subject)
Jul. 4th, 2022 02:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
laurajva thing I am seeing more & more in fanfic these days is authors marking out sex scenes as "optional", and giving people info on where to skip if you don't want to read that part.
and! like! more tools for curating one's reading experience! care for your audience! that's -- I understand where it's coming from, is what I'm saying.
but it also means the sex scenes are really, really boring. Like. so boring. because if they're optional extra scenes, they aren't there to illuminate character or plot, they're just there to be....sex. this is the most boring kind of sex, in fiction or real life. it's so boring that the few times i have bothered to read one of these optional scenes my eyeballs turned to dust and my heart shriveled up like a prune and my liver withered and my vagina locked and barred the door.
I've always skimmed way more sex scenes than I read, because frankly most people aren't good at writing sex that illuminates character or plot, but some of the optional scenes make normal boring sex writing look like high erotic art.
yes, i am being very mean here, but that's because it should be impossible to write sex this boring AND YET here human beings go, managing it handily! once again humankind does the impossible! go us! this is up there with airplanes and telecommunication!
also, there are some things i don't like about oldschool slash aesthetics in fanfic but i gotta say when you have 90% oldschool slash aesthetics in your fanfic but also use "cum" as a verb i get whiplash. but that is a rant for another time, even though it is Related to the whole incredibly boring sex thing.
and! like! more tools for curating one's reading experience! care for your audience! that's -- I understand where it's coming from, is what I'm saying.
but it also means the sex scenes are really, really boring. Like. so boring. because if they're optional extra scenes, they aren't there to illuminate character or plot, they're just there to be....sex. this is the most boring kind of sex, in fiction or real life. it's so boring that the few times i have bothered to read one of these optional scenes my eyeballs turned to dust and my heart shriveled up like a prune and my liver withered and my vagina locked and barred the door.
I've always skimmed way more sex scenes than I read, because frankly most people aren't good at writing sex that illuminates character or plot, but some of the optional scenes make normal boring sex writing look like high erotic art.
yes, i am being very mean here, but that's because it should be impossible to write sex this boring AND YET here human beings go, managing it handily! once again humankind does the impossible! go us! this is up there with airplanes and telecommunication!
also, there are some things i don't like about oldschool slash aesthetics in fanfic but i gotta say when you have 90% oldschool slash aesthetics in your fanfic but also use "cum" as a verb i get whiplash. but that is a rant for another time, even though it is Related to the whole incredibly boring sex thing.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-04 07:33 am (UTC)I have only encountered the scene marker thing for content they warned for like a detailed rape scene or assault or such, and then the plot part was summarized in the notes.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-04 01:21 pm (UTC)I don't care for demarcating a violent scene like that, either, tbh, even though I personally prefer not to read such scenes.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-04 01:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-04 03:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-04 03:25 pm (UTC)I find it a bit more odd in text, because I feel with skimming or skipping ahead or such reading gives you more control spread without the author highlighting anything, but it seem a cross media trend.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-05 01:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-04 10:21 am (UTC)I don't even think it's that mean. I mean, it would be mean if you said this directly to someone in the comments of their particular story! But as a PSA, not mean-spirited.
It's a simple fact of story-building. It doesn't apply only to sex scenes. A scene has to have relevance to the plot to make sense and fit; a scene that doesn't tell you anything or go anywhere, so by definition any scene that is absolutely optional and unnecessary, doesn't have a reason to exist or stay in the story. Of course, there are people who will, for example, always be happy to, to make an analogy that occurs often in comics and movies, look at large breasts so they're happy to see them any time they appear on screen and their attention will be held even if there's nothing at all happening on the screen EXCEPT breasts... but much of the audience will be bored, annoyed, confused, etc, apart from their feelings about breasts specifically.
The same applies to every interest on the planet. A long aside about how railway time-tables work may be interesting to anyone who is independently fascinated by railway time-tables, but if it doesn't contribute anything to the story or go anywhere, it will still be boring, confusing, and/or annoying to much of the audience.
Sex scenes get overlooked in this regard by many people in fandom because of the booby rule, I think - the same force that puts bad, illotgical, etc objectifying images of women in comics and film posters. That is, many people are perceived to be there for sex scenes in the first place, and that's true to enough of an extent that it doesn't occur to many of them to look away (or to complain even if they are bored). The cultural expectations in fanfiction have probably conditioned many more people simply to expect the sex scenes in the same way. As a result of this expectation and the fact that sex scenes ARE more or less omnipresent in fandom, when you read a bunch you probably get used to such a wide variety of them, and hence a wide variety of style and writing quality and boringness. Thus the bad and boring sex scenes of this particular type generally are able to blend in among the other bad and boring sex scenes one encounters, more or less.
However, the fact remains that to care for both parts of your audience, you should simply not write the scene if it could truly be skipped with no effect.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-04 01:17 pm (UTC)yes, I think you are correct -- there's a feeling a lot of the time that a story is "supposed" to have a sex scene, that it's owed to the audience, so of course you put it in even if it doesn't say anything.
For some reason, I am thinking of Pretty Woman, which used a lot of lead-up to sex and pillow talk to illuminate character and move the plot along, but didn't include an actual sex scene; I'm also thinking about The Terminator, where is it vitally plot-important that the sex happens, and it would be an R-rated movie even without the sex scene, but the sex scene itself still feels kind of pointless because it doesn't tell you anything about the characters -- you need to know it HAPPENED, but you don't need to see it for any reason, so unless you want to see boobies it's very enh. It's not a problem limited to fanfic, is what I think I am saying here, and you can see the way genre conventions play out in this way in film as well.
And I do realize that to some (a large?) degree this is taste, judging by the comments about how hot some sex scenes I find boring are. We are creatures of infinite variation! I get it! Glad someone liked that bit, but it could not be me! But I am reminded of why, back in the day, I started a rec list based around oral sex; it's not that I particularly LIKE oral, but at the time it was less common to write and often written less...mechanically? because of a lack of convention around it, I think.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-04 08:05 pm (UTC)Huh, that's a good point about oral. The most formulaic, genre-dictated form of The Sex Scene at every period is usually penetrative, and scenes with that sex act are more likely to be constructed formulaically. I'm pretty sure there was a time when at least some fandoms almost never used frottage at all, for example. I remember reacting like "YES, a maverick!" whenever a fic had that as the primary/ultimate act in a sex scene for a while.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-04 04:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-04 01:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-04 02:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-04 09:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-07 05:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-05 01:34 am (UTC)Write the story as you think it should be written, and let the readers read it or not as they choose. Not every fic is going to appeal to every reader, and that's fine! Providing instructions on how to bypass sections of one's fic suggests to me that the author isn't writing the story they wanted to write, which dulls my enthusiasm for the whole thing. When I'm browsing for fic, I'm looking for, here is a really cool story that I hope you'll enjoy as much as me, not here is a compilation of story bits I put together in order to appeal to the broadest possible audience - if you don't want to write a sex scene, then don't write one! It's not mandatory. If you do write a sex scene, though, please write one that is an integral part of the story you are telling, instead of a disconnected snippet tossed in for some external reason.
Enthusiasm is contagious, and fandom has always been about enthusiasm for me - I'm in fandom because I love these characters, and I've opened this fic because I love the premise, so if the author isn't actually enthusiastic about it and is just trudging through a list of popular tropes that will maximise their hit count, that's going to make the fic a lot less enjoyable.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-05 06:54 pm (UTC)YES
(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-11 02:15 am (UTC)We may disagree on what's cool, but I'd rather the author wrote something they thought was cool than wrote something they felt obligated to write without enjoying.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-05 02:16 am (UTC)Yeah, I don't get it either. I've seen a few stories where it's been done and the sex was... okay? Which is to say I didn't skim it any more than I usually skim sex (but, y'know, I skim most sex in fic even when I'm actively interested in sex scenes, so yeah) and it had some characterisation and wasn't totally pointless. But I only bother continuing at all when I hit that shit if it's a story I've already gotten invested in, tbh, because in general if you tell me I can skip massive sections of a fic then I'm not... clear on why I should read it at all.
Also, it's bewildering to me even beyond that. Like. If you just wanted to write the sex but don't feel it's necessary to the story itself, idk, maybe just fucking write it as a separate story and post it separately in a series, and drop a link to the separate story in your chapter notes as an 'outtake' set between whatever scenes? That feels vastly less weird to me than this 'here's your keywords for how to skip this scene!' bullshit.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-05 06:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-05 11:31 pm (UTC)I mean, hilariously, I'm less likely to post porn as an outtake than a completely gen scene I had to excise because it ended up not working or having to be completely revised, because honest to god if I'm writing sex there's character stuff happening and the specific bumpity bits are actually important. (Even when it's completely ridiculous fucking batshit smut written to be as weird as possible, lol.) But, still. The point is I totally get the desire to share something you wrote and liked and ended up not needing for the thing you wrote it for. I just... do not get including the sex if it's not something you feel the story needs. Post it up as an outtake saying "hey, I liked this and thought it was good enough to share, it just didn't help me tell the story I was telling".
Like, I have my stupid ridiculous epic Dragon Age romance I've been working on for like at least a year and it absolutely has sex at the climax of the story that functions as a payoff in the Romance Genre sense. But also, like, even if it weren't literally An Romance Inna Genre sense I genuinely cannot imagine excising it because there is a ton of character development/illumination happening. (I also think it's hot but that's actually... not why it's there! Also I don't think it would be nearly as hot if it weren't about those specific characters at that specific point in time and what they're getting out of it.)
Anyway, gentle fistbump of cranky old fen being baffled by The New Trends in fandom. (gentle because lol let's neither of us dislocate fingers.)
(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-06 01:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-06 01:50 am (UTC)yeah, my splints are in my knitting bag and i haven't worn them in like a week so i feel this deeply. (also i need to knit myself fingerless gloves so the splints stop trying to fall off when I'm wearing them, which is what they do when i wear them regularly enough the inflammation goes down. in theory i should be smaller splints for that but also silver splints are not cheap enough i really want to do that when i'm so iffy about wearing them consistently enough to keep the inflammation down. /o)
(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-07 05:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-05 04:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-05 06:53 pm (UTC)