(no subject)

[the_rck]

Since I've still got time with the kids distracting me, here's a meme entry. I'm not sure how seriously to take this topic. silverr listed about twenty questions (even after I eliminated the ones that I really couldn't answer or that duplicated things other people had asked me), and this is rarely asked seriously in my experience. Anyway:

What are your thoughts on yaoi?

When I first came into fanfic, I came in mostly through anime/manga fandoms, and I saw all m/m slash labeled as 'yaoi,' so that's the convention I followed. I thought the terms were synonymous.

I thought some things were strange-- Like those folks in Gundam Wing fandom who fought not just over pairings but over who topped in the pairing. 1x2 was considered a completely different thing from 2x1, and neither set of fans was keen on 1x2x1. (For those who don't know, in anime/manga fandoms, the order in which the character names are listed tells readers who they should expect to do what. The character listed first always tops.) There also seemed to be a tendency to weaken one of the characters in comparison to how he was presented in canon.

What I didn't know at first is that yaoi is a commercial genre in Japan. It's a genre with very specific conventions and a very specific audience (adult women). There's always a size difference between the two men, and often the smaller one is younger than the larger one. The smaller one tends to display a lot of stereotypically feminine traits, and the larger character frequently (but not always) forces himself on the smaller. This results in true love.

I'm not entirely (or even mostly) comfortable with the genre conventions of yaoi. Some of that is that I'm dubious about most romances, yaoi or slash or otherwise. I tend to want something more to the story than a lot of romance provides. I want a different type of plot complication than is typical. I think that shows in what I write. I'm terrible at straight up romance. I don't think I've written it successfully more than once or twice. Usually, I don't even try.

So I guess my main thought on yaoi is that I wish it were more flexible and did more of the things that interest me, but I feel that way about slash in general, too, and about f/f and het romances. I wish I were clearer on just what I do want so that I could articulate it.

Comments

[leorising1959.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on these points. I think of your way of thinking as the "Westernization" of yaoi conventions. We prefer flexible pairings, deeper plots, and unconventional -- everything. I've read a lot of conventional Japanese yaoi, and the formulaic bits get really boring after a while.