pontisbright | Teaspoon and slash: a pondering

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Teaspoon and slash: a pondering

(Sorry for the borked formatting, LJ is chucking a mental)
I'm reccing at calufrax this week, and since calapine pointed out the tragically small number of slash recs so far, I'll be serving up an all-slash, all old-skool (or old/new crossover) selection of fics.

Finding stories has been interesting - possibly in a way which is just a reflection of my own reading habits - but it made me ponder. My automatic reaction was to go looking for slash I'd already loved on LJ, in the hope that I'd find it at Teaspoon, with varying degrees of success. Some people seem to upload everything they write as a matter of course, both to multiple comms and to Teaspoon: some stories only crop up on LJ (often in small comms, where there’s likely an small audience of familiar faces): some (especially older) fics are on knackered old geocities sites where the author has likely forgotten they’re even still there (and it’s only thanks to the likes of ghost2 and the who_otp Masterlist of Doooom that we ever find them again).

Conclusion: it seems as if a lot of writers of slash and femslash don’t use Teaspoon – or if they do, they’re selective about what they post there, especially with stories involving explicit sexual content.

So, I’ve got two questions. One: is that accurate? (I'm more than happy to be proved entirely wrong!) And two: if I’m not just being crap, what’s the likely reasoning behind writers being selective at Teaspoon? Is it the notion of small LJ comms being a cosy coterie – and if so, is that a lovely thing or a problem? Readers, do you mentally categorize Teaspoon and LJ differently in terms of expectations? Writers, are there some stories you’ve written that you feel are ‘more Teaspoony’ than others? Can you unpick what your notion of ‘Teaspooniness’ is?

(Please note: this is in no way a dig at Teaspoon, which I love with a burny flamy love. Nor a dig at LJ comms or individuals. I know that some stories seem to have the best ‘fit’ in certain locations; some were written as commentfic or ficathon entries or in-jokes, and outside of that context they can read as oddities, weird deviations from the author’s usual style, or just plain incomprehensible. And that’s before we get to the fics that we regret for one reason or another, and will happily let vanish in the LJ scroll (as much as anything ever can) instead of placing them somewhere more accessible like the ‘official’ fic archive. It’s entirely up to you where you post your fic: I’m just curious about the reasoning, that’s all.)

LJ – for any old thing, which you can pass off as just fluff if need be, but which can also result in nice quick feedback and the making of fannish friends
Teaspoon – for ‘proper’ fic which you’ve spent a bit of time over and reckon is worth showing to people outside LJ (despite the fact that you value the opinion of those on LJ more): feels a bit more detached from the audience
ff.net etc – not worth even looking at

Apologies for the tl;dr. Am interested to know if other people's heads are quite so keen on compartmentalisation as mine, anyway...

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I'm actually more likely to post my slash to Teaspoon than on LJ, as I have a few very good friends who aren't really comfortable with slash, and while I respect their ability to scroll past, I just ... feel better not putting it in front of them.

Um ... speaking as a Teaspoon mod, the slash I see is usually one of the big established pairings -- Doctor/Master, Doctor/Jack and Jack/Ianto. Everything else sort of bubbles under, and femmeslash is relatively rare.

I suspect, and others may thwap me if this is inaccurate, that the great rise of slash culture in fandom, and the concurrent emphasis on non-canon pairings, coincided approximately with the rise of LJ as the primary base for fannish activity. In all of my fandoms, those sorts of fics just don't get posted to major archives with the same frequency. Sometimes authors seem to equate all archives with FF.net; others just prefer to have more control over where their fic is, what the pages look like and who can read it. I don't know.

Teaspoon also has a greater proportion of male authors than a lot of fanfic archives. This might lead people to think slash is less welcome? I'm not sure, but I'd be curious to know.

I'm definitely a lot less likely to put fics that are a bit cracky or have odd pairings in them on the Teaspoon (and I'm a mod there, for heaven's sake...)

Ooh, interesting. I can see how that makes a lot of sense: it's technically a lot more anonymous than LJ where there's likely to be a degree of crossover with 'real' you and 'real' friends; with Teaspoon it's more possible to read various things without necessarily registering who wrote them in any meaningful sense, and without any of the fandom politics of which comm you're in etc.

Certainly LJ seems more 'friendly' to random pairings etc to me - but I don't know how much of that is just a self-perpetuating thing: I don't think of it as especially slashy, therefore it remains not especially slashy... And yes, perhaps DW as a fandom with a lot of blokes in it might have an influence. But maybe it is a cross-fandom thing as you say: LJ is the natural home of the marginal, and major archives just never will be. Interesting to consider how that migh affect the likes of OTW, if it ever happens.

*is even more curious now*

That was always my thought. But why? How come somewhere that seems less personally attached to 'me' feels like a more troubling place to offer up the weird? Mabe it's just that 'don't know who's reading' thing, which is true of LJ but we sort of pretend it isn't, somehow.

I like to think I post to LJ and Teaspoon equally. The only thing that might not make it to Teaspoon are drabbles/ficlets that I wrote "off the cuff" and therefore don't like enough to bother adding elsewhere. But defintely all my proper fics should be on both. If they're not, it's just because I forgot.

I often forget to post to Teaspoon for a couple days after LJ, and I'd give up Teaspoon in lieu of keeping LJ if I had to make a choice, but I don't have any fears or anything about posting to one or the other.

Huh. I've always felt perfectly comfortable posting slash to the Teaspoon--sure, most of it slips by with 0-2 comments or something (actually, most of my fic slips by with 0-2 comments but this might be because I continue to dabble in more obscure niches. Or I just suck at self-advertising), but it always seemed to be the Thing to Do. (Something which did not seem to be the Thing to Do when I still posted to ff.net, but I haven't done that in years.)

I kinda hate trolling the various comms where fic could go because personally I hate scrolling along my flist and seeing the same fic five times or more, so I try to post it just to my own LJ and one or two appropriate comms at most. (I just posted a fic involving both book and audio characters and posted links to it on

henriettastreet and

bigfinishlove, for example.)

Teaspoon was created to archive Who fic, for goddess's sake; it should bloody well be open to all fic. But I don't need to rant about the blasted thing.

I use Teaspoon as a great big wonderful archive, so pretty much everything I write goes there, unless it was a comment!fic or one of my not-stories that I didn't bother to turn into something with a title, etc. Some people do use it as first reading, as well, so I get a handful of nice reviews there, usually, which is a bonus.

I did notice the lack of slash on

calufrax so far; I posted on slash rec (aces' excellent Turlough/Five, Turlough/Ten AU); it got no comments on the rec and no new comments on the actual story. I highly suspect, therefore, that the audience for Calufrax is not made up of that many slashers. I'm hoping to post one more slash rec when I'm up for reccing next week again (though, like you, some things are simply not on Teaspoon, which makes it tricky), though then again, I'm just culling lazily from my recs website, and I realized I have a grand total of *three* slash recs on there. Oh, whoops. Clearly not my genre of choice...

What, me ramble back? Sorry.

Only a couple days? It's usually a couple months at least before I remember to get around to it...

what’s the likely reasoning behind writers being selective at Teaspoon?

Interesting question. When I wrote my first Jack/Doctor slash fic I put it up on Flexible and posted it to comms. Teaspoon was then all about Rose/Doctor and I didn't think slash would be welcome. Then, when Torchwood started it looked as if there was going to be a main fic archive and three of my fics were uploaded there, as well as x-posted to my LJ, but the archive died a death. As did Flexible.

And to me Teaspoon seemed to be a DW archive so... I didn't really think about it as a centralised archive. Factor in a bad browser experience trying to upload a fic to Wraithbait and there you have it. I was reticent about coding (possible differences between coding for LJ and elsewhere) and then it was the idea of uploading all the drabbles and fic again. *sigh*

It's been the practicalities for me, not fandom or any perception of types of readers and/or feedback.

Oh, not to jump in on you in comments, but - there's one story of yours missing from the Teaspoon that I wanted to be able to rec next week on

calufrax - "Everybody Wants You", that one where Jack hilariously shags his way across canon (I just have to picture Harry wandering into the invisible spaceship and I start cracking up!) I have recced it on my recs website but linked to an LJ version only, and Calufrax is only for stuff on Teaspoon.

I agree with you on the appropriate comms thing; I try to post at two max, three in very rare cases if I'm trying to promote the ficathon it was for, or something. But sometimes that involves trying to figure out where the right audience is, and realizing you're probably losing some potential readers. Teaspoon is great because it is just there, and people can click or not click, as they wish.

The archive is certainly open to all fic, but these days it's just overwhelmed with certain pairings, unfortunately (a ton of Torchwood fic coming through the queue right now, actually, and I hate having to read them to validate them). All I can say is - everyone reading this, archive there! Archive your strange things and weird pairings and all sorts of great stuff!

It's all connected in my mind. I usually crosspost to a couple comms at a time and "crossposting" to Teaspoon is connected in my head with that. Besides, I'm a big fan of feedback so if I post it to Teaspoon that's more chance to get feed back! Or soemthing.

I'm glad I was able to convince you to put the Rose/Benton, Harry/Martha up there then...that is my favourite fic, EVER. And now I can rec it next week, hurrah! :D

/spamming teh comments

Yes, that's what I've started doing too; I try to post to Teaspoon like a crosspost right after finishing posting to communities and my journal. I'm as big a fan of feedback as anyone else in fandom... ;)

Heee. Yes, it's definitely one I was leery of putting up because it has two strange pairings, it splits up Rose and the Doctor, and it branches off from canon at a certain point, which people don't always get.

Yep, I think you were one of the few people who seemed to post absolutely equally here and there. Yay!

What can I say, I guess I'm very thorough? Ahahaha. It's baffling to me that people wouldn't. To me, that's what Teaspoon is for.

Oh wow, thanks for pointing that out--I'm shocked that I didn't post that story there, since I was so proud of it when I wrote it. (And yes, the entire blessed thing started because of the image of Harry blundering into contact with Jack.)

It's not only Teaspoon that's overwhelmed with those pairings, though--it's only natural since TW is on air right now and therefore inspiring people. And because generally certain pairings like Ten/Simm!Master or Ten/Rose are so freaking HUGE in the fandom overall. So I'm not surprised over that, just surprised that people might not like archiving their slash on the site.

Ooh: I wish to hear of your misadventures at The Pit now.

And Teaspoon does say it's for everything, and is for everything: I just wonder if there are lurking hang-ups there since I seem to have a few.

Rambling most welcome!

Sounds like my week's recs will go down like a lead balloon. 'Hey everyone, here's some random porn with characters you probably don't know!' Ah well, it's made me happy to read new things and rediscover some old ones.

And you should absolutely cull from Cloister Bell, for there is gorgeousness there.

No misadventures, really--I had no problems posting my gen DW fic there but had hang-ups, like you do, about posting any slash. (Only in DW, though--I know I posted slash pairings in other fandoms to the site.) I think because of my perception of the audience I was likely to find on ff.net in DW fandom? Whereas I never, ever had that perception about Teaspoon, perhaps because I was there, peripherally at least, when it was all being put together originally and many of the original people involved rather liked dabbling with cracked-out pairings.

It is strange how fannish life can become compartmentalized in and of itself--like an M. C. Escher print, really. In certain fannish circles I will categorically refuse even to admit I write fic, let alone slash (but mostly probably because of the slash--I don't want to out myself to everybody! Shock, gasp, horror!).

I've been discovering that I get wonderful feedback on some of my strangest stuff there; my long, original Harry/Martha with the detective agency got six glowing reviews and was favourited six times. I mean, that might not sound like much compared to a Ten/Rose epic, but since all I write is obscure stuff, that's really quite excellent, and I was very pleased.

I think to a certain extent people are intrigued to see something *different* pop up in the recent list on Teaspoon, and that's as good a hook as any. So I do recommend posting everything there.

Hadn't thought about that angle at all: interesting. I've always thought the Teaspoon interface was massively better than most of the other big fandom archives: you can go back and edit, so even the occasional formatting issue is quite easily solved. Some places have this laborious system of things being uploaded by someone else, and then once it's up, tough shit if it looks like crap: maddening.

Someone asked the other day on

torch_wood about a central fic archive for TW, and how there isn't really one. As you say, Teaspoon's available sort of by default, which might well be off-putting: 'all fics are welcome, but some are more welcome than others' kind of thing, maybe.

That's very true - I got a nice number of comments for an Evelyn genfic, and my most commented on fic by far is Mickey gen.

Yay, I'll be happy to see it go up there, then! Oh, Harry - and the scene in with UNIT, OH MY GOD. I do love that fic ever so. (And it's a good mix of gen, slash, and het for reccing!)

*nods*

It's intriguing, because it does impact on the overall perception of the fandom (as much as there ever is such a thing). You still encounter people popping up and declaring how disappointed they are in the lack of slash for (old-skool) Who, and however much we can go 'oh look, who_otp, loads!' etc, comparatively it's a tiny little corner of the fandom and a relatively recent development. Which part of me thinks is quite lovely, because there are positive aspects of that coterie atmosphere, but it's also sort of depressing.

And obviously I don't write fic at all, and certainly not that nasty slash, not me sir. *sighs*

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Teaspoon and slash: a pondering

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