#fraactals

a real highlight and a focal point for dramione

TALK TO ME ABOUT THIS PLS

I knew this would interest you! By the way, Janice Radway’s study is pretty famous -- I don’t know if you’ve read it, but I’ve seen it referenced multiple times in conjunction with romance. My understanding is, it changed the game. I don’t know if Beebee’s book would be interesting to you at all because I think it uses “supermarket novel” genres as a jumping off point rather than an extended area of theorization.

But as for my thoughts on this particular bit, I think it’s fascinating if a bit overgeneralizing? “American women are not provided with nurturers” seems like a potentially fraught claim: which American women? what counts as a nurturer? do housekeepers, personal assistants, nannies, etc., count as nurturers? and those are obviously different from romantic nurturers, and so may not discredit Radway/Beebee’s point, but it’s worth thinking through. I also don’t know the demographics on what women are most likely to read romance (I might guess: white? middle-class? lower-class? straight? but that could easily be wrong) or what demographic of men are reading war books. However, all that said, I think it’s undeniable that romance novels are gendered a particular way, and war books another, and I think “use-value” (for women, for men) is an incredibly smart way to talk about how those “genres” therefore work. 

Based on the introduction (which is all I’ve read!), Beebee seems to be arguing that genre is ALWAYS at play, and that what makes works legible (no matter how postmodern, anti-genre, or generically confused) is the knowledge of genre and how genre works. I’d love to think about that more deeply in conversation with the most “typical” genres (e.g., romance or murder mystery), and how “emotional satisfaction” comes not just from how well these books conform to generic beats, but also how they play with, defy, and surprise those beats. If something aligns too closely with those beats, it’s easy to feel bored or let-down, but if something deviates too far, it can be disappointing or not even feel like it’s part of the genre. I don’t read a ton of romance novels but I can think of some romcom movies where I feel like this absolutely applies, and I suspect it’s a similar situation. Murder mysteries too. You want the murder, you want a solution that makes sense, but you also want to be surprised.

Same. I hope you're doing well ❤

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I am always still doing them.  Otherwise I’d get no asks :D;

3. Any fandoms that don’t appeal to you? - I’m not sure there is. If I don’t like an element of a fandom and it crops up on my dash, i just unfollow the source of the problem. I feel like it’s more of a the show doesn’t appeal to me thing than a the fandom doesn’t appeal to me thing. I mean once you go through the Supernatural fandom at its peak insanity, nothing else quite tops it. I mean someone once reviewed a fic of mine (that I have since taken down) where they told me they hoped I burned in hell they hated my fic so much. It was a really gruesome review, but it didn’t make me leave the fandom. What made me leave was the writers stopped carrying character development over to the next season and everything started to get squicky incestuous as an undertone, which negated the real reason I was watching the show in the first place. I miss the characters sometimes but when I go on the spoiler tag I remember why I stopped watching. 

7. Is there anything you used to like, but now can’t stand? - A lot of things I can’t stand now I couldn’t really stand from the get go like ship wars or sex fic or fics that throw my favorite female characters under the bus for the sake of slash. I mean nothing ruins an OTP fic faster than knowing I’m getting my OTP because my fav was killed/humiliated/just doesn’t exist despite being one or both of the OTP’s bff, etc… I have found though now that I’m reading in fandoms like Star Wars and Marvel that when people do this with Finn or Rhodey or Sam, etc…it also pisses me off. I mean am I supposed to believe in a slow burn Steve/Tony fic Rhodey wouldn’t show up at all? That is BS. He’s Tony’s best friend. It also ticks me off that the Star Wars fandom doesn’t like Finn as much as I like Finn because I want to read a lot of Finn-centric fics but it’s so damn hard to find them because he’s tagged in fics as a side character more than the main character. Or sometimes I’ll look through ships with him in it and they’ll just be side ships. It’s so stupid and disappointing. This is why my whole post-op cognitive dysfunction writing hiatus disappoints me too because I feel like maybe I’d have written something to fill the voids by now but my brain is still not up to writing yet, though I’m getting closer each day, but by the time my writing kicks back in I’m going to have to devote time to my novel because I really desperately need to get that project out of pre-writing/first draft mode sooner than later. 

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Orange 🍊: I look up to you and I trust you

I will endeavor to live up to this :D

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