#popslash

God must have spent a little more time on Flesh Mechanic! (Actually, Kel and Lise did.) This week, V and Emily FREAK THE FUCK OUT over the single best fanfiction they've ever read, probably, and it is NOT what you would expect. No spoiling. Click the first source link, read the story, and then join us to FREAK THE FUCK OUT. Huge thank you to Lise for speaking with V about the writing and design process of this story, and a huge thank you to lovely Patron Nevanna for pointing it our way! TW: Mentions of suicide, car accidents, murder, manipulative behavior.

Sources

Flesh Mechanic: Not An AU Flesh Mechanic: Authors' Commentary Track A Twist of Lemon Review, 2003 Fanfic and Resistance: Appropriation, Casey Burton and Mike Edwards (Link has died in the month since we recorded, sadly)

LIVE SHOW ANNOUNCEMENT!

We’ll be attending TGIF/F aka TGI Femslash, which is a small femslash fan con in southern California over Valentine’s Day weekend in February. It’ll be the con’s ten-year anniversary, and they’ve asked us to do a special, live podcast episode about the history of the con as their special highlighted programming. If you love femslash and want to come meet us and be a part of this wonderful, small event, you should register! A 3-day pass starts at $120. You can register for the con and find lots more details at tgifemslash.com!

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When it comes to slash fanfiction and especially popslash, there’s a tendency to focus a lot on Western boy bands (though it can be argued KPop fandom’s part of this to some extent) but ignore their black predecessors. In the case with the Backstreet Boys, there’s far more fanfiction of them than there is of their contemporaries Destiny’s Child and the only black person to regularly show up in popslash is Mel B from the Spice Girls.

Even then she gets way less fanfiction than that of the Backstreet Boys, especially somebody like Nick Carter on AO3. It gets weirder still when you realise that while the Backstreet Boys are patterned after New Kids on the Block, New Kids on the Block were created as a white version of New Edition a black vocal group inspired by those at Motown, a mostly black music label. New Edition and any Motown act are pretty much nonexistent in fanfiction.

(Sadly, black music’s palatable if it were done by white people.)

If I were to bring up groups like The Temptations and Four Tops, you might say they’re old and irrelevant so why bother making fanfiction based on them. Yet The Beatles are also old at this point, therefore they should be irrelevant but there’s a lot of fanfiction based on them. Likewise the BSB’s contemporaries Destiny’s Child don’t get much fanfiction either, so perhaps it’s not so much age that’s a deterrent to fanfiction but rather race.

And in Destiny’s Child’s case, an intersection between race and sexism (misogynoir here as they’re black). It’s really going to be a case of white boy prioritisation, sometimes at the expense of groups that can be doable muses. A muse is fine, if they’re white. If they’re black, most people wouldn’t enjoy or like in any way. The only (other) way for them to show up is to be fetishised for things they get stereotyped for, a form of othering.

On one hand, we’re spared from the horrors of smutty Four Tops fanfiction but on the other hand it’s pretty weird how The Temptations and Four Tops, despite being much closer to the Backstreet Boys than the Beatles are, get ignored in fanfiction. They might as well not exist, not to mention I could imagine some fans dismissing them as music for old people even though the Beatles get played in oldies blocks from time to time as well.

The real answer would be racism, albeit one too uncomfortable for others to honestly admit. That would mean they’re more sympathetic to white people than they would to others, with black people they’d be good for fulfilling a stereotype but never for violating them though that involves actually seeing them as people. So othering them’s the way to go, even well-meaning people do this from my experience.

Popslash remains white and perhaps whiter still since AJ McLean and Howie Dorough are part white while Destiny’s Child is all-black but don’t get much fannish attention despite being contemporaneous with them. I guess black people don’t matter much in popslash, just a few regularly show up in popslash and the rest is going to be all about white men all the way.

This is a trailer someone made for a Backstreet Boys/O-Town/Nsync fic using Flash. It goes for two minutes but it’s worth watching to the end

i mean, these choices are not groundbreaking or unique.

while I do not like crossovers, I will accept crossover aus, so like there was a malec hunger games fic i loved.  hunger games characters had nothing to do with it, but all the tsc characters were in hunger games verse.  acceptable.

honestly, there are very few things i won’t read, or at least attempt to read.  i even almost enjoyed an mpreg, but I think that’s mainly because all the preg-ness was offscreen and the baby just showed up.