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Aug. 20th, 2007 04:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI read thru metafandom a thingy about calling stories that focus on two gay-identified men in a relationship as “M/M,” rather than “gay fiction,”
It had a point. I read the point. I'm not sure that specific objection proves the point.
Fanfic uses headers. There's a line that fits in the subject line, and there's a bunch of lines in a post that describe the story. Headers are often standardised. Within fandom as a whole they vary vastly, but with particular lists or comms they tend to follow a pattern. The idea of them is to tell you what's in the story so you can see if you want to read it.
M/M is header data, often in the one-line bit that goes in the subject line. Stories can be M/M, M/F, F/F. You could call that gay, het, lesbian. But stories can also be M/M/M, and that too would be gay, but you'd lose data to label it that way. And it can also be M/M/F or M/F/F or M/M/M/F/F or, you know, all those others. It's a scaleable labelling convention. As such it is very handy.
And it's not quite broken by needing more initials for genders, as long as someone notes somewhere what E or H or O or whatever stands for in the context.
Mostly though I see stories with Name/Othername labels instead of M/M. Unless it's Canon/Original, where mostly you'll get Jack/M rather than Jack/some dude you never heard of.
All that up there is not to do with the point the other thing was having. It's just got it's own point, with nice handy logic.
One of the reasons I like fanfic is the header labelling system, with logic. Trying to dig through a couple thousand books I inherited and figure out what's in them just from the backs of the books... oh so not easy. Same with trying to buy stuff at Amazon. Adding headers for print books would simple things up rather.
... huh, now there's a project ...
It had a point. I read the point. I'm not sure that specific objection proves the point.
Fanfic uses headers. There's a line that fits in the subject line, and there's a bunch of lines in a post that describe the story. Headers are often standardised. Within fandom as a whole they vary vastly, but with particular lists or comms they tend to follow a pattern. The idea of them is to tell you what's in the story so you can see if you want to read it.
M/M is header data, often in the one-line bit that goes in the subject line. Stories can be M/M, M/F, F/F. You could call that gay, het, lesbian. But stories can also be M/M/M, and that too would be gay, but you'd lose data to label it that way. And it can also be M/M/F or M/F/F or M/M/M/F/F or, you know, all those others. It's a scaleable labelling convention. As such it is very handy.
And it's not quite broken by needing more initials for genders, as long as someone notes somewhere what E or H or O or whatever stands for in the context.
Mostly though I see stories with Name/Othername labels instead of M/M. Unless it's Canon/Original, where mostly you'll get Jack/M rather than Jack/some dude you never heard of.
All that up there is not to do with the point the other thing was having. It's just got it's own point, with nice handy logic.
One of the reasons I like fanfic is the header labelling system, with logic. Trying to dig through a couple thousand books I inherited and figure out what's in them just from the backs of the books... oh so not easy. Same with trying to buy stuff at Amazon. Adding headers for print books would simple things up rather.
... huh, now there's a project ...