{ if you want to belong you'll write a sing-along. }

[delga]

Went to town this morning, bought some wrapping stuff. The Fairy is leaving to study in France for a year, and it was her birthday on Wednesday, so we're (the old group! oy) going out tonight. I bought her AM Holmes' collection of short stories (The Safety of Objects) and Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair (Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada) because she said she was saving money for Real Life things and thus couldn't afford to buy books. To which I declare (a) BOOKS ARE REAL LIFE THINGS! and also (b) well, if you can't buy them, I will. So. The Neruda, by the way, I am totally coveting. It's gorgeous to look at and it has the originals as well as the translations. !!!

Also, HAHA, yes, I'm actually going out tonight. CONTAIN YOURSELVES. (Um: I know where the restaurant is, but apparently we're meeting somewhere else beforehand for drinks? Fuck if I know where. Does anyone local know where Rigby's is?)

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It's Friday. I think the options will be fairly obvious today. I know I already rec'd The Be Good Tanyas, but it might be worth doing again.

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So, my issue with yesterday's rec was that I didn't know how to describe it without saying that it's Sheppard/Weir. Because it is that but the fic isn't really about the two of them doing couple-y things, or getting together on Atlantis. It's a realist fic, about family, about levels of loss. But, yes, it's also Sheppard/Weir. I just don't want people to be put off by that as a label, and it got me thinking: to what extent are pairing labels misleading? Or rather, to what extent is such a label necessary to define a fic. I'm loath to read Sheppard/McKay, but there are times when I do if only because regardless of that being the ship being represented in the fic, the fic isn't actually about that pairing. So at what point do ship labels become redundant?

Whatever: if you haven't already, check out the rec in the last post.

Comments

[general-jinjur.livejournal.com]

i kind of wish nothing got pairing labels. partly because i know i'm missing out on a lot of great gen stuff, lately. and i did have a lot of resistance to reading that story - weird, illogical resistance that possibly a lack of pairing label would have bypassed.

i took the pairing labels off my stories on my website, mostly because if i saw stories labeled the way most of them were? there's no way i would read them. however, i have seen people bitch a storm when pairings are left off - like they've been tricked into reading.

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

and i did have a lot of resistance to reading that story
Well, I'm the same with all things Sheppard/McKay. It's ridiculous (on my part especially because those ethical oppositions to Sheppard/Weir don't apply) but it happens a lot.

But you're right: people do feel deceived if the pairing isn't listed. On the one hand, I understand that - say, if a fic was about the couple, about their relationship, then the pairing label would act as a genre listing. But that doesn't really apply to fics where pairings are incidental, or peripheral. So.

Randomly! I realised yesterday that I can't read Parrish fics. I was trying to read something that was Lorne/Parrish (because Lorne = yay!) and I couldn't do it. Now I'm worried about my Inner Prejudices. Or not.

[viciouswishes.livejournal.com]

I tend to enjoy stories that focus less on the romantic pairing. Now don't get me wrong, a romance story is nice once in a while, but I'd rather have a plot-driven story.

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

a romance story is nice once in a while, but I'd rather have a plot-driven story
Sure, same here, and I find that often with Sheppard/Weir fics, it's more the former than the latter. (Also: lots of crazy AUs but that seems par for the course in this fandom).

I guess with labelling, what I meant was that if it's a plotty fic which involves two characters as a ship, but isn't specifically about them (as a romance), then how much does having the pairing label hurt the representation of that fic? Except, as Jinjur was saying, if you don't have the label, people get annoyed, as though they've been tricked into reading something they don't want to.