Enthusiastic slash ship adoption based on minimal canon interaction WITHOUT pwp???

[cimorene]

I haven't watched the Mandalorian yet. I'm a fan of Star Wars and I always check out what the fanfiction looks like for each new live-action piece of it, but like many others, I've been dealing with so many emotions from real life that I seem to have a limited amount of emotional bandwidth and attention with which to process new fictional stories that require emotional engagement and might have like... conflict... and suspense. I'm sure I'll get around to it eventually.

In the meantime, I'm still aware of new developments through fandom osmosis on Tumblr (I don't bother avoiding spoilers for most things). So I was aware when Timothy Olyphant showed up with a fetching undercut and I know that spoilers: Luke Skywalker shows up in his black goth Chanel boots Return of the Jedi outfit (if you don't recognize the Chanel boots reference: here's KnowYourMeme) and saves the day, exchanging probably ten seconds or so of dialogue, and agrees to train baby Yoda. I learned all of this through Tumblr gifsets and reaction posts as usual, and so you could say I learned that people were reacting in part by shipping Chanel Boots Luke with Pedro Pascal's Mandalorian, although of course since I go here (Fandom), I already knew that both of them were beloved slash objects/fandom favorites and thirst objects whom people would be eager to slash with anybody who looked likely, so their meeting made it inevitable.

A few days ago I saw yet another shippy post about this on Tumblr and thought to myself, "I wonder how much people have written of this already in the last 2 weeks (literally, because it aired Dec. 18: 2 weeks as of 1 January, 2 days ago)?" Out of curiosity, I went to look at the pairing tag on Ao3 and:



...Nice.

 

 









Babies Yoda are here to help preserve spoiler space, from the following projects on Ravelry - which you can only see if logged in: jamylyn's, LarissaMaced's, Gallynette's, loopysue's

 

 

(No spoiler content below this paragraph in the post itself.)

So to reiterate, in summary: less than a minute of shared screentime?, two weeks ago; and already 69 fics in the ship on AO3. (Nice.) (None of them including 69ing.)

I poked through the headers a bit, as is my wont, and discovered:

• a bunch of WIPs begun


• a bunch of short-to-medium-length essentially fluffy shippy first time stories


• more than one extremely long shippy fic that was already written before the episode/character introduction, lol


• of course several people had already managed to finish shippy first-time fics that were over 10k words: not a lot of them, but a few

I opened a couple to skim through the beginnings and ends (of the long ones) or the whole thing (of the short ones) in curiosity... and something jumped out at me after a while:

The lack of explicit sex.

I saw some fluff, some fade to black, and a bit of unexplicit sex was present in the stories with sort of partial fade-to-black or rather vague references, but when I finally found one (that still wasn't entirely explicit, actually), it jostled the elbow of my memories from TPM fandom, sort of.

Now, there isn't a TOTAL absence of explicit sex in this pairing; last night there were 100 works exactly on AO3 and 10 were rated E, for 10%. BUT when you apply many of my usual filters...

• only finished works (8)


• that were written after the episode aired and hence not in a canon-divergent au (4)


• excluding threesomes with Boba Fett (3)

... you come up with three, one of which says in the headers that it's "my first smut".

Because the first thing I read in TPM was a kink novelette set in a bdsm club (when you're introduced to a fandom via multifannish recs lists it tends to be the iconic ones), it's possible that my memories are a little skewed, but the contrast seemed rather shocking. I mean...

... even apart from how much kink there was in TPM (which felt like about half of it at times but I'll guess was probably more like 5-10%?) wasn't explicit sex like... the default? At least a quarter or a third of it?

(Feel free to argue with my impressions, anybody else who used to hang out in the TPM-era slash archives.)

Anyway, though, it really did make me wonder about how much the fandom demographics have shifted, both overall on AO3, and possibly specifically in Star Wars as a result of Disney producing constant kids' animated content for it for ten years.

Comments

[krait]

I think you've got a good point about Disney content. I don't think Disney owned the Star Wars franchise back in the TPM days? So it was marketed to a broader audience, or not as closely linked with the "For Kids" connotations that come with the Disney name, and (fandom being somewhat of a microcosm of the total audience) as a result the fic was correspondingly broader in scope.

Or so my theory goes, anyway. :D Now that Star Wars is "a Disney movie," I suspect the marketing has shifted toward 'people already inclined to see Disney properties,' i.e. children and parents with children. (If only because it's cheaper to advertise toward the audience you already have! And they're probably relying on the Star Wars name itself to pull in other audience segments that don't already watch Disney programming.)

BUT ALSO I feel like longer fic takes more time to appear, so it would be really interesting to see the numbers for this six months from now and two years from now! :D New fic for TPM continued to pour forth from fandom years after the movie release, and it seems the kind of longer, explicit-but-also-plotty fic was often in the later output. Good plot and characterisation might require longer soaking in canon and exploring other interpretations to produce.

(Now I really want to go browse the MasterApprentice archive and check dates on the fics I've bookmarked!)

[cimorene]

No, it did not own Star Wars then, but the new theatrical Star Wars trilogy (or the two spinoffs) hasn't been marketed more exclusively to children; the main movies have always been intended to appeal to adults and children, but there's been side-properties (starting with the animated movie before the Disney purchase as Wax points out... I'd forgotten how long ago that was) aimed at children continually on the market for the past 10+ years now. In the various times I've spent among children in that period I've seen that from daycare toddlers up through the school ages, they've all been familiar with Star Wars, but before The Force Awakens most of them were unaware that there are major live action adult movies at all.

[cimorene]

But yeah I did think about that. Of course the people writing longer fic might be a slightly different group from the ones who are prepared to quickly churn out shorter and more plotless things, but I'm not ready to hypothesize that the body of long fiction would be very DRASTICALLY different in character from the short fic in the same fandom. Will be interesting to see what happens as it develops though, yeah! I've definitely seen the tenor and mood of fanon change over time in other fandoms before.

[stranger]

TPM fanfic was spurred (both before and after the premiere) by Ewan McGregor's recent fame in Velvet Goldmine, so the BDSM club isn't quite out of left field, or at least, from a known left field. That *was* the first fandom I'd seen that had fanfic actually ahead of the movie (the prospect of !new SW trilogy! was mesmerizing), and the sequence with Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan was engaging enough to keep fans going afterwards.

Not quite related, but LucasFilms also leaned on the "for kids" label for SW, at least when they were (~1981) trying to get fans not to write slash. By 1999 and TPM, suppressing fanfic was rather a lost cause.

[cimorene]

Ah, yes, the great slash suppression efforts of the 80s - I've read some very funny anecdotes about that. Judging by the Han/Luke zines that survived from that time that I've seen, they weren't exactly successful... but perhaps someone eventually realized that the fact that slashers write stuff about a blockbuster isn't going to irretrievably tarnish its family-friendly reputation and ruin its toy marketing tie-ins. (They still sell My Little Pony toys, and there's no worksafe way to google that!)

But that's a great point about Ewan. I remember it vividly as I was in high school at the time. His reputation as a 'sexy' actor and also for his willingness to be naked on film was everywhere, and fairly well earned I'd say, even apart from Velvet Goldmine. And of course there was a fair amount of drawing on an actor's other roles in fanfiction back then. Every fandom seemed to produce some "actor's other role/actor's other role" aus, but TPM had tons of them. I'm sure that had a big impact on the tenor of the fandom.

Not that I think there was a lack of explicit or kinky fics in other fandoms (although the popularity of a specific scene like BDSM would vary based on where the interested fans were)... there was plenty of so-called smut in the popslash and Star Trek and Sentinel I read around then. And plenty in Harry Potter too, although I understand there were at least debates about it, primarily from the het side of the fandom that I wasn't aware of at the time. Still, the distribution of this Mandalorian fics' ratings wouldn't necessarily look weird if you compared it to the ones for a handful of different fandoms from around then.

[stranger]

Oh, yeah, the 80s were a wild time for fandom. Believe those stories; they're probably not half the reality. Blockbusters and toy tie-ins do seem to have survived the shift to gay-is-okay in law and large parts of culture. It's slash that had to adapt, there.

You're completely right about actors' other roles; I've been highly entertained by characters meeting their cousins/brothers/mysterious doubles in fanfic. (Then later Bujold went and guyed the whole concept with Miles/Naismith/Mark.) I think there's been a shift in fandom to writing crossovers and fusions for similar *shows* instead. (Sentinel and Due south, for instance.) Does SW fandom do crossovers like that, since there are myriad space-opera shows? Do they need to, given all the movies/series/novels of the source universe?

Of course, there are all kinds of smut everywhere; it doesn't take Ewan McGregor. Original K/S had slave and bondage and other kinks, along with invented alien physiology. I haven't read *any* of the Mandalorian fic you speak of, but I'm surprised that a first crop of slash for a pairing wouldn't have some really explicit PWPs. Maybe the initial fannish audience does skew young, or thinks the material does. I mean, all I've seen about it are pictures of Baby Yoda.

Further analysis is clearly called for...

[cimorene]

You know, I think SW maybe does have fewer crossovers where characters from other properties appear in the SW verse (as opposed to just like... If He Was A SW Guy versions of them)... but I have seen headers for some over the years related to my compulsion to read through every header in an archive from time to time. My reaction is usually like, Well, that's impossible because SW took place long ago in a galaxy far away, not in the 23rd century! Or whatever.

There also used to be more of those sort of humorous fics where a more modern character gets transported to a different universe by mistake, like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court type stuff, and I can't think of anything like that I've seen that wasn't a het or reader-insert kind of thing in quite a while.

Good point about baby Yoda being the avatar of the show though... although I think the people shipping the dad have obviously made the leap to thirsting for Pedro Pascal, they might subconsciously feel like it's a bit like slashing the grownups in Sesame Street or Rugrats or something like that...