Shipping the Velvet

1. Shipping the Velvet Slash Fandom, Convergence, and why you should care about Harry Potter M-Preg.

2. What will not happen in the next 110 minutes • Justification of Slash (in this panel, slash justifies itself!) • Debate about whether slash is about feminism, queerness, misogyny, or your (secretly pervy) mom • Ship debates • Discussion of why people write slash What will happen in the next 110 minutes • Overview of the evolution of slash • Discussion of fanfic in participatory (“convergence”) culture. • Overview of media / academic reactions to slash and fanfic (and the increasingly blurry lines between creators and consumers of canon and fanon) • Applying all this to HP slash (the fun part) • InterActivist audience participation.

3. “I'm always going to hold a true disappointment that Jo chose not to write in a gay couple (R/S was the natural choice). - Alixandra, 3/8/07 She could have changed lives.”

4. Evolution of Slash • Slash fandom mentality  general fandom mentality (FBG 58) • Debate that used to belong to ‘slash v/s het’ has moved to the purvey of ‘fringe’ genres. • What Catherine Tosenberger calls the “subcultural coding” of incest, chan, m-preg, and other kinks

5. Changing reactions to slash: media, academic, creator/producer • Crossovers between fandom/professional borders • Fan/Creator dynamics

6. Authorial Reactions to Fanon: Dangerous liaisons? • Anne Rice: • Robin Hobb: “At the extreme low end of the spectrum, fan fiction becomes personal masturbation fantasy… at the less extreme end, the fan writer simply changes something in the writer’s world. …The intent of the author is ignored.” • Lee Goldberg:

7. There was once a conjurer who boasted that he had become god-like. One god happened to overhear, and challenged him to a contest. “Can you do this?” the god asked, scooping up a handful of dirt and making it into a bird. They watched the bird fly away. “Sure,” said the conjure-man, and reached down for a handful of raw material. “Hey,” said god. “Use your own dirt.” Props to any writer who can make a story fly. None of us use our own dirt. - Patrick Nielsen Hayden “If ever I do something like that, please shoot me.” - Neil Gaiman

8. Reader Interpretation “If several fans of my books got together and had a good old time speculating on my characters' sexual peccadillos, or if students in a lit class did an essay dissecting my characters' psyches, these would generally be seen as perfectly all right even though their views on my character radically differed from my own, and they were in fact presenting those views to others and possibly changing the way others saw my story. I frankly don't see fan fiction as that different from the scenarios I just listed.” - Shadow82

9. Reader Interpretation; Reader Activity “No reader ever truly reads the book the author wrote; no reader ever visualizes exactly what the author visualized as he or she pounded the keys. The divergences may be trivial or they may be huge, but they're there and they're an intrinsic part of an interactiveentertainment medium.… Readers aren't worshippers; they're paying customers of an entertainment product that depends on its interactivity for its power to compel and fascinate. The only right way to read a book is one that suits the reader; the only right way to visualize a book's contents is the way that best gives the reader pleasure.” - Scott Lynch

10. Naomi Novik: I do think that for all of us who write [fanfiction], it’s about falling in love with characters.  In fact with my own work, the way that I sort of knew that I had a fun idea was that I felt the same sort of pleasure, the same desire to write about my own characters, about Laurence and Temeraire, as I felt about writing fan fiction, because of course with fan fiction it’s done for love because you can’t do it for money. Blurring Lines: Fans and Creators Engaging in the same Spaces Doris Egan: When we write… the laws of the universe do a one-eighty, and all these things are good. By which I mean that whatever pleases you, whatever excites you, whatever you obsess about, whatever glittery thing holds your interest, whether it's some complicated and spiky relationship between two characters or the last days of the American Civil War or the possibilities involved in Schrodinger's cat -- this is your lawful subject matter. Do not complain to me, "But what interests me is an obscure political event from 1899. And it's been made clear to me that nobody else in the world finds it exciting," because I will say, "Congratulations." Do not complain, "I want to write slash professionally, and there's just no market for that," because I will say, "Good for you!" Do not sigh and say that you want to write a romance, and a billion romances have come before, so what is there new to say? For I will pat you on the back and offer you a celebratory drink.

11. “I find it both very cool and professionally useful to pick apart the elements of a successful novel and then reassemble them or add to them or experiment with changing this or that element in order to see what effects can be produced by such alterations. … If I write Potter fic, it is not because I hope that J. K. Rowling will read it and appreciate the tribute. If I write Potter fic, it is to explore how Rowling's rules of magic work, or perhaps to tinker with what difference her point-of-view choice makes in the story, or to extend her ideas about prejudice, nationalism, politics, and leadership in ways that she will not and cannot in a popular young-adult series.” - Conversant

12. End part one; 5-minute break!

13. “It was during that first mammoth session that I met the shippers, and it was a most extraordinary thing. I had no idea there was this huge underworld seething beneath me.” - J.K.R. Shipping versus Slashing: Or, why is this panel called *Shipping* the Velvet?

14. Remus/Sirius versus Remus/Tonks: Tonks as Interloper “This is not a genuine romance.” - Shaggy “I don't [see] any non-Sirius medium between Remus and Tonks… it seems like Remus and Tonks have nothing in common but Sirius, that they are two characters brought together only by Sirius' death. Which is fine and dandy usually, but when you want to have a pairing, I can't see it happening. Sooner or later, they are going to stop mourning Sirius, and then what happens?Plus, I think it only makes the case for Sirius and Remus stronger.” - Creativepseudo “I have never yet seen any reasonable explanation as to why we should care about Remus and Tonks' love life. … Even if JKR is trying to say that love brings hope and light into the world, she fails, because she ignores all the things working against the hope and light. Ignoring and dismissing darkness is not the same thing as having hope.” - Ignipes

15. “My faith was solidified when J.K. told us we shouldn’t like him. And now I have finally been proven correct. We weren’t supposed to like him because he was supposed to be a big surprise.” - Bloodyrose82, 7/17/05