Somewhere out on the Internet

[davidn]

For a long time, there's been this sort of unwritten agreement between two Internet subcultures as to what they will and won't touch. On one side, there's the furry fandom which tarnishes things we grew up with like the Sonic series, the majority of the Disney films and anything and everything else animated and anthropomorphic. And on the other side, the community of slash writers takes care of just about every other film or storyline involving one or more men, including Lord of the Rings, Torchwood, and countless others. (I'm well aware this is a bit of a weird introduction, but keep going, it gets even better.)

I could cope with that situation, but at the beginning of the week I was appalled to find out that a number of these individuals had turned their attention to power metal as well. I have seen many horrors of the Internet and haven't been overly fazed - let's be honest, you could rightly say I'm part of several of them - but there was a boundary line in my head, and this crosses it, smashes it to bits and reverses over it with a tractor. The introduction on the description page invites you into this new area of expression that features "love, loss, hope, insecurity, frustration, joy, addiction, disappointment, ego, failure, success" as well as the entire membership of Iron Maiden, Helloween, Rammstein and Marilyn Manson (among many others) in a gigantic slash mega-bender. I have not explored this area of the site any further.

But as if that wasn't enough, you'll be thrilled to hear that a significant number of these writers have been published in a number of collections and stand-alone novels. They have four individual categories for various levels of creepiness and insanity, but in reality all but two of the books have the tag "slash" and involves members of German bands talking in surprisingly English accents and eventually violating each other. One of the full-length ones involves Kai Hansen being kidnapped by aliens from Uranus, and the page shows an excerpt where he has to pretend he's homosexual to avoid a potentially appendage-endangering situation. I had to use a cache link for that because it mysteriously disappeared in between the time I saw it and the time I wrote this up. Maybe they're hiding.

This post has been unusually damning, I know, and normally, I'm all for people doing what they enjoy as long as they're being good to each other and not posting lolcats. But my difficulty here is that I can't get past the fact that taking anyone else's real, non-consenting and unaware personality and moulding it to your own will seems a bit... wrong. To stand against what must be a common thought, there's a quotation from the California Supreme Court displayed at the bottom of each page on this site. "Surely, the range of free expression would be meaningfully reduced if prominent persons in the present and recent past were forbidden topics for the imaginations of authors of fiction." And it did make me stop and think for a bit... but in this case I'd rather not know any more of what the imaginations of these authors of fiction have come up with.

Comments

[ethelfleda.livejournal.com]

While I have very few boundaries, fiction about living real people (even entirely clean non-orgiastic stuff) makes me feel very uncomfortable. Even dead people who have relatives who can be upset about what's been said about their granddad (or whatever) makes me slightly edgy, but not as uncomfortable.

Also, you obviously didn't find any band related male pregnancy stuff. I'm only telling you this because I did, and misery loves company.

[tweeasfuck.livejournal.com]

There was quite a bit of Libs mpreg for a bit. Twitch, twitch.

I used to write this stuff. I have it well-labelled so that no one can accidentally read porn about themselves, and as Pete Doherty knows about this stuff all the Libertines stuff is locked down. Maybe I am morally weird but I have never seen a problem with it, myself.

[davidn]

I knew that band fiction existed, but it hadn't really bothered me until I discovered that site because these are people that... well, that I actually know about (Whitney said last week that I live in a black hole of popular culture). By comparison, Pete Doherty is someone that I really knew about as a slash character rather than a real person or musician - I'm surprised he knows about it as he's usually so full of unpronounceable substances I would have thought he lacks the awareness to care anyway.

Slightly late comment, but I remembered I needed to respond to it. Speaking of memories, remember this?

* Wong has happened upon Iron Savior fanfiction
[lsq] :O
[Wong] (Not _that_ kind of fanfiction, Kim)

And now there is. Thanks a lot, Internet.