The famous Sherlock Holmes fanfiction Two Two One Bravo Baker would be better without the sex scenes.
meh. see, in the first place, i wrote it as pornography, and pornography by…
hi!
i don’t think anyone (certainly not me) was *offended* by your comments, i was just responding to your comment in a spirit of ‘yeah, but i built it the way i wanted, and so i don’t think it would be ‘better’ in terms of what i intended it to do without the sex’. and i think a lot of us get exercised about ‘the sex is just unnecessary to the story’ arguments (not that you made that argument, i mean) because it’s frustrating to have a favorite area of human activity get stripped of narrative value just because – because. so we all sort of flock about going ‘sex is narrative, sex is plot, sex is character godamnit’ ever chance we get.
i can intellectually understand how someone who doesn’t like reading sex scenes for whatever reason would want a ‘non-sex’ version of ttobb, but i don’t know if the interpersonal story would even make any sense without them – as i said, to me, the explanation for sherlock and john’s instant connection is at least largely sexual. you could tell the story of sherlock and john as a story of platonic connection, but i didn’t, and so the stuff in the sex scenes is the explanation of the stuff happening between them outside the sex scenes.
i can also understand how tiresome the emphasis on sex in fanfic must be if you’re trying to avoid it – but it is a massive driver for many of us. i can’t express it other than to say, i would be amused thinking about john and sherlock solving cases and having adventures, but i am solely interested in actually arranging and writing stories that involve john and sherlock becoming involved in a relationship that is deeply sexual.
I did think near the beginning that there was too much sex, but that’s just my own preferences talking. I generally only enjoy reading smut when the characters are madly in love, so in the beginning when it was just a sexual relationship it bothered me a little, but after several chapters I got what was going on and they were falling for each other emotionally as well as physically. It made sense after that.
And I guess I write the stuff where they don’t have sex and actually go around solving cases. You know the ‘amusing’ stuff that takes me months to plot out so that the crime, mystery, and clues are believable. Not that anyone takes that seriously. 🙂
Oh man, no, I wasn’t offended. I simply saw an opportunity to get my opinions all over everything and I took it. ^_^
No, I know—and this might sound ironic—just how you feel about the way sex seems to get into everything. I LOVE gen. I started out reading and writing gen, and sometimes I still just want to sweep all the other stuff aside and appreciate a nice piece of canonically grounded good-times. I love you guys for writing it!
Actually, do you know, I write gen sometimes? The disparity in hit counts is hilarious. My top three stories, which recently broke 10,000 hits each, are all centered on sex. My highest hit count for a story that doesn’t involve sex or at least what looks like the promise of it is…*checks* 2700. Still Two Days Till We Say We’re Sorry. Which is also the third-oldest Sherlock story I’ve got on AO3.
It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Almost everybody seems to want sex in their stories. Sex gets lots of attention, lots of readers, lots of comments…and yet at the same time it’s looked down upon and derided as vulgar. (Though, admittedly, not so much by the members of fandom.)
Gen, meanwhile, largely gets overlooked entirely.
The reading audience is weird, man. It’s not like this is confined to fandom. Published authors get the same treatment.
But I’ve got to say, havingbeenbreathedout and pennypaperbrain made some great points about how fanfic is really the only place where they get to find thoughtful explorations of sexual and psychosexual dynamics. That’s what attracts me about sex in fanfic, too. Those are some powerful, dangerous currents of the mind getting tossed around in there, and that stuff is my bread and butter.
Brighteyes-Vanderde: Sex in stories (previously “Unpopular opinion:”)