about Supernatural fanfic...

[ratcreature]

I'm not feeling particularly fannish about Supernatural, but I have watched most episodes, thus while I was bored I looked around for Supernatural fanfic to read. I was mostly interested in gen, and while of course I knew that there's Sam/Dean slash I was actually surprised how common it is, from my first impressions even more widespread than gen (though I could be wrong about that). And I just don't get it. Personally I just have a hard time seeing Sam/Dean slash.

It's not that I'm particularly squicked by sibling incest, but the story has to somehow work harder to make that kind of thing work than other pairings. Not only because it has to make me buy that they would act on a sexual attraction despite incest taboos, that is similar in a way to other "relationship obstacles" in romance stories, but because it has to make me buy that there would be attraction in the first place. With most pairings I can buy that the author simply has a character feel attraction, inappropriate or not, and then the story goes from there, but for me (and I suspect most people) thinking about close family members with whom you grew up with, like your own siblings or parents and sex together is, well, sort of icky. Not just incestuous sex, but even the fact that your sibling or parent has sex with anyone, that's the kind of thing you don't want to contemplate in much detail. At least I don't, and I suspect I'm not alone in that.

I tried reading a couple of Sam/Dean stories, but they seemed to be much like regular slash in the way that it assumes that the reader buys the possibility for attraction between the guys in the first place. I don't quite get what makes this plausible for Sam/Dean shippers just from watching the series, and yet it seems very common. Which leaves me puzzled. I looked whether there was an essay on this pairing at ship_manifesto to provide me with some insight, but there doesn't seem to be one yet. So does anyone know of any Supernatural meta that would explain to me where the Sam/Dean shippers are coming from?

Comments

[thelana.livejournal.com]

But the question is how much that doesn't also hold true for normal slash. Like why can't two characters be friends, hug, argue or have an otherwise intense relationship without somebody standing up and calling it gay or slashy? After all I'm sure men are capable of being like that with other men without automatically fucking each other.

I think the reason we interpret everything as sexual is because we want to. We see the characters, we like them. We want to read about them in a sexual manner. So they need a partner. On Supernatural there *are* no other people. You are bound to come back to Wincest because they simply do not have a relevant emotional relationship with anybody else because there are no other permanent cast members. If you want to read about Sam and Dean in a sexual context you simply do not have much other options, especially if you are looking for something with any type of emotional resonance (as opposed to a one night stand with a guest starring character).

It's simply the most important and relevant relationship of the show and it kind of comes with the territory that people snazz it up with sex because porn is popular.

(BTW I completely agree with your point about how incest, while I think that it should be looked for like one would look for any slash pairing, should be written differently from "normal" pairings. After all, what's the fun of having a fucked up pairing if you are not going to write about the fucked up-ness?)