Refelections on my first WisCon

So, I've just added a lot of people to my friends list, most of whom I met at WisCon (and some of whom I only admired from afar!). If you're wondering who I am, I am a white girl with curly/frizzy brown hair. My name tag said "Jacqueline" (although I go by Jackie). Last night at the parties (I was mostly in the LJ room), I wore a brown dress.

If you don't friend me back, I won't angst and feel like dying, although if you do I'll probably squee and be all excited. I post in my blog that I've had since 2001. The problem is that I kept reading LJ and friending people and joining communities, but nobody really knew anything about me. So, now I copy and paste entries from my blog to here.

So. I was expecting WisCon to be neat and interesting, but I really didn't expect it to be the life-changing experience that it was. I feel like I will consume my media in a very different manner. The way I approach movies, TV shows, books, anime, and comics/manga will now always include, "Why are women being depicted this way?" "Why are people of color being portrayed this way" (or, where ARE the people of color?), "Why are there no non-heterosexual people in this imagined universe?" I will still like shows that get it wrong (ie, Battlestar Galactica), but even all the more because I like them, it will very much be worth analyzing what they get wrong.

I absolutely love the sense of community and connectedness that is WisCon. Saturday night, I went to go find Kristen so that I could give her a ride home, and I found she and Gretchen in the room in which their panel on Dragons had occurred. There were about 10 people in the room who simply couldn't leave because they kept talking about dragons, which authors and books they liked or didn't like, and why. I attended two panels on the show Heroes and was amazed at how excited I was, and I realized it was because I can't think of anyone I know in real life (other than Gordon!) who watches Heroes. One of the women in the dealers' room who was trying to thin out her collection of paperback books set Enchantress from the Stars on top a stack and said to me and another person who was browsing, "I have a lot of good books that nobody's ever seen before." "I've read that book!" I exclaim, "I loved it!" "Yeah, I've heard good things about that book," says the guy standing next to me.
"I should have known," said the bookseller, "this is WisCon."
The greatest thing, for me at least, is that everyone at WisCon was nice, and also articulate. People spewed geek knowledge like fountains, but I never got the vibe of "OMG LOOK AT ME!" or "WTF, I know so much more than you ever will about this particular series" like I often do at other places. I will admit, though, that part of that might be because we were only by each other for one weekend.

I did feel like I was way behind "the curve" most of the time. At most panels, I didn't speak or contribute to the conversation at all, but I listened and took lots of notes (except at the Battlestar Galactica panel.....ohmygod, I am SO geeky!). There seemed to be many common texts that everyone else was aware of, and I wasn't. At this point, I feel like it's my duty as a geek to see some Star Trek so that I catch all of the throw-away references. But, it's not only that. I've only read one book by Tamora Pierce. I've only read one book by Ursula K. LeGuin. I've never read anything by Octavia Butler, Barbara Hambly (possibly some Star Wars books, but I can't remember which), Ellen Kushner, Pat Murphy, or Nicola Griffith. I had never heard of James Tiptree until this weekend.

I almost felt guilty because as a young person who has read book since age 3, I never noticed that 9 times out of 10, I was identifying with a male character, or that even when the female was the protagonist, everyone was swept into gender roles. I think that I never felt weird about always identifying with male characters, especially in sci-fi and fantasy novels, because I myself was very much a tomboy. In the third grade, my career goal was to become the first woman in the NFL. Once we hit seventh grade and my peers switched over from flag football to tackle football, I stopped playing. I don't think that I have analyzed why that "had" to happen.

Expect many posts in the next few days; I intend to do write-ups of all the panels I attended, partly for my own reference, but partly also because I feel like many of the things that were said are things that people need to hear.

This is the first day in as long as I can remember in which I have had no homework to do, no scheduled hours at which I should be at work, and no WisCon to attend. I am so excited because I actually have time to do laundry. I have time to tidy up my room. I have time go and buy groceries (the store will be open, right?!). I have time to read manga (because God knows that before I dive into the page-long list of book recommendations I have, I need a brain-break of cracktastic goodness like Saiyuki first!). I will have time to hang out with Antoine (my boyfriend), and we can watch anime! I'm even excited to go to work tomorrow (for n00bs to my life: I am a Senate page at the Wisconsin Capitol) because I have been chosen to accompany my bosses on a trip to Milwaukee, where a committee will hold a listening session with constituents on gun control - it promises to be vastly interesting, and I get to go to Milwaukee! And not pay for it!

So! It's time to unwind, relax, and eventually type up all my wonderful notes and thoughts about WisCon panels. I hope that even those of you who didn't attend the convention will find them interesting. I haven't felt this wonderful in a long time. Badass.

Wiscon 31 Panel Report: "Please Explain Slash to Me"

Please Explain Slash To Me

Reading, Viewing, and Critiquing SF&F•Capitol B• Saturday, 10:00-11:15 a.m.

Slash fans and authors explain the appeal of their chosen pastime. Why are women in particular so drawn to this form of expression, as readers and writers? What's so special about mucking around in someone else's fictional world?

Sharyn November, Yoon Ha Lee, Rebecca Marjesdatter, Lyda Morehouse, JJ Pionke

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I went to this panel because the questions in its description are questions that I have asked. I am a member of lots of fandom-related communities on LiveJournal - for anime, for TV shows, etc. Thus, I see lots of links posted to people's slash fanfiction. Even before that, my first online fandom was Final Fantasy VII, and to this day, it remains really the only fandom for which I've ever taken a stab at writing fanfiction, and the only fandom for which I ever made a concerted effort to seek out well-written fanfiction, and read it. I think I still have Frank Vederosa's "Shards," a FF7 fanfic about my favorite character Tifa Lockheart, printed out and inside of a binder in my room at my parents' house.
Despite being aware of slash fiction, I've never written it, have rarely read it, and never really understood the appeal of it. Thus, I went to this panel.

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The panel opened with a definition of slash. Slash is romantic or erotic fanfiction which focuses on unresolved sexual tension between two characters from a book, TV show, movie, etc. The sexual tension is unresolved because it focuses on two (or more) characters who would never get together in the actual show/book/whatever. There is slash for everything, not just Harry Potter or anime. There is slash fiction for the TV show JAG (and lots for The West Wing! I've seen it!). There is slash fiction for Winnie the Pooh. No, I am not kidding.
Most often, the tension is unresolved because the characters are heterosexual, but both of the same sex. Slash fiction will often taken canonically heterosexual characters and make them homo- or bisexual for the purpose of the fanfiction.
( Here are the rest of my notes )

Special Quote
"Harry is like rice, which goes with everything, but the question is: which one goes on top?" A lot of people in the audience seemed to read, or had written, Harry Potter fanfiction, so this caused much uproarious laughter.

Wiscon 31 Panel Report: "Three Comrades Go on a Quest..."

I sort of apologize for posting so much today/this past weekend. Even I don't normally blog this much. Still, I know that if I don't do these panel reports soon (and I *do* want to post them because I think they're interesting), I just won't do it for months on end, and it will keep bothering me.

Three Comrades Go On A Quest....

Politics, Race, Class, and Religion•Senate B• Saturday, 1:00-2:15 p.m.

So many of the traditional fantasy tropes rely upon distinctions either of class (princes/princesses, lost heirs to thrones, etc.) or that map quickly to class (the aristocracy of those who can use magic, say, lording it over those who can't.) How do we fix this? Who's already done the work that we can look to for examples, and what are the traps we want to avoid?

M: Janine Ellen Young, Leah Bobet, Laurie J. Marks, Meghan McCarron, Hilary Moon Murphy

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I'll be up-front in that I didn't really like this panel all that much. I'm not sure why that is, otherwise I'd explain why. I think I thought the panel would focus more on alternative ways to tell the story, while instead it focused on trying to explain who had already written it differently, and also why someone might have written their story that way in the first place.

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The premise is that many fantasy novels revolve around quests, usually ones in which members of three different socioeconomic classes unite and save the day. One of these people is usually an anointed Chosen One. At the end of the story, the three classes split again and go their separate ways. Thus, the fantasy epic reinforces the status quo.

( Here are the rest of my notes. )

Books Recommended that break the trope, or just recommended period:
Diana Wynne Jones's Tough Guide to Fantasy
The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin
Watership Down, Richard Adams
Princess Academy, Shannon Hale
Mister Monday, Garth Nix
Goblin Quest and Goblin Hero, Jim Hines
Stuff by Elizabeth Moon
Stuff by Terry Pratchett (depending on whether or not you think that farce "counts")