Pimping

[brigdh]

tad_coast reminded me that I hadn't signed up for stagesoflove yet, and I realized what pairing I should write: Sanzo/Gojyo/Hakkai/Goku. Because, yes, I am crazy.

But tad_coast and I are the only ones writing for Saiyuki, and there's also only two people signed up for YnM pairings. What are you people doing? Go sign up! I need stuff to read, too.

You've got until the 30th. Here's the list of pairings already taken, and here's the post to claim your own.

In other news, I got my first package from the BPAL lab today. Exciting! Especially since I didn't expect to get it for another month. I have all sorts of wonderful news smells to try now, and then I can join everyone else in crowding your flists with review posts.

Comments

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I managed to internalize it as referring to power dynamics within the relationship

That's so interesting! Though I tend put names in seme/uke order when labeling stories, if just for the sake of not confusing anyone who assumes naming always follows that convention, I've managed to internalize it as "POV character comes first". Which isn't actually all that useful, because when talking about a general category rather than a specific story, it's anyone's guess who I'll end up putting first.

But I'm fascinated by how different people think about this naming thing.

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

I think I was permanently imprinted by a comment in -- to the best of my imperfect memory -- the celebrated crack_van overview. If I'm remembering correctly, boniblithe included a note about how anime/manga had this bizarre naming convention she always forgot about; and someone commented to say that she wished people would remember it, because she would drop anything and break down walls to read a Hisoka/Muraki if anyone recced one, and it would be a hideous disappointment to have dropped things and broken walls only to find out that the story in question was actually Muraki/Hisoka.

Given the context, it sounded more like a who's-in-charge issue than a who's-doing-what-specific-physical-act issue. And by the time I found out anything at all about semes and ukes and stereotyped and invariant roles, it was too late for my brain: it knew what it believed, and it wasn't changing. And as you see, not only do I use it this way to this day, but I forget that it ever means anything else.

I think this is the first mention I've seen of ordering by POV character, but I like it. For one thing, it means that labelling your story isn't already giving away plot elements.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I think this is the first mention I've seen of ordering by POV character

I think I invented it myself, when trying to figure out how to label stories that did not have a sex act, or had one for which I can never remember which position counts as top or bottom (for instance, I'm fairly certain that I read somewhere that the giver and receiver of a blowjob are supposed to correlate to the seme/uke paradigm, but damned if I know in what order). It seemed logical to me to put first the character who had more control of the story.

This makes me wonder how many different variations people have come up with on the whole naming order thing.

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

Now I'm curious about how everybody else is using it, too. I wonder whether anybody's done a poll or anything? It sounds like just the sort of question people could have gotten all obsessive about, and possibly even had strangely heated arguments over.

As it happens, I think I can answer the blowjob question. It's deeply counterintuitive for those of us steeped in American culture, but if the things that get posted on yaoi_daily are anything to go by, the seme's the one giving the blowjobs. Reciprocation isn't unheard-of, but it doesn't seem to be the norm, either.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I wonder whether anybody's done a poll or anything?

Hmmm, not that I know of. I think it'd be particularly interesting to see what conventions are popular in Western-based fandoms, as opposed to animanga ones. Though the seme/uke idea has likely spread much farther now than it had at the time, I remember being a newbie in LotR fandom and talking about this very topic on a maillist, and having not one single person suggest it had anything to do with sexual positions.

question. It's deeply counterintuitive for those of us steeped in American culture

An indication of where I am entirely not appropriately socialized then, as that would seem to be the more logical approach to me (if you can call anything involving the whole seme/uke debate logical).

[b-hallward.livejournal.com]

trying to figure out how to label stories that did not have a sex act

Yay! somebody else has had this problem, it's not just me -- since none of my stories have explicitly described sex acts I end up just tacking things like "Hisoka and Tsuzuki" onto the end of my summaries and saying to hell with the rest.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Hee. Yeah, the strict standard of naming conventions sometimes makes things that fall outside the paradigm really hard to label.

So obviously, the answer was to invent my own method that no one shares and is probably even more confusing, but hey- at least I don't have to worry about it any more.