crack_van | After Image by Ingrid Cross (PG)

Nice story. It's easy to get caught up in the awe of how a mind meld would work and not think about the experience of it. "Mirror, Mirror" has remained one of my favorites, so it was great to see this epilogue. Thanks for sharing this bit of fanfic history -- 28 years? Wow!

I also want to congratulate you on the admirable job you did in putting together such diverse ST universe stories. You represented the whole group of shows very well.

Thank you! I wanted to do an especially good job, seeing as how it's a featured fandom.

As for the fanfic history, I'm not old enough to remember it (this story was written before I was born ;) ), but I know people who were active then.

Star Trek, like many shows of its era, has incredibly few regular female characters, and fanfic has always been predominantly written by women. If they wanted a het relationship, most of the time they had to invent an OFC or take Uhura or Nurse Chapel for the woman. And OFCs were frowned upon--Star Trek is the fandom that coined the term "mary sue." (All the way back in 1974.) So there wasn't all that much het, proportionally--it was mostly gen or slash. The "/" vs. "and" distinction already existed for character/pairing listings. And the two characters that 90% of stories were written about were Spock and Kirk. So most fic was either "Kirk/Spock" or "Kirk and Spock." And that's where they got the term "slash" from--you rarely saw a "/" in a het pairing because there weren't many het pairings.

Star Trek, like many shows of its era, has incredibly few regular female characters, and fanfic has always been predominantly written by women. If they wanted a het relationship, most of the time they had to invent an OFC or take Uhura or Nurse Chapel for the woman.

Which I find amusing, since in the Original Series there was always at least one female per episode for Kirk to chase after, preening like a peacock. I'm glad that the later shows had more women cast members, especially those in power. I actually cheered when Janeway was the captain of Voyager and Troi was obviously listened to and capable of command if necessary. It only took millenia from now to achieve equality!

I've often wondered why guest female characters on these sci-fi shows are often scorned by fans (who are predominantly women)and OFCs in fic frowned upon. I don't necessarily see every show with slash-colored glasses and welcome interesting females. The only thing I can think of is that it takes time to develop an original character, so it takes away from verbage that could be going to the main characters? It's a puzzle for sure.

Thanks for the history lesson ::grins::

The babe-of-the-week on Classic Trek was often just that--the babe-of-the-week. They weren't on long enough, and often weren't interesting enough or developed enough, for people to get attached to them. (This is true of most guest stars, male and female, unless they've got recurring roles, but it's especially true of babes-of-the-week.) When you're writing an established character (even if they're only just in one episode), you have to deal with whatever characterization and backstory they have in canon. If you're doing even a half-way decent job, that will shape your story, emotionally and plot-wise. If you don't care all that much about the character to begin with, why bother? It's easier to create a character from scratch, where you can make their backstory and personality fit your story, rather than the other way around.

As for why OFC's are frowned on, well, do you know what a "Mary Sue" is? Most beginning writers cannot resist the temptation to put an author avatar/Mary Sue character in to their stories. It gets really annoying. Since the vast majority of fanfic writers are female, the vast majority of Sues are female. If your fandom has no major female characters, Sues become even more glaringly obvious than they otherwise are. So in fandoms like that, a lot of readers see that a story has an OFC and assume it's a Mary Sue without even bothering to read the story. (Because for a reader who wants a good story, Mary Sues are incredibly annoying.)

The problem with stigmatizing Mary Sues is that it's a symptom of larger problems in their writing, usually. Now, every writer has a million bad words in him/her, and the trick to learning to be a good writer is to write until you get those million bad words all out. If Sues are stigmatized, people don't want to take the chance of writing one, which for beginning writers often means they don't write at all, which is bad. Because yeah, no matter how talented they are, their first story is going to suck and is probably going to have a Mary Sue in it. But if you don't write, you have no hope of getting past that stage. Also, it's gotten to the point where people who don't even know what a Sue is are afraid to write them, which means they're afraid to write female characters in general, which is a Very Bad Thing.

And, uh, "millenia" means 1,000 years. Star Trek is only three or four hundred. ;) I didn't like Janeway much, actually, but a large part of that was that Voyager as a whole bored me, and they never developed the characters well enough for me to feel that any of them were more than cardboard cutouts. Janeway, you could tell they were trying too hard to make a "Woman Captain" instead of just writing a captain who was a woman. (Stargate: SG-1 had a similar problem with the character of Sam Carter. Amanda Tapping, the actress who played her, told the writers to forget about trying to write her as a woman, just try to write her as a person--AT could bring the specifically female bits to the character. You could tell the episodes where the writers (all men) ignored that and tried to write her as A Woman. The results weren't always pretty.) Troi I loved, particularly in later seasons where she was actually in uniform like any other officer. It does bug me all the episodes where they completely ignore even the vestiges of counseling ethics, but that's got nothing to do with her being female.

The babe-of-the-week on Classic Trek was often just that--the babe-of-the-week. They weren't on long enough, and often weren't interesting enough or developed enough, for people to get attached to them. (This is true of most guest stars, male and female, unless they've got recurring roles, but it's especially true of babes-of-the-week.)

I don't find that to be true in The Sentinel fandom. It was quite obviously a male-dominated show and every week had the BOTW, but in most cases the fans called them bitches. That didn't stop authors from writing a variety of fics using them, providing backstory where there was none. Hell, there was even a story in which the donut girl at the PD had a leading role! They've written inventive stories with male villains who appeared in only one episode, Lee Brackett being one of the most popular. One of the most memorable stories I've recently read is about Chancellor Edwards, Blair's nemesis who ends up firing him from the university more than once. Quite obviously it's easy to portray her as a bitch. Lemon Drop wrote a story entirely from her POV, where the foundation for her dislike of Blair is explained and how things go in her life before and after her interactions with him on the show. I firmly believe that a good writer can make you accept just about anything.

We certainly have mary sue's in our fandom but by no means is every OFC a mary sue. Perhaps some readers have become jaded, if they immediately don't read a story just because it has an OFC or even an OMC. Characters, canon or original, can be written well or extremely badly. I read horribly written stories that had only the canon characters in them. Terrible language snafus, derived plot devices, out-of-characterizations, and not necessarily written by neophites. In fact some of the most lovely, long, plotty and satisfying stories have been either their first or only stories written. Some writers are artists and some are not.

Excuse the millenia comment. I stopped really focusing on the ST series after the original and thought mostly they were linear and stretched out longer than they did. Centuries is still too long for women to finally achieve equality. Obviously some of our fen don't agree, since the "bad" females are viewed as bitches OTW but the "bad" men are viewed as villians. ::grin::

I'm not saying that people can't do wonderful things with BOTWs, or that every OFC is a Mary Sue. I agree that wonderful things can and have been done with both BOTWs and OFCs. And there have been many horrible stories with only canon characters. I'm describing general trends, here, not stating the absolute rule.

But the thing is, reading is work and it takes time. This is as true for the good stories as it is for the bad ones--people generally just don't consciously notice the effort it takes to read a good story. There's a lot of fanfic out there, and unlike professionally published works, there's no one sitting down and reading stories before they get posted to ensure that only the good quality stories get posted. For every good story, there's at least twenty really bad ones out there. For every well-written OFC, there's at least ten Mary Sues out there. Most people learn to filter out what they want to read, either on the quality of story or characters or plot line or some combination.

Me, I generally don't read a fic unless I know the author or it's been recommended or the plot really catches my eye; I simply don't have time to wade through the crap to find the gems. I am less likely to read a fic from an author I don't know that has an OFC, particularly one in a relationship with a major canon character. Partly that's because OFCs have a very good chance of being Sues, and partly that's because I read fanfic because I like the characters on the show. If I want to read a new character, why bother to read fanfic? I could read a professionally published novel in the dead-tree version (i.e. printed on paper) that would be easier on the eyes and has a guarantee of being at least decently well-written. It's not a matter of being jaded.

For strong female characters, you should check out DS9. Now, that was an awesome series. And they knew how to write people--male, female, alien, human, whatever. They're the only ST series to manage having not one but two strong, competent women the entire run of the series who were neither a)nurturing mother types or b)bitches. (There's nothing wrong with nurturing women, and women in nurturing roles are much better than no women at all, but it would be better still if the writers of TV and movies would get a clue that it is possible for a woman to be neither a nurturer nor a bitch nor a BOTW.) Both Troi and Crusher on TNG had "nurturing" jobs; on Voyager, Kes was a definite nurturer, and Janeway often acted more like a den mother than a captain to her crew. Neither 7 of 9 nor Torres were bitches, but both had definite bitchy tendencies, and 7 of 9 was only there for part of the series. 7 of 9 was a great character, and would have been a much better one if she hadn't so explicitly been added to attract adolescent boys, and if the writers hadn't turned Voyager into "The Seven of Nine Show (and, oh yeah, there's a couple other characters here and there who might show up occasionally.)" Voyager disappointed me, on a lot of levels. DS9 had wonderful characters (male and female), interesting plots, and real ethical issues; on Voyager the characters were cardboard cutouts, the plots were stereotypical, and they never met a platitude they didn't like.

They're doing a wonderful job with the trektales website; it's wonderful that she's been able to post all these old tales.

Oh, I quite agree.

Are you a member of her yahoo group? If not, I highly recommend it.

After Image by Ingrid Cross (PG)

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