So yeah.

[emmagrant01]

I've always despised portmanteaus -- those smooshed-together pairing names. But on Tumblr, since you can't have a "/" in tags, you essentially have to use them in order to label and organize posts.

And then it occurred to me the other day that portmanteaus are put together based on how the pairing name sounds -- not by who's on top and who's on bottom. And if you know me at all, you know that I've never liked the concept of classifying fic according to whose dick goes in whose ass, for reasons I don't think I have to go into here (but if you really want to know, just ask).

So I think I've changed my mind about portmanteaus. Drarry. Snarry. Johnlock. Johnlockstrade. Nothing about those names implies anything about what the characters might or might not do in bed. I think I like it. Converted, perhaps. :-)

Comments

[celestlyn.livejournal.com]

I feel the same. Dislike portmanteaus, but I don't mind a few. It just gets ridiculous sometimes.

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

I've totally changed my mind about them. Used to hate them, but now I... don't. :-)

[zeitgeistic.livejournal.com]

I wondered why a few people were so opposed to the pairing names. Other than just sounding silly, they've never bothered me. I never associated one person being the top versus the bottom from the names, either. What would Drarry indicate to you? Because Draco's name's first, but there are 4 letters of Harry's name in it, versus 2 or 3 of Draco's. Does Draco top because he's first or does Harry top because he dominates the name?

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understand your question!

But let me give it a shot. I like portmanteaus because they don't indicate who might top whom. I know that not everyone who uses the pairing name Harry/Draco means to imply Draco will be the bottom in a fic, but I like the fact that "Drarry" doesn't say either way. And I have issues with the idea that characters (a) need to have anal sex at all in order for it to count as "sex" and (b) that it's so important who tops that this would need to be made explicit in the pairing name.

Basically, fandom pet peeve, solved. :-)

[zeitgeistic.livejournal.com]

ooooh, I get you. I thought you said you originally didn't like Drarry/Snarry/etc because to you, they did indicate who topped and who bottomed.

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

Aha, hence the confusion. Right, no. ;-)

[themostepotente.livejournal.com]

Depends on the name. I've always hated 'Drarry.'

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

I'm not overly fond, but it's not like there are other options, really. :-P

[themostepotente.livejournal.com]

This is true. I just got a Tumblr, so this is good to know for art recs for future reference. Although, I suppose you could just smash the two names together without a hyphen.

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

And there's a third option I hadn't thought of! But of course, no one would search for that; they'd all look for Drarry or Johnlock. If you want your posts to show up in the common tag, you kind of have to use it. :-P

[juushika.livejournal.com]

I dislike portmanteaus and other shipping names (like these (http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Shipping)) because of their exclusivity: you have to be in the club to recognize and use them. Some are pretty obvious, sure—Johnlock, I gotcha, I know what that means. But media with large cast sizes give rise to a ridiculous number which can have overlapping aspects (i.e.. similar sounding names), or multiple names per ship, or non-mnemonic names—Homestuck is awful for this, and Pokemon, as linked above, is also ridiculous; and oh god Prince of Tennis why (http://princeoftennis.wikia.com/wiki/Shippings), why would you do this. The alternatives, in the attempt to simplify, basically means constraining the number of identifiable 'ships, and that way lies sadness if you ship a rarepair.

I dislike the idea that you have to be "in the know" to know what the hell is being posted because I only engage in the fringes of fandom for my own sanity. I love reading the occassional fanfic; I don't want to expend the social energy to engage with fandom's various mechanics, because I have no social energy to spare. It has a bit of a "well then you can't come to our party" vibe when the nomenclature gets in the way of my engagement

Don't get me wrong, the A/B mechanic is also fatally flawed; I share your issues with whittling down the relationship to the order of tabs and slots. Ideally, I wish fandom as a whole would put aside top/bottom connotations to name order, but that sort of inherent heteronormative/sexist preconception can't be wished away. Portmanteaus may be a lesser evil, so I don't have to like them for them to be the better choice ... but man, I wish there were better option.

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

you have to be in the club to recognize and use them.

I think fandom is and always has been like any other subculture in that way, though. That's the whole point of being in a subculture, in a way. There's this special thing that only a minority of people are interested in being a part of, and so you have secret codes special language and the equivalent of secret handshakes to make it all seem extra special. Fandom has done that since the very beginning of fandom, for protection at first (because there were very real threats from TPTB against fannish activity, particularly for slashers) and for group cohesion later when protection was no longer an issue. That's a very human thing to do, and every single subculture does it.

At this point, there kind of is no other option than portmanteaus. This post is partly me making peace with that, I have to admit. It's what fandom at large is doing, and in order for your fics and art and posts to be findable (assuming that's what the average fan wants), you have to use the common terminology. When LJ was king, you could use your own terms and it didn't matter. Now it's all about Tumblr, and there it's all about the portmanteau. If you don't use it, you're not really participating.

For better or for worse, Tumblr is reshaping fandom.

[oninomaggie.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I'd never realized that the X/Y was supposed to be connoting top/bottom! But like juushika, I'm on the peripheries of fandom.

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

It is in certain corners. I never used it that way, but it was always there, and it caused conflict and confusion occasionally.

[capra-maritimus.livejournal.com]

I was always a snot and wrote the names in whatever order I felt like. LOL! (Usually because I couldn't remember what I had done for the previous fic. :D)

[foxestacado.livejournal.com]

I hate hate hate portmanteaus. I refuse. The only one I use sometimes is Snarry, and that's because of the taboo of liking Snarry, so calling the pairing Snarry and not the / classification is a bit of distancing on my part.

I didn't know that this smashing together of words is called portmanteaus. I shall use that term more often.

By the way, I just realized that Severitis is not a portmanteau, or is it? Where did that term even come from?

[pauraque]

I believe Severitus was the name of the author who popularized the genre.

[foxestacado.livejournal.com]

Wow, there is so much history in the Harry Potter fandom that have persisted through collective memory.

[kitty_fic]

Severitus is a type of Harry Potter fan fiction in which Severus Snape is really Harry's father.
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Severitus_(trope)

Sevitus is a variation used for adoption fics.

And yes Severitus was the author who orignally came up with the challenge of having Snape be Harry's biological father.
http://severitus.livejournal.com/5823.html

Sorry to butt in, but this is a genre that brought me to the HP fandom. So it's rather close to my heart <3

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

You're not on Tumblr, right? It's basically impossible to avoid them there, which is part of the reason why I'm making my peace with them. :-)

[pauraque]

I don't like the top/bottom convention either, but maybe for a different reason. In some places where kinky fiction is written, the convention is that the first is the dominant and the second is the submissive, so you get F/M to indicate hetero femdom and so on. So to me, if anything, Harry/Draco sounds like Harry is in a dominant role, and the idea of penetrator=dominant, penetrated=submissive really irks me, even though I am aware that's not necessarily what people are saying (though it does turn out that way depressingly often in fanworks).

Portmanteaus only bother me when they're applied retroactively to older fandoms, producing weird anachronisms like "Spirk" for TOS Kirk/Spock and so on. It seems forced and grates on me.

[germankitty]

"Portmanteaus only bother me when they're applied retroactively to older fandoms, producing weird anachronisms like "Spirk" for TOS Kirk/Spock and so on. It seems forced and grates on me."

I was going to mention that -- "Spirk" drives me absolutely NUTS!

However, I have to concede (very, VERY grudgingly) that there is a certain method to the K/S newbies' madness -- back in the day, pairings were established due to onscreen chemistry/subtext between the characters, at least 95% of the time. Ever since the ST Reboot, though, it seems to be mostly about Teh!Pritteh, so K/S might just as easily mean Kirk/Sulu or Kirk/Scotty. *sigh*

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting point about kink fics. It's fascinating how fandom works out all of these little codes, heh.

Spirk is at least better than Kock. Well, maybe that's a toss-up, come to think of it. ;-)

[jedirita.livejournal.com]

I thought it was "Spork"?

[mugenmine.livejournal.com]

I don't mind them, I just see them as a quick way to describe a pairing. Johnlock, Leslock, Jimlock. I never really realized that they could mean which char was topping which char. I started using portmanteaus at my office when pairing software developers together to work on projects... The devs kind of like it and came up with their own pairing names though I doubt they realize the origins... Lol...

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

Portmanteaus don't indicate top/bottom, which is exactly why I'm saying I like them. :-)

[mugenmine.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, I'm sorry my bad in reading too quickly. I thought that your original assumption was the way other folks thought about portmanteaus as well. I always assumed that the whole "x" was the way folks determined the top bottom thing, which I don't particularly care for... johnxsherlock or sherlockxjohn. (I could be wrong about this)

[kitty_fic]

So weird you posted this! I was thinking about making a post or poll about this subject XD You must have read my mind!

I've never minded them but I know some people hate them.

I never thought they had to do with top/bottom dynamics... that's interesting. I didn't realize people thought that about the name 'smushes'. LOL

Glad you were converted :D

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

I must not have explained myself very clearly above, sorry. I'm saying here that one of the reasons I like portmanteaus is because there's no hint contained in there of who is topping whom. But there was definitely a section of fandom for whom the order of the pairing written with a slash was very important. Do you remember the days when people would say things like, "I'll read Harry/Draco but not Draco/Harry"? I never understood that, TBH.

[kitty_fic]

Oh, yeah. Sorry, I misunderstood. I thought you meant that some people did think of the name smooshes that way- and I was like, "why? O_o"

The order of the names in either the portmanteaus or the / doesn't matter to me at all. I have heard that said about Harry/Draco vs Draco/Harry though, so I definitely know what you mean.
I almost always use H/D but some comms I've noticed list the names in alphabetical order. It never crossed my mind that people would think that the order of the names had anything to do with who topped or who bottomed...

Topping dynamics and the way fandom views them fascinates me tbh. I like it both ways (or any way I can get it). LOL
With h/d I always think that people who will only read one or the other are missing out on so much! But then again, I am guilty of having my preferences with other pairings. Mostly it just intriques me- I'm always curious why people like the things they do.

But yeah, sorry that's a whole other topic XD

[angelbabe_cj]

I have a love-hate relationship with portmanteaus. I tend to think they're stupid because the names usually end up sounding totally daft. I'd never twigged the top/bottom dynamic to the slash separated names because I tend to like my slash in all flavours and switchy.

I can see the sense of using a single term, especially if tumblr doesn't like /'s, but I shall continue to grumble and not use portmanteaus unless I have to.

Although I love the word portmanteau, because it is clever and French!

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

I think the top/bottom thing isn't as big a deal as it used to be. I really don't see much talk of it in the fandoms I play in now, but it used to be such a big deal. I remember labeling a fic as Harry/Draco and getting comments telling me I need to change the pairing to Draco/Harry because Harry bottomed in the fic. The idea that a story would be reduced to a single sex act that occurred after 10000 words of character development and plot just blew my mind. :-P

[angelbabe_cj]

Yeah, I do seem to remember some wanky stuff I was faintly aware of when I was at the height of my HP reading. I'm with you on the sex act over character development blowing my mind though. Although I don't thin I've ever read a ship where I was fixed one way or the other. Sure sometimes I'm looking for something specific, but a lot of the time I'm focused far more on plot than I am on sex.

Then again since I write so rarely and have generally been away from busy areas of fandom (pretty much any fandom) I don't tend to come across the big controversies until I see it second or third hand.

[shadowfireflame.livejournal.com]

I disliked the name "Johnlock" until I thought of it as a John Locke joke...

[hechicera.livejournal.com]

I am ecstatic that you've made your peace with this, because it means you can stop wasting time agonizing over it and get back to writing goddamn it hurry up and update #allaboutmeeeee

[aprilstarchild.livejournal.com]

I liked the folks that pointed out that Johnlock could have been Hotson. LOL!

I used to hate them too. I've gotten over it, I dunno why. I think the first time I read "Snupin" I was like, wait, what?! I think that was the first one I heard of...

I'm fond of saying "Mystrade."

My other favorite pairing name: Holmescest. And yes, I read some of it.

[jedirita.livejournal.com]

Way back when I started in HP fandom, I hated portmanteaus. I refused to use the term "Snupin," and always initialed with a slash: RL/SS. But...I got over it. Now I rather like "Snupin."

I guess the deal for me is that some sound okay, and others sound just stupid. I'm not crazy about Drarry, but I can live with Snarry. Snack is kinda cute, but also kinda dumb. I can't imagine what monstrosity people would come up from Neville/Harry. Narry? Harville? Eww. But Janto for Jack/Ianto in Torchwood works very well. Gwack for Gwen/Jack? Just - no. Johnlock - eh. But I could live with it.

So it's more about aesthetics for me.