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The
most frequent criticisms leveled at polyfic, (fanfic about polyamorous
relationships) are that it's implausible, or that the way it's written is
unrealistic. Oddly enough, these are the same criticisms that are most
frequently used against slash. In general, I don't find well-done polyfic
any more or less believable than slash, and I don't find slash any more or
less believable than non-canon het pairings. This is probably because
I think most people tend toward bisexual, even if they've primarily been
involved with the opposite sex, and that many people could, under the right
circumstances, be poly. Obviously there are characters who are vehemently
straight (although even those characters often get slashed under the theory
that people who make a big deal out of being straight are actually
sublimating their homosexual urges), but for the most part, we assume that a
character is straight because his or her canon relationships have been
heterosexual, and we assume that characters are monogamous because their
canon interactions have been monogamous (although this often breaks down if
you start to examine it, given the serial monogamy and overlapping
relationships that occur so frequently in tv shows/movies/novels).
Depending on the characters, you might have to do more or less work to set
up slash or poly, but I think it's do-able and believable in many, if not
most cases.
Objections to both slash and poly often focus on how improbable it is. The
argument goes that it's unlikely, especially in a fairly small group of
people, that there would be multiple characters who appear
straight/monogamous but are actually gay/poly. This assumption is
predicated on the idea that everyone who is gay/bi or poly is very open
about it, and so we can accurately assess what percentage of people are
queer or poly (and because that number appears to be very small, it's
unrealistic to have multiple characters who fall into that camp). But
because of taboos against homosexuality and polyamory, the public world is
resolutely straight and monogamous. (This is changing in regard to
homosexuality, but look at the number of people who still swear that no one
they know is gay.) Because of this, it's difficult to accurately guess how
many people are truly straight or monogamous vs. how many people are simply
being discreet about their sexuality. If, as I suspect, more people are
bisexual and open to poly than you'd guess from watching tv and talking to
your neighbors, then neither slash nor poly is improbable. (And even if the
numbers are fairly small, romances are often about coincidences -
it's a given in a romance that the principles will be attracted to each
other. If that requires them to be gay/bi or poly, it's no more ridiculous
than some of the set-ups I've seen for het romances between characters who
appeared to have nothing in common or to actively despise one another.)
Another frequent objection is that the depiction of poly is unrealistic,
because it so often depicts characters in happy relationships and doesn't
address the problems and difficulties that may occur in poly relationships.
This is true of all romances - het romances gloss over potential problems as
do slash stories. Most readers of romance (and a large percentage of fanfic
is romance of one kind or another, as evidenced by the categorization of it
by pairing) want happy endings. It's unfair to expect writers of polyfic to
always use their stories as PSA's in which they address jealousy and
conflict. Also, this complaint assumes that poly relationships are somehow
more difficult than monogamous ones, and inherently less stable. While they
are more complex, because they involve more people, I don't believe they are
necessarily more difficult for everyone. For some people it's much
easier to be in a polyamorous relationship than to be faithful to one
partner. Personally, I love to read about relationship negotation in any
kind of romance, so I like stories that address potential difficulties
(which is why it took me 25,000 words to get Jack, Will and Elizabeth
together in
"Triangulation" ), but I don't think that every romance should be
required to deal with every potential problem in the 'ship.
Like everything, so much depends on your frame of reference. If you like
slash, you're less likely to spend a lot of time nitpicking about whether
character X would really have sex with a guy. If you like polyfic, you're
less likely to question whether these characters would really have a poly
relationship. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't consider canon - the
best slash addresses canon, and shows how these specific characters, who are
products of a specific cultural mindset and have these specific sexual
histories, come to be attracted to one another. The best poly does the
same. In both cases, depending on the characters, you may need to show how
they arrived at a place where a homosexual/poly relationship was possible,
but that's never the only question, or even the most interesting one.
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