Hee, you're welcome to the "discerning omnivore", I like it because it totally maps onto those times where I want to read ooc, bad grammar, no-plot smut-fic and I can tell myself that occasionally a little junk food is a-ok, just as long as you're aware it's bad for you, lol.
It's interesting that you say that often people in football fandom aren't in other fandoms, and I definitely think that's a contributing factor to the lack of het. I'm also a relatively new arrival to football fandom but I've spent a fair amount of time bobbing around general fandom (I actually started out in het Buffy fandom, then bounced through several Big Slash fandoms before ending up gravitating towards sports rpf), and it sometimes seems that football fandom can be quite insular. By which, I mean that club culture can lead to little enclaves of writers that form a repeating loop of fic and feedback where authors never really step outside their comfort zone. I'm also frequently surprised by how low the level of knowledge about wider fandom is within football fandom and also how often some of the architecture of fandom seems to be missing, for instance, the use of Betas seems to be much lower in the fandom as a whole than it is in other fandoms that have been around for more than a few years.
Rereading the last couple of sentences of that paragraph makes me sound like I'm flinging my toys out of the pram because football fandom doesn't match up to my expectations of fandom, but I'll leave it stand because I think they are real issues.
In going back to the issue of the low amount of het fic, and touching on some of the points that you and others made in the comments, I do think that there are sources of characterisation available for quite a few of the women involved in the game and they aren't utilised enough. Even if we say that only those with public personas are fair game, there are still a lot of fairly famous women who are wives or girlfriends and for whom there should be enough public material available - kickette, their own newspaper columns, tv footage especially when they're reporters or presenters - to produce fleshed out, realistic characters. There are issues with writing about women who choose to remove themselves as much as possible from the public side of their husband's/boyfriend's lives and I think that's a judgement call that a writer has to make but I know that if someone wrote good Olalla DomÃnguez fic, with or without Fernando present, I'd read it. Also, pictures like this (http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m11cunqvVY1qdfl6xo1_500.jpg) of Raul Meireles's wife, Ivone, really make me want kick-ass lady fic, no matter how public the lady's life is. Incidentally, I would love to see well-written fic involving those women that are employed by football clubs themselves such as Eva Carneiro (Chelsea doc) or Gigi Salmon (Chelsea TV presenter - have I outed myself as a Chelsea supporter yet?) or Kay Murray (Real Madrid TV), although I find myself wanting gen or outsider-pov fic from them mainly so...
I don't know if a new complementary comm is necessary, but maybe we need more encouragement of authors who do write het and gen to crosspost to footiefic - the comm might be mostly dead, but I still have it on my friend's list and I would love if more fic showed up on it.
no subject
It's interesting that you say that often people in football fandom aren't in other fandoms, and I definitely think that's a contributing factor to the lack of het. I'm also a relatively new arrival to football fandom but I've spent a fair amount of time bobbing around general fandom (I actually started out in het Buffy fandom, then bounced through several Big Slash fandoms before ending up gravitating towards sports rpf), and it sometimes seems that football fandom can be quite insular. By which, I mean that club culture can lead to little enclaves of writers that form a repeating loop of fic and feedback where authors never really step outside their comfort zone. I'm also frequently surprised by how low the level of knowledge about wider fandom is within football fandom and also how often some of the architecture of fandom seems to be missing, for instance, the use of Betas seems to be much lower in the fandom as a whole than it is in other fandoms that have been around for more than a few years.
Rereading the last couple of sentences of that paragraph makes me sound like I'm flinging my toys out of the pram because football fandom doesn't match up to my expectations of fandom, but I'll leave it stand because I think they are real issues.
In going back to the issue of the low amount of het fic, and touching on some of the points that you and others made in the comments, I do think that there are sources of characterisation available for quite a few of the women involved in the game and they aren't utilised enough. Even if we say that only those with public personas are fair game, there are still a lot of fairly famous women who are wives or girlfriends and for whom there should be enough public material available - kickette, their own newspaper columns, tv footage especially when they're reporters or presenters - to produce fleshed out, realistic characters. There are issues with writing about women who choose to remove themselves as much as possible from the public side of their husband's/boyfriend's lives and I think that's a judgement call that a writer has to make but I know that if someone wrote good Olalla DomÃnguez fic, with or without Fernando present, I'd read it. Also, pictures like this (http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m11cunqvVY1qdfl6xo1_500.jpg) of Raul Meireles's wife, Ivone, really make me want kick-ass lady fic, no matter how public the lady's life is. Incidentally, I would love to see well-written fic involving those women that are employed by football clubs themselves such as Eva Carneiro (Chelsea doc) or Gigi Salmon (Chelsea TV presenter - have I outed myself as a Chelsea supporter yet?) or Kay Murray (Real Madrid TV), although I find myself wanting gen or outsider-pov fic from them mainly so...
I don't know if a new complementary comm is necessary, but maybe we need more encouragement of authors who do write het and gen to crosspost to footiefic - the comm might be mostly dead, but I still have it on my friend's list and I would love if more fic showed up on it.