Moments of Permanence - One tiny thing that's annoying Sami today, on what is not actually a good day

From: sami Date: May 21st, 2009 02:26 am (UTC) (Link)

A lot of the complaints I've seen have been more along "it's BAD GRAMMAR" lines, which... really not, you know?

I am a bit variable on fannish language variations. Grok is actually one of my favourites, despite the serious flaws in the book it comes from, but pairing portmanteaus give me a small but distinct hive. Fortunately, they've yet to be prevalent in a fandom I was really into.

The thing I really don't understand at all is this drive people have to try and dictate the terms on whcih fandom operates. That doesn't work, not with fandom, not with any (sub)culture. Linguistically or in any other sense.

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From: smillaraaq.livejournal.com Date: May 21st, 2009 06:36 pm (UTC) (Link)

Of course, Saiyuki has its own arcane numerical shorthand, which avoids the portmanteaus but replaces them with regularly-scheduled befuddled n00b "HALP HALP WHAT DOES ALL THIS MATH STUFF MEAN?" posts from folks who don't know it all comes down to bad Japanese puns...

I must admit that I kind of like the linguistic playfulness of some of the portmanteau namesmoosh shipname patterns, but I *love* the numerical coding because unlike the portmanteaus, / or + or x conventions, it can also be used to indicate in convenient shorthand "I like to see these two characters together and DO NOT CARE WHICH ONE IS ON TOP". One of my biggest peeves with slash or yaoi fandoms is the tendency of some writers and fans to treat top/bottom seme/uke roles as cast in stone to the point where it almost feels like badly-done het, so I really like being able to say "switchiness OK here" by just typing three measly characters.

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From: sami Date: May 22nd, 2009 12:49 pm (UTC) (Link)

...

Numerical shorthand?

How does that work?

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From: elspethdixon Date: May 22nd, 2009 08:04 pm (UTC) (Link)

I don't remember which Saiyuki character is which number, but in Gundam Wing fandom, every Gundam pilot and most of the other major characters has a number that identifies them for pairing purposes, usually one based on their names (a lot of Gundam Wing characters -- Duo, Quatre, Zechs, Noin, and Treize are some of the more obvious ones -- are named after numbers).

So Heero/Duo, for example, is written 1x2 (Heero as seme), 2x1 (Duo as seme), or 1x2x1 (I defy your seme/uke rules and have them switch off!). Zech/Treize is 6x13, 13x6, or 6x13x6. And so on.

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From: smillaraaq.livejournal.com Date: May 22nd, 2009 08:35 pm (UTC) (Link)

Oh my, you haven't seen that around? It's all over the place on the comms and fansites, English-speaking and Japanese alike; you'll even see it on the covers of lots of doujinshi. It started in the Japanese fandom because it's based on the characters' names incorporating number kanji as part of the reading (Sanzo, Hakkai) or else including phonemes that are homonyms for numbers in Japanese or English (Gojyo, Goku, Tenpou) -- none of the others have widely-used numbers, and Kenren is usually "K", or sometimes "Ken" for the rhyme with "Ten"...ad some of the Japanese sites that use "K" will use "T" for Tenpou to keep the abbreviations matching, but I've never seen anyone in the English-speaking fandom use "KT" as a pairing abbreviation, it's usually something like "10K" or occasionally "TenKen". (For the other guys, Sanzo=3, Hakkai=8, Gojyo=5 and Goku=9 -- flemmings explains it pretty nicely in the comments here: http://community.livejournal.com/saiyuki/760917.html ...amusingly enough, there's also a digression on the history of "fen" as a plural there, too!)

Japanese fans usually write the number-shorthand pairings either smooshed together directly or else separated with an "x", just like the yaoi name x name convention, with the first name/number being the seme: so you'll see Japanese fanart sites or doujinshi with things labeled 5 x 8, or 39. Western fans seem to lean more strongly towards writing the pairings as numbersmoosh rather than equations, which is probably where the triple-number convention for "this pairing in any permutation" arose -- the unspoken rule seems to be that the larger number goes in the middle, so that shorthand gets written like 353, 585, 393, 898, etc.; there's no comparable shorthand for the Gaiden boys, not even Kenren/Tenpou, so folks just muddle along there. Threesomes and more can also be indicated with this, although at that point folks usually give up on trying to read any significance in the number order; when someone who doesn't have an abbreviation gets involved it's often written as established-pairing-number/name or + name or x name, like 10K/Goujun. On the rare occasions where someone is doing some arcanely complicated sort of threesome with clones or shikigami duplicates or such of one of the guys, that may also be indicated with the usual triple-number thing and a note that the abbreviation is to be read literally for once.

...now aren't you sorry you asked? ^_~

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