On Squee

I have been, as noted earlier, indulging in red and blue pimpernallings over at LiveJournal, and I came across an interesting statement in comments.

One commentor noted, laughing, that if a particular story had not been so silly, or clever, that he/she "would have died of squee." This made me smile too, not just because it was funny, but also because I'd never seen squee used as a noun before.

It got me to thinking.

We are all familiar with squee.

Those of us who read Survival Instinct are VERY familiar with squee.

Indeed, I would hazard a guess that the servers over at that site run almost entirely on squee. A little ethanol, maybe, and some unresolved sexual tension, and a generous portion of raunch, but mostly squee.

But there is more to say about squee than that, I think.



First, I should say that squee in its hardest and most head-banging form is usually a little too sweet for my palate. For example, there is this story, which hits every squee button known to woman. This, I think, is the Ur-Squee. This is the sort of place squee can take you if you give it the car keys. Whether you want to go on that trip or not is up to you.

However, I do see the point of squee. Squee is emotional payoff. When used judiciously, it can really work. This, after all, is the point of the ending of the "The Hub" episode.

Interestingly, smut does not seem to produce squee.

Squee and smut are closely related, I admit. Often, squee stories contain smut. Certainly squee and smut are both versions of the same desire for storyarc resolution. They go to a lot of the same parties.

They are, though, fairly distinct. A lot of smut is clearly not intended to provoke squee, and the most squeesome narratives usually treat sex humorously, and sometimes immaturely.

Slash fiction, whether it's manslash or femslash, also seems to fall outside of the squee category. Possibly because a lot of it is raunch, but possibly not. I think if I had to go out on a limb here (I have noticed, looking back over some of my earlier posts, that I appear to spend much of my time up in trees) I would say that most of the squee-making stories are resolutions of tensions set up by the canon. Slash is about setting up your own tensions, or picking up on tensions that may be in the shows, but aren't acknowledged by the canon in any obvious way.

Squee, in contrast, or at least the desire to produce/experience it, is the result of being toyed with by the canon story, usually in a fairly obvious way. The Roslin/Adama romance is a classic example of this, as is the Kara/Lee/Dualla/Sam/God Knows Who Else Polygon of Love. Loads of squee to be found about both of these. Fans want these romances acknowledged, and they want them wrapped up in a gratifying way.

Squee, then, is the enemy of dramatic tension. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Tensions have to be resolved, or why read the story? And sometimes the canon refuses to resolve them, or does so unsatisfactorily.

But there is, as you would expect, a down side. Squee provides the emotional payoff that the show so often withholds, but only at the risk of ending the story. Which we do not necessarily want. Sometimes, it is nice to be tied to a pine tree and forced to plead for your climax. This is why I liked the fact that the show danced with the Roslin/Adama thing for so long without actually going there.

Bondage encounters aside, this means that squee is in fact a vital part of the storytelling process. You want the impulse-to-squee to be there, because squee in fanfic is a sign of a healthy and interesting narrative in the canon, but at the same time, the squee has to be kept in the fanfic arena, until the end of the story itself - because squee is a sign that something has ended.