Fanfiction what is slash

But slash fiction serves a whole range of functions outside of the purely literary, and, like fanfiction itself, it is neither good nor bad: it is, quite simply, fulfilling a need. The first thing those not in-the-know tend to ask is something along the lines of, but why do you like that? The most facile response to this question is to point out that straight men quite famously get off on watching lesbians make out and have sex; why, then, should women attracted to men not find the inverse arousing?

But while this answer is hardly incorrect, it is an oversimplification. Slash as a cultural construct and force goes beyond sheer titillation and gets at much deeper and complex aspects of female sexuality. As many other people have pointed out before, slash is much more about women and female sexuality than it is about men or male sexuality, for all that the characters on the page or, well, screen are male, and in possession of biologically male genitalia.

Though slash in the past focused more often on issues of gay oppression and homophobia, internalized and externalized, that trend has mostly been supplanted by a kind of fantasy world in which characters rarely struggle with their sexualities and sexual identities, in which two men falling in love is a remarkably straightforward phenomenon, typically unquestioned not only by the characters in question but also by the world surrounding them.

For, as the statistics above show, these stories are almost always stories about men, and many of them conform to fairly standard romance plot tropes. But though the characters may be male, in many ways they are mere stand-ins for their female writers.

Part of that, to be sure, derives from the fact that most mainstream media is regrettably devoid of strong, dynamic female characters, but that can hardly be held up as the only explanation for the rampant dominance of slash in fan culture. Slash can be understood most simply and potently as an indirect dialogue between women and their bodies. Many fans have historically been eager to categorize this dialogue as inherently sexist, as resulting purely from an internalized misogynistic disgust with female sexuality and specifically with female genitalia.

Particularly amongst younger fans, the existence of this trend is undeniable: while researching for a paper I gave this past spring on One Direction fandom, I stumbled across a Tumblr post that exemplified this tendency with breathtaking ignorance:. Because the early slash community kept such a low profile as above , there weren't clearly written definitions of the term that people could refer to as they got on the net and came in contact with the existing community.

So a term might experience fannish drift as newcomers used the term according to the way they interpreted it, rather than how the existing community used it. Slash was a term that experienced fannish drift in this manner. It has also evolved over the years in response to canonically gay characters and relationships becoming more common in mainstream television shows and movies. As is easy to see on countless discussion forums these days, the definition of slash has become more elastic.

Many fans consider slash to mean, simply, a same-sex pairing thus, they refer to Queer as Folk fan fiction as slash, though the characters are gay in canon. See Slash Controversies for the main article.

See Slash vs. Gay for the main article. As long as slash fans have been calling their stories slash, there have been conversations about how slash relates to LGBT issues. In early years, it was thought that slash was by definition about two heterosexual men.

Some gay men have voiced opposition to heterosexual women appropriating gay male experience. Literary questions of the differences between slash and published LGBT fiction have also been discussed. Some fans feel that slash offered a new take on an old fandom, bringing new writers, readers and their interests to the table:. Other fans feel that slash is simply retreads of hetero-normative subjects given a new hat, often by casting one person in the couple as "the girl".

I believe A. Hall commented in RJ's LiveJournal that she could understand people not reading slash for moral reasons. Ah, here it comes:. Some people, it is true, who I know and who write slash have difficulty in understanding the "I never touch slash on principle because it can never be canonical" attitude. Most would have considerably more sympathy with a consistent moral position. I was thinking about that, and came to the conclusion that there is no legitimate moral reason for not reading slash.

There's a moral basis for avoiding smut, and insofar as slash is smutty it falls under that reason, but slash without the smut is not a moral issue. Why not? We read murder mysteries, even though murder is wrong. Were there an entire genre devoted not only to murder but to the glorification of murder it might be wrong to write in it, but not to read the occasional story.

Even in non-fiction, we read about terrible things without feeling that reading about them makes us culpable in them. The objections to slash are more basic than moral differences, and I think they fall into two categories: the literary and the visceral.

A visceral dislike for slash is often identified with homophobia, but it's more commonly human nature. Heterosexual men, especially, are deeply squicked by the notion. It's not as strong as the incest taboo, but it's out there and it's a good enough reason not to read slash. My objection falls into the literary camp. I have nothing against reading fiction that's about homosexuals - I particularly enjoyed LMB's Ethan of Athos , even though it's not one of her better works.

It's not homosexuality as a topic that disturbs me but slash as a genre. It doesn't make me want to know them, to be part of their clique, or to read their stories. The slash description adds no value for me - it merely alerts me that the story wasn't directed at the general reader but at a subcommunity whose motives and principles I barely understand, never mind share. I think when RJ exempted " Lust Over Pendle " from the slash genre she meant it in this sense - not that the story wasn't about a non-canon homosexual relationship, but that it wasn't about contradicting canon for its own sake.

It was not about being slashy. I haven't read it so I can't say for sure. A question many fans feel compelled to answer. See: Why Slash? When the term "slash" was coined you didn't have to discuss what it meant, because you knew it was gay fanfic. How did you know? There were no canonically gay characters in the mainstream media fandoms people wrote in. The early slashers had to queer the text based on subtext they thought they saw -- I don't think anyone really thinks that any subtext in ST:TOS was intended by the producers, writers or actors -- because they knew the powers that be TPTB were never going to do it for them.

In fact that's still a common answer to the " why write slash " question -- we have to because that's the only way to get what we want.

Then the winking, the conscious subtext, started. I don't really know where; my first encounter with it was with TNG -- where one of the main writers admitted that he felt Q was in love with Picard -- and it was really blatant in Xena where TPTB did everything but say "they're lesbians and they are so doing each other!

And then Films — Live-Action. Girl vs. Monster has three oneshots written by Halia Stone that ship Skylar and Sadie. Another one by the name of Skylar's Real Fear taking place a year after the events of the movie, where Skylar experiences feelings for Sadie despite dating Ryan. A 3rd one that takes place before the events of the movie, Experimentations involves Skylar being curious with Sadie which includes tickling her.

In the years succeeding the film's story, Maleficent finds her feelings towards her "beastie" Aurora developing into a more romantic nature. Unwilling to confront her feelings in fear that they're unrequited, Maleficent leaves the moors. Pessimal takes borderline or undeveloped one-line characters and fleshes them out as fully rounded story leads.

Actual slash is vanishingly rare in the Pessimal world - Word of God is that the author has tried , but can't write sex without bursting into laughter at how ridiculous it is. However, Assassin, Miss Alice Band, is written as uncompromisingly gay in her tastes. An under-developed sub-theme in The Graduation Class is Alice's frustrated yearning for her attractive but then woefully naive room-mate Johanna Smith-Rhodes.

This is left unresolved, but with a strong hint that something happened , fuelled by champagne and elation, on the night of their Graduation Ball as Licenced Assassins. Pessimal is waiting to see what fans make of this and whether any Continuation Fic appears. The characters in her stories, Simon and Baz, go on to get their own spin-off novel Carry On. Havemercy : The series lends itself particularly well to slash fiction, considering that the number of female characters with names and personalities can be counted on one hand.

A good picture of what I mean can be found on the LJ fan comm. It doesn't help that the series had a built-in slash base For example, The Royal Wedding of Oz is a oneshot where a now physically at least roughly-eighteen year old Dorothy and Ozma get married to one another.

Over the Rainbow is an Alternate Universe Fic where the gap between the fifth and sixth books was several years. Now a young adult, Ozma misses Dorothy and wishes she would come back to Oz. Elphaba Thropp was born on third day of the third month during the third year of the Verdigris Plague. Years later, her paths cross with Glinda Upland. Live-Action TV. The amount of deliberate Homoerotic Subtext in the source material has not lessened the number of fics on this pairing, but it has encouraged fics on just about every other pairing possible.

British comedian and substitute host John Oliver has a stand-up routine about discovering TDS slash when he was sent a link to some by a friend: "These were beautifully written stories, I don't want to give you the wrong impression! It was not just base pornography! There was a lot of time and lyrical language spent in describing the romanticism of each situation. A story might begin: 'Softed fall, the snow outside a ski lodge in Vermont, mounting up inch upon snowy inch on the wooden window sill.

Lit from within by the glow of the roaring fire. Around the fire did sit Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, flushed from a long day skiing, toasting the marshmallows on the dancing flames, that surely they would enjoy as s'mores later that night. In walked the butler That is basically racist!

That's just ignorance, is what that is. That's just ignorance! Pish-posh, hufflepuffle, flip-flop! Butler," said Stephen Colbert. And I'm going to stop there. There is an entire website dedicated to Radiohead slash. Proving that the internet does indeed have everything, there exists slash Every Boy Band ever, more or less.

Taako remarks that "if [Kravitz] wanted to lure [him] in there, [he] should've stayed handsome. In-universe fans of Survival of the Fittest are apparently fond of these types of fanfic heck, this kind of fanfic in general. Elphaba returns to Glinda after finding out Fiyero fathered a a child with Glinda, but abandoned her to be with Elphaba. Girlfrenemies involves Apple and Raven faking being a couple. It soons turns into Apple realizing she wants to really be a couple with Raven.

Video Games. It uses elements from Candace's Heart Events with the male lead. Claire and Keira are a couple, but their neighbors are too backwater to accept it. It's also a rare example of a Sheik fic where Sheik is Zelda in disguise , not a separate male character.

The fic also makes reference to Zelda having a crush on Malon, which later appeared in a separate most likely AU fic by the author. Specifically, Zelda is transgender and "Sheik" is his preferred name. The fic focuses on the transition as well as his feelings for Link. While there, he comes across Maria Robotnik and a younger Shadow. Web Animation.