mememememe

[lotesse]

Okay, got a computer again. Missed qualifying for Yuletide--damn it. Guess it wasn't meant to be.

Snicked from cesperanza: Five formative slash texts, before I even knew what it was

1. Frodo/Sam. I read the "comforted him with his arms and body" bit over and over again. I never quite understood what the squishy, squirmy thrill in my stomach was.

2. Luke/Han. Blanketfic on Hoth? OMGduh.

3. Legolas/Gimli. So doing it. I never wanted to know, but they so totally were.

4. Will/Bran. I never liked that damn ending, not as an eleven-year-old, not now.

5. Odysseus/Athena. Okay, yes, I was a classics geek as a kid. And it does count as slash. Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name, beyotch!

Comments

[haloisi.livejournal.com]

Yay for #2, and amen to #4. Amen.

[hyel.livejournal.com]

:D How does Odysseus/Athena count as slash? Athena's a transsexual?

[lotesse]

oh, man...see, now you get into the debate of what actaully counts as slash. On the one hand, slash is m/m. Cept no, it's non-canonical m/m--QaF doesn't count, to some people. And then you get the people who talk about het ships in terms of slash--stuff like Mulder/Scully.

Myself, to me slash feels more like a style than anything that has to do with specific plumbing. PGY? SO slash all the way. And I know it's a bad word to use, but I can't find anything else in fannish nomenclature to expalin how I feel.

[hyel.livejournal.com]

Well, the majority view is that slash = male homosexual. As a verb, also applicable to lesbians. Best stick with the majority view. Calling het slash is just going to confuse people.

PGY is slash and het and femslash.

[lotesse]

That's why I disclaimed it in the meme. And I do know the most common usage, but there is a lot of debate coming to light, partially, I think, because media is changing. Frex, Willow/Tara caused a lot of debate. Back in the Kirk/Spock days, a same-sex relationship was necessarily subtextual. Not so anymore, and so there's this layer of subtext/canon that our terminology makes no distinction for.

Confusion levels are going to vary, according to the group. cesperanza, who I gacked the meme from, listed Cathy/Chris from Flowers in the Attic as a slash pairing under much the same rationale.

[hyel.livejournal.com]

I don't really find it relevant whether Willow/Tara is femslash or not, because you don't really need to know that. Nobody needs to be warned that a fic has lesbians in it, if it's mentioned that Willow and Tara are in it. All fans already know they're lovers. Same with Queer As Folk fans. It's there, it's part of the canon, no special warning needed. Whether canon gay is or isn't slash is irrelevant, since I see the first purpose of the word "slash" to be to let the reader know that this fic/art has gayness in it. Which is also why it absolutely should not be used for het.

If one wants to warn that non-canonical pairings are ahead, one should call them non-canon pairings, or name them, as in "Harry/Luna". It's clunky, but at least it's clear. I actually ended up tagging a bunch of fanart "non-canonical femslash" because the original had femslash in, just not between those two. I put no warning at all on the fanpics involving the canon femslash.

[lotesse]

Oh, see, I'd never think of it as a warning. I mean, most m/m lists a pairing, so the word "slash" isn't needed to point out teh gay. We all know that Frodo/Sam means bonking, and that both Frodo and Sam are male.

Naw, I'm thinking in terms of identification, genre maybe. A signifier that designates a certain data set, something for use in conversation and analysis. A way of saying "That which includes both A and B and D, but not C."

In general, I'm coming at this from a very meta standpoint. I want to be able to talk about the behaviors of fandom, and from that standpoint Willow/Tara shippers and Frodo/Sam slashers seem to me to be more similar than, oh, the twelve-year-old with the gloopy, Disnefied Aragorn/Arwen--not to say that het is by necessity part of a different set than slash. Style rather than plumbing.

[hyel.livejournal.com]

A lot of people USE it to mean m/m - I know I do. M/m to me sort of sounds like it's necessarily going to be smutty. For instance! Frodo/Sam does not mean bonking necessarily - it could mean kissing, or just holding hands in a distincly non-hetero way.

*shakes head* I just don't think slash should be used to denote het. It's much too messy and confusing. Same as calling any old ficlet "drabble". Words shouldn't have multiple meanings.

[lotesse]

yes, yes, totally on the drabble thing. But there's "ficlet," which is a perfectly good word to describe something that is short but not 100 words.

At this point, yes slash means m/m. I'm just bonking around with all these things that don't have words for them. I'd be a lot happier if we could have stylistic groupings as well as biological ones. I'm not going to call Lily/James "slash", but I'm going to hang about moaning about how I don't have anything else to call it.

My use of slash in terms of this meme was tongue-in-cheek, because I'd seen it done on my flist.

[hyel.livejournal.com]

But Lily/James is canon. Can't you just call it romantic fanfiction? A pairing? Canon pairings, non-canon pairings? While I do NOT support in any way using slash to mean het, perhaps there could be a new slang term for pairing fic. If "pairing fic" won't do.

And okay. :D I'm just trying to convert you utterly and absolutely to the conventional use of the word slash.