WHY? A NOT REMOTELY-COMPLETE INVESTIGATION OF THE "WHY SLASH/WHY HET/WHY FEMSLASH" DEBATE

The stages of fandom are many, and are repetitive. Everyone knows the stage: "ABC is interesting." Everyone knows the stage: "Wow! I really like ABC! And couple X/Y is way hot. I wonder if there's porn?" About ten minutes into a search for same, especially if this is one's first fandom, one will find a badly-written paeon to the true love that is Y/Z, and again, if this is one's very first fandom, one will utter those two magic words: "Why slash?" (Actually, the two magic words tend more to be along the lines of: "Ew, somebody put Y and Z together? But they're … Hey, that's kinda hot … " A little later, one will discover the word "slash" and many things will become clear.)

What is slash? Well, that depends on whom you ask. Old-school fans will happily give you the summary of Slash As We Know It, starting with roots in Biblical times (David/Jonathan, and later Jesus/John, with some Satan/God and Jesus/Judas hatesex thrown in) and moving quickly onto Sherlock Holmes, Man From U.N.C.L.E., and Star Trek. Slash is named for the wee little slashmark between the two names of the pairing, coined in Trek fandom back in the days of Kirk/Spock, and originally, it encompassed any pairing that wasn't in canon. Fandom being fandom, the non-canonical pairings that got the lion's share of the fanfic were male/male, and the term "slash" has since morphed into meaning "male/male relationship fanfic." Canon rarely provided actual male/male sexual relationships, though now that Torchwood is front and center to so many fannish pursuits, with canon Jack/Ianto (okay, also canon Jack/anything with a pulse and at least two robots), the old-timers are amused but accepting of the name.

Femslash is technically a subgenre of the original definition of slash: non-canonical female/female relationships. Thanks to the Buffy-verse, not to mention Xena: Warrior Princess, Star Trek: DS9 and Babylon 5, femslash has been weaved into canonical relationships for some time, if only to titillate the desired 18-35 year old male audience. In fandom, femslash is often written by men, but at least as often by women.

Het has a few definitions. For the purposes of this essay, I am using the term to mean "stories which focus primarily on a romantic relationship between an opposite sex couple." This can include adult material, but doesn't have to, just like slash and femslash.

So, why?

No one asks "Why Het?" If you cruise on by Metafandom, as a rule you'll find plenty of dissertation-length discussions as to why women turn out in droves to write about two men getting it on, and you'll even find the occasional essay about why they do the same for two women. Het isn't invisible so much as it's omnipresent in so many situations that the word heteronormative is used as a derogatory term in some fannish circles. Yet, women flock just as happily to tales of heterosexual couples doing the deed.

Why?

Why slash? Why het? Why femslash? (We will ask "Why Gen"? for an essay topic on August 14^th, which is exactly six months away. Stay tuned!)

"It fills a need," said Tara O'Shea, a mostly het-based fan who's been writing for nearly twenty years. "The same way plotty gen fills a need. The same way slash fills a need. … Most action/adventure television series aren't structured in such a way as to place emphasis on the inner lives of the characters, or their relationships (romantic or otherwise). Prose fiction as a medium however can and does. It can give us what the source material can't or won't, in a way that is emotionally satisfying in a different way than the source material, but using the medium to its fullest potential and telling a story that can't work in any other medium."

Celli Lane, who runs Fanfic101.com and who has been writing since 1995, said, "I think the thing that I love most about [slash] is creating romance between characters who usually aren't romantic at heart. Rodney McKay and John Sheppard [from Stargate: Atlantis] aren't really hearts-and-flowers guys, and Casey McCall and Dan Rydell [from SportsNight] are sort of infamous for screwing up their relationships with women, so why would men be any different? So you have to get creative in terms of how these guys fall in love and how they demonstrate love, which is a challenge I really enjoy."

A slash writer named Lies said, "I love writing slash for all the reasons I love writing in general – the satisfaction of creating new, interesting stories. Slash pairings just feel more real and powerful to me - just more interesting, and that's why I write slash instead of gen or het. Honestly, my favourite thing about writing slash is writing the sex scenes. M/M sex is hot."

"Slash is hot! Slash is romantic," said Aris, who's been writing since the early '90's. "Slash lets us take these buddy-pairs that, if they were a man and a woman, would obviously be romantic pairings, and extrapolate in that direction if we want to. Slash lets women get together and objectify the male body and enjoy female sexuality in the same way that men have had sanctioned for years, and I think that's very important. There aren't very many avenues for women to enjoy pornography and sexuality in our culture. There's basically romance novels, porn written for men, yaoi manga and anime, and slash."

Yahtzee said, "I don't know that the things I enjoy about writing het are any different than the things I enjoy about writing gen or slash, which I also do. Really, for me, I *don't* see a big difference between the two. If you're writing about two people in love (or in lust), the plumbing is really just a detail, isn't it? The bigger leap is between writing canonical relationships versus noncanonical ones (which most slash is). If I feel like I'm getting at something vital within each character and in their relationship to each other, I'm happy."

Allaine, a femslash author who's been writing for about seven years, said, "I think part of the point of fanfic is to expand the horizons of a community. There are few more satisfying feelings as a writer, than to be one of the first writers to tackle a certain pairing, and to see people's feelings about that pairing grow and evolve, and to realize that you're part of the reason why that happened. I've helped awaken readers' minds to things they never considered before." He added, " I tend to gravitate toward fandoms where women outnumber men, or where women are the dominant characters (or both). This almost always means my favorite characters, the ones who keep me involved, are female. And as a writer, I have always found that I prefer writing female characters over male. (Perhaps it's because I prefer dialogue over action scenes, and women are generally more talkative and open with their feelings.)"

One slash fan, who asked not to be named, said that "reading smut involving gorgeous women with taut stomachs and pert breasts and perfect little butts makes my brain bleed. I kind of don't need to be reminded that 99.9% off the women on this planet (and apparently 100% of the women on all the other planets) are better looking than me. So, if I feel the urge to read erotica I prefer it to be completely absent of women who are five thousand times better looking than I am. Chances are I'm interested in reading fic because I'm in a bad mood to begin with and don't want to read something that will just make me more depressed."

Of course, there are things that drive everyone crazy about their chosen genre or genres. For some people, it's the difficulty in getting their work before a large number of people. For others, it's the in-fighting between genres.

A.j., a mostly-het writer, said, "What drives me kind of fruity batshit about writing het is that in a lot of places - most certainly not ALL places - it feels like writing het isn't very 'edgy', and thus it really doesn't get a lot of the frighteningly dedicated appreciation slash does. I like to relate writing het to being German in the United States. People, as a whole, don't really think about the extremely vast German population of the US as being a culture. They're just white people. There aren't really 'German' parades - and I know a lot of that has to do with the massive downplaying German communities did after WWII - and whenever I say that I'm German, people just nod it off until I mention I also have some Irish decent. It's like this culture is so completely ingrained in the bedrock of the US that it isn't even considered as different anymore. There's an invisibility to it that runs very deep. To me, writing het is like that. There's not a lot of shock value to it as a concept, so there isn't really the encouraging reader response that there is with slash... which is still newly titillating enough to still have that shiny 'This is something NAUGHTY!' to it. Don't get me wrong, I have no ill will to the slash community for this particular line of reasoning. This is just the way things are for the moment; but it's still a bit frustrating as a writer to be considered less worthy of reading because you commit the crime of being mainstream."

Raynos Kai, who's been writing primarily het for eleven years, said, "What drives me crazy about het is that most het writers with different pairings can't seem to stand each other, especially if their pairings tend to share a common character. Most of the time, that tends to dissolve into character bashing." She continued, " Another thing that gets me about het writers is their obsession with the OTP aka One True Pairing. They assume that just because they ship something it excludes all other possible relationships from existing. I think non-het pairings are a lot less prone to being glorified that way, since those pairings tend to be non-canon/based on pure crack. (This is not to say that all het pairings are canon/not based on crack, just that it's more likely for writers/creators to have the leeway to outright state het pairings.) On the other hand, there are some fandoms that don't seem to think het exists. At all. It's either slash or you're weird!"

Celli said, "I … get a little irritated by the fact that after all these years, I still see the 'ick, slash' comments from people who are otherwise friends of mine. I don't make big posts about why het isn't my favorite thing; I just take the attitude that it doesn't turn my crank like slash does, but I don't feel like it has to be discussed. But I'm all too often confronted with arguments against slash. It doesn't have to be argued for or against! I like it and you don't! Stop turning it into a thing where het or gen have to be superior to slash and leave me the heck alone. Sigh."

Allaine shared Celli's annoyance with the anti-slash crowd. "I find the opinions of non-slashers frustrating. No, I'm not a pervert. No, I'm not obsessed with sex, or at least with lesbian sex. (You'll find there's almost no adult sex scenes in any of my fics.) And just because the woman you see on your television screen is straight, that doesn't mean there's no possible way she is gay or could ever become gay, especially younger women. There's time for a LOT of self-discovery along the way, so don't tell me I'm 100% wrong and am completely off-base." He added, "I also find it frustrating (and this is by no means unique to femslash) when I'm virtually the only person writing a certain pairing. I would love to find just ONE good fic longer than five hundred words about that pairing written by someone other than me."

Sandra Faith, who has been actively writing fanfiction for over twenty years, also has problems finding stories to read and readers for her stories. "It's tough to adore a rare fandom, even if the pairing is very canon."

Tara said, "[W]ithin fandom sometimes it's hard to find your audience when you're in the minority, and [for] a lot of fandoms I enjoy the volume of slash fiction greatly outnumbers the het or gen. So it's hard to connect with your audience, or with a broad audience because you're not offering what the masses are looking for--you're offering what the niche is looking for. And being a niche, it makes it that much harder to get the word out so your readers can find you. And that much harder as a reader to find the stories you want to read."

Aris had a different take on hard-to-find pairings. "I really dislike the trend of slashing the pretty white guys just because they're pretty white guys. I mean, there's statistically less slash out there that involves characters of color, even if the relationship is there and interesting, because fandom is composed of people who have problems talking about race. I also hate the reflexive dismissal of a lot of female characters in slash. And I think it comes from a similar place--we write slash, or I write slash, mainly because the writers of these mainstream television show and movies are so interested in their handsome white male leads, and thus those relationships are deeper and more convincing than any relationships they have with the characters who are in the minority; the characters of color or women in the ensemble, which is usually where they're relegated to.

Yahtzee had some thoughts about society's place in the context of her own work. "The things that drive me crazy about het itself are that it's so much harder to keep out the detritus of societal ideas about gender and male/female relationships. Some author -- I forget who -- said that no writer could truly know herself until she'd tried to write dialogue for a man and a woman in a rose garden. The call of stereotype and cliché is very strong, no matter how hard you try to recognize it. In some ways, I became (in my opinion, anyway) a much better writer of het only after I also started writing slash. With slash, you can't fall back on those ingrained ideas about "well, this is what the guy does, and this is what the girl does." You have to ask yourself, what would this person do? And once I'd trained myself to always ask that question, I was able to ask it when writing het as well." She continued, " The things that drive me crazy about fandom's perception of het: The idea that it's 'schmaltzy,' 'stereotyped,' 'babyfic,' etc., at least compared to slash. Fact is, if you want to find schmaltzy, stereotyped Mpreg slash, there's plenty of it out there. And if you want to find good het, that's out there too. The thing that drives me absolutely BATTY is the sometimes-slash-rationale, 'I want to write about relationships between equals.' The idea being that this is somehow liberating, when in fact it's writing off the whole idea of women being equals in their relationships with men. I find that profoundly depressing."

Aris echoed Yahtzee's thoughts about gender roles. " One of the things I find while writing het is that I want to be careful not to automatically put the woman in a position where she's subordinate to the guy, either emotionally or physically, because that seems like just doing what Western Civilization has done to women and told women to do for the last however many centuries. So one of the things that's nice about writing slash is that the cultural subordination of one character to another because of gender is gone, and that makes that part of writing easier."

Christine Morgan, a published author who has also been writing fanfiction since 1996, said, "I think we all face the same challenges of telling a good story and getting noticed in a glutted market. There's a lot of stuff out there. It takes something special to stand out. … What drives me crazy is the attitude … of how only sad desperate lonely sickos need to include [sex]. It's a part of life. A major part, and a fun part."

The fun is the important part, at least as far as fanfiction is concerned. We write because we love our subject and want to share that fun.

Celli said, "[S]ome of my favorite romances are Regency romances. I have a thing--I have a real thing--for forbidden love, and Regencies so often use that as a device. When I started reading JAG slash, you had a CIA agent and a military officer, both men, and talk about your forbidden romances. It makes my heart skip a beat just thinking about it. :) Most of my slash pairings since then have had some kind of 'forbidden' aspect to them--the military might be involved, or maybe one or both of them are public figures of some kind, or maybe there's a historical context involved."

A.j. said, "People tend to write what they know, and I know enough about myself that het fic hits my buttons in ways that m/m or f/f fic never can. So, for me it's not really a case for liking writing het more than liking writing slash; it's just me writing what I would want to read."

Allaine said, "The very [first] time I became attached to a lesbian pairing, I found them so intensely romantic and sweet. Maybe that has made me predisposed to enjoy other femslash pairings, or to see 'subtext' where others may not. Or maybe because there's just so little of it out there, compared to the much larger number of hetero pairings. It's always a little bit more fresh. So most of my all-time favorite fanfics (with the big exception of the hetero fics of my favorite author) are femslash."

Lyssie, a femslasher and het writer, simplified this: "Because girls are pretty naked."

Sandra said, "I enjoy creating the headspace and conveying the sensations of the physicality of love, the romance of sex--I realize, though, this is not limited to het, and I also realize crafting erotica seems to be very typical of women writers in general. It's like painting a scene with words for the most intense emotions a person can feel."

Tara said, "I am a romantic. Unashamedly, unabashedly, have been my whole life. I am the sort of person who as an adult revisited my childhood favourites that were never built for this kind of fiction, and wrote epic romance stories. We're talking Yeoman Diana Prince and Maj. Steve Trevor, from the ABC Wonder Woman series set during WWII. All to appease my inner five year old, who knew what she wanted but had no idea what it was she actually wanted. I am writing Stormer and Riot solely to make my sister--who is a 32 year old teacher, may I add--happy, because we loved Jem when we were teenagers, and it's a grown-up way of playing with dolls. It's fantasy, it's wish-fulfillment, and it's meant to be nothing more than that. So I'm having fun with all the conventions of romance as a genre. I am a sucker for unrequited love, and it is one of my bullet-proof kinks, as they say. Even when I do not think the pairing would work (as good drama OR as a solid relationship) if it were requited. For example, I only really was interested in Spike and Buffy in relation to Spike's unrequited feelings because it made his character more interesting. I am fascinated by Gisbourne's relationship with Marian in the BBC Robin Hood, because it is the only complex relationship on the series, and because putting Lucy Griffiths in scenes with Richard Armitage forces her to bring her A game and put in better performances. The thing is... I am not one of those people who buy into the whole 'soul mates' thing. It's bullshit. More than that, it's usually a cheap excuse not to actually work at characterisation. I don't buy Clark and Lana in canon because it's never presented as an actual relationship. It's just stated as a fact, and a dodgy one at that. But I was fascinated by Chloe and Clark, because you could see exactly why Chloe loved him, and how the twists and turns affected them both, and there was something there for me to hook into as a writer and as a viewer. More colours to paint with, because it was a more complex relationship, and frankly, because Allison Mack was a better actor. It's those same qualities that made me seek out and read Clark/Lex, even though I was still only driven to tell stories about Clark and Chloe. But in both cases, I flat out rejected the show's notion of 'soul mates'. I rarely if ever am interested in Our Hero and Our Heroine settling down with the white picket fence and 2.5 kids and a dog. That is not my goal, as an author. That is not the 'prize' at the end of the long battle. The prize is the battle, and the battle is ongoing. It's how people change each other, how people learn each other, how we grow and regress and fuck up and strive and win and lose, together and alone. That is what interests me about romance as a genre. Because love is basic. Love is something we all seek, love is something we all want. And love is something not all of us get to experience in our day to day lives, so often love is something we get vicariously through fictional characters. This is normal, healthy, and pretty much a basic human fact."

What about where things are going? Is the slash/femslash/het divide just hype? Can't we all just get along?

Tara said, "I don't think either flavour of romance is intrinsically more complex or more interesting by its nature, even though that argument pops up in fandom now and then. I think it's all about the characters and the ability of the authors. Any relationship, if done well, is interesting. I think there are folks out there who genuinely believe that slash is more interesting, not because it is, but it's because it's what they prefer to write or read. And unfortunately, you can't argue that logic because it's not actually based in logic. It's about personal preference, and in some cases, the need to justify our preferences by elevating them from 'this is what I enjoy' to 'I enjoy this because it is inherently better' because at heart, people are still afraid we'll be judged by our preferences. But that attitude can be found anywhere--not just among slashers, but in any arena. It's not unique, and it's also not the majority. At least, it's been my experience in fandom that most folks write and read what they love, without passing judgement on people who don't share their preferences."

Celli said, "I think that these days, within fandom, slash is pretty mainstream. Maybe that's the challenge--to get used to not being different and subversive."

Aris said, "I think that fandom as a whole, internally, has mostly gotten past the whole 'you can't write guys as gay if they're canonically straight' thing. I mean, you still get that complaint, a lot of the time, but I see it as coming from people who are new to fandom and who are external to fandom. There certainly isn't a problem finding a sympathetic audience for slash! I think the biggest problems that are remaining for slashers are just technical ones--most of us aren't men, and we don't know what it's like to be a guy, and there's the line we're walking where we know we're writing idealized, fictional men who are in our porn for our purposes, not 'real gay men,' so some of the problems can just be elided over, and the physical writing-sex parts can be researched on the internet."

Not everyone was quite so verdant about the grass on both sides Lies said, "Slash brings the naughty. There's nothing more delicious than an illicit pairing you know will never, ever occur. Het pairings all seem very boring in comparison. Slash is also about denying gender roles, or at least messing with them, and I'm all over that."

Christine said, "In many fandoms, most of the canon pairings tend to be het anyway, so writing that way often seems to be less forced in terms of character and believable behavior. To take a character presented as het, and then write that character in slash, can be a big challenge. One that, honestly, many writers aren't up to doing in a plausible way. Of course, as I well know, just about ANYTHING can be done if you are clever / creative / twisted enough."

Sandra said, "I admit my biggest hesitance with writing slash / femslash has more to do with the difficulty of getting past pronoun confusion! My reading preferences are pretty much anything goes that's consensual, het, femslash or slash alike, though I don't care for slash as much. This may have to do with the fact that I don't prefer men, given the choice. :)"

A.j. said, "Mostly, I think someone who writes slash is just as often bashing their head against a desk trying to GET THE IDEA ON THE PAPER WHERE IT SHOULD BE rather than rattling around in my/their brain. Writers are writers, whether they're writing about tab a going into slot b, slot b and slot b going to town, or tab a and tab a going interesting places. I think it all boils down to wanting to set your computer on fire."

So, seriously now, why slash? Why het? Why femslash?

Celli: "Because it makes me happy. And what else is fandom for?"

Tara: "For me, it's not so much 'why het?' as it is 'why 'ship?' (het or slash). And the simple answer is: Because I like kissing books." (Editor's note: Tara means books about kissing, not actually locking lips with her book collection. Trust me on this.)

Sandra: "I've often pondered and theorized that I must be drawn to het for similar reasons that ostensibly straight women seem to be drawn to slash, though I've never bothered to track down studies (formal or informal) on why that is. I can very easily relate to and convey the male's point of view, and equally easily relate to the woman's."

Christine: "Since I've had het sex, I feel at least a little bit more qualified to write with some kind of knowledge on the subject. Of course, when I'm also writing about characters who aren't even HUMAN, that kind of makes it a moot point. What do I know about gargoyles, or elves, or the like? I have to use a lot of imagination either way."

Aris: "[W]hile earlier I was critical of stuff written just for the pretty pretty men, I have to admit that I'm all about women enjoying pretty pretty men. Slash lets us have a forum to talk about and appreciate sexuality in a supportive environment. And it's hot! If women didn't find slash hot, it wouldn't be so successful."

Lies: "Because it's hot. Because those who like it like it a lot. Because it's wonderfully counter-cultural and sometimes just a little bit wrong, and you can love it all the moreso for that."

Allaine: "[T]here's a special sweetness, a connection my female characters share that make their relationships seem all the more romantic."

A.j.: "Because, societally engineered or not, I wanna read about men and women making out! It's what I like, it's what pushes my buttons, and it makes me happy."

Yahtzee: "Why not?"

I'd like to thank everyone who took time to talk about this. I'm not sure if you have come to any stronger conclusions, gentle reader, but I suggest conclusions aren't the point. Learning where the other questioners are coming from, that's the fun part, and that's how you figure out the real "Why?" to anything you do.

And now we open the floor to you. What do you like about your favorite genre? What about what you read makes you happy?

http://firefox.org/news/articles/1196/1/Why----A-Not-Remotely-Complete-Investigation-of-the-quotWhy-Slash--Why-Het--Why-Femslashquot-Debate/Page1.html

I suggest to copy them to your computer so you can be able to enlarge them (and read them!).

It's 195 pages long, in PDF format. You can download it here:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/fo7yv9

If you follow this link you will be able to read through some pages of her book. If someone have it, it would be great if you could scan it so I can put it here.

http://books.google.com/books?id=oBEWH97mGVsC&dq=constance+penley+slash&source=gbs_summary_s&cad=0

This extract comes from the book "Fan Cultures" by Matt Hills, published in 2002:

"This apparent need to maintain a moral difference or dualism between academic and fan is evident in Penley's psychoanalysis of Star Trek fans as "slash" writers. Slash is a type of fanfiction which depicts male characters such as Captain Kirk and Mr Spock as sexually involved with one another, while (usually) maintaining that the characters concerned are still "heterosexual". Slash writing has also extended to cover female/female slash, although this type of slash has yet to be meaningfullly examined psychoanalytically in fan studies.

Slash has, perhaps, been disproportionately focused on by academic writers working on fandom, probably because it offers an exemple of tactical fan reworking which can be fitted into a de Certeau-derived model. For Penley,psychoanalysis i once again important because the activities of these slash-writing fans seem to resist any other logic of explanation: "I agree with Lamb and Veith's argument, although I think it helps us more to understand the sociological question of 'why Kirk and Spock?' than the perhaps more psychical question of 'why two men?' " But this comparison of explanations is telling: why is the psychoanalytic question purely a matter of gender rather than referring to the actual characters? Can Kirk and Spock not form the objects of psychoanalytic investigation? This must, in some sense,remain a possibility given that Penley wants to emphasize the fans identification with the whole Star Trek universe rather than just the characters.

Penley also offers the standard justification for using Laplanche and Pontalis: their account allows that the subject can hold a number of Pontalis's account is therefore assumed to make sense of the complexity of slash writing and fan identification. But by separating off the issue of gender from the issue of characterisation (Kirk/Spock). , albeit temporarily, Penley enacts the same type of splitting that marks Creed's account of the horror film. For Creed surface details (secondary fantasies) are reduced to primal or original fantasies, and for Penley the seemingly incidental (K/S) is subordinated to the essential (slash as male/male). This shift is not absolute; Penley does pay attention to the specificity of K/S and Star Trek fandom, ands oscillates productively in her own identifications between sociologist and psychoanalyst. Ultimately, Penly's moral dualism is thus distinctive from those offered by Creed and Hoxter. For Penley, the good fans that she identifies with 'show a everyday life'. But these fans are also a bad object. They also trouble Penley by refusing to identify as feminists: "I cannot tell you how many times during the three slash conventions I have attended that I heard the phrase, 'I'm not a feminist,but...' ". This is actually a more intricate moral dualism than those usually inhabited by academic writers. On the axis of psychoanalytic understanding Penley perceives herself and the fans as engaged in a communal activity, while at the level of self-declared politics the fans remain, rather disappointingly for Penley, adrift of her own position, which is nevertheless assumed to be morally superior to the fans. Burt does not quite seem to capture the intricacy of Penley's position when he castigates her work for reinstating the academic's superiority over fans. And Michele Barrett certainly misses this intricacy altogether in the following rather bizarre comment:

"It is a shame that the image of Star Trek in cultural studies is so coloured by Constance Penley's rather bizarre enthusiasm for the sexual fantasies of a tiny group of fans. As an increasing literature on 'The Metaphysics of Star Trek', 'Star Trek in Myth and Legend', 'Star Trek and History' and so forth demonstrates, there are more serious things to say about this huge phenomenon."

Barrett succeeds in superimposing a new and highly rigid moral dualism onto Penley's work, while simultaneously displaying an apparent ignorance of the fact that Penley's enthusiasm for slash has been shared by many other scholars. Barrett also neglects to consider that her more serious exemples are also products of the Star Trek industry as well as of serious or disinterested reason."

You can buy the book here (or go to the nearest library, it's cheaper!):

http://www.amazon.com/Cultures-Sussex-Studies-Culture-Communication/dp/0415240255/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222315498&sr=8-1

The terminology of fanfiction is wide and diverse (and often some words are related to one particular fandom) and it's easy to get lost. So here's a little (well not so little) lexicon.

A

ALTERNATE UNIVERSE: Also AU or A/U. Fanfic set in a universe which is different from the canon show universe.

ANGST:  Emotional pain. Can add intensity to a story or turn it into one big whinefest. Angst may also refer to fanfic which have emotional pain as the main plot (angstfic).

ARCHIVE:  A virtual web library of fanfic from multiple authors.

B

BABYFIC: Fanfic that has the main characters adopting or having 1 or more children of their own.

BADFIC: Short for bad fiction. Badfic is often written by new writers, but can also be done by more experienced writers, deliberately, to entertain and inform readers about common cliches, plots or conventions that should be avoided.

B/D,  also B&D: Short for Bondage and Domination. Adult fanfic about mind and control games, sometimes with humiliation involved.

BDSM:  Adult fanfic containing bondage, domination, sado-masochism.

BETA READER:  A fanfic editor who betas or test reads a story, giving feedback on plot points, characterizations, grammar, typos and generally providing encouragement. Invariably, fanfics undergo an improvement with a beta reader, because of the valuable outside perspective.

C

CANON:  Elements established by original source material (TV show, book, movie, etc...) itself for either plot, setting, or character developments.

CHALLENGE:  An idea given out by a reader that sets a plotline or idea for a story.

CON, Short for CONVENTION: A fair or expo with dealers selling books, games, collectibles, fanart, and fanzines. Guests of honor such as sf writers, tv actors or writers give talks and sign autographs. Other activities include film showings, costume contests, award presentations, panel discussions, art shows, demonstrations and workshops.

CRACKFIC, Also CRACK!FIC: A type of fanfiction that is intentionally unbelievable and insane; often humorous.

CROSSOVER, also X-OVER and XO: Subgenre of fanfic using characters or scenarios from two or more different sources. Ex: NCIS/Law and order crossover.

D

DISCLAIMER:  A copyright notice attached at the beginning of a fanfic, acknowledging the real owners of the universe or characters and no financial gain is intended.

DRABBLE: A story of exactly 100 words. But there are variants of 150, 200, or 350 words.

E

ER: Acronym for Established Relationship. Refers to stories featuring characters already involved in an established romantic or sexual relationship prior to the beginning of the story. The opposite of a first time fic.

F

F/F: Female/Female. Refers to a homosexual relationship involving two women. Sometimes referred to as "Femslash".

FANART: Original illustrations and/or photo manipulations featuring fandom-related characters, etc... based on original source material, but created by a fan.

FANDOM: The fan-based community dedicated to a particular TV show or other cult-inducing medium.

FANON:  Fan created fact that nearly all fans take for granted as true but is not supported by the official source. (See Canon)

FANVID: Music videos and montages created by a fan using a combination of clips from original source material set to a song.

FEEDBACK: Thank-you email sent to authors expressing appreciation for their story; may contain critique.

FIRST TIME:  Romantic fanfic which have the main characters getting together for the first time. Often passionate and explicit.

FLUFF:  Lighthearted short fanfic.

G

GEN.:  Short for 'general'. Conflicting use. Slash writers usually use this term to indicate fanfic suitable for all ages, but it can also be used to refer to fanfic with heterosexual adult relationships.

GENRE: The category a story belongs to. (Ex: Humor, angst, romance, ect.)

GENDERSWITCH (-BENDER or -FLIP): Stories in which a character of one gender undergoes some kind of sex change at some point throughout the fic. Are usually sudden and unexpected, caused by magic or alien technology. Can be temporary or permanent. Can be serious or, often, quite humourous.

H

H/C: Acronym for Hurt/Comfort. A subgenre of fanfic where one vulnerable partner suffers emotional or physical abuse or pain, and is then comforted by the other partner. In adult stories, the comfort often leads to sex. The main plot element is reaction to the character's pain, which can be quite intense in some stories.

HET.: Short for "heterosexual". Fanfic about a romance between a male and a female.

K

KINK:  An unusual element of a story that some authors and readers find especially pleasing, but which others may consider squicks.

L

LIME:  In anime fiction, the term lime denotes a story that has sexual themes but is not necessarily explicit.

LEMON: Explicit sex stories in general, especially in anime fan fiction, are known as lemon, a term which comes from a Japanese slang term meaning "sexy" that itself derives from an early pornographic cartoon series called Cream Lemon. More recently, describing the sex scene in itself in a fic.

M

MARY SUE & MARTY STU OR GARY STU: A character who is a thinly disguised version of the author. A major warning sign is the new character who becomes romantically involved with one of the main characters and/or saves his life. First coined in 1974, the original Mary Sue was a beautiful half-human, half-Vulcan who rescued Kirk, Spock, and Dr. McCoy. According to Paula Smith, "the truest mark of a Mary Sue is not how she's described or what she does, but the effect the sheer fact of her existence in the story has on the other characters in the story. If program characters start worrying endlessly about her, or go all gooey because she's just so darn cute or smart...the girl's a Mary Sue."

MPREG:  Acronym for "Male Pregnancy". Refers to stories featuring a male character capable of conceiving and/or carrying a child within their own body. May or may not include birth as well.

N

NC-17: Refers to the strongest rating a story may carry; indicating graphic or explicit sex and/or violence. Must be 18 years or older to read the story.

NON-CON or N/C: Non-consensual sexual act, ie. rape. 

NOROMO: Acronym for "No Romance". A Noromo is an anti-shipper, someone opposed to romantic pairings in general or to a particular pairing. Ther term originates from the X-Files fandom.

O

OC: Acronym for "Original Character". A character invented by the author.

ONE SHOT: A one-shot story is a short piece of work, generally a single moment in time, that is completed in no more than one chapter.

OOC: Acronym for "Out Of Character". Refers to the fact that the characterizations used by an author are not those established by canon standards.

OTP: Acronym for "One True Pairing".  Refers to an author's preferred relationship pairing within a fandom.

P

PAIRING: A romantic/sexual combination of any two characters.

PLOT BUNNY: Fanfic plots or ideas. Inspired by a quote from John Steinbeck: "Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."

POV: Acronym for "Point Of View". The perspective a story is written from.

PREQUEL: A story that takes place before events in the book, movie or series.

PWP: Acronym for "Porn Without Plot" or "Plot? What Plot?". A story with no real plot, an excuse for a sex scene.

R

RATING: Fanfic ratings are based on the American Motion Picture Association codes (G, PG-13, R, NC-17).

REC: Short for "Recommendation". Refers to a story written by another author that is considered especially good and worth suggesting to other fans to be read.

REVIEW: Another name for "feedback".

ROUND ROBIN: Stories written by multiple authors taking turns; often open to the public so that anyone can add a passage to the ever-growing story.

RPF and/or RPS: Acronym for "Real People Fic" and "Real People Slash". Refers to stories featuring the actors themselves (rather than the characters they play). If RPS, those real people are placed in a slash relationship.   

S

SHIPPER: Short for "Relationshipper". A fan who believes in a romantic relationship between a certain pair. Originally from X-Files fandom, shippers were originally a fringe group who fervently believed that Mulder and Scully "belonged together". The term "shipper" has now spread into other fandoms, and one can see fanfics described as 'shippy' to describe their romantic bent.

SMUT: Refers to stories of pure sex, no plot. Other name for  PWP.

SONGFIC: Fanfic inspired by and based on the lyrics of a song.

SPOILER: Info that reveals and "spoils" important plot points that the reader has not yet seen. Put in the header of a fanfic, it can indicates the summary of the story.

SQUICK: Refers to possibly offensive elements (ie: bestiality, BDSM, rape, MPREG, etc...) of a story which may cause feelings of unease or revulsion in a reader.

SUBTEXT: In fandom, any canon action that implies sexual attraction between two characters. Subtext exists only in the minds of the viewers and is most often used in Xena fandom.

T

TPTB: Acronym for "The Powers That Be". The writers/directors/owners of the original show or source material. Often used in a sarcastic way.

V

'VERSE: Short for "Universe". The events, characters, and storyline surrounding a fandom or an AU series of fics. Often seen in Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings fandom where there are a book and a movie.

VIGNETTE: A short piece of writing, usually a story which is only a few pages long, that focuses on making a particular point or exploring a particular emotion or event. The characters' thoughts are usually internally focused, and the tone more formal.

W

WIP: Acronym for "Work In Progress". Fanfic where the ending has not yet been written, or which has not been betaread.   

WHO ARE YOU?

Hello, my name is Seshat and I'm an alcoho... er... slasher! I'm a 24 years old girl, I live in Québec, Canada and I'm a student in english (but I'm not perfect so please don't laugh at me for making errors, just point them out to me so I can fix them).

I've been a slasher for 6 years now, and a fanfiction reader and writer for at least 10 years. I started with het pairings (if you don't know what all these funny words -slash, fanfiction, het, pairing- mean, just take a look at the lexicon). I was a big fan of The X-Files and I could spend hours reading X-Files fics where Mulder and Scully have dirty fun together... Yuck. Well, that was my thing back then. Until I discovered a french band named Indochine. The singer and the lead guitarist had fun kissing each other on stage and it was soooo exciting and sexy and deliciously perverse to me... I have to mention that I had already a growing fascination and respect for gay people, so the conversion to slash happened quite fast. And now, here I am, a slasher.

WHAT THE HELL IS SLASH?

That is THE question!

Let's see what Wikipedia (I looove Wikipedia) says about it:

"Slash fiction is a genre of fan fiction that focuses on the depiction of romantic (and often sexual) relationships between two male characters, who may not be engaged in relationships in the canon universe."

I guess that's pretty clear, except for one thing: why the name "slash"? That's pretty simple really. It's because of the "/" sign (which is called a slash) between the two names of the pairing. Exemple: Harry/Draco

YEAH, OK. BUT WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF YOUR BLOG?

My love of slash has gone beyond reading and writing and I've come to wonder what slash was all about. Where does it come from? Who are those other people writing slash? Why are we writing and reading it? I did a lot of research on the net, and I found some answers. And now I want to share them. That is the purpose of this blog. I won't really composes messages, I'll just copy/paste (with the credits of course) because other people can say it better than I do and this blog will be more of an encyclopedia of slash than a personal blog.

I'M A SLASHER TOO AND I'M CURIOUS: WHAT ARE YOUR FAVORITE FANDOMS AND PAIRINGS?

My favorite fandoms:

-The french band Indochine

-The english band Placebo

-The Lord of the Rings

And I like other fandoms (such as Xena, Hercules, Buffy, etc..) but I'm not really reading about them.

My favorite pairings:

-Nicola/Boris

-Nicola/Brian (crossover Indochine/Placebo)

-Merry/Pippin

-Frodo/Sam

-Dominic Monaghan/Billy Boyd

So here it is!