Quickly translated Nörttitytöt article on slash
I posted my Nörttitytöt article on slash! Here's a shortened version, and undoubtedly badly translated as well. I wrote this quickly and dirtily...
Romantic relationships between men for women: slash
Ten years ago a pen pal told me delightedly about slash and recommended it to me as well. She included a couple of pictures she'd printed and a link. I was baffled but also curious. The pictures were actors from The Lord of the Rings being naked and intimate. The link turned out to be an English story about the Fellowship and how they decided to come closer together by setting up an orgy.
This introduction left me aghast. Not only wasn't I ready for Merry, Pippin and Boromir having sex, but it had never occurred to me to imagine a sexual relationship between two same-sexed characters in any setting, if the source text didn't tell me so. I was also taken aback by the straightforward, pornographic nature of the story, fic.
Still, somehow slash, fan-made romantic or erotic material about relationships between men, did appeal to me and I started to look for fics that would better suit my tastes.
I found out that slash is part of a world-wide culture where mostly women create texts based on other people's sources and share them freely. Later I learned that this was called Western media fandom and that it was a rather scattered community. This fandom that was built around mostly Western tv-shows, movies, books and celebrities contains many traditions to be a fan, so the name is, at best, loose. Still fans experience fandom as a community. In fandom, fans publish fanfiction, vids and other art, comment on each other's works, befriend each other and exchange thoughts on pretty much everything.
In this article I comment on some aspects of slash fiction. Slash is written by a variety of people: there's a prism of different genders, age groups, sexualities and ability levels. Slash has often been presented as a hobby of heterosexual housewives (mothers) or middle-aged women but this image isn't truthful. Slash has a long history spanning for decades and it's difficult to generalise. My claims always apply to only some of slash. Some of it is political, some erotic, some well written and so on. There are always exceptions.
However, I write about slash as literature mostly written and read by women, which I also believe to be true. Femslash which tells about relationships between women I have excluded because the history and characteristics of femslash are very different. (This may have been badly put. It's not the reason I excluded femslash, it's the reason why my article can't be applied to femslash. Oh well.)
Slash as subversive type of literature
Recently I saw a fan reminiscing slash based on a cop show in the 1970s or 1980s. She stated that it felt revolutionary to think about these two macho guys in an intimate relationship with each other. Slash can be seen as subversive in many ways. Some claim that the male gaze can be ignored in slash, which makes it exceptional. (Pandarus.) In slash, a man is the object of the gaze, women's sexual desire and their fantasies -- but also a subject that women identify with.
Buddy slash is based on a close friendship and partnership between men in the original source text. This kind of texts are among others Miami Vice, The Sentinel and due South. There are uncountable amount of stories where for example Ray Vecchio and Benton Fraser, partners who work together and friends, become lovers. Also The Lord of the Rings is full of close bonds between men. As a matter of fact, there are not many female characters in the story at all. Slash can be interpreted as a reaction of female readers and viewers to fiction where the representatives of their own gender have been almost erased.
There are still rather few women in mainstream movies and tv-shows. The phenomenon is familiar: there are different types in the cast of main characters to offer many possibilities of identifying for the viewer, such as a nerd, a clown, a jock, a socially awkward person, a rebel -- and one of them is a girl. (Better expressed in this article.) If a girl or a woman wants to identify with a multifaceted character, there are often no other choices but men. Slash writers have been criticised for keeping this kind of erasure of women going in fiction. On the other hand, slash can be seen as a counterstrike on narratives that are hostile towards them or ignore them. The women take the settings and characters of popular stories and change them to their liking.
A lot of slash is romantic or erotic, but considerably different from commercially published romance and porn. The reader of slash knows the characters already and the characters have backgrounds, personalities, jobs, interests and relationships that aren't connected to their romantic and sexual relationships. In more traditional romance the main characters may not have anything going on in their lives other than the romance. In porn, the characters are often nothing more than people having sex.
Slash has been called a rare type of literature because it combines the characters' sexual and other kind of lives. (The characters in and outside the bedroom, that is.) Fics tell about the characters' regular lives but also in detail their sex lives, and how their sexualities and other aspects of their lives are related. (The shoshanna's great post.)
Fans have thought a lot about how slash that's mostly written by women differs from fiction for gay men. There are a lot of aspects in slash that are considered a feminine part of sexuality: care-taking, warmth, monogamous romantic love. Fans themselves have pointed out the female homosocial continuum in slash. (In slash philosophy.) That is, the easy slide of the partner-bond becoming an erotic relationship, whereas the male homosocial culture forbids it.
Slash fics are sometimes criticised for not depicting men "realistically." Some fans have responded by saying that slash is about women's fantasies and they've got nothing to do with real men. (Carenejeans.)
Slash as a shunned hobby ("shun" is a strong word -- the Finnish equivalent is more like "avoided")
A lot of people think slash started with Star Trek: TOS around 1970 but fanfiction and sexualising of relationships between men did happen before that, and also elsewhere than North America. Still, Star Trek was an important step. Among others, Francesca Coppa has written about it in the article Women, “Star Trek,” and the early development of fannish vidding. Coppa writes about Spock as a character that speaks to nerdy women (she does, but I also wanted to tie slash to the Nörttitytöt (geek girls) blog). Spock replaces the female scientist in the original pilot, but the character shares a lot of the same traits as Number One.
According to Coppa, Spock was an important character for technologically oriented women as can be seen in slash vids that were made about Spock already in the 1980s. In slash made about Spock rationality, logic and technology are united with physicality and sexual desire, exactly like in the process of making a vid, where women used technology to express erotic desire.
If the geeky girls and women of the 1960s and 1970s felt like they were weird and found therefore similarities in the character of Spock, slash as a hobby didn't help. Often slash fans don't tell about their hobby to acquaintances, some not even to close friends or family members. Slash, they feel, is too easily misunderstood. The public image of slash doesn't help. "Women’s fantasies find a powerful outlet in these strange stories about odd couples," the journalist Julie Madsen writes in 2002. (Here.) A pile of similar articles on slash have been published: it's seen as weird and eccentric in them, something that needs to be explained.
It's no wonder that often fans get annoyed when their interests are questioned and sometimes judged. A fan writes about how women's interest in sex between men can be seen downright sick because, it's claimed, these women would think their own bodies as gross and wouldn't want to read about women having sex. She points out that she doesn't remember anyone ever suspecting that men who watch lesbian porn secretly hate their own bodies. (Fabu here.)
The basis of slash is the homoerotic tension between male characters in the source text. Some fans enjoy the idea of subverting the relationships that the creators of the original text, authors, actors, directors, didn't intend to be erotic. Some view the tension at least partially acknowledged. (Shadowcast on the subject.) Especially recently some fans have grown tired with being enticed with a little bit of homoerotic content while the creators have no intention to ever add any indisputable homosexual narratives to their texts. This queerbaiting has made a lot of House and Sherlock fans feel fed up, for example.
Aja Romano of Daily Dot has written a detailed post on the crash between slash fans and the makers of the tv-show Supernatural. (Here.) She claims that slash fans have been a substantial part of the viewers of the show from the beginning and a partial reason for the show's success. The creators of Supernatural have been aware of their fanbase because there's even an episode in the show where the main characters meet a slash fan, to their surprise and horror.
The actors of Supernatural have also referred to slash themselves, as can be seen in one of the gifs in the article: Jensen Ackles points to himself and his colleague Misha Collins, gestures in a sexual manner and winks to the viewer. Romano writes about the great amount of objections that the possibility of writing an actual romance between the characters of Ackles and Collins has raised. It's noteworthy that it's under discussion in the first place.
The question of how to interpret slash
After I learned about The Lord of the Rings slash I told about it to a friend who'd been a fan for decades. He was mostly amused. He said that he wouldn't mind if I talked about it but that he'd be prepared with counter arguments when I would try to claim that for example Legolas and Gimli were anything other than friends.
I was surprised by the reaction of my friend. I hadn't myself thought that I claimed anything at all while reading slash and talking about it. I thought The Lord of the Rings was a world of its own, and everyone who'd read it had their own interpretations of it. Slash fics were different kind of interpretations each, too, and independent in that they didn't change the original work at all. I thought the fics and the original text were like alternative realities that could be in conflict, but still each could be read and enjoyed and immersed in.
In the same way I view real person slash which is written about celebrities. At first the stories written about actual living people felt revolutionary and a little dodgy to me. Quickly, however, I realised that in these stories the characters were just as fictional as in other kinds of slash, and literature all in all. A fan told me that slash about real people was disgusting because she didn't want to know intimate details about celebrities. She asked me how I'd like it if someone told me details about the sex life of the President. It did feel nauseating. Still, immediately I noticed that slash and other kind of fiction about real people isn't fact. It shouldn't violate the privacy of anyone. It's only fiction.
Some fans oppose to slash and other fiction about real people because it makes people objects and denies their humanity. In any case, in my opinion fanfiction about real people is closer to other literature than fanfiction that uses characters created by others. Real people are constantly written about in literature: in exposé books, in regular fiction to create the feel of the particular time and place, in biographies. For example the author Helvi Hämäläinen caused sensation by including recognisable characters in her books in the 1940s.
Slash fics
Lastly, I'd like to recommend some slash fics to give a preview of the variety of slash stories.
synecdochic: Freedom’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose (2006)
This story is based on the tv-show Stargate: Atlantis. It's a scifi story about the time when one of the main characters, Rodney McKay, has come back from another galaxy and works in the United States as a university professor. It's about Rodney's getting used to the civilian life. The story is subtle and well written. People who know the show get more out of the story, of course, but I read it myself for the first time when I knew next to nothing about Stargate and yet it made a big impression on me. The story is not particularly erotic and slash is mostly in the background.
Resonant: Transfigurations (2003)
The novel-length story Transfigurations is based on the Harry Potter series and it's about the relationship of Harry and Draco Malfoy, changing slowly from enmity into something else. The story is not only about this relationship but it tells about other characters, Hogwarts, and magic. The story is rich in imagination and suits also a reader who's not sold on Harry and Draco being together.
Transfigurations has been written when the Harry Potter series wasn't yet finished. It tells about the time after Voldemort's defeat but everything from Harry's fourth school year onward is come up with by Resonant.
ahestele: Embers (2004-)
Embers is a story about two high school boys in Detroit. One of them is a tough guy who plays hockey, the other one is a figure skater. There's undeniable attraction between them, but being together isn't easy for them. The skilful author uses the rapper Eminem and Taylor Hanson of the band Hanson as a basis for her characters. The fic is riveting, but unfortunately it hasn't yet been finished. Despite that I want to recommend it because it's an amazing romantic story and a peek into two seventeen-year-old boys' lives in the USA. People who like the subversiveness of slash may enjoy Eminem as a character in a slash fic.
fyredancer: The Blue of Desire (2009)
Loosely based on the manga Desire, the story is about two college kids, Bill and Tom, who try to figure out their feelings and their relationship. Bill has had a crush on Tom, his best friend, for about as long as he's known him, but Tom identifies as heterosexual and has one night stands with girls. The situation gets complicated when Tom starts making confusing suggestions to Bill.
The fic is written about the band Tokio Hotel. Tom and Bill are twins in real life, but in this story they're not related (OR ARE THEY, this I didn't say obv.). I myself read this story without knowing anything except what the main characters look like. It worked great as a romantic story.
Mira: Crysanthemum Tryst (2007)
In this story about the actors of the movie The Lord of the Rings, in the centre is Billy Boyd, but there is a lot of cast present and the author focuses on the relationships between them. The fic is filled with the love, clever dialogue and family-like time among the characters. The story brims with the affection and warmth that the fans feel toward the characters.
Romantic relationships between men for women: slash
Ten years ago a pen pal told me delightedly about slash and recommended it to me as well. She included a couple of pictures she'd printed and a link. I was baffled but also curious. The pictures were actors from The Lord of the Rings being naked and intimate. The link turned out to be an English story about the Fellowship and how they decided to come closer together by setting up an orgy.
This introduction left me aghast. Not only wasn't I ready for Merry, Pippin and Boromir having sex, but it had never occurred to me to imagine a sexual relationship between two same-sexed characters in any setting, if the source text didn't tell me so. I was also taken aback by the straightforward, pornographic nature of the story, fic.
Still, somehow slash, fan-made romantic or erotic material about relationships between men, did appeal to me and I started to look for fics that would better suit my tastes.
I found out that slash is part of a world-wide culture where mostly women create texts based on other people's sources and share them freely. Later I learned that this was called Western media fandom and that it was a rather scattered community. This fandom that was built around mostly Western tv-shows, movies, books and celebrities contains many traditions to be a fan, so the name is, at best, loose. Still fans experience fandom as a community. In fandom, fans publish fanfiction, vids and other art, comment on each other's works, befriend each other and exchange thoughts on pretty much everything.
In this article I comment on some aspects of slash fiction. Slash is written by a variety of people: there's a prism of different genders, age groups, sexualities and ability levels. Slash has often been presented as a hobby of heterosexual housewives (mothers) or middle-aged women but this image isn't truthful. Slash has a long history spanning for decades and it's difficult to generalise. My claims always apply to only some of slash. Some of it is political, some erotic, some well written and so on. There are always exceptions.
However, I write about slash as literature mostly written and read by women, which I also believe to be true. Femslash which tells about relationships between women I have excluded because the history and characteristics of femslash are very different. (This may have been badly put. It's not the reason I excluded femslash, it's the reason why my article can't be applied to femslash. Oh well.)
Slash as subversive type of literature
Recently I saw a fan reminiscing slash based on a cop show in the 1970s or 1980s. She stated that it felt revolutionary to think about these two macho guys in an intimate relationship with each other. Slash can be seen as subversive in many ways. Some claim that the male gaze can be ignored in slash, which makes it exceptional. (Pandarus.) In slash, a man is the object of the gaze, women's sexual desire and their fantasies -- but also a subject that women identify with.
Buddy slash is based on a close friendship and partnership between men in the original source text. This kind of texts are among others Miami Vice, The Sentinel and due South. There are uncountable amount of stories where for example Ray Vecchio and Benton Fraser, partners who work together and friends, become lovers. Also The Lord of the Rings is full of close bonds between men. As a matter of fact, there are not many female characters in the story at all. Slash can be interpreted as a reaction of female readers and viewers to fiction where the representatives of their own gender have been almost erased.
There are still rather few women in mainstream movies and tv-shows. The phenomenon is familiar: there are different types in the cast of main characters to offer many possibilities of identifying for the viewer, such as a nerd, a clown, a jock, a socially awkward person, a rebel -- and one of them is a girl. (Better expressed in this article.) If a girl or a woman wants to identify with a multifaceted character, there are often no other choices but men. Slash writers have been criticised for keeping this kind of erasure of women going in fiction. On the other hand, slash can be seen as a counterstrike on narratives that are hostile towards them or ignore them. The women take the settings and characters of popular stories and change them to their liking.
A lot of slash is romantic or erotic, but considerably different from commercially published romance and porn. The reader of slash knows the characters already and the characters have backgrounds, personalities, jobs, interests and relationships that aren't connected to their romantic and sexual relationships. In more traditional romance the main characters may not have anything going on in their lives other than the romance. In porn, the characters are often nothing more than people having sex.
Slash has been called a rare type of literature because it combines the characters' sexual and other kind of lives. (The characters in and outside the bedroom, that is.) Fics tell about the characters' regular lives but also in detail their sex lives, and how their sexualities and other aspects of their lives are related. (The shoshanna's great post.)
Fans have thought a lot about how slash that's mostly written by women differs from fiction for gay men. There are a lot of aspects in slash that are considered a feminine part of sexuality: care-taking, warmth, monogamous romantic love. Fans themselves have pointed out the female homosocial continuum in slash. (In slash philosophy.) That is, the easy slide of the partner-bond becoming an erotic relationship, whereas the male homosocial culture forbids it.
Slash fics are sometimes criticised for not depicting men "realistically." Some fans have responded by saying that slash is about women's fantasies and they've got nothing to do with real men. (Carenejeans.)
Slash as a shunned hobby ("shun" is a strong word -- the Finnish equivalent is more like "avoided")
A lot of people think slash started with Star Trek: TOS around 1970 but fanfiction and sexualising of relationships between men did happen before that, and also elsewhere than North America. Still, Star Trek was an important step. Among others, Francesca Coppa has written about it in the article Women, “Star Trek,” and the early development of fannish vidding. Coppa writes about Spock as a character that speaks to nerdy women (she does, but I also wanted to tie slash to the Nörttitytöt (geek girls) blog). Spock replaces the female scientist in the original pilot, but the character shares a lot of the same traits as Number One.
According to Coppa, Spock was an important character for technologically oriented women as can be seen in slash vids that were made about Spock already in the 1980s. In slash made about Spock rationality, logic and technology are united with physicality and sexual desire, exactly like in the process of making a vid, where women used technology to express erotic desire.
If the geeky girls and women of the 1960s and 1970s felt like they were weird and found therefore similarities in the character of Spock, slash as a hobby didn't help. Often slash fans don't tell about their hobby to acquaintances, some not even to close friends or family members. Slash, they feel, is too easily misunderstood. The public image of slash doesn't help. "Women’s fantasies find a powerful outlet in these strange stories about odd couples," the journalist Julie Madsen writes in 2002. (Here.) A pile of similar articles on slash have been published: it's seen as weird and eccentric in them, something that needs to be explained.
It's no wonder that often fans get annoyed when their interests are questioned and sometimes judged. A fan writes about how women's interest in sex between men can be seen downright sick because, it's claimed, these women would think their own bodies as gross and wouldn't want to read about women having sex. She points out that she doesn't remember anyone ever suspecting that men who watch lesbian porn secretly hate their own bodies. (Fabu here.)
The basis of slash is the homoerotic tension between male characters in the source text. Some fans enjoy the idea of subverting the relationships that the creators of the original text, authors, actors, directors, didn't intend to be erotic. Some view the tension at least partially acknowledged. (Shadowcast on the subject.) Especially recently some fans have grown tired with being enticed with a little bit of homoerotic content while the creators have no intention to ever add any indisputable homosexual narratives to their texts. This queerbaiting has made a lot of House and Sherlock fans feel fed up, for example.
Aja Romano of Daily Dot has written a detailed post on the crash between slash fans and the makers of the tv-show Supernatural. (Here.) She claims that slash fans have been a substantial part of the viewers of the show from the beginning and a partial reason for the show's success. The creators of Supernatural have been aware of their fanbase because there's even an episode in the show where the main characters meet a slash fan, to their surprise and horror.
The actors of Supernatural have also referred to slash themselves, as can be seen in one of the gifs in the article: Jensen Ackles points to himself and his colleague Misha Collins, gestures in a sexual manner and winks to the viewer. Romano writes about the great amount of objections that the possibility of writing an actual romance between the characters of Ackles and Collins has raised. It's noteworthy that it's under discussion in the first place.
The question of how to interpret slash
After I learned about The Lord of the Rings slash I told about it to a friend who'd been a fan for decades. He was mostly amused. He said that he wouldn't mind if I talked about it but that he'd be prepared with counter arguments when I would try to claim that for example Legolas and Gimli were anything other than friends.
I was surprised by the reaction of my friend. I hadn't myself thought that I claimed anything at all while reading slash and talking about it. I thought The Lord of the Rings was a world of its own, and everyone who'd read it had their own interpretations of it. Slash fics were different kind of interpretations each, too, and independent in that they didn't change the original work at all. I thought the fics and the original text were like alternative realities that could be in conflict, but still each could be read and enjoyed and immersed in.
In the same way I view real person slash which is written about celebrities. At first the stories written about actual living people felt revolutionary and a little dodgy to me. Quickly, however, I realised that in these stories the characters were just as fictional as in other kinds of slash, and literature all in all. A fan told me that slash about real people was disgusting because she didn't want to know intimate details about celebrities. She asked me how I'd like it if someone told me details about the sex life of the President. It did feel nauseating. Still, immediately I noticed that slash and other kind of fiction about real people isn't fact. It shouldn't violate the privacy of anyone. It's only fiction.
Some fans oppose to slash and other fiction about real people because it makes people objects and denies their humanity. In any case, in my opinion fanfiction about real people is closer to other literature than fanfiction that uses characters created by others. Real people are constantly written about in literature: in exposé books, in regular fiction to create the feel of the particular time and place, in biographies. For example the author Helvi Hämäläinen caused sensation by including recognisable characters in her books in the 1940s.
Slash fics
Lastly, I'd like to recommend some slash fics to give a preview of the variety of slash stories.
synecdochic: Freedom’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose (2006)
This story is based on the tv-show Stargate: Atlantis. It's a scifi story about the time when one of the main characters, Rodney McKay, has come back from another galaxy and works in the United States as a university professor. It's about Rodney's getting used to the civilian life. The story is subtle and well written. People who know the show get more out of the story, of course, but I read it myself for the first time when I knew next to nothing about Stargate and yet it made a big impression on me. The story is not particularly erotic and slash is mostly in the background.
Resonant: Transfigurations (2003)
The novel-length story Transfigurations is based on the Harry Potter series and it's about the relationship of Harry and Draco Malfoy, changing slowly from enmity into something else. The story is not only about this relationship but it tells about other characters, Hogwarts, and magic. The story is rich in imagination and suits also a reader who's not sold on Harry and Draco being together.
Transfigurations has been written when the Harry Potter series wasn't yet finished. It tells about the time after Voldemort's defeat but everything from Harry's fourth school year onward is come up with by Resonant.
ahestele: Embers (2004-)
Embers is a story about two high school boys in Detroit. One of them is a tough guy who plays hockey, the other one is a figure skater. There's undeniable attraction between them, but being together isn't easy for them. The skilful author uses the rapper Eminem and Taylor Hanson of the band Hanson as a basis for her characters. The fic is riveting, but unfortunately it hasn't yet been finished. Despite that I want to recommend it because it's an amazing romantic story and a peek into two seventeen-year-old boys' lives in the USA. People who like the subversiveness of slash may enjoy Eminem as a character in a slash fic.
fyredancer: The Blue of Desire (2009)
Loosely based on the manga Desire, the story is about two college kids, Bill and Tom, who try to figure out their feelings and their relationship. Bill has had a crush on Tom, his best friend, for about as long as he's known him, but Tom identifies as heterosexual and has one night stands with girls. The situation gets complicated when Tom starts making confusing suggestions to Bill.
The fic is written about the band Tokio Hotel. Tom and Bill are twins in real life, but in this story they're not related (OR ARE THEY, this I didn't say obv.). I myself read this story without knowing anything except what the main characters look like. It worked great as a romantic story.
Mira: Crysanthemum Tryst (2007)
In this story about the actors of the movie The Lord of the Rings, in the centre is Billy Boyd, but there is a lot of cast present and the author focuses on the relationships between them. The fic is filled with the love, clever dialogue and family-like time among the characters. The story brims with the affection and warmth that the fans feel toward the characters.