Prejudice and Slash

[rochvelleth]

It's interesting what people are prejudiced about, isn't it? I was just thinking about sexism because of a certain post I was replying to, and about having been bullied for being northern. And this morning I caught a bit of that morning debate show (the one Richard Dawkins sometimes turns up on), and they were talking about religion discriminating

Comments

[rochvelleth]

Now, I can understand people who don't want to read fanfic that is focused exclusively on romance. And I can understand people who like romance, but don't enjoy reading pornography, so they prefer only non-explicit stories. And I can understand people who only want to read *canonical* romances and not non-canonical pairings. So if people want to forbid/not read any of those particular things, that's understandable.

Yes, thank you, you're putting that much better than I could. I think it's the non-canonical aspect that I'm not sure about, in the sense that I don't know whether it's offensive to object to slash purely on the grounds that it's non-canonical. If that makes sense. I'm not sure whether that's like restricting the characters' potential sexuality (which perhaps hasn't been fully explored in the canon, or at least this could be posited), or whether it's something that's easy to understand and not based at all on sexuality anyway. I'm not sure whether this makes sense either, actually, sorry.

Well, there are many gay and lesbian fans who write slash in reaction to the historical invisibility of gays and lesbians in most tv and movies. (Or the tendency to not let the gay characters *have* romances, or to portray gay relationships with much less detail and intimacy than similar heterosexual relationships.) So in that sense, for them, it's "more than that," it's about visibility and making a space for themselves in the fictional worlds that they enjoy thinking about.

Oh, I didn't even think of that. Yes, of course it must be completely different from that point of view. When I write slash I don't have any such agenda - I simply think of it as a genre, or a way of thinking about people, or an interpretation of something that seems like innuendo in the programme.