Confession
You may not know this about me, but I used to write fanfiction. Specifically, I shoehorned my way into a friend's World's Worst Fanfic-inspired fic called Beast Machines: The Lost Episodes. I don't want to claim it ever got as big as World's Worst, but I still have people stop me on the Internet and tell me how much they loved my Phil Bond stories.
I bring this up, because when I met jeklnskinsgrl last weekend, she admitted to being a fanfic author, and I think I said something like, "Ah, a kindred spirit!" Then some mention was made of slash. I thought I had an idea of what it was, but I looked it up just to be sure.
After that little bit of research, I came to the realization that I may have once skirted dangerously close to writing slash, but I assure you it was purely unintentional. Or, at the very least, I had no idea I might be potentionally drawing the ire (or, perhaps worse, interest) of slash fans.
See, one of the MOST ANNOYING aspects of Beast Machines was one character's angst over the fate of her erstwhile heroic boyfriend. Then they brought him back, but HE was all angsty. And it was stupid. So what we did (well, what I did) was to poke fun at it every chance we could.
I swear what I did was purely in the interests of comedy. Cathartic scenes (cathartic for me, anyway) would frequently smack far too much of the source material I was trying to parody, so it needed a twist to distract the reader from what was actually happening. What better way to do that than use one of our existing story conventions to make the female character male -- at least physically -- for this "romantic" interchange? (I think the whole story is riveting, but the part I'm talking about is in the last scene)
Perhaps there are some who -- upon further examination of the extensive back story -- might possibly assume that making a deeply involved Silverbolt/Tarantulas slash was the goal all along (but WHY?! Who would want to do such a thing?). There was a design at work, but -- since this is parody -- that design was to have an intricate setup ending in nothing more than a tasteless, cheap joke. I'll post the excerpt for the sake of expediency:
Botanica: And just where have you two been?
Silverbolt: By the light of Unicron's full head my lady love and I passionately transformed our longstanding interpersonal aggression into a consummate experience of intimate bliss.
Blackarachnia/Tarantulas: Primus, did we ever!
Rattrap:
What, like THAT?
Silverbolt: My lady's true beauty lies within.
Rattrap: Oh... that's just... THANK you for that wonderful visual!
I don't know about you, but I think that's goddamned hilarious.
You're probably wondering why she would have a male form in the first place. You might be thinking to yourself, "What other reason could there possibly be for that except to experiment in slash?" The answer is multi-fold, like so many of the intricate in-jokes in The Lost Episodes.
The character of Blackarachnia is voiced by the lovely, gravely-voiced Venus Terzo. She has some voice acting roots in anime, specifically as the female voice of Ranma in Ranma 1/2; for the uninitiated, Ranma (male) was put under a curse after falling into a pool where, whenever he's doused in cold water, he'll turn into a lovely young girl. This is doubly appropriate for Blackarachnia, because her original Beast Wars toy was tooled from the Tarantulas mold and didn't look terribly feminine at all (despite the TV show's version was based on a stripper).
So there was cause to 1) give the character a male form, and 2) narrow down the candidates to one. It's a gag, and it's always been used as such (although, if I ever finish the last "episode", we'll discover some consequences to this unusual "condition"). Admittedly, one might (successfully) argue that in this instance I took it too far.
If I read the definition right, slash in and of itself provides a sufficient plot motive for its existence. I'm not particularly interested in that kind of storytelling (unless it's done as one-off gag), so my unintentional intrusion into the well-worn territory was purely a product of circumstance. But then, if I can twist around Hamlet to make it all about the redemption of Laertes and convince an AP test examiner that it's a good idea, I'm sure someone out there could just as well claim that the Lost Episodes contains an intricate (and riveting) slash sub-arc. After all... I did get a 5 of 5 on that English test, so I must have fooled someone.
~Away!!
I bring this up, because when I met jeklnskinsgrl last weekend, she admitted to being a fanfic author, and I think I said something like, "Ah, a kindred spirit!" Then some mention was made of slash. I thought I had an idea of what it was, but I looked it up just to be sure.
After that little bit of research, I came to the realization that I may have once skirted dangerously close to writing slash, but I assure you it was purely unintentional. Or, at the very least, I had no idea I might be potentionally drawing the ire (or, perhaps worse, interest) of slash fans.
See, one of the MOST ANNOYING aspects of Beast Machines was one character's angst over the fate of her erstwhile heroic boyfriend. Then they brought him back, but HE was all angsty. And it was stupid. So what we did (well, what I did) was to poke fun at it every chance we could.
I swear what I did was purely in the interests of comedy. Cathartic scenes (cathartic for me, anyway) would frequently smack far too much of the source material I was trying to parody, so it needed a twist to distract the reader from what was actually happening. What better way to do that than use one of our existing story conventions to make the female character male -- at least physically -- for this "romantic" interchange? (I think the whole story is riveting, but the part I'm talking about is in the last scene)
Perhaps there are some who -- upon further examination of the extensive back story -- might possibly assume that making a deeply involved Silverbolt/Tarantulas slash was the goal all along (but WHY?! Who would want to do such a thing?). There was a design at work, but -- since this is parody -- that design was to have an intricate setup ending in nothing more than a tasteless, cheap joke. I'll post the excerpt for the sake of expediency:
Botanica: And just where have you two been?
Silverbolt: By the light of Unicron's full head my lady love and I passionately transformed our longstanding interpersonal aggression into a consummate experience of intimate bliss.
Blackarachnia/Tarantulas: Primus, did we ever!
Rattrap:
What, like THAT?
Silverbolt: My lady's true beauty lies within.
Rattrap: Oh... that's just... THANK you for that wonderful visual!
I don't know about you, but I think that's goddamned hilarious.
You're probably wondering why she would have a male form in the first place. You might be thinking to yourself, "What other reason could there possibly be for that except to experiment in slash?" The answer is multi-fold, like so many of the intricate in-jokes in The Lost Episodes.
The character of Blackarachnia is voiced by the lovely, gravely-voiced Venus Terzo. She has some voice acting roots in anime, specifically as the female voice of Ranma in Ranma 1/2; for the uninitiated, Ranma (male) was put under a curse after falling into a pool where, whenever he's doused in cold water, he'll turn into a lovely young girl. This is doubly appropriate for Blackarachnia, because her original Beast Wars toy was tooled from the Tarantulas mold and didn't look terribly feminine at all (despite the TV show's version was based on a stripper).
So there was cause to 1) give the character a male form, and 2) narrow down the candidates to one. It's a gag, and it's always been used as such (although, if I ever finish the last "episode", we'll discover some consequences to this unusual "condition"). Admittedly, one might (successfully) argue that in this instance I took it too far.
If I read the definition right, slash in and of itself provides a sufficient plot motive for its existence. I'm not particularly interested in that kind of storytelling (unless it's done as one-off gag), so my unintentional intrusion into the well-worn territory was purely a product of circumstance. But then, if I can twist around Hamlet to make it all about the redemption of Laertes and convince an AP test examiner that it's a good idea, I'm sure someone out there could just as well claim that the Lost Episodes contains an intricate (and riveting) slash sub-arc. After all... I did get a 5 of 5 on that English test, so I must have fooled someone.
~Away!!