How Do YOU Define Slash?

[gehayi]

Got into a discussion at fanficrants about slash, and now I'm a bit perplexed.

Now, I've been in various fandoms for the past thirty years. The original Star Trek. Star Wars. Doctor Who. Highlander: The Series. Poltergeist: The Legacy. Buffy. Angel. Harry Potter. Rent. (ETA: I forgot to mention Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series and Jacqueline

Comments

[spikeyboots]

I think that the people who defend a strictly "non-canonical homosexual relationship" standpoint must feel that slash is made slash by subverting what is being shown onscreen/onpage/onstage(!). Thus, if a couple are being shown already as being homosexual, then the fic writer essentially isn't 'creating' slash.

Maybe (just pondering) it is in the sense of being able to "slash" a pairing. To be able to slash, in an active sense, requires the pair to be changed, however subtley by the action of the writer?

I suppose it comes down the old argument as to whether we believe slash and homosexual relationships are exactly one and the same.

It's a really difficult thing to pin down completely. However, I think fandom is at a point now where slash (or femmeslash) has come to mean any homosexual relationship written by a fanficcer - regardless of whether it is canonical or not.

(I hope the above made sense!)

[gehayi]

It made perfect sense.

I think that the people who defend a strictly "non-canonical homosexual relationship" standpoint must feel that slash is made slash by subverting what is being shown onscreen/onpage/onstage(!). Thus, if a couple are being shown already as being homosexual, then the fic writer essentially isn't 'creating' slash.

Maybe (just pondering) it is in the sense of being able to "slash" a pairing. To be able to slash, in an active sense, requires the pair to be changed, however subtley by the action of the writer?

I think that's how it was used initially. Now, over several decades, I think that the meaning has shifted somewhat.

We may be watching the evolution of a word.

[minkhollow]

Far as I'm concerned, slash is a homosexual relationship, be it canon or not.
I did see someone once trying to say slash was any non-canon relationship (I believe they labeled a het fic 'slash'), but that was once, a while ago. And I just sort of stared at it.

[gehayi]

I did see someone once trying to say slash was any non-canon relationship (I believe they labeled a het fic 'slash'), but that was once, a while ago. And I just sort of stared at it.

Yeah, that was my reaction to the guy on GAFF who labeled Buffy/Giles "slash."

Far as I'm concerned, slash is a homosexual relationship, be it canon or not.

That's how I feel. And that's how I've always defined it.

BTW, love your Angel icon.

[minkhollow]

::grins:: Thanks!
I feel I should also note that Angel can complicate things somewhat just by being there. Pretty much everything I've seen in the fandom takes Angel/Collins as slash, but... there are pronoun issues, thanks to that fuzzy gender line thing, and no set rule on how to handle it (which I think is for the best). In fic, I handle that depending on whose point of view I'm writing from; RPing is a whole different ball game.

[gehayi]

That's right. Collins calls Angel "he," Mimi calls Angel "she," and Mark tries to avoid pronouns altogether.

[gehayi]

Well, I was in the Buffy fandom for years, and I never heard that. Which doesn't mean, of course, that some people in the Buffy fandom didn't consider "slash" to mean "non-canonical relationships." It does mean that the people whom I knew in the Buffy fandom didn't use that definition.

It's like what makes genfic exactly -- technically, almost everything I write is genfic, since I focus on storylines, as opposed to relationships, but many people insist the moment you feature a relationship, it becomes het or slash.

I know what you mean. And then there are some people who insist that once you have ANY relationship between characters--not a romantic or sexual relationship, but parent and child, sibling and sibling, teacher and student, friends, enemies, and so on--the story should be labeled het if the two are the opposite sex, and slash if the two are the same sex. That just makes my brain hurt.

No one can agree.

Word.

[mysid]

I agree with you; slash is any same-sex pairing.

If the person who ranted over at fanficrants wants to get really traditional in her definition, she should keep in mind that the term originally stemmed from identifying the romantic pairing in the story "Han/Leia" or "Kirk/Spock" and so was used for all couples regardless of gender. It only became associated with same-sex pairing because those were the ones we had "warn" people about in the summaries.

[malefics]

My understanding when I first joined the fandoms was that slash was non-canonical relationships between two members of the same sex. But I think that definition is a little dated now. It started out when there weren't any actually gay characters to worry about