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Perhaps I should stop wandering over to metablog and reading the thought provoking essays found there. It would certainly make me less inclined to try and rant while my brain is still mostly asleep and distracted by the thought of having to memorize way more Japanese vocab than I can possibly handle right at the moment. But, no, I am Todesengel; therefore I must rant. So. The rant. I was casually reading this essay by a profic writer and it made me wonder. Do profic writers just not understand fandom, in particular the slash fandom? Because as I read it seemed to me that she was walking on some parallel path that ran close enough to slash to make out blurry generalities of the genre -- generalities that she thought were specifics -- which made her think she had enough information to discuss the genre with familiarity. (Well, probably not the right word, the connotations are slightly off. But for right now it serves my purposes.) And her essay, while valid in certain respects, is so not about what I think of as slash that I just have to shake my head and be fascinated by her Bizzaro-world type of slash. Okay. Look. I get that slash isn't for everybody. I get that some people think that taking Sam and Frodo, or Harry and Draco, or Keith and Lance, or Kirk and Spock, or Whomever with Whomever, and queering their relationship is sacrilege and I'll burn in hell and how can I do that and am I totally insane because there's no way that Aaragorn would want to do that with Frodo and dear god man what are you on blah, blah, blah (though that last one might actually be applicable to some of the shit I write just because of content/quality). I get that there are people who can't see that, yes, there's friendship here (or hatred or whatever) but there's this spark underneath it -- that it's the same spark that's led Warner Brothers (or whoever was in charge of the scripts) to create this UST 'ship between Ron and Hermione in the HP movies. (I don't get this 'ship. I really have no idea from what part of the book they pulled it from. Honest.) Basically, I get that the essence of slash -- the homosexual parings -- isn't everybody's cup of tea. And I'm fine with that, because there are genres (and sub-genres though I suppose these are actually genres once they're taken out of the over-arching umbrella of pairing-genre) that aren't my kink. I don't read F/F, and most Het. stuff leaves me cold because, really, slash is what pushes my buttons. (The "why" of that is a rant for a day.) But, the thing is? Slash? It's not all about the sex. It's not just erotica -- which is the impression satorias seems to be under. If slash was all about the pr0n, all about the sex life, then what does that say about Het.? Does this mean that the only stories that aren't all about sex are those Gen. stories where even the most Dr. Lora-esque reader can read them and go "Yup, there's nothing sexual here"? If that's the case, then where's the interest? I mean, I enjoy a good Gen. story as much as anybody who enjoys a good Gen. story, but I couldn't stomach just Gen. fic. Because Gen. fic is like, hmm, bread (from flimsy, worthless Wonderbread to warm, homemade Challah) -- a great basis if you want to just get a hold on characters, or just crystallize an idea/style, or to explore the non-sexual emotions, but kind of boring without the heat and spice that sexual-want of any variety can bring. (Although, now that I'm discussing Gen. fic, I find myself wondering what, exactly, Gen. fic is. Have I ever written any? Am I merely confusing true Gen. fic with a lack of explicit pairing -- with a lack of explicit sex? Or can a story that features a character that is bisexual and has explicit sex with both genders be considered a Gen. fic? What about an asexual character who's lusted after by both genders? And how do fics centered on ST:NG's Data who -- though male is form -- should really be considered gender-neutral? As a further aside, the little trip I took to the Fanfiction Glossary in hopes of clearing up my confusion, was less then helpful. I have, however, learned two things. First, I'm a habitual canon raper. Two, I've been incorrectly using OTP. OTP, as I've just learned, means "one true pairing" and not, as I've been using it, "Oh the pain!" But since, in my lexicon of fannish terms, "Oh the pain!" occurs far more often than "one true pairing", I'm just going to stubbornly continue to use OTP that way.) Slash isn't about men getting it on with other men. Well, okay, yes, it is, but only in that same broad, general way that Het. is about men getting it on with women. Slash is...well, it's not the substitution of "man" for "women" in Het. fics, because the relationships -- and the dynamics and even the very way the characters are written -- are entirely different when it's a guy and a girl and a guy and a guy. Even without romance, that difference is obvious. What slash is, is another forum, another medium, for expressing the complex splort* that is the Human Condition. And, yes, there's sex. And, yes, in the slash world, there's a plentitude of bad sex, and painful sex, and sex that makes you scratch your head and go "Wha?" and wonder if the writer has any concept of the male anatomy at all. And there are bad fics, and worse fics, and fics that should have never seen the light of day (and I've perpetrated some of those types of fic). But that can be said about all fanfiction -- and about certain types of media as well. (Did nobody else want to smack Harry and tell him to just suck it up and deal already about halfway through book 5?) And maybe I'm spoiled because there are no 14-year-old girls with their pseudo-angst writing Voltron slash, so maybe I hold slash in a higher regard than most because it was like an Uber-oasis* from the horrors of Voltron Het. (I'm trying to remember a Voltron Het. fic that made me go "wow" quite as much as the first time I read kaie's "Black as Love, Sweet as Death" and I'll be damned if any can come to mind.)
Slash is fanfiction. So, fundamentally, slash is about the what-if. It's about the "hey maybe", the "gee, that's an interesting thought", the "the book/movie/show is over but I don't want it to be done, I don't want the lives of these characters to end here". And, yes, it is about sexualizing the relationship, but isn't that what the Mulder/Scully 'ship is all about? (Or should that be was? Did it ever get clearly stated what, exactly, was the status of their relationship?) For that matter, isn't it that what it's about in the Ron/Hermione 'ship (or the Harry/Hermione, or Keith/Allura, or any X/Y-friendship-type relationship)? And, okay, so perhaps in slash it's more common to take two characters who have no contact and strip them of their clothes and watch them fuck like minks than it is in Het. or Gen. fic, but there's a rational for that. Because sometimes that particular pair is hot; and sometimes it's because it's interesting emotionally; and sometimes because it's just so damn creepy and disturbing that you can't look away, so you plunge headfirst into the deep end. (And I shall now direct you all to But we slashers aren't (generally) dumb. I know that the fact that I can totally see Keith and Lance fucking doesn't mean that person X can. I know for a fact that I'm the only person to ever write a serious, not-at-all-funny Keith/Zarkon fic. But I know that my vision of Keith and Lance is just my view, and to imply that I can't tell the difference between this 'what-if' that I've created and the real article is just demeaning. If I couldn't recognize the real thing (the Platonic Form of hot man-love, if you will), I'd never be able to write it, never be able to make it convincing enough for my wonderfully picky readers. I'd never be able to write anything decent if I couldn't differentiate (and articulate that difference) between non-sexual friendship and true sexual desire. I'd never be able to create (for the purposes of a fic, at any rate) something that embodied enough splort to satisfy me if I couldn't give the character at least a few of the facets of the human emotional landscape. And, yes, sex changes things. Sex always changes things. But that's what's good about sex. That's why sex is introduced so often in the media (Spike/Buffy, anyone? Or how about the almost-sex of Willow/Xander?). Sex gives the relationship a new tool, a new outlet. It can create barbs that can bind the two characters closer, or destroy them completely. It may not deepen the relationship (the shift may be lateral or diagonal or cause the creation of a whole new dimensional axis) but it in no way trivializes the relationship. Unless it's a pure, wanking, pr0n fic, with no plot and just lots and lots of good old fashioned sex. [I'm going to get really whiny right now, so you may just want to skip this part, since it's not really important to the general rant. Something that really, really bugged me about the post and the discussion thread -- though I can't quite point my finger to where this particular part is, so it may just be me bitching about an imagined bur -- was the assumption that if slash wasn't just about the sex, or even within that primarily-focused-on-the-sex scope, was that slash readers like to read men sharing their angsty love. Um. No. Not really. Okay, yes, I'm about chest deep in the pool of Angst and currently sucking on the bitter fruit of melodrama and, god, 'Broken Wings' was just filled with excruciatingly long paragraphs of 'pity me!' prose. But y'know what? I don't like reading mopy "wah my life sucks 'cause X doesn't love me/I can't tell him about my love" or "wah, hold me, I'm all abused and tortured and brooding" bullshit. And, so far as I know, I that's a pretty common opinion. I don't know a single fan (though, admittedly, the fans I do know are a pretty twisted lot) who'd prefer this type of immature Lackey-angst to the real, painful, soul wounding angst that's so much a part of splort, that makes the human condition so worthwhile. So. Yes. Slash readers (at least the ones I know) do like to read about "two men expressing their angsty love for each other" (ha! found the quote) but it's the "Sophie's Choice" type of angst, hardcore, dark, deep, evil angst.] Look. Slash is ultimately about the Man-Love, not the Man-Fucking. daegaer writes the painfully beautiful GO fics that are, largely about the Aziraphale/Crowly love and are so obviously slash (and can get pretty hot) and Aziraphale and Crowly barely kiss. Sexual contact is pretty much nil. But. It's slash. It's blindingly obvious that Aziraphale and Crowly are in love, and that it's more than non-sexual smarmy love -- though for the life of me I can't define how she does it. It's. Look. In life, there are many types of love. I may love my friends to the point where I'll do anything for them, love them down to the bedrock of my soul. And maybe I won't love my partner quite that deeply, but that's because I'll love him differently, know him differently. If non-sexual love is like the color Blue -- a blue so absolutely blue that it can't be anything else but blue -- then sexual love is like the blue of the night sky about halfway up from the horizon. It's still blue, but it's a quintessentially different blue. And it's darker and more mysterious and it can trigger something entirely different inside -- some hurt, some beauty that can't be touched by the simple blue - and it's just. Unique.
And that's really what slash is about.
=================== *Yes, it's a stupid sounding word, and I should have thought of a better (or prettier) one to describe the complexity of humanity. But there aren't any words in the English language to describe with any degree of adequacy the beauty, the pain, the turmoil, the serenity, the evil and good and basic, tangled, twisted mess of humanity; that thing -- that splortness -- that's lead philosophers to come up with crazier and crazier methods of trying to define and pin down (or at least outline, or maybe even snap a blurry, underexposed picture) what it is to be alive, to exist as a human. *An uber-oasis is an oasis that seems like a mirage and very much like all the other oases-mirages that you've seen already in your long, dusty trek, but you're so thirsty and tired that you trudge over to the oasis and fall to your knees and stick your head into the water -- expecting at any moment to get another mouthful of sand, just like you've gotten every other time you've done this -- and you're so surprised by the sweet taste of cool, cold life (so much more refreshing because you'd been expecting hot, gritty sand) that you stop breathing. You can't believe that this is real, so you have to pinch yourself, step away from the oasis, come back, convince yourself that this is real. And in that moment of acceptance, of the true, hard belief in the actuality of this place -- that's the moment that I'm talking about. That's what an Uber-oasis is. And, damn, it's pretty impressive that I can get so far sidetracked in a tangent. |