That was excellent! Huzzah for fish!
The funny thing to me is, in the old Greek versions, Hercules and Iolaus were explicitly stated to be lovers.
Naughty, bad Bruce Campbell fan! I knew the user name reference and always picture Bruce Campbell when Autolycus posts. I don’t think the ladle thing is beyond him either.
Any gay subtext in Hercules was really underplayed because everyone knows that hot lesbian chicks are okay on mainstream TV but hot gay guys require their own cable TV channel. Straight women can tolerate lesbian subtext by thinking, “they’re just really, really good friends” but only gay guys and the occasional shipper will accept the male homosexual subtext.
By the way, Gabrielle and Xena were just really, really good friends.
So that’s why there’s a separate Fine Living channel now!
They were just really good friends running around in tight leather shorts. Wait a minute… :eek:
“Shipper”?
On another message board, I kept running across this term, and it took forever for me to figure out what it meant. Apparently, it is a term for a fan who is highly invested in seeing one particular relationship work out for the character. You see it a lot in discussions of the Gilmore Girls, for example…which guy was Lorelei going to end up with? I don’t remember the guys’ names, because I don’t watch the show, but you were either a Lorelai/guy A shipper, or a Lorelai/Guy B shipper.
ETA: Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong about this! I’m not up with all lingo these crazy kids use these days. 
Fans with a particular interest in a romantic pairing between two characters in a TV show, movie, comic, etc. Often as not, the pairing is invented by the fans, and not present or even hinted at in the source material.
And often the pair are same sex, like Kirk and Spock, but there may be another specific term for that type of shipping.
Ah…(relation)shipper. Got it. I’m a Spuffy shipper. And a Logan/Veronica shipper. Thanks!
slash
Ah yes, that’s it!
I don’t think “slash” is specifically same sex pairings, though. It’s just a reference to the naming convention for that sort of fan fiction, where the two parties’ names are seperated by a “/” Like Harry/Hermione, or Buffy/Cordelia.
That’s how I’ve always understood it: shippers were all about the “will they or won’t they” discussions, slash writers dealt with the “when will they, how many times, and in what positions” side of things: no same-sex connatations, other than the fact that most of the early slash was Kirk/Spock.
If anyone’s ever read the novel for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, you’ll know that Roddenberry dealt with that stuff within the first few pages.
I beg to differ. On every board I’ve ever hung out on, “slash” meant “same-sex.”
Xander/Willow is just fanfic. Xander/Spike is slash.
Then why do they call it slash?
My understanding is it comes from the days of ST:TOS fanfic, where the dominant pairing seemed to be Kirk/Spock. If you google “slash fic,” I’ll bet that the overwhelming majority of sites and stories are same-sex pairings.
It was the episode called “Been There, Done That”, and sorry, but you’re remembering that wrong. They didn’t grin at each other or even look at each other when he said that. They both looked somewhat guiltily at nothing in particular while an uncomfortable silence passed. It was hilarious, especially because of Joxer’s unrequited crush on Gabrielle.
Xander/Willow is het.
Xander/Spike is, indeed, slash.
Willow/Buffy is [del]canon[/del]femslash, or else just slash. Femslash is more common, IME.
Willow and Xander being buddy-buddy is gen.