One of my friends is a veteran TV writer (even wrote an episode of “Star Trek”), and has been “retired” for some years now. (But she was prolific in her day and no doubt you’ve seen her work on TV many times.) She now writes fanfic for personal creative enjoyment. (I’ll illustrated some of her stories.) She also enjoys the reading the occasional slash story (though I don’t think she writes it). She’s a nice lady; certainly not a “perv” or nutcase. (Well, no more than anyone else!)
Look—I’ll be honest, I don’t “get” slash and I don’t want to read it. I also roll my eyes when slash fans try to convince me that Gene Roddenberry (or George Lucas, whoever) really “secretly” put homoerotic undertones in their storylines. (Slash is just fantasy, an “alternative universe”, OK? There’s nothing wrong with “alternative universe” fanfic!)
But, with all that said, I’ve learned over the years that some perfectly “normal” (depending how you define that) people love slash. That’s just the way it is.
RexDart, I advise you to consider what I’m telling you—you don’t have to get it. You can think it’s “icky” (some of it really is—“incest slash”? Blech!). I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not liking it—it’s simply not your cup of tea, (and it’s not my cup of tea, that’s for damned sure). But, open your mind a little and just accept that there is this weird phenomenon out there that makes some perfectly well-adjusted people like it. That’s just the way it is. Do what I do—don’t expose yourself to it, and don’t listen to the geeks who try to tell you that George Lucas really put homoerotic “undertones” in his films, and you’re be fine!
One of my friends is a veteran TV writer (even wrote an episode of “Star Trek”), and has been “retired” for some years now. (But she was prolific in her day and no doubt you’ve seen her work on TV many times.) She now writes fanfic for personal creative enjoyment. (I’ll illustrated some of her stories.) She also enjoys the reading the occasional slash story (though I don’t think she writes it). She’s a nice lady; certainly not a “perv” or nutcase. (Well, no more than anyone else!)
Look—I’ll be honest, I don’t “get” slash and I don’t want to read it. I also roll my eyes when slash fans try to convince me that Gene Roddenberry (or George Lucas, whoever) really “secretly” put homoerotic undertones in their storylines. (Slash is just fantasy, an “alternative universe”, OK? There’s nothing wrong with “alternative universe” fanfic!)
But, with all that said, I’ve learned over the years that some perfectly “normal” (depending how you define that) people love slash. That’s just the way it is.
RexDart, I advise you to consider what I’m telling you—you don’t have to get it. You can think it’s “icky” (some of it really is—“incest slash”? Blech!). I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not liking it—it’s simply not your cup of tea, (and it’s not my cup of tea, that’s for damned sure). But, open your mind a little and just accept that there is this weird phenomenon out there that makes some perfectly well-adjusted people like it. That’s just the way it is. Do what I do—don’t expose yourself to it, and don’t listen to the geeks who try to tell you that George Lucas really put homoerotic “undertones” in his films, and you’re be fine!
Oh, I do agree with you, yosemitebabe, that people seeing all these hidden messages are usually more than a bit obsessed-like the conspiracy theorists of fan fiction.
On the other hand, sometimes, you can see POTENTIAL for a slash, that the author didn’t intend. It happens.
Oh, and Lucas does NOT mind fan fiction. He did say he prefers it kept “family friendly”, but he doesn’t do anything about SW erotica.
What about when the characters are clearly heterosexual, as with the example someone posted of a Tom Paris slash from Voyager. That guy was a ladie’s man, the playboy of the Delta quadrant, how is there the “potential” for a slash with Chakotay in that? The author not only didn’t intend that, he totally closed it off by the way he wrote the character. Where does that “potential” come from? It’d be like writing Six Feet Under slash with Keith and Brenda, or the aforementioned Will/Grace slash, that just isn’t who the characters are.
And if Lucas has said he wants this stuff family friendly, how come you said you were over on theforce.net trying to convince the site to go against Lucas’ wishes and allow erotic stories? The man created these characters you apparently enjoy so much, but you want to turn around and just ignore his wishes regarding them? Even if you did succeed in keeping it PG-13, it would still be about sexual relations. Han giving Chewie a sensual massage could be written PG-13, but I doubt it’s what Lucas was considering when saying “family friendly.” If he really has been nice enough to allow some fan fiction, why can’t you respect his wishes about the scope of that permission? Don’t you at least owe him that much for giving you this fictional world you so enjoy?
I have one year left at law school. So you never know, I might be in a position to “deal with it” at some point in the future. Probably not the area of law I’m going into, but there’s no telling on what I might end up working.
No, we did NOT want “erotic stories”, we wanted to be allowed to talk about same sex relationships, especially in the cases where certain characters have not been defined, or original characters.
That is annoying, but I think most slash fans aren’t really like that. At least, the ones I’ve met aren’t (I knew lots in college). Here, paraphrased, is my favorite thing any of them ever said on the subject of “secret homoerotic undertones”: “I’d suspect them of intentionally putting in homoerotic subtext, if it weren’t clear that the writers for this show lack the talent and skill necessary for any degree of sophistication or subtlety. So it must all be coincidental, but it’s still fun.”
Of course, there is some really bizarre, weird, twisted fanfiction out there, stuff I’ve never read but that I wish I’d never even heard of, but even that seems harmless enough. Unless you count seriously creeping me out as “harm”, but I’m not that delicate. And I suspect some of the worst stuff is probably really written as a joke, or as some sort of creative exercise in trying to write the most awful slash pairing you can think of. I mean, I can’t imagine that anyone out there is really turned on by the thought of (spoilered because it truly is the most awful slash pairing I’ve ever heard – you have been warned):
hot yet still cold-blooded (and possibly incestuous) eel sex between Flotsam and Jetsam in The Little Mermaid.
Someday I may forgive the friend who told me about that one.
I think I encountered more slash fans like that (not all were like that, but some) because they were authors who were trying to convince me to illustrate their slash stories. I guess there was a different dynamic going on with them.
I know of many deluded uberfans. I knew of a fan contingent that thought (I mean, seriously, dead seriously from the bottom of their hearts believed) that the Empire in the Star Wars saga was going to win out in “Return of the Jedi”. (This obviously was before the “Jedi” movie came out.) They were big “Empire” fans (meaning, the bad guys–the Empire),
I mean, they were flat-out convinced that George Lucas and company would have Darth Vader and his baddie cronies squash Luke and Han, etc. I had a hard time believing they were sincere in this delusion, but apparently they were. Go figure.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. “Provincial” is the perfect word. Can’t you just see him on a cable access show in Armpit, Idaho, wearing a shiny Sears-n-Roebuck suit and waving printouts of slash stories in the air, ranting until white flecks of spit gathers in the corners of his mouth?
(On preview, I have decided to delete the PG-rated RexDart/“handsome manager at the cable station” fic I wrote to highlight the lunacy of this whole thread. I don’t have the energy today to deal with the inevitable hissyfit that would have followed. Suffice it to say, dear reader, it was good stuff and contained many dewy, longing gazes broken by Rex Dart’s outraged inner monologue.)
On the other hand, there are some cases where I think the homosexual subtext does exist in the original series to some degree, and the slash writers are merely taking an undercurrent that’s there and making it explicit. Buffy/Faith, for example, or Xena/Gabrielle.
I know, I know, there wasn’t any homosexual subtext between them and I made it up inside my head. IMHO, it is, however, Pairing Most Likely To Be Canon.
Don’t forget Due South. Fraser and Ray in Mountie on the Bounty. Remember when they were swimming underwater and Fraser noticed Ray was in trouble of drowning, so he gave Ray some extra oxygen? Lovely scene. Ray quizzed Fraser about that afterward. “What was that all about?!”
I have been reading lots of fanfiction lately, almost all at fanfiction.net. Mostly I read anime but also some Harry Potter and Discworld. I personally do not usually read slash, except Cowboy Bebop slash. Why I make an exception for that I’m not really sure.
Then again, there are also heterosexual pairings that I just don’t like and don’t read… sometimes I even like both characters but I just don’t like to think of them together, even if it makes sense in the show or book. (Usually it’s because I’m some awful shameless fanatic of another pairing for one or both of them, of course)
I will confess I have left reviews that started out “I don’t usually read slash (but I liked this)…” which may be a bit tacky and I hope hasn’t offended anyone. Then again I have also left “I don’t usually read crossovers” and “I don’t usually read Spike x Faye” (er, this is Spike from Cowboy Bebop, not Buffy).
To me there is no excuse whatsoever for flaming a story because it contains slash and that offends you. Though I don’t write slash I do write fanfiction (though I won’t claim to be good at it) and I label it as well as I can. If people don’t like the pairing or idea I expect them to have the decency not to read it. So far they have.
As far as the complaints about the very idea of fanfiction, I think they are baseless. It is just a fantasy and people have every right to interpret that fantasy however they like.
As for arguments about whether something is really implied in the show or book, I don’t get into them. If someone wants to believe the creators intended their favorite couple, that’s fine with me even if I disagree. (Then again I think some of the funnest couples are those that are obviously not intended anyway).
By the end of the series Xena/Gabrielle was explicit. Well, there wasn’t explicit sex, but their romantic relationship clearly became canon. Even Lucy Lawless has said that, after the last episode, she felt bad for saying in interviews for years that the relationship was open to interpretation because she thought the finale made it clear that Xena and Gabrielle were essentially a married couple and there was no two ways about it.
