1. The whole "what is slash" debate seems a little futile, because it's always going to come down to semantics, and since English is the wonderful mutative beastie it is, no matter how many people decide it should mean this or that, there will be large groups of people using it in other ways. (The young 'uns even claim that it is used to describe het sometimes!) As it is, "slash" is a convenient fannish shorthand for saying "these fictional people are/do something gay". And slashy (which I myself use more often than slash) to describe the gray area which is subtext, and can range from blatant to totally reader-constructed. Not to say that the debate shouldn't take place, and I'm sure you know all this anyway, but just that - even if you decide, say, that slash only applies to people who are *made* gay, people will still describe literature involving homosexuality as slash because it's easier for everyone to understand.
2. As for original writing, I don't tend to write slash, and when I do I don't really think of it as 'slash' in the fannish sense, often because I'm not primarily concerned with the relationship. However, it's interesting, because in the Before Teh Fandom days, I was largely unware of slash as phenomenon, and nowadays when I write I am much more aware. I think odd things like, "If this ever manages to gets published and gets fans, which characters will they slash? :o" and then "should I put in teh subtext? :o" and then I start wondering if there *is* subtext and then I get confused.
2a. Random Tangent. Is there anybody who reads already-slashed (canonically gay) text and looks for het subtext? And then writes het fic? Wouldn't that be seen as very offensive?
3. Clearly it is something else, or else there wouldn't be an ongoing discussion of just how much slash should or shouldn’t mirror real life gay men. I think that some people get grumpy about the divide here, but also I think that it's just a standard feature of fiction. It's not as though every het relationship actually mirrors the way all het relationships are. And even when schmoopy romance or overdramatized!romance is written well, there are still all these literary tropes that make the relationship unrealistic, and sometimes it's intentional because people want to feel overdramatized and not-like-RL. That bleeds over into slash quite predictably. But slash suffers a bit because it's still quite new (to this culture, if not historically), that is, that people still think about this fiction/RL (intentional) divide, because people care about the way 'gayness' is presented to the world at large. It's a bit like (apologies for stale simile) people are concerned with the way minorities are presented on film/TV. Or...perhaps a better analogy, if there was some book about someone going to visit the ancient Aztecs, and all the Aztec historians were going, ">:O that is totally not how the Aztecs behaved!" while everyone else was going, "woo, exoticism!" (I think 'making sense' is a foreign idea to me at this point. *facepalm*)
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Date: 2004-11-19 04:56 am (UTC)1. The whole "what is slash" debate seems a little futile, because it's always going to come down to semantics, and since English is the wonderful mutative beastie it is, no matter how many people decide it should mean this or that, there will be large groups of people using it in other ways. (The young 'uns even claim that it is used to describe het sometimes!) As it is, "slash" is a convenient fannish shorthand for saying "these fictional people are/do something gay". And slashy (which I myself use more often than slash) to describe the gray area which is subtext, and can range from blatant to totally reader-constructed. Not to say that the debate shouldn't take place, and I'm sure you know all this anyway, but just that - even if you decide, say, that slash only applies to people who are *made* gay, people will still describe literature involving homosexuality as slash because it's easier for everyone to understand.
2. As for original writing, I don't tend to write slash, and when I do I don't really think of it as 'slash' in the fannish sense, often because I'm not primarily concerned with the relationship. However, it's interesting, because in the Before Teh Fandom days, I was largely unware of slash as phenomenon, and nowadays when I write I am much more aware. I think odd things like, "If this ever manages to gets published and gets fans, which characters will they slash? :o" and then "should I put in teh subtext? :o" and then I start wondering if there *is* subtext and then I get confused.
2a. Random Tangent. Is there anybody who reads already-slashed (canonically gay) text and looks for het subtext? And then writes het fic? Wouldn't that be seen as very offensive?
3. Clearly it is something else, or else there wouldn't be an ongoing discussion of just how much slash should or shouldn’t mirror real life gay men. I think that some people get grumpy about the divide here, but also I think that it's just a standard feature of fiction. It's not as though every het relationship actually mirrors the way all het relationships are. And even when schmoopy romance or overdramatized!romance is written well, there are still all these literary tropes that make the relationship unrealistic, and sometimes it's intentional because people want to feel overdramatized and not-like-RL. That bleeds over into slash quite predictably. But slash suffers a bit because it's still quite new (to this culture, if not historically), that is, that people still think about this fiction/RL (intentional) divide, because people care about the way 'gayness' is presented to the world at large. It's a bit like (apologies for stale simile) people are concerned with the way minorities are presented on film/TV. Or...perhaps a better analogy, if there was some book about someone going to visit the ancient Aztecs, and all the Aztec historians were going, ">:O that is totally not how the Aztecs behaved!" while everyone else was going, "woo, exoticism!" (I think 'making sense' is a foreign idea to me at this point. *facepalm*)