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cathexys and I'd love to hear what all the slash readers/writers on my flist think about it. Basically, it was a question about the idea of "original slash," meaning slash about original characters and whether that could actually be called slash. My first answer was obviously not--slash implies fanfic, of course. Not only that, but it implies some difference from the text. Thus: Chandler/Joey=slash because they are both straight in canon (sadly, these two were the first male couple I could come up with where I felt comfortable really saying their sexuality was established in canon-I tossed out a lot of others I was going to put there). Will/Bran=slash because as 12-year-olds their sexuality has not been defined and we're filling in a blank. Blaise/Theodore=slash because they are names in the text and we’re filling in the rest. However, Brian/Justin=/=because they are gay in canon. At least that's how I do it.
Because it struck me that I can easily imagine reading a fic about two original characters that read to me as slash despite not having a source text. Similarly, I suspect one might be able to read a Brian/Justin fic and consider it slash too--saying, "This author took a gay romance and turned it into slash!" I think anybody familiar with slash would understand what was meant by that criticism, whether or not they could articulate it: does it mean Brian and Justin have become wimpified? Too emotional? Feminized? Does Brian suddenly not want to sleep around? Does Justin suddenly need children? Is one of them pregnant? Things like that.
But what would it really mean? Would it just be bad characterization? Because one could characterize them badly in many ways. I think part of it--not all, but part--would literally come from an author supplying a slash factor that isn't there in canon. That is, almost writing *as if* Brian and Justin exist in a primarily straight canon and have been made gay only here, in the story. Sure everyone else is/has been made gay too, but then that's not unusual in slash. What I mean to say, I guess, is that rather than taking the direct route and writing gay Brian and Justin as seen on the US QAF, a writer (and I'm speaking hypothetically here, not criticizing any writer of B/J because I haven't read any QAF fic) could go through the motions of slash: create a phantom Brian and Justin to which she relates as she would straight men, make *them* gay and write the slash from there. I don't think this is something the writer would be aware of doing--I can't imagine a slash writer sitting down to think about what the characters would be like straight. Why bother? I rather think that the act of slashing could become so natural you wouldn't have to think about it. You would just miss it if it weren't there. I described it tocathexys as it being a bit like you and your naked partner dressing up just so that you could take each other's clothes off.
You could do this with original characters too. I know some writers on my flist have described their original fic as "slashy" (which is different from slash, but since they're the ones making it slashy, perhaps there's a little slashing going on there as well). I know I often wind up thinking about slash when I write, despite the fact that most of the characters I write for are about ten or eleven (hey, so were Will and Bran and all of Harry’s class at Hogwarts!). I don’t slash them, but it makes me think of their relationship from non-sexual slashy angles-yes, they do exist, imo. So I think it seems almost natural for slash writers to have gotten to the point where they/we can slash without the need of a straight source text. We all carry a phantom source text, in a way, that adds tension or a foundation to a story without anyone knowing where that tension came from. Perhaps, I thought, years from now there might be a real recognizable tradition in early 21st century lit (particularly amongst female writers?) that actually came from slash. Students would have to study the history of it to see where it originally came from, though they might interpret it a different way themselves.
For instance, look at Frodo and Sam. A while ago I read The Great War and Modern Memory and the author had a whole section on homoeroticism in WWI literature--a section some, apparently, found offensive. But his point was really interesting, especially for anyone interested in slash. Essentially what he described was a huge hurt/no-comfort narrative running throughout war literature: beautiful and beloved young man dies in the arms of the narrator. I believe the author pointed out that while there was tons of homoeroticism (it was completely common for commanders to find favorites in the prettiest youths under their command), homosexuality was quite rare. It wasn’t homosexuality as we understand it today it was...something else. That may sound like a sort of prissy denial, I don’t think it is. After all, don't we see something similar in slash after all? The homoerotic/homosexual meaning something else besides the recreation of what we call homosexuality in real life? 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.
LOTR doesn't go too over the top with that imagery, but we all know there's a bit of it there, which is why people nowadays ask whether Frodo and Sam are gay, or Sam is, since he's the one usually waxing rhapsodic.;-) While I don't think they are, there are a lot of ways of disagreeing with that proposition that annoy me. One of those is, "I hug my friends all the time! Like when we see each other at the mall, even! You can hug your friend without being gaaaaayyy!" And that bugs me because yes, hugging your friend doesn't make you gay, but Frodo and Sam are not hugging like you and your friends. A modern reader who raises an eyebrow at Sam's affection does not have to be being stupid or childish or puerile, because come on, Sam's affection is written in a way that modern writing reserves for romance. He is physically attracted to Frodo literally, just not (necessarily) sexually. Nowadays, though, men are not physically attracted to each other, period, so you can't blame someone for reading certain passages that way. You can blame them even less when you get a load of this WW1 literary tradition, which is pretty damned slashy! It reads differently to us today, perhaps, than it did to contemporary readers of the time because modern readers don't make the same associations with it. They don't just "get it" the way perhaps others in the past might have.
So I wonder if slash writers might affect literature the same way. Think about it: you'd have a writer who is perhaps used to taking canonically straight or unresolved characters and having them interact sexually with people of their own gender--interact in many different ways, too: angrily, sweetly, lovingly, humorously, tediously. Now you've got that writer doing original fic. Still interested in male characters (as perhaps many slash writers/readers are-I know I am), s/he might easily dip into his/her slash experience to write them. Nowadays that would probably play as slashy to anyone reading, whether or not they knew the word slash, because we understand and are familiar with the culture of which slash is a part. But perhaps in the future that same text would be looked at differently; people might see other things in that tension besides the sexuality of it, particularly if (*crosses fingers*) by then homosexuality has become seen as just a normal part of human life.
Would slash-influenced original work come across as simply prudish homoeroticism? Just as the more subtle and complex things Tolkien was saying with Frodo and Sam sometimes get reduced to just, "Just shag already!" Or would the complexities become *more* clear because after all, it isn't just sex it's often got other gender and intimacy issues among other things. I mean, there's a lot of slash that's PWP, but this hypothetical original writing would presumably not be porn, and when there's no actual sex in the story slash writers tend to get really intense about the friendships involved. Plus, it seems like it would be hard to look at several slashy texts with completely different tones (funny, angry, light, heavy, violent), and think they were all only about sex.
Err, so I wonder how any of the slash writers on my flist feel about slash and original writing. Do you all feel it influences it? How do you incorporate it into your original fic, be your original characters straight of gay?
cathexys and I'd love to hear what all the slash readers/writers on my flist think about it. Basically, it was a question about the idea of "original slash," meaning slash about original characters and whether that could actually be called slash. My first answer was obviously not--slash implies fanfic, of course. Not only that, but it implies some difference from the text. Thus: Chandler/Joey=slash because they are both straight in canon (sadly, these two were the first male couple I could come up with where I felt comfortable really saying their sexuality was established in canon-I tossed out a lot of others I was going to put there). Will/Bran=slash because as 12-year-olds their sexuality has not been defined and we're filling in a blank. Blaise/Theodore=slash because they are names in the text and we’re filling in the rest. However, Brian/Justin=/=because they are gay in canon. At least that's how I do it. Because it struck me that I can easily imagine reading a fic about two original characters that read to me as slash despite not having a source text. Similarly, I suspect one might be able to read a Brian/Justin fic and consider it slash too--saying, "This author took a gay romance and turned it into slash!" I think anybody familiar with slash would understand what was meant by that criticism, whether or not they could articulate it: does it mean Brian and Justin have become wimpified? Too emotional? Feminized? Does Brian suddenly not want to sleep around? Does Justin suddenly need children? Is one of them pregnant? Things like that.
But what would it really mean? Would it just be bad characterization? Because one could characterize them badly in many ways. I think part of it--not all, but part--would literally come from an author supplying a slash factor that isn't there in canon. That is, almost writing *as if* Brian and Justin exist in a primarily straight canon and have been made gay only here, in the story. Sure everyone else is/has been made gay too, but then that's not unusual in slash. What I mean to say, I guess, is that rather than taking the direct route and writing gay Brian and Justin as seen on the US QAF, a writer (and I'm speaking hypothetically here, not criticizing any writer of B/J because I haven't read any QAF fic) could go through the motions of slash: create a phantom Brian and Justin to which she relates as she would straight men, make *them* gay and write the slash from there. I don't think this is something the writer would be aware of doing--I can't imagine a slash writer sitting down to think about what the characters would be like straight. Why bother? I rather think that the act of slashing could become so natural you wouldn't have to think about it. You would just miss it if it weren't there. I described it to
cathexys as it being a bit like you and your naked partner dressing up just so that you could take each other's clothes off. You could do this with original characters too. I know some writers on my flist have described their original fic as "slashy" (which is different from slash, but since they're the ones making it slashy, perhaps there's a little slashing going on there as well). I know I often wind up thinking about slash when I write, despite the fact that most of the characters I write for are about ten or eleven (hey, so were Will and Bran and all of Harry’s class at Hogwarts!). I don’t slash them, but it makes me think of their relationship from non-sexual slashy angles-yes, they do exist, imo. So I think it seems almost natural for slash writers to have gotten to the point where they/we can slash without the need of a straight source text. We all carry a phantom source text, in a way, that adds tension or a foundation to a story without anyone knowing where that tension came from. Perhaps, I thought, years from now there might be a real recognizable tradition in early 21st century lit (particularly amongst female writers?) that actually came from slash. Students would have to study the history of it to see where it originally came from, though they might interpret it a different way themselves.
For instance, look at Frodo and Sam. A while ago I read The Great War and Modern Memory and the author had a whole section on homoeroticism in WWI literature--a section some, apparently, found offensive. But his point was really interesting, especially for anyone interested in slash. Essentially what he described was a huge hurt/no-comfort narrative running throughout war literature: beautiful and beloved young man dies in the arms of the narrator. I believe the author pointed out that while there was tons of homoeroticism (it was completely common for commanders to find favorites in the prettiest youths under their command), homosexuality was quite rare. It wasn’t homosexuality as we understand it today it was...something else. That may sound like a sort of prissy denial, I don’t think it is. After all, don't we see something similar in slash after all? The homoerotic/homosexual meaning something else besides the recreation of what we call homosexuality in real life? 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.
LOTR doesn't go too over the top with that imagery, but we all know there's a bit of it there, which is why people nowadays ask whether Frodo and Sam are gay, or Sam is, since he's the one usually waxing rhapsodic.;-) While I don't think they are, there are a lot of ways of disagreeing with that proposition that annoy me. One of those is, "I hug my friends all the time! Like when we see each other at the mall, even! You can hug your friend without being gaaaaayyy!" And that bugs me because yes, hugging your friend doesn't make you gay, but Frodo and Sam are not hugging like you and your friends. A modern reader who raises an eyebrow at Sam's affection does not have to be being stupid or childish or puerile, because come on, Sam's affection is written in a way that modern writing reserves for romance. He is physically attracted to Frodo literally, just not (necessarily) sexually. Nowadays, though, men are not physically attracted to each other, period, so you can't blame someone for reading certain passages that way. You can blame them even less when you get a load of this WW1 literary tradition, which is pretty damned slashy! It reads differently to us today, perhaps, than it did to contemporary readers of the time because modern readers don't make the same associations with it. They don't just "get it" the way perhaps others in the past might have.
So I wonder if slash writers might affect literature the same way. Think about it: you'd have a writer who is perhaps used to taking canonically straight or unresolved characters and having them interact sexually with people of their own gender--interact in many different ways, too: angrily, sweetly, lovingly, humorously, tediously. Now you've got that writer doing original fic. Still interested in male characters (as perhaps many slash writers/readers are-I know I am), s/he might easily dip into his/her slash experience to write them. Nowadays that would probably play as slashy to anyone reading, whether or not they knew the word slash, because we understand and are familiar with the culture of which slash is a part. But perhaps in the future that same text would be looked at differently; people might see other things in that tension besides the sexuality of it, particularly if (*crosses fingers*) by then homosexuality has become seen as just a normal part of human life.
Would slash-influenced original work come across as simply prudish homoeroticism? Just as the more subtle and complex things Tolkien was saying with Frodo and Sam sometimes get reduced to just, "Just shag already!" Or would the complexities become *more* clear because after all, it isn't just sex it's often got other gender and intimacy issues among other things. I mean, there's a lot of slash that's PWP, but this hypothetical original writing would presumably not be porn, and when there's no actual sex in the story slash writers tend to get really intense about the friendships involved. Plus, it seems like it would be hard to look at several slashy texts with completely different tones (funny, angry, light, heavy, violent), and think they were all only about sex.
Err, so I wonder how any of the slash writers on my flist feel about slash and original writing. Do you all feel it influences it? How do you incorporate it into your original fic, be your original characters straight of gay?
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Great questions as usual! :)
I think if you're writing two male (or two female)original characters of your own having sex, then you're writing homoerotica. If you're taking someone else's original characters who are not portrayed in canon as being actively gay, like Snape and Harry, then you're writing slash. If you're taking characters portrayed in canon as actively gay, like the guys in Queer as Folk, then you're probably just writing fanfic, because you're just expanding on an existing relationship.
There is that grey area you mentioned when it comes to writing romantic stories about characters written in another age, like Robin Hood & Will Scarlet, Holmes & Watson, or Arthur & Lancelot. People declared their love and loyalty differently in different ages.
LOTR doesn't go too over the top with that imagery, but we all know there's a bit of it there, which is why people nowadays ask whether Frodo and Sam are gay, or Sam is, since he's the one usually waxing rhapsodic.;-)
I've heard this debate before, and the thing that I don't get is that LotR isn't a story from a different age. It was written and published in the 1950s. A guy waxing rhapsodic about how much he loves another man while he's watching him sleep in the 1950s meant pretty much what it does today. Admittedly, Tolkein was very old world, but, the man taught at a university. He knew the English language backwards and forwards. He didn't live under a rock. I find it impossible to believe that any man in the 1950s above the age of ten could be completely innocent of the overt sexual connotations in that scene where Sam and Frodo are in bed together. I think a lot of people want to believe that it doesn't mean what it says it means, but I'm inclined to think that the man wrote precisely what he meant - Sam loved Frodo. Sam mightn't have known how to act on that love; hence the later mentions of being torn between his feelings for Rosie and his feelings for Frodo when they're all living together, but in that morning bedroom scene, I think Sam meant precisely what he said, that he loved Frodo.
Whew, sorry about the tangent, but that's my biggest pet peeve! LOL Hope this finds you happy and healthy. Cheers.
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So when you read the story do you see it, as I know some people do (and this is a way that makes a lot of sense to me), as Sam essentially being in love with Frodo romantically but unaware of it? Would you say Tolkien had more understanding of this than Sam, or would he, too, probably not be able to say Sam literally wanted to have sex with him? Do you think Tolkien was specifically using that language to say this *wasn't* just a friendship, but being more vague about just what it was, or was he hinting it was sexual?
I guess what I mean is...Tolkien lived through that earlier time, but was now living in the 50s. A lot of LOTR he seemed to be an intentional throwback to earlier eras. So if he was using language that he knew would be taken sexually in his own time, I wonder if he might have done it as a rejection of the current interpretation.
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From:
LotR: Sam & Frodo Part 1
So when you read the story do you see it...as Sam essentially being in love with Frodo romantically but unaware of it?
If I'm looking at it in terms of story only, not what the author means, but what is specifically written, then I think that Sam is in love with Frodo, but that it isn't a love he could ever act upon for a variety of reasons. In book canon, there is a huge class difference between Sam and Frodo. Sam is Frodo's servant. They aren't equals and will never be. In the book, Frodo is also considerably older than Sam, and far more educated than the movie Frodo seemed to be, so they weren't even of the same generation. Also, they lived in a very small world. People couldn't just take up with anyone they wanted or move on to another town if there was a scandal in their hometown. If Sam were to make a sexual play for Frodo and be rejected, he'd be disgraced and bring dishonour to his whole family. Sam is the most sensible person in that entire trilogy. I think he wanted Frodo, but that he was too conscious of convention to go for what he wanted and risk the consequences.
<i>So when you read the story do you see it...as Sam essentially being in love with Frodo romantically but unaware of it?</I>
If I'm looking at it in terms of story only, not what the author means, but what is specifically written, then I think that Sam is in love with Frodo, but that it isn't a love he could ever act upon for a variety of reasons. In book canon, there is a huge class difference between Sam and Frodo. Sam is Frodo's servant. They aren't equals and will never be. In the book, Frodo is also considerably older than Sam, and far more educated than the movie Frodo seemed to be, so they weren't even of the same generation. Also, they lived in a very small world. People couldn't just take up with anyone they wanted or move on to another town if there was a scandal in their hometown. If Sam were to make a sexual play for Frodo and be rejected, he'd be disgraced and bring dishonour to his whole family. Sam is the most sensible person in that entire trilogy. I think he wanted Frodo, but that he was too conscious of convention to go for what he wanted and risk the consequences.
<Would you say Tolkien had more understanding of this than Sam, or would he, too, probably not be able to say Sam literally wanted to have sex with him?</I>
Tolkein's intent always confuses me. When you look at the heterosexual relationships in LotR, they are pathetically unreal to non-existant. The entire Aragorn/Arwen relationship happened off screen, and was mostly explored through an appendix. The Faramir/Aowen relationship was portrayed in a very staid, courtly manner that felt terribly unreal. There was no emotion at all between the characters, just a sense that Aowen would settle for Faramir because she couldn't get Aragorn.
Then you get that scene with Sam in bed with Frodo, with all its heartfelt emotion. It was the only real romantic scene in the book. I couldn't believe what I was reading in that scene. You could have easily lifted it and put it in any slash story without changing a word.
<i>Do you think Tolkien was specifically using that language to say this *wasn't* just a friendship, but being more vague about just what it was, or was he hinting it was sexual?</I>
I'm not sure what he meant by it. The book was written in the 50s, so the words meant pretty much what they do now. He might have been writing LotR in an earlier style, but the audience he was writing for wasn't going to be interpreting the words the way readers would 200 years ago & he had to know that. While it's true that Tolkein was a devout Catholic, married with children; he was highly educated and raised in the British boarding schools, so he knew about same sex relationships. It's my feeling that Tolkein probably was portraying the type of relationship common to that time, the kind of romantic love that you see in <i>Brideshead Revisted</i>, where a young man falls passionately in love with another man in what is probably the strongest, most passionate connection of his life, but that they stop just short of having sex.
To be continued
From:
Re: LotR: Sam & Frodo Part 2
That is possible, of course. However, I think adding that scene to reject current interpretation was a risky venture. There could have been a massive outcry at the homoerotic overtones and the book could have been black-listed. I mean, why put it in at all? He didn't have anything faintly like it between a man and a woman. It was just a very weird scene to have in this book that was filled with traditional heroes and endless battle scenes. All the other relationships were very underplayed, except for that morning bed scene with Sam, which had the realest emotion in the book.
Another slant might be the fact that women weren't really thought that important back then. From the way he handled his female characters, I don't think Tolkein thought too much of women, if he thought of them at all. I read that the only reason he added Aowen's scenes was because his daughter asked him to. LotR was a man's story. It's filled with heroes and fighting, and all that war and chivalry stuff that stirs young men's passions. Maybe that weird morning bed scene with Sam and Frodo was so clearly fleshed out because it was the only relationship that Tolkein felt important enough to explore.
I don't really understand why Tolkein did what he did in that scene or why it's there at all. It just drives me crazy when people insist that the words don't mean what they say they do, or that the book was written in another age, because it wasn't. The experiences that inspired the book might have been WW1 period, but even if the book had been written then, that was the same age as F. Scott Fitzgerald. That scene with Sam still wouldn't have been viewed as completely innocent and platonic, not as written.
Anyway, I hope I haven't overwhelmed you with all this!
Hope this finds you happy and healthy. Cheers.
From:
Re: LotR: Sam & Frodo Part 2
It is also particularly funny when people act as if LOTR was written so long ago it's completely divorced from us, as if the 1950s are not part of the modern world, or that homosexuality wasn't even known about much less written about when of course it was.
From:
Re: LotR: Sam & Frodo Part 2
They don't act like the 50s were another age. My roommate read LotR as it came out when she was a kid in the 50s, and she talks about the books like they were written in the 1850s or something. Many people seem to think these books are a lot older than they really are, possibly because of the style in which they are written. I don't know. It just drives me nuts when people go on about how we're taking a book from another age and putting modern interpretations upon it, when the book was written at exactly the same time as the Persian Boy and Mary Renaults' other literature.
Hope this finds you happy and healthy. Cheers.