Original Slash

[sistermagpie]

This topic came up talking to 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?

Comments

[chresimos.livejournal.com]

Ooo! Okay, structured reply!

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*)

[chresimos.livejournal.com]

4. Re: historical slash. It's very hard to know, usually, what the people of olde thought about sexuality because it wasn't very talked about...not in the sense that there is no evidence of homosexuality and such but in the sense of, more people may have been gay than we think but would not have admitted it, or have been (openly) gay if they had got the chance, which wasn't culturally available? However, I do think...tentatively...that the way men relate to each other has been altered in the way that you say, where things seem to either have to be completely platonic, or else are perceived by us as completely romantic/sexual. So there is this murky area of things that seem "slashy" but might not be, but revisionists claim is, but there's no way of knowing, really. The other day I was reading a letter written to Keats by one of his friends that went, "God bless you, let our hearts be buried in each other"...I mean, who would write that these days? I wouldn't write that to my boyfriend...sappy...;) But anyway, I have just realized that #5 has no real point(except to agree with you that contemporary views might have difficulty comprehending certain relationships without sexual subtext), and as the Gratuitous Keats Referencing has begun, it is probably time to move on...

5. Forget not the fiendish beastie of authorial intent! If an author wrote steamy subtext, how would you know if she intended her characters to be actually gay but didn't have a place or reason to put it in the narrative, or if she just wanted subtext for the sake of 'slashiness'? ;)

6. He is physically attracted to Frodo literally, just not (necessarily) sexually In my modern, all-or-nothing uptight way, I find this sentence intriguing. What do you mean? Is that possible? Do you mean in a "comfort" sense? Or, like, artistically? *ponders this*

[chresimos.livejournal.com]

And just because this comment isn't long enough, I ponder sometimes about how I have sort of come think of this greatmalebonding thing that is usually taken for slash. That is, there there is a certain type of friendship, that seems very slashable, and sometimes the presences of that...slashability...seems to define the strength of the friendship. (Which is interesting by itself, because I don't tend to think of, say, Harry/Ron having that vibe...and it isn't a hugely popular ship afaik.) And that often has a hierarchical element - thinking of K/S and F/S here. It is the extravagantfriendships-become-slash, joining such variations as the minion-slash(because servitude needs a sexual element!) and rivalryissexualtension-slash.

But the point of my ill-conceived ramble, is that (in my limited experience, of scifi/fantasyish things) I very rarely come upon any type of female friendship written like that. Why is that? Are women supposed to just relate in different ways? Are their frienships seen as more nurturing instead of OMGIloveyouMADLYandUNHEALTHILY? I found one the other day and I was all, *glee*, at last! The only other one that comes to mind is...Janeway/Seven...possibly? (I don't know ST fandom from my toe...) I also don't read much femmeslash, but I'd assume(badly?) that, in HP anyway, because of the rarity, it would be written without so much slashy schmoop, and also sans the conventional-slash omgfriendship! thing as a prelude.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

You know, you mentioned that there's often a hierarchical situation involved and I wonder if that's a male thing. I mean, men do tend to organize themselves socially in hierarchies as opposed to females who have very different ways of doing it, traditionally. Speaking from a kids' mass-market perspective, stories about girl friendships are often fueled by jealousy.

You know, that makes me wonder if that's the thing about femmeslash. See, with women very often jealousy is the subtext, not sex. It's sort of like men-inverted. Like, with men there's the idea that on the outside they tend to "pretend" not to like each other. They fight, playfully insult each other, call each other names. That's why it's always a big deal in fiction/TV comedy when they have to show real affection. You know that means things are serious.

With women it's the opposite. This was described in a book I read last year, Odd Girl Out, but the book basically told you what any girl who went to junior high already knew--it was about the "hidden aggression" of girls. It talked about how girls are so expected to be "nice" and be good friends and all that that what they tend to repress isn't affection because that's what they use to cover the real stuff up. The subtext isn't love, it's jealousy. Not because women can't really be friends, of course, but just because that's the things they feel like they have to hide. I can't think of too many female friendship movies (Let's just say I'm not a Beaches-type!) but think of something like The Turning Point. Two women who are best friends for life and yet the climax is a screaming fight where they finally say all the things that have festered between them for years. There are similar scenes between men, of course, but I don't think they have the same cliche of jealousy and resentment buried under kissy-kissy affection.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

God bless you, let our hearts be buried in each other

LOL! Try this on your friends and see how they back slowly away!

In my modern, all-or-nothing uptight way, I find this sentence intriguing. What do you mean? Is that possible? Do you mean in a "comfort" sense? Or, like, artistically? *ponders this*

Heh. Well, I meant Sam appreciates Frodo physically and often wants to touch him for comfort or for whatever reason. Like when Frodo wakes up in Rivendell Sam strokes his hand, happy that it is no longer cold. There are many times when they both need physical contact for reassurance. Now, that doesn't have to be sexual, but it is physical: Hold my hand. Put your head in my lap.

Or, more obviously, there's the part where he's watching Frodo sleep and admiring his face when he sleeps. Tolkien writes this clear physical description of beauty and says Sam can't describe it in those terms but can only say, "He's like that and it shines through sometimes." So what we've got it someone admiring the face of their friend as they sleep and coming to the conclusion that "I love him, whether or no." It's something you usually associate with a lover--or perhaps also with a mother and child.

There's definitely a lot of comfort to it, but it's not always about just comfort. There's also the element of Frodo pleasing Sam's senses, liking to look at him, liking to care for him-including physically. With a lot of males if you asked them about physical aspects of their friends they either wouldn't know them or they'd claim they didn't. Sam, you know, could detail Frodo's every birthmark, tell you how he stirs his tea, how he sleeps. Part of this is from being his servant, but clearly Sam approaches his job as a higher calling.:-)

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

1. Yes, you're totally right. And that's kind of a good thing, really, because I've found every thing that tries to nail down anything about fanfiction in general is usually far too simplifying. For instance, when I was growing up I always did something that was basically slashing and I was sure I was the only one. Then I go on the 'net and read an essay about slash where a woman is describing her experiences growing up and doing exactly what I did with the two guys from Emergency! Thinking back I realize, "Wow, I was slashing..." and yet not, because I'm still not really prepared to put a name on what I was doing. I know I couldn't at the time. It was just the thing I did compulsively with all fiction. Describing it as something simple is like describing "art" as something simple, like it's the same for everyone and fulfills this easily described, practical purpose.

The word slash, presumably, appeared like most fandom words, as a way of describing some phenomenon that everyone recognized but there was no word for. So everybody had a similar impulse to want to read or write these stories, and the stories all seemed to have something in common. It's so funny, after all, that it refers to the / in between the two name. /=just about anything depending on the story! (It was even one of the rare fandom terms whose origins I figured out without having to be told.)

2. 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.

Yes! And I feel so embarassed because part of me is like--how arrogant are you that you're imagining yourself having a fandom invested in enough in your characters they want to slash them! But yeah, I do notice exactly this--I was talking about it with ranalore above too. If I as an author find something slashy does that make the slash more valid?

3. Totally agree on the grumpiness and the reasons for it. The worst conversation I remember getting into about it was with a truly unpleasant guy who seemed to unfortunately think being gay also meant having general contempt for women because they were all out to bring men down or something. Anyway, I just remember this guy kept saying, "But why do you write about this when it HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU!" He just seemed incredibly threatened that these women (the same ones who were always so angry when he revealed he was gay and thus they would not be able to trap him and get at his money and prestige) could make "this" about "them" in any way. It honestly almost sounded like he was saying gay sex was about excluding women--that's the vibe that came through. Anyway, I agree with your thoughts on it.:-)