Slash rant

[dangermousie]

I hate the main idea of slash. I really do.

Nope, not homophobic. I exclude from my loathing of slash stories about same sex couples where it is merely continuing canon. All the fic in the world writing about Renault's Alexander and Hephaistion, or the two female leads of Deepa Mehta's "Fire" or even something where you could concievably read in a lover's relationship (e.g. Sirius and Remus. I don't see it, but I can see how one would) does not bother me one whit.

I mean all these stories where there is NO indication the canon characters are anything other than straight (and/or violently hate each other). Aragorn has faithfully loved Arwen for 60 years? Too bad, as in fanfic he is paired with Legolas. Harry Potter likes girls? Too bad. In fanfic he is Draco Malfoy's love slave (even though there is nothing redeemable about Draco in canon and the boys loathe each other. Harry/Neville would even be more plausible). Anakin is obsessive about Padme, and went to the Dark Side for her? But what do you know, fanon Anakin is too busy boinking Obi-Wan to care. Apparently, so many men are gay that it's amazing that the human race is managing to reproduce at all.

Basically, I find the notion that one cannot be really good friends (or even have a strong emotion like hatred) with a person of the same gender without wanting their naughty bits in one's mouth utterly revolting and a horrible (not to mention oversexed) view of the human nature.

I am very close to my best friend, who is female. We have been friends for almost a decade, talk on the phone every day, and share a hive mind on a lot of books, movies and other minutia. We help each other through problems and are hopefully there for each other. Yet, somehow we managed to avoid an unbridled lesbian orgy. I certainly don't think men are any different.

Hey, teenybopper girls who revel in slash between characters whose only claim to slashiness is that they are friends. How would you feel if everyone assumed you had sex with all your girlfriends merely because you hung out with them and were good friends? See? Absurd.

/rant

Flame away.

Comments

[aliterati.livejournal.com]

(I need to break this into two comments, because I'm longwinded.)

No, I think that what you've said it totally valid. Slash that has no basis in canon whatsoever (even if you squint and turn your head and look the other way a moment) isn't good slash. Nor is slash where the characters are so OOC that you can barely recognize them good slash.

(E.g. Harry as Draco's love slave, or what not. As a dedicated slasher, I hate the idea of giving characters 'slash personalities'--i.e. creating a whole new psychological mold for them to fit a slash relationship. In my head, proper slash is slash where the characters already have a slash personality in the canon. It's seeing that personality that makes me want to read fic in the first place.)

However, I think your rant is ignoring two important points…

A) This might have been covered by some other people, but I'm not certain, so I'll just go for it. Your assessment of 'acceptable' or even 'good' slash is functioning on the idea that slash fiction articulates or explores a relationship already set up in the canon. And your grievance, in this case, is that so many slash authors maintain very loose integrity with the canon. (Ergo your chastisement of them making you a 'canon nazi'--the idea that your interpretation of the canon is right and strict, and that people who deviate too far are inherently wrong.)

But I think you're leaving out another, very valuable version of slash: not exploring something in the original story, but writing your own story. I daresay that the best slash stories I've ever read aren't stories were the author said, 'Oh my god, they are so in love, I must write about it.' Rather, they're the ones where the author said: "The story as Writer X wrote it is really interesting, but mightn’t it be even more interesting if these two characters had a different relationship? What kind of story would we then have? How could we then psychologically reinterpret these scenes, events, etc?'

What I'm basically trying to say is that the best slash--and I think this makes sense--isn't slash where the author tries to address the existing canon. Rather, it's where the author borrows some situational inspiration to create her own canon. A perfect example: For the last few weeks, I've been obsessed with this Firefly story called 'Trauma Medicine.' It's beautiful, it's brilliant, it's slash. It's also--to set your own heart at ease--incredibly in character. Not only does the author not ignore the male characters' female love interests, but she never tries to undermine the hero's love for his female interest, and even devotes whole chapters to building (het) romantic tension between them! In the end, of course, the hero goes with the (non-canonical) male love interest. The author never pretends it's in the original story. Instead, she focuses on building her own story--which is a sophisticated, nuanced, and incredibly compelling exploration of 'trauma' itself and which, through the demands of this theme, necessitates a pairing between those two particular (and incidentally male) characters. And before you ask why she didn't just write her own characters to begin with, I need to say that part of the author's brilliance is her very use of the canonical material--her incredibly thoughtful recontextualization of certain scenes, certain quotations, etc, into the greater tapestry of her own story. She references T.S. Eliot. She references children's songs like Humpty Dumpty. She references Joss Whedon's Firefly. In the end, she creates a brilliant story that--as an added bonus--makes you appreciate each of those three referents all the more.

[aliterati.livejournal.com]

And point (B) is short. You say that the problem with slash is that it isn't based on canon--it's not believable in context of the original story. I've just said that slash doesn't have to try to place itself within the original canon. But a confounding variable is that very well-written slash sometimes makes you recognize the author's recontextualizations in the original story. I'll reference the story above. The author makes a point of saying that her work is an absolute re-imagining of the series. Having seen the show, I don't think that there is actually any slash in it. But her story is so good, so thorough, and so well thought-out that I almost have to place the original show in its context, because it makes so many parts of the show more profound or more logical than they were in the original canon. Nothing against the original show--I'm not saying it's bad or thoughtless. But her work actually makes it better.

And, hey, let's ignore the fact that there is no such thing as canon, that there are no such things as original stories, and that all stories exist only as interpretations. You always end up choosing an interpretation of a work, which you then come to believe in as the 'true' story. I'm choosing the interpretation of 'Trauma Medicine' for my true Firefly because it's actually better than the original interpretation I formed after watching the show. And if even one slash story in a thousand is good enough to do that, I have to love the entire practice.

P.S.

[aliterati.livejournal.com]

Re: the main idea of slash being that two men can't be just very good, intimate friends without being erotically in love with each other. I agree that this is a problem. It bothers me. It bothers me more that sometimes my own slasher tendencies follow that exact psychological pattern. This is actually a bit of cognitive dissonance that I'm currently in the middle of ironing out, because I do love pure friendship between men, and I do attach a lot of value to it.