first a slasher, fourth a fan

I have frequently debated this with one or another of you but I have yet again realised that I am first and foremost a slasher and only incidentally a fan.

I know this works the other way round for some people. They like the fandom thing. They value canon. They will read het and gen and all sorts in their fandom.

I will read good writing anywhere, of course. But the reason I'm online and in slash is because of the man/man action. First and foremost. And I've discovered I get just as much pleasure and swoony kicks out of reading good orig man/man as I do in reading good fanfic man/man. (Specifically, I came to this discovery through reading resonant8's Exog and Annie Proulx's heartbreakingly gorgeous Brokeback Mountain.)

Which brings me to the vexed question of: What is slash? Technically, slash is a type of fanfic. It pairs two men (or more) from some canon, fp or rp, and indicates via the / that they are in some kind of sex relationship.

For me, it's the 'two men' and the 'sex relationship' that is operative here. I don't care as much about the 'some canon' part of the equation. And in that sense, I would like to extend slash to origfic, also. Origfic can be slashy. Or it can be something that pushes my slash buttons as much as fanfic slash does -- maybe this something deserves a different name but I don't know what name to give it. I'll stick to slashy.

Because the reason I like Annie Proulx's story and the things I like about Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, both published works of fiction, is not simply the man/man'ness. Otherwise I would be happy with gay novels and gay porn. Which I'm not. Although I do read them. But the buttons are different! No, what I find in Proulx and Barker which is also what I find in online slashfic is the 'slashiness'. It's the woman-writing-about-men thing. It may take another post and a few more days (weeks?) of musing to pinpoint exactly what this consists of. But it is a something that, to me, is immediately identifiable and different from men writing about men/men.

So does it boil down to the gender of the author? In my experience, it does. There was a test case: when I first read Lian Hearn's Across the Nightingale Floor, I assumed the author to be a man. The novel is about boys with swords, after all. But then, in the very first chapter, the main boy has sex with some other boys in passing, and in the last chapter there's a full-on sex scene and a kiss between main boy and other boy, and this latter scene seemed so phenomenally slashy to me that I googled 'Lian Hearn' and discovered that it's the pen name of an Australian woman children's writer.

Hah, I say. Hah!

And now I'm going to backtrack a little bit on my earlier position. Because yes, I am certain that I am first and foremost a slasher; I will read any good man/man and not give a hoot about fandom, canon, orig, whatever. In fact, what I loved about the Proulx story is that the men are not handsome, and that is something that gets writ too large in fandom sometimes for me. Every boy is pretty; every man is ruggedly sexy -- fat people, ugly people, short people, deformed people, old people, ethnically non-mainstream people: in the world of fanon, these people apparently have no sex lives. So I find that aspect of origfic liberating. (Still, Proulx is so slashy in that she contrives for her protagonists to appear as both boys and manly men, and they are oh-so-manly... but that's by the by.)

Anyway, to get back to the backtracking: Because it's not that I'm not a fan. I'm just sort of incidentally a fan, not primarily. I'm not here for the fandom; I'm here for the man/man and the good!writing. But I can see the point of fandom. And this is how I came to se the point (for me):

Because the next question I asked myself was, well, if this is the case, why am I not writing origfic? (That ever-surfacing question!) Is it perhaps because I associate origifc with het and gen and not with slash? Would I be more fired with lust for origfic if I wrote slashy origfic? I think I would. So perhaps I will try that next. One of these days. Which gets me to the point about origifc seeming to be more hemming-in. As if there are rules for origfic that don't exist for fanfic. Intellectually, I know this is not so but emotionally I believe it.

So, finally, fandom: what's in it for me? It boils down to the community. I think it's not so much not being able or wanting to create new characters. I think I could do that. But using shared characters and only creating the characterisation, not the character, connects the writer to the readers on a much more equal and interactive and intimate level. Because Harry is not my Harry, and Karl is not my Karl: they are everyone's. This forges a bond between writer and readers that's not replicable in origfic where the writer owns the characters tooth and nail.

Anyway, these are just some post-Portugal musings. :-)