No, this doesn't have anything to do with the other essay. I just like the song.

Anyone writes and complains and I really will tell you about my novel.

What is slash? torch is talking about it. So is someone named, "bettyp" who must be an interesting person, based on torch's interest in what she (bettyp) had to say.

I should imagine that everyone asked would come up with different answers to the "what is it, why do we do it, why those two people and not the other two" questions. Coming up with a single definition that most people could agree on is impossible.

Especially when you consider the growing number of HetSex fiction fans who want to call m/f stories 'slash'.* And, not to get all rude or anything, there's also a group of [expletivedeleted] writing sex-based stories about real people who want to be able to call their stuff both "fanfiction" and "slash."

(* And yet, honesty compels me to admit that I'm more amused than anyone could know by the idea that the hetsex crowd wants to share the "slash" designation as a handy way to identify erotic stories as opposed to, say, gen or case file stories. The word "slash" was originally used to identify stories with homoerotic content so that the vast majority of fanfic readers who freaked out at the thought of homosexuality wouldn't get any cooties by accidentally getting close to "one of those" stories. Now they don't mind a bit. Sure, readers want the stories labeled, but slashers are just as bad, wanting to be warned if there's any icky hetsex in a story before they'll open it, so the labels work both ways. Part of me is laughing and muttering, "we've come a long way, baby.")

I guess it's nice to be trendy. Everyone wants to be like us slashers. (Get away from me, you perverts.)

I like torch's description.

"...the potential for/reality of homoerotically tinged interaction between two specific characters, A and B, as evidenced by the canonical dynamics between them in the show X."

I might quibble about the "potential" thing, but maybe not since a lot of slash is in the eye of the viewer. In any case, I like the erudite tone of the quote, so I'm adopting it and giving it a second home in my heart.

What she calls, the "general end of the continuum" she also names "slashiness" and explains it as prurience or wish-fulfillment or something.

To me, slashiness just a word I used to describe the interaction that inspires slash. "That episode was full of slashiness" means that a particular episode contained a lot of the kind of interaction that's open to a slash interpretation.

The "wouldn't those two be hot together?" stuff that she mentions, that kind of thing is pornography in my world. (Or erotica, if you're squeamish.)

Slash is homoerotic fiction based on interpretations, extrapolations, and outright subversions of canon interactions between two same-sex fictional characters.

That means there has to be a canon relationship. These two people should ideally have shared significant amounts of screen time. Or at least some screen time. In the same show.

One of them shouldn't be from a comic book while the other one is from a live-action television series.

Characters shouldn't fuck outside their own medium.

Boy Q and Boy T from two different shows written as a "dreamy couple" is nothing but fevered mental masturbation. Girl F and Girl J, one from a live-action movie and one from Japanese anime is the same thing. It's sexfic but not slash and just because it's homoerotic sexfic doesn't make it slash.

Not everything that's homoerotic is slash. Slash isn't some kind of all-inclusive genre that you can stick everything that doesn't fit somewhere else into, okay? It has an identity. Parameters. Even boundaries.

What happened to the days when pretty much everyone writing or reading slash understood that it was the interaction between the characters, the chemistry between them on-screen that has made a pairing slashable? When it was the people, not the bodies that made speculating about the relationship intriguing?

When did the shape of someone's eyebrows become more interesting to the reader than who the character actually was as a person?

In pornography for men, you get big boobs favored over any attempt at characterization, but women used to pretend to be above all of that. At this point, I'm not sure whether to cheer because we've achieved full equality in one area (We're as shallow as men! Finally!) or to go around slapping some sense into people.

I'm just not sure I struggled for women's rights, stood up to men who thought pinching my butt was an okay way to say 'good morning', or worked to be taken seriously as an intelligent professional so that the next generation of women could fight about the size of the bulge in some actor's pants and decide he's a perfect match for Archie or Jughead, okay?

I'm not saying I didn't.

I'm just saying it really wasn't something I considered when I was trying to keep my six foot tall boss from exercising his manly right to look down my shirt, that's all.

But I digress. As usual.

To repeat, slash is homoerotic fiction based on interpretations, extrapolations, and outright subversions of canon interactions between two same-sex fictional characters.

Mulder and Scully bumping hips isn't slash. (It's a travesty, but it's not a slash travesty.) Captain Marvel and 007 doing the horizontal mambo isn't slash. Pendrell and Krycek isn't slash. (Yeah, they were on the same show, but they never shared two seconds of screen time. Where's the canon interaction you're supposed to be working from?) Ditto crossovers and AUs. Homoerotic fiction? Possibly. Slash? No.

There doesn't have to be explicit sex. The sexual attraction doesn't even have to be acknowledged, it just has to be there, a significant component of the story. M/M or F/F? Both slash.

How complicated is that?

I think it's pretty typical that while others are trying to make their slash-related definitions more inclusive, I'm all about exclusivity.

And I know I'm eliminating and possibly alienating huge chunks of fandom by refusing to accept AUs and crossovers and pairings where the characters never interacted on-screen, but I'm the Purity Police today and no one writing Frodo/Harry Potter stories is going to leave here unbruised.

Characters shouldn't fuck outside their own species.

Just…just ICK, okay? Knock it off, or I'm telling your mom.