Two more slash questions

[thrihyrne]

I'm going to be revising my slash article and would like people's thoughts on a couple of things: One is the very definition of slash. Is it still slash if the characters canonically are already gay or bi? Say writing Queer As Folk fanfic. Is it slash or just fic about canonically gay characters?

The other is chan. Perhaps even more than incest, chan is controversial in the slash world. Thoughts?

Spread the word! I'd also like to put together a side bar of 'top slash pairings' in some large fandoms. The ones for HP are pretty obvious, but I'd also like to include Tolkien, Star Trek reboot, Merlin (though that's pretty much a one-hit wonder as far as I know)... Would people concur that the top three HP pairings are Harry/Draco, Harry/Snape and Remus/Sirius, as far as sheer fanfic volume over the past several years? What other fandoms are buzzing these days that have a high slash content?

Comments

[brumeux77.livejournal.com]

Ah. When you started you said the article was specifically about women's reactions and motivations.

OK. To me, slash means non-canonical pairings between two men at least one of whom canon does not suggest is gay or bi. I don't boggle and say, "What is Jack/Ianto doing here? They're a canon couple!" (or even Dan Radcliffe/Draco Malfoy or Dan Radcliffe/Tom Felton (where "canon" includes "real life"--although I do expect an RPS warning on those)); but I do say, "what is John Doe/Richard Roe doing here? That's not slash, that's original fiction."

Chan, as I understand the term, is distressing to me. It's distinct from "underage", where two 15-year-olds are in a relationship. That I can appreciate; although if the relationship is going to be sexual there's only so young I can take it. Chan means an adult and a child. Disturbing because the child really isn't capable of giving informed consent--and so, no matter how willing the child is depicted as being, it's still essentially rape. Chan always needs a warning, underage not so much. Because underage is usually very nebulous. No story starts out "Remus and Sirius, who were only 14..." and the reader is left free to understand that they're 16 and over the age of consent.

Have I strayed too far?

[thrihyrne.livejournal.com]

No, not at all! And I guess I've been misunderstanding chan as I thought it implied underage, not necessarily one underaged and one adult. I just looked on wikipedia and in a slash section, simply underage seems to be the definition for chan, but stuff like this doesn't have any hard and fast definitions, which is part of what makes it so interesting!

So you do think of Jack/Ianto as slash and not simply canonical fic? Did I understand you properly?

[brumeux77.livejournal.com]

No, I don't think of Jack/Ianto as slash; they're canon and I think of slash as non-canonical. But if I were in a slash archive and found J/I I wouldn't think it didn't belong there. If that makes any sense. I guess they don't fit my definition, but do fit the spirit.