The Morality of Reading
LJ is too slow to look up the exact quote, but I believe A.J. Hall commented in RJ’s LiveJournal that she could understand people not reading slash for moral reasons. Ah, here it comes:
Some people, it is true, who I know and who write slash have difficulty in understanding the “I never touch slash on principle because it can never be canonical” attitude. Most would have considerably more sympathy with a consistent moral position.
I was thinking about that, and came to the conclusion that there is no legitimate moral reason for not reading slash. There’s a moral basis for avoiding smut, and insofar as slash is smutty it falls under that reason, but slash without the smut is not a moral issue.
Why not? We read murder mysteries, even though murder is wrong. Were there an entire genre devoted not only to murder but to the glorification of murder it might be wrong to write in it, but not to read the occasional story. Even in non-fiction, we read about terrible things without feeling that reading about them makes us culpable in them.
The objections to slash are more basic than moral differences, and I think they fall into two categories: the literary and the visceral. A visceral dislike for slash is often identified with homophobia, but it’s more commonly human nature. Heterosexual men, especially, are deeply squicked by the notion. It’s not as strong as the incest taboo, but it’s out there and it’s a good enough reason not to read slash.
My objection falls into the literary camp. I have nothing against reading fiction that’s about homosexuals - I particularly enjoyed LMB’s Ethan of Athos, even though it’s not one of her better works. I don’t even have anything against writing about homosexual characters, be they Willow/Tara or characters in my own original fic. It’s not homosexuality as a topic that disturbs me but slash as a genre. A host of fans explicitly devoted to reversing canon sexual orientations, to writing stories because they are risqué, and to being generally contrary or rebellious do not appeal to me. It doesn’t make me want to know them, to be part of their clique, or to read their stories. The slash description adds no value for me - it merely alerts me that the story wasn’t directed at the general reader but at a subcommunity whose motives and principles I barely understand, never mind share.
I think when RJ exempted “Lust Over Pendle” from the slash genre she meant it in this sense - not that the story wasn’t about a non-canon homosexual relationship, but that it wasn’t about contradicting canon for its own sake. It was not about being slashy. I haven’t read it so I can’t say for sure.
There are other subcommunities of fandom that are just as self-congratulatory and anti-canonical as slash is - J/C fandom comes to mind immediately - but most of them don’t assert or assume a literary superiority over other fans. It is entirely possible that slashers are better writers, overall, than non-slashers, but that’s a matter of statistics which does not make slashfic better in principle than other kinds of fic. Being slashy is not a literary good in and of itself, and no amount of claiming it is will make it so.
February 5th, 2003 at 10:08 pm
I think when RJ exempted “Lust Over Pendle” from the slash genre she meant it in this sense - not that the story wasn’t about a non-canon homosexual relationship, but that it wasn’t about contradicting canon for its own sake. It was not about being slashy.
Yes, that’s exactly what I meant, and thank you for putting it so lucidly.
And I liked Ethan of Athos, too.
March 14th, 2003 at 7:16 pm
Hi - hope you don’t mind me commenting, since you don’t know me from Adam, but I stumbled across your entry and I found it interesting, particularly this:
I can quite appreciate that this particular take on slash (slash-as-conscious-act-of-subversion) does not appeal to you, but I would respectfully offer that there are very very many different types of writing and very very many different agendas contained within the umbrella term ’slash’. I’m sorry to hear that you have encountered instances of slashers asserting literary superiority by merit of the gender of their preferred characters - certainly I’d agree that this is a ridiculous stance. Nobody gets extra brownie points for literary merit because they are writing in a particular genre, or writing about particular characters. (To be honest I don’t have much truck with this whole het/slash/gen labelling thing anyway.)
I take your point that some slash goes out of its way to be anti-canonical, but there are many other pairings and writers who simply respond to an interesting dynamic and riff on the text. I don’t see any meaningful distinction between the artistic process of writing Spike/Buffy (pre-Season Six, or even pre-Season Five) and writing Willow/Tara (pre ‘New Moon Rising’) or Buffy/Faith. In each case the viewer has seen an interesting dynamic and spun their own ‘what if’.
For me, watching or reading a canonical text from an open-to-slash perspective just gives things an interesting twist - it’s like reading Jane Eyre with an awareness of the colonial context (and coming up with ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ as a result), or like the moment when you’re looking at an Escher print and suddenly realise that the spaces between the black dragons are white dragons.
March 16th, 2003 at 12:11 am
I would respectfully offer that there are very very many different types of writing and very very many different agendas contained within the umbrella term ’slash’.
I’m not sure what you mean by many different types of writing, but I will agree that there are plenty of agendas out there. I’m not interested in any agenda, nor in the fiction born out of it.
Writing a single fanfic is riffing on the text, but being slashy as a genre is putting the agenda before the fic.
March 16th, 2003 at 10:04 am
I’m not interested in any agenda, nor in the fiction born out of it.
My bad - I’ve not expressed myself clearly. imho everyone has an agenda in writing. Putting the agenda before the writing is (often) bad writing, yes, but one’s agenda - by which I simply mean one’s reason for writing any given story - inevitably colours the writing, whether het, slash or gen. Some people see the relationship between Mulder and Scully as the most interesting and important thing about The X Files and so in writing an X Files fic their agenda may be to explore this relationship, whether in terms of romance or friendship. Or they might be more interested in trying to make sense of the tangled alien conspiracy itself. Or they might be writing something for a competition, and so the story is tailored around particular words or themes. Or else perhaps they’ve just had this crazy idea and they want to follow it and see where it takes them. That’s all I meant by agenda, and I’d use it as readily of ‘het’ or ‘gen’ fiction as I would of ’slash’.
I’m not sure what you mean by many different types of writing
Labelling a piece of writing ‘het’ or ‘gen’ or ’slash’ tells me very very little about the themes, the subject, the quality of the writing or even about how true to canon the piece in question actually is. Each of the labels is applied to such a vast and diverse array of stories that the label in itself means very little. ‘Slash’ and ‘het’ are both terms that imply the fiction is relationship-focused; which could mean anything from a ‘Pride and Prejudice’ length novel crammed with plot and nothing steamier than a chaste kiss and a tactful fade-to-black, right through to a graphic PWP drabble. There are many different types of writing. Similarly ‘gen’ can mean a character-study, a vignette or a vast plotty epic.
A host of fans explicitly devoted to reversing canon sexual orientations, to writing stories because they are risquÈ, and to being generally contrary or rebellious do not appeal to me.
I think perhaps part of the reason we have different takes on this - and forgive me if I’m mistaken here - is that you’re seeing all characters as being canonically heterosexual as a default setting? For my part, most all the gay folks I know have had relationships, or at least drunken fumbles, with people of the opposite sex, and have all passed/continue to pass as straight in some (or most) contexts. So I tend to take chemistry as chemistry, whether someone has come out and said they (sometimes) fancy people of their own gender or not.
There are many same-sex relationships in fiction which, although not expressly stated as romances, read very naturally in that way - not because one is trying to be ‘rebellious’ or ‘risque’, but simply because there’s palpable chemistry there. Reading the relationship between Clark and Lex on Smallville in terms of eros rather than agape is at least as compelling as (and far more affecting and moving in terms of narrative arcs and character development than) the relationship between Clark and Lana. Similarly the Buffy/Faith relationship involved considerably more onscreen chemistry (and tangled emotions) than the Willow/Tara relationship did; interpreting the tension as at least partially sexual isn’t automatically mistaken, nor does it give rise to bad writing any more than any other pairing, canonical or non, straight or heterosexual.
IMHO a good writer develops the canonical characters and their interactions and motivations believably; as such they can sell you on an idea that you’d never have expected to buy, as well as on ideas you already have in your head. They can show you things from a different perspective - and I don’t just mean in terms of characters’ relationships or sexual orientations, I mean new perspectives in general. That’s one of the things I like most about fanfic - being given new perspectives to turn dodgy bits of canon into something elegant and logical, or being won over to liking a character whom I’d previously found unsympathetic. Having the text enriched. It’s my thing, as a reader - but I’m really interested in hearing about how other people interact with fanfic, because it seems to mean different things to different people.
March 16th, 2003 at 5:40 pm
Not everyone has an agenda in writing. Some people just have stories hit them out of the blue, and some people will write anything, without prejudice. Other people come right out and say that they will only write slash, or a certain pairing. So I’m talking about publicly advertised agendas here.
I don’t think all characters are canonically heterosexual. Tara, for example, was canonically homosexual. The monks from season 5 were canonically asexual. If there were just a few fics scattered out there that changed canonical sexual orientations - say, in the proportions in which other AU’s appear - your arguments would be quite convincing.
Instead of being a random literary occurrence, however, slash is a huge romance subgenre. So from my perspective, slash is just more bad het, with less canon backing and more attitude. The only difference between het and slash is that slash writers get to call people outside their community homophobic. All the other het writers know (or can be made to realize) that people outside their community just don’t want to read their on-line Harlequins - especially when only the subcommunity itself can see the alleged basis in canon.
April 6th, 2003 at 4:34 pm
Slash, Canon, and Shades of Grey
Before I go into this, it may be a good idea to read all of Jemima’s posts on the subject