drew: (book)
OKAY. So it's Monday and I hate a lot of things, including the fact that I was up for an additional two hours past my bedtime watching episodes of Project Catwalk, which is a pretty awesome if slightly lamer UK version of Project Runway (their Tim Gunn gets to YELL AT THEM! it's great!). Things I do not hate this morning: [molasses spice cookies] which I made last night with FRE and her boyfriend. SO good. ...yeah, that's about it.

I *especially* hate Supernatural's move to Thursdays because I have rehearsal and can't watch it when it airs, which means I can't do the fabulous [livejournal.com profile] spn_live thing, etc. WOE.

It appears that the whole "is slash gay?" thing is moving through fandom again, and I'm all "..." about that because it appears to be a definitional thing for some people (i.e. people who can't separate gay/queer culture from "gay" as a label for whom you have sex with -- and people who feel you shouldn't) and dealing with definitional questions isn't something I generally like to do. HOWEVER. In a completely unrelated [post], [livejournal.com profile] thelionforreal and I were talking about story labels and I professed my annoyance that a large section of fandom (I'd call it "the old guard" or "bitter old fan hags" except I'm not sure I want to be lumped in with the newbies) feels that labeling *canonical* homosexual pairings as "slash" is incorrect. There's something to be said for that canonical/non-canonical labeling, but when I go looking for a story, I start at "well, it needs to be slash" because I don't particularly like m/f or f/f stories, canonical or not. And, granted, all my fandoms have been such that all m/m stories are non-canonical, but if I were to go looking for, say, a RENT Angel/Collins story, or a QAF US Brian/Justin story, I would go "aha, m/m means slash" and go looking in slash archives. Basically, what I'm getting at is that there's no handy classification for canonical same-sex stories -- not to mention all the stories that flit around the border of what is canonical -- and I'm not sure I'd buy into it even if there were.

I said something to the effect of: writing a story for a particular source requires that you bend the source anyway, what's different about the bending you have to do to make slash happen? [livejournal.com profile] lovelypoet refuted my point, saying that in writing slash you have to explicitly alter the source material, whereas stories in general do not have this requirement -- you can set a story between episodes of a show, or give someone else's POV, for example -- and though I might argue that (there's something to be said here about gay rights and not assuming that a given character is heterosexual, but I won't get into that) I will grudgingly agree with that premise. HOWEVER. How much of fanfiction, or what fandom tends to produce, revolves around that? I think a large majority revolves around new situations, throwing a few characters into something of your own devising and seeing how the pieces fall. In that sense, I think you're altering the canon and for me there is no fundamental difference between *that* alteration of the canon and the alteration of canon necessary for slash.

I'm open to argument, but I'm sticking by my own personal labels -- "slash" is *any* m/m story, "femslash" is *any* f/f story, "het" is *any* m/f story, and "gen" is any story in which a pairing does not come into play. In this regard, a story can be both het and slash at the same time, which I know *also* annoys some people, but I seem to be good at that recently.
how i feel: cranky

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