i'm a pixel here, myself

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 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], 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? 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.