Talk:Slash - Fanlore

The first paragraph of the definition that slash was same sex, shouldn't the PPOV policy cause to mention the kerfuffle that dragged on for a long time on mailing lists with some people feeling that slash could also be certain m/f romances (I unfortunately don't have links handy, but I remember that some felt quite strongly that non-canonical romance was the sticking point in the late 90s, early 00s iirc, and that some m/f felt like slash to them, often mentioned was Mulder/Scully, I think), and more widespread the position that canonical gay relationships don't count as slash?

I know in the last years these views seem to have gone the way of the dodo, but I think they should be mentioned somewhere, maybe under controversies? --RatCreature 16:55, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

This. I know it came up as late as 2001ish or so in SV, and I've seen it a couple of times since then. --Seperis 17:27, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

I'll take a stab at adding something, but my memory is bad, so it'll be short and need support and smoothing out from other people.--rache 17:32, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, I browsed a bit in old metabib linked entries and for example found this one tallking about "het slash", also mentioning that for them "for me, stories about openly gay characters are not slash, because they don't have the problematic sexual tension that I'm looking for":

http://helenraven.livejournal.com/79618.html --RatCreature 17:32, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

here is another meta post I've found to document this, from 2002 by bettyp, it lists competing different slash definitions: http://bettyp.livejournal.com/36560.html

maybe there should also be a mention of the whole "slash as sexual identity" position as well, or perhaps that ought to go under "slasher"? I know for a while in these endless "why do we slash?" discussions I was careful to emphasize that I like to read slash but don't self-identify as a slasher and thus have not as much stake in the discussion on that identity politics level. --RatCreature 17:54, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Oh, that's a really interesting distinction, one I hadn't thought of. It's definitely worth putting in somewhere, although maybe "slasher" as a subsection of slash rather than a separate page. (Although I do self-identify as a slash, but that has nothing to do with my sexual identity. Layers upon layers!) --Arduinna 18:01, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, I remember discussions about this I had, like in this this one from 2002 where I explain that I don't see it as an identity for myself but just read it but am aware that for others there is more importance in the definitions and boundaries because of the identity thing, and bettyp replies with "That's what I'm really interested in, here, to be honest with you -- Slasher as a sexual orientation. Because I think it is. And that's my agenda with all of this, to somehow figure out what's up with that."

There is a section in metabib with posts about slash as identity so I think it is a common enough perspective on the genre.--RatCreature 18:20, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Lezlie Shell has an awesome rant about slash getting "too gay" quoted in an article of henry and shoshanna's, and I'm grabbing just the good parts, here.

Two heterosexual males becoming involved in a sexual relationship. To say that there is no relationship between homosexuality and slash is absurd. To say that slash is just another name for homosexuality is equally absurd. We have appropriated men's bodies and sexual activities for our own gratification.

Three years ago I wouldn't have made a distinction between sexual and homosexual. Since the beginning, slash writers have appropriated what we want from the physical side, adapted it to fit female hot buttons... Somewhere along the line, our appropriation of the physical act of homosexual sodomy [...] has been coupled with the obligation to portray these acts realistically and to also give the characters the emotional make-up of homosexual men. The failure to do this is taken as evidence of the writers 1)naivete; 2)homophobia; 3)social irresponsibility; 4) all of the above.

My question, selfish and self-serving, is where do I fit into this? Something that was an extension of me is now being reality checked to fit the sexuality of a group of people who don't even READ slash... Why is it our duty to accurately reflect the gay male experience? Is it the duty of gay male writers to accurately portray the lives of spinster librarians?

"Slash" characters excite by being extensions of female sexuality while the 'gay' characters excite by being a window into an alien sexuality, that of homosexual men. It is internal vs. external in a way. The issues I will write about, power and trust, concern me as a woman, not Bodie and Doyle as gay men. I am fulfilling my kink, not accurately portraying the kink of gay men. http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/bonking.html

Contents 1 we should check the WP slash page ocassionally, too 2 Slashy het 3 Acafen and "Closer" 4 fancy quotation marks 5 Klangley quote? 5.1 new zine to add 6 Confusion over the meaning of "slash"

we should check the WP slash page ocassionally, too

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_fiction It's long, and hard fought, and largely written by people I've never heard of, which is cool for variety of viewpoints.

We should let them fight it out on their page and just point to it from our page and be like, "Here are some other opinions on it. Check their discussion page for multiple viewpoints. --Etothepii 03:22, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. I also think, as a sort of guideline, that it's interesting to link to Wikipedia in every article where it's relevant, glossary or other (like for canons, characters, etc), so that the variance between what Fanlore does (look at fandom, written by fen, PPOV) and what a general-purpose encyclopedia (NPOV, etc) does can become apparent and enrich the reader's outlook on things *makes note to say so somewhere else*.--anatsuno 09:33, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Slashy het

Another thing that might be worth mentioning is a discussion that occasionally recurs about 'slashy' het pairings. I know I've seen it around livejournal. --Betty 16:29, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Acafen and "Closer"

I deleted the bit about acafen and "Closer" because I didn't quite understand why it was in that particular section-- it's one thing to argue that "slash is written by slashers, therefore outsiders who write it aren't writing slash," and another thing to argue that something like "Closer" becomes not-slash when viewed by non-slashers (if that is the argument that was being made-- I'm not sure.) -- Liviapenn 08:11, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

fancy quotation marks

Maybe I should find the talk page of some formatting help, but since this is an article with edits from plain to curly quotes, I'd like to point out that these special characters make some things harder. Like they don't always c&p correctly on my system, and the plain text editor I use doesn't display them, making editing things harder. I get that fancy print formatting wants these special quotes, rather than the simple ascii version, but I find the simpler ones much more practical for a wiki.--Ratcreature 02:26, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

…But don't they look pretty?

Is your editor Unicode enabled? Are you on the Unicode character set when editing? If not, that's why you won't see them. You're welcome to make edits using the ASCII characters.

My logic is that if the Wiki supports using them, we should use them, because it adds a sense of quality to our Wiki. Really, the Wiki should convert the ASCII characters to their proper typographic equivalents when we submit edits.

--awils1 04:51, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

That's your opinion. Personally when I see curly quotes, I think the author wrote in Word and doesn't have the sense to turn them off because it looks like shit on the web. Furthermore, they don't show up properly for everyone, and they can break links.

As for quality, unless you plan to go through every page and replace every single quote and apostrophe, it's going to look half-assed. Not exactly a sign of quality. (Note: This is NOT a suggestion to go through and replace everything! D:)

99% of people editing are going to use normal quotes and apostrophes, because that's just what people use on the web. I think the best way to look like a "quality" site, is to have some sort of standardisation, and since you are the minority, maybe you should just adhere to the pre-established style. --Kyuuketsukirui 07:12, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

Well, personally I think curly quotes look crap in most non-serif screen fonts. (And while not really relevant, I find the »...« prettier in books in general, but I know that those are not used in English, and since it's an English language wiki we are obviously stuck with the uglier English standards for quotation marks.*g*) Also I've had an irrational hatred of curly quotes on the web ever since the idiotic use of "smart quotes" in non-standard windows encoding by M$Word generated pseudo HTML wrecked my fanfic reading online a lot in the mid- and late-90s. It got better with Unicode since they now usually are encoded so that my browser displays them, but I still hate them a lot...

I have no idea why my c&p hiccups on the curly quotation marks sometimes, in principle I use UTF-8 and can type all kinds of special characters in the editor. I never bothered to figure out the glitch, because it rarely matters.

And since right now the wiki doesn't convert automatically, I agree with Kyuuketsukirui above that it just looks inconsistent to have some curly, some not.--Ratcreature 07:22, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

Jeez, double team attack. I'll revert them, then.

For whatever it's worth: I'm a big Unicode supporter (comes from a personal interest in localisation, and linguistics), and haven't had any experience with such historical glitches.

While we are on the subject, are the em-dashes OK?

--awils1 13:46, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Klangley quote?

Additional info about British fans was added to Klangley's quote: is this text part of Klangley's original text? " Many of the same fans ... of the fandom's archivists." If not, I'm thinking it should be moved after the quote.

On a related note, I'm finding it hard to identify indented, quoted text as a quote when it's in the middle of a large section of text. Would people object to having borders around quotes? Is it time to revisit the Quote template?--æthel 20:59, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

I don't think it's part of the quote, but I'll look up the original material Klangley sent me when I get the chance to check it. It can certainly be broken out right under that bit of the quote, though, if need be - it's good info! --Arduinna 05:38, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

Responding to question in edit: can we change all these quotations into regular wiki text so that other people can work with it? That sounds like a good idea, although we should still cite Klangley as a source. I wonder if we should follow the Fanlore Live example and put Klangley's text in a subpage of Slash and then break the quotes up a bit more on the main page, paraphrase things, intergrate other perspectives/information, etc.--æthel 01:55, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

I know it's unusual, but Klangley specifically requested that her material be entered as a quote(s), and not as editable wiki text for other people to modify. She did unbelievable amounts of primary-source research on this, and really didn't want people coming in and saying "well, I heard x three years ago from my fannish mentor, so I'll just change this" -- those things are important as part of our oral history to see how things have changed, but Klangley's quotes are top-level research, so to speak. (When she sent me the material to add, I assumed I'd be adding it as regular wiki content, and that's when she made the specific request of me.) And I've just looked at the page, and that quotation template ROCKS. \o/ Please let's keep Klangley's contributions in those quote blocks - she doesn't have them posted anywhere else on the web, and seriously, they're an amazing, accurate look at our fannish history, based on looking at the original sources rather than relying on memories. --Arduinna 05:38, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

I agree that it is good to keep the quote somewhere so the text is here, but I'm not sure it's so great to have a very long part of the slash article basically not editable. I think æthel's suggestion above makes sense.--Ratcreature 07:19, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

I'd like to run this past the wiki admins before a decision is made - ordinarily I would totally agree that the quoted material be somewhere off the page with a pointer to it, but the quoting was a specific condition of Klangley's agreeing to put the information on the Slash page, and she trusted me to make that happen. I don't want to just change it on her, not without a decree from above, as it were. --Arduinna 13:05, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

new zine to add

Help me out here. I have a zine to add. I find two references to it:

• MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. -- USED

“/” (generic UNCLE zine), /, 78p

and from Agent With Style:

• GENERIC "/" MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. ZINE

Type: slash

• In the novella "A Fine Line" by Clotilda Willard, the author asks the question — from a torturous imprisonment by Justin Sepheran to a battle warred with each other — only fifteen years could heal the emotional wounds — or could they?

Is the zine called / ? Is the zine called "/" ? Is the zine called "Generic "/" Man from UNCLE Zine"?

And from the description, it's by Clotilda Willard?

(could there be any more of a difficult name for a zine.... grrr) Mrs. Potato Head 20:11, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

Maybe you could just put it under the novella's title if that is the only content in the zine?--Ratcreature 20:47, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

Now, I get it! AWS filed this under "GENERIC "/" MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. ZINE" as if that was the title, rather than, "A FINE LINE" which is already cataloged on Fanlore. The confusion was furthered by the fact that "FINE" and "GENERIC" both fall next to each other alphabetically. *scowls* Mrs. Potato Head 20:55, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

Looking at the cover that explains the listing troubles as the design seems to omit the novella's title. Though that one needs moving anyway-- searching now I noticed A Fine Line - BEKi, a ST:TNG zine...so I see a disambiguation looming. Heh.--Ratcreature 21:02, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

Confusion over the meaning of "slash"

Embarrassing fandom true confessions: "The embarrassing part is that I made it a couple of years, in HtLJ, with the firm conviction that slasher fanfic was just like slasher movies, and all these nice ladies were spending their free time writing stories about one character hacking the other to pieces, possibly while the characters had sex." Not that uncommon a reaction to the term, going by the comments! --Anenko 21:06, 30 June 2010 (UTC)