Any Two Guys

Synonyms:	ATG
See also:	bodyfic, Fanon Characterization, Two White Guys
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Any two guys (or, sometimes, any two girls) usually abbreviated as ATG, is a pejorative term used to refer to a slash story where the characterization is so weak that any character names could be swapped in without affecting the story in any way.

The Fanfiction Glossary defined it as "A poorly-written slash story which is so generic that if you changed the names and a few minor details, the main characters could be mistaken for any two men pulled off the street. Usually abbreviated to ATG ."

Fan Comments

1996

Slash burnout - has anyone else ever experienced this? After reading three issues of Dark Fantasies in three days, I found that I was totally bored with slash. The sex may have been detailed, explicit and frequently sadistic to boot, but the plots were thin, the characterisations poor, and the sex scenes repetitive. (There were a few worthy exceptions, but not many.) Why is slash sometimes seen as an excuse for poor writing? It doesn’t have to be. If I look at the three B7 stories that won Stiffies this year, they all had plots (although Wild, Beautiful and Damned had less plot than the other two, it at least had a detailed background and some character development). Presumably, then, readers like stories with some real meat in them, so why on occasion do we just get landed with 'fill in the name' stories? I'm sure all fans have read them - tales where you could remove the names of Blake and Avon, substitute the names of Starsky and Hutch, change all references to the Liberator to something else, make about three lines change to the text and voila! - a story in a different fandom.

When characterisation is that poor, you might as well go and read porn novels as slash, as the point of slash has been lost.