Bob Kanefsky interview cont'd

Slash

"Slash" used to be a discreet code-word for a certain type of fan fiction sold under-the-table at conventions. Nowadays everyone seems to use the word openly. It used to be such a useful and innocent word, before fan writers took it over. I don't know what to call that little slanty line on my keyboard anymore without people giving me knowing looks. I can't even spell out a URL aloud these days without blushing.

One thing that I've always found strange about slash is that, even though it's usually about two male characters, it's written almost exclusively by and for heterosexual women. Since I'm neither, that puts me in a small minority of slash fans. The standard explanation has always been that the only strong characters in SF shows are male, and the fan writers want to put strong characters into a relationship. There was a recent article in the LA Times about slash, and the same claim was made: if you want to write about an equal relationship between two strong characters on TV, they have to be men. For example, Kirk had no strong women around him (none that lasted through a whole episode, anyway), so they wrote about Kirk and Spock. Lacking any obvious strong and intelligent female character who Mulder spends any time with, they paired him up with his male boss. And so on.

What makes for a good slash story, in my opinion, is similar to what makes for a good parody: being true to the original, and making the taboo violation seem inevitable. The challenge is to convince the reader, without stretching the suspension of disbelief, that the characters they know from the screen (or the book) might really have those feelings for each other. The first slash zines I bought were some Kirk/Spock zines, and one of those was half Starsky/Hutch. Most of the Kirk/Spock stuff were very explicit about Spock routinely going where no man had gone before (er, I didn't mean that to sound like a triple entendre). I preferred the Starsky/Hutch stories, which only tried to convince me that these two men were the most important thing in each other's lives; there was some physical horseplay but no sex. Some of that may be my own quirky tastes, but I think part of it is that it's easier to believe.

The best stories take care to be consistent with what's shown on the screen, even if they give it a non-standard interpretation. I think it's important to write the characters accurately, and not to play down whatever it is that makes them unique. I once wrote a story based on the Wizard of Oz books, with a Scarecrow/Tinman pairing, just to see if I could do it. I think a lot of slash writers would have tried to anthropomorphize them as much as possible and then had them engage in fairly vanilla activities, as if they were human men. What would be the point of that? That would be as boring as having a TV show where explorers travel halfway across the galaxy and every new form of life they meet acts just like Earth people with funny foreheads. Instead, I thought about what the Scarecrow would find sensual, due to his unique nature, and also extrapolated from things that "really" happened in the canonical stories.