Meh, slash fic

[breakinglight11]

As I’ve mentioned, I’m not a slash fan. I tend to prefer when fan work sticks to canon, so I don’t really enjoy when the characters’ relationships are disrupted to suit an author’s personal preferences. But another thing that bothers me is how it encourages fans to interpret everything characters who are close to each other do through a lens searching for romantic possibility. This propensity in slash often leads to the invalidating of the notion that FRIENDSHIP CAN BE A POWERFUL AND MEANINGFUL RELATIONSHIP IN AND OF ITSELF.

Of course, my making this argument at all is kind of missing the fact that slash is mostly porn. The assumption is made all the time that women don’t like or don’t use porn, which irks me for a lot of feminist reasons, and is obviously refuted by the existence of slash. So I don’t like to gloss over it, and that makes it a little less silly to bitch about. But still, there’s a big cultural concept going on that suggests that friendship is inferior to romantic connection. A girl who doesn’t want to date a guy is “demoting” him to friend status, for example. This is what pushes people away from making real connections with each other non-sexually or non-romantically, either because they think those relationships aren’t as valuable, or that they’re afraid that, since people assume romantic relationships are the only ones worth seriously pursuing, their attempts at closeness will be perceived as romantic interest. This is especially off-putting if there is a concern of making other think the person is gay. So we don’t get a lot of strong portrayals of friendship, or when we do, people wonder at the supposedly “romantic” undertones. :-P And in real life, we get lots of people who don't have any strong connections outside of their significant others, which leads to less emotional support in their lives.

Comments

[twilighttremolo.livejournal.com]

I very much agree that it's a problem when society devalues friendship. This also comes up for me when people declare that two people in history were a gay couple -- yes, in societies where queer people have to hide, those queers who are lucky enough to find each other and find love often disguise it as a great friendship. But some people are also lucky enough to have great friendships. Also, this discounts the possibility of even-less-mainstream (if I can say that) queerness, such as asexual romantic relationships, people who identify as the other gender but present as their assigned gender and are in a straight relationship that looks gay, etc. But I digress. I agree that slash is often another form of this -- although I think it's possible to create slash that respects the fact that the slash pairings don't HAVE to be the case based on the relationship we've seen, and I think plenty of slash does respect that.

(what's this about P and P slash? Unless it's Lydia and Mrs. Foster, who have been intimate two months...)

[lisefrac.livejournal.com]

Oh, there's just a moment where Mr. Darcy puts his hand on Mr. Bingley's shoulder very fondly... there may have been some giggling going on in our row when that happened.

[jh1230.livejournal.com]

I'll remind you that's only to shove me into a chair and lecture me on why marrying Jane is a bad idea, but yeah, I shouldn't be surprised you looked at it that way.