oh, what the heck. I stayed quiet about the fanhandling kerfuffle...

[buggery]

For some reason or another, they would read a slash fic or two. They wouldn't like it. But, either because a friend of theirs wrote it or an author they liked did, they'd keep reading it. And, eventually, they'd learn to like it. They would begin reading solely slash. They would eventually become almost anti-shippers of Spuffy (and any other het pairings) and would be 'converted' entirely to slash. It wasn't their original taste, but they acquired it over time, and came to prefer it over what they'd originally enjoyed. The same was true for writers; almost everyone I read who stopped writing Spuffy didn't go for another het pairing, but went straight to slash.

Ladies, gentlemen, and other denizens of my friends list, meet kantayra and her theory of How Spuffy Traumatized Fandom and Made Fans Gay For Slash.

Lucy was admirably diplomatic: "You seem to have constructed a very elaborate theory here that is hinged on one very simple thing: you don't get slash."

I went a different route: "Congratulations. You have rooted out yet another sub-plot of The Homosexual Agenda. And soon enough we will RECRUIT YOU TOO." And then I appended a "/sarcasm" tag to the end of my comment, and frankly I'm worried that the post's author still may not get it, given the track record displayed just in this post. (Said post goes on and on and on, BTW, without making much if any more sense.)

It almost disturbs me more that so many of the comments are along the lines of "ZOMG you're so analytical I never thought of that" than that anybody would concoct a theory like this to begin with.

Did WAR GAMES turn anybody into a slasher? How about IDENTITY CRISIS, with its message of heterosexual relationships equalling doom? Or maybe it happened back during BRUCE WAYNE: MURDERER?

But wait, slash has been around for a long time. How did the first slashers get traumatised into it? Maybe it was seeing Kirk lose his space-babe-of-the-week week after week...

Comments

[ratcreature]

That is just bizarre. I wonder what the reverse theory would be,

I mean, I started out reading gen and slash (in TS and DS), and then got "corrupted" into reading het, and these days I'll read everything, and my best queer intention to avoid the heterosexual norm are all shot to hell. Ruined I tell you. There I was as a teenager baby dyke, happily reading lesbian mystery novels with lots of gratuitous sex, valiantly avoiding all heterosexual romance stories, and then I came into online fandom, which through the intermediate step of m/m romance got me to succumb to the evil het-ickyness... And I didn't even notice any trauma, so insidious was it. *g*

[buggery.livejournal.com]

::snickering::

Amusingly enough, I might have become an obverse example for kantayra's theory, if things had gone just a little differently. I had avoided both the BtVS show and its attendant fandom for years, thinking it would have little if anything to appeal to me (and having now seen the early seasons in repeats, I was right). Then a friend pimped Willow/Tara at me, and I sat up and said, 'Well, why didn't you tell me that before?' and tuned in.

Just in time for the last few episodes of season five.

So I came for the canonical lesbians, but I stayed -- and I even stayed past the end of BtVS into the final season of AtS, despite an intense disinterest in Angel himself, Cordy, Wesley, Harmony and most of the other regular cast -- for the Spuffy. It was a disorienting experience for me, because I'd been a slash fan since the mid-90s when I discovered slash online, and though I'd been a fan in the more general sense (a Trekkie initially and still, with a great many other media layered on afterwards after TOS ended) for years before then, I'd never been all about one or another 'ship in any of the other shows, films or books that made my fannish heart go pitter-pat. But I really was tuning in every week much more for the Spike/Buffy relationship than for any of the other characters, though I was fond of many of them for other reasons.

I did actually look for Spuffy fanfiction online, and found and read some, but... it failed to move me. None of it seemed to quite hit the button that what I was seeing on-screen did.

So I never went through the full transformation-of-fannishness-orientation -- does anyone, I wonder, in either direction? -- and when other fandoms *did* grab my pleasure centers with well-written fic, I went there.

I don't have many comics-based het 'ships -- though two of them, Roy/Grace and (sort-of het) Indigo/Shift, are enshrined in my icon there. Recently, Te has turned me into a CSA!verse Tim/Steph 'shipper. (In addition to my 6794 other DCU OTPs.) Maybe we should be trying to unravel her cunning plan -- or Judd Winick's in giving us canonical pairings that can interest slashers...

[ratcreature]

So I never went through the full transformation-of-fannishness-orientation -- does anyone, I wonder, in either direction?

Not that I have any empirical data (then again, who needs data to posit fannish theories? *g*), but I have a hard time to imagine that such preference transformations from het to slash or vice versa are permanent across a succession of fandoms. I mean, there are people who only like slash or only like het (and probably some who just prefer gen as well), but I think most people who are open to liking both kinds of fanfic will keep reading both, if to different degrees, just like people who go from completely mono-fannish to multiple fandoms, rarely go back to being *strictly* mono-fannish. Even if they may have a main major fandom as a focus again, usually people then still seem to be open to read in different and/or former fandoms under certain circumstances, like if a favorite author wrote something. I've seen in TS that sometimes people went from liking gen to liking gen and slash to reading just slash, and finally felt that gen didn't quite work for them anymore, but that was more that they were new to slash and really looking for things in gen, like certain h/c scenarios, that were better met by slash.

Not that some gen TS really seems all that gen if you look at it from a cross-fandom perspective. And I don't just mean that half the time people looking for stories they vaguely remembered (myself included) couldn't recall whether something was gen or slash. I mean, at its most extreme, I have read "gen" (as per the author's label) TS stories in which they showered together and masturbated each other, as well as "gen" TS stories in which they had anal sex in bizarre "bonding" situations. I never really understood why some writers labeled that kind of story "gen", and my first assumption that the authors had some weird reluctance to just call their stuff slash didn't work out, since some of those same writers also posted other stories to their sites in a slash section. Well in some respects TS fandom had truly weird quirks. *shrug*

[buggery.livejournal.com]

I think most often when others point to some fan as having started in het (or gen) and then was 'converted' to slash, more likely what happened was that the fan in question simply *discovered* slash, and it was (as it is for many of us) something she (she as in the gender-neutral pronoun for fen, there) had been yearning for for years without having a name to put to it.

I have read "gen" (as per the author's label) TS stories in which they showered together and masturbated each other, as well as "gen" TS stories in which they had anal sex in bizarre "bonding" situations.

I... that is not gen. I'm sorry. The closest you get to that kind of m/m sexual contact without it crossing out of gen-land is... uh, Deliverance. But yeah, there really were some profoundly weird terminology quirks in TS fandom, insofar as I know from my brief lurking round the edges.

[unlovablehands.livejournal.com]

I actually saw a theory elsewhere on comments about this assertion that something about B/S really appealed to people who like or would like slash. Something about the relationship played out pinged for people who more broadly would/did prefer m/m to m/f. I have no idea how true that is (I'm not sure how I feel about the "queerhet" assertion), but it doesn't seem to be totally out there.

[buggery.livejournal.com]

Innnteresting. Do send me the link if you should come across the thread(s) in question again...