Lit Ignorance is Bias: The Diversity Manifesto

Somehow it's more acceptable to tell the kiddiewinks about hired killers than it is to tell them "Some men fall in love with men and some women fall in love with women."

Jango is such a good role model, after all! You want your kids dressing up like Jango or Boba to show their fondness for Star Wars! But gay people? No sir, we don't want any of those where the kids might hear of them!
Pfeh.

 

It's more of a [specific type of family] friendly.

 

To me the term slash has never been about homosexual relationships, it has always seemed to refer to same sex porn when ever I have seen it mentioned. As in the primary point of the fic was to depict same sex couples in explicit sexual relationships on the page - basically stuff that does not happen on screen in the Star Wars universe.

To me it's a negative term, in the same way I view porn as a negative term. I do realize that this is no longer the basic definition and that actually bothers me a little. I'd like to see some sort of seperate terminology(if seperate terminology is needed at all) to describe same sex relationships.

I just googled "Star Wars Slash Fiction" and the of several stories I opened every single one had the main characters making love to each other in an explicit manner within the first ten paragraphes. That to me is something way different than an actual story involving a homosexual relationship and I don't believe they should be labelled in the same way.

I'm curious, has anyone tested TF.N Fan Fic forums to see if this is an enforced rule? Perhaps it is just my own certain point of view but I can't imagine a story involving say Goran and Medrit, presented as it was in the novels, being something edit worthy.

So count me in as someone who would like to see same sex relationships allowed in fan fic on this forum, but only if they meet Star Wars content levels for how sexuality is depicted on screen. I also believe that the stories should be labelled as containing elements that some people may find offensive, just so we are not trying to trick people who may bot be interested into reading something they may not be comfortable with.

The labels wouldn't be any different than someone labelling something like( K/J -Romance/Mush) like we see on a lot of fics now, just so readers could better sort out what they are looking for.

And of course if a story is tagged as "canon compliant" we shouldn't be seeing Obi-Wan and Anakin ending up in the threesome with Bail Organa.

 

I definitely heard a rule-enforcement story or two back in the day, but no idea what it's like currently.

 

The term slash started out in the Star Trek fandom. Kirk/Spock. More to do with pairing them than with them throwing their Starfleet uniforms across the room at every opportunity - though admittedly they did plenty of that, because when you get a popular pairing you'll get people writing at pretty much every level of explicitness or lack thereof. So slash-as-porn did not even start out as the basic definition.
And a slashfic needn't contain explicit sex; as someone who actually reads (and writes) the stuff I can assure you of that. Plenty of it contains no actual sex, or only implications that sex has taken place, or 'fade to black' sex in which we get enough kissing and so on to get a pretty good idea what'll happen next, and then the action picks up later on.

 

Considering how mush-dominated the TFN fanfic board currently is, I'm sure that if that rule came down we'd see a slash-fic explosion. I suspect (neither category of fanfic interests me in the slightest so I haven't looked) that several of the board's more prominent authors probably do have slash fanfiction under their names on FF.net or other venues where it is allowed.

 

I don't type up my slash fics. As with my... more mature artwork, those are part of a "private" collection.

 

That sounds.......illogical.

I'm not saying your wrong as your clearly going to be more well versed about this topic than I, but I do question why it then needs a special name?

I realize that it is not possible to figure out realistically but I would love to see a break down of how much "slash" fiction contains no over the top sexual scenes when compared to what regular Star Wars novels would contain.

Or perhaps a link to a couple Star Wars Slash Fictions that contain nothing that would seem out of the ordinary by Star Wars standards?

 

"Slash" mainly applies to the slash between the names. By that logic, any pairing, hetero or homo or robo or whatever, is slash. Unfortunately, due to a high number of fics involving sex, it earned slash that stigma.

 

Fanfiction.net doesn't have a 'slash' category, but if we're refering to the prevalence of explicit sex in general, it's possible to produce an approximation. There is a 'romance' category.

Currently FF.net's Star Wars category (the one under movies, unfortunately FF.net's classification system is segregated by media, which kind of leaves Star Wars in the lurch) contains the following ratings breakdown for romance:
K-Teen: 5,882
Mature: 1,103

Now, obviously not all those fics rated mature will contain explicit sex, many are likely rated for violence, but it provides an upper bound anyway.

Using the search function on the Star Wars category for 'slash' provides somewhat different results.
K-Teen: 680
Mature: 272

That would seem to indicate that slash fanfiction is more likely to get explicit than romantic fiction in general (worth noting that many of the fics returned under a
'slash' search do not categorize as 'romance').

For those who care, the overall ratings breakdown for Star Wars fics is as follows:
K-Teen: 26,224
Mature: 2,206

That would seem to suggest that first, explicit sex sequences are contributing to a whole lot of mature ratings (not surprising, in my experience with FF.net you can get awfully violent and still hide under 'teen') and second that even with that explicit sex is featured in a rather small proportion of stories overall.

 

Well, Gene Roddenberry did coin the term T'hy'la:
T'hy'la is an apocryphal term in Star Trek coined by Gene Roddenberry in an infamous footnote in his novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture; the footnote states that Spock thinks of Kirk as his t'hy'la, a Vulcan word that can mean "friend," "brother" or "lover."

Now, he didn't have to include that third definition, but he did. And that leaves some room for ambiguity.

As for why it needs a special name:
That lets people who want to read it find it more readily, and warns away people who don't want to read it. Plus, it creates a certain sense of community that some fanwriters find very important. You want to be around other fans who like what you like.

Some people like vast, elaborate AUs branching off from canon, retelling the story with some crucial element changed. Some people like stories in which the characters interact as children. Some people like other sorts of AU - at the moment on Tumblr there's an AU that sprang into being for Deep Space Nine - Deep Dish Nine, where all the characters are reimagined as working in a pizza place. Some people like dark fics. Some people like fluff. Some people like slash. And it's good to be able to find 'your people' - the ones who like what you like, the ones you can write for, or read fics by.

 

I'd still be interested in a couple links to Star Wars "Slash" Fictions that contain no overly descriptive sexual encounters.

But at the same time you seem telling me that the category is so vast at this point that it almost renders it meaningless imo. I'm going to see a story labelled as "slash", and associate the way I have, and complete miss out on an incredible story because I've read another story labelled "slash" which had the sole purpose of being a decent into pornography.

None the less I'm going to investigate what Mechalich has pointed out from fanfiction.net to see what I can learn.

 

You can always get a way with violence plenty of it. Star Wars has the advantage of having its main weapons not cause a lot of bleeding.

 

So would slash be always about romance?

Just trying to get a handle on things and narrow down this definiton a little.

 

The term "slash" was derived from the slash between character names, which signified a romantic pairing. If you look through our fanfic section, you'll see terms like L/M, H/L, J/J, B/T, etc. Those are basically telling you what characters would be involved in that story. The story itself needn't be explicit or feature same-sex relationships. But, technically, having "L/M" in your title makes it slash, by simply having that slash. Many may argue this, but if you go back to the basic definition of the term, it is derived from that slash, so any pairing, no matter what it may be, and no matter the story content, be it explicit or mushy, is slash.

 

Except not in practice. In practice, slash becomes m/m, femslash becomes f/f, and the rest just get called het.

Well, you could always do the clever thing and look at the rating and/or content warnings...

Slash features a romantic relationship between guys. It really is that simple. It might be against the backdrop of other genres, or be itself a backdrop genre.
But it would not likely be a genre in that style if it were not for the reactions people tend to get for the idea. In my opinion, in an ideal world, it wouldn't have to be.

Look, in terms of slash... I rate high to be on the safe side, to avoid people complaining about ohnoes, the dudes might be getting it on. But... no overly descriptive sexual encounters? Here. Thrawn/Pellaeon. I rated it M, one person rated it PG-13 instead. There's sex in it, but not particularly described. (So, like links that have swearing in, consider this the warning, okay?) It's only very short, because it was a quick fic written as a present for a friend.
And as for ones with no sex... I don't have a SW one, because I write very little SW slash, but here's a Star Trek: DS9 one - no sexual encounter, just some smooches and stuff. Garak/Bashir, which was practically canon anyway with the way the actors confirmed the undertones being there to some degree.
Plus, well, this is their first meeting in canon, so judge for yourself:

And they proceed to have lunch together for years after, get to go on adventures, find out each other's secrets...

 

So would Revelation be "slash" fiction?

I'm really trying to see the pro side of the arguement as to why TF.N should allow slash fiction, yet most of what I find seems to point right toward why TF.N doesn't slash fiction on its forums.

I mean look at your own response to TrakNar's comment "Not in practice". Its going to boil down to how it is percieved by the general audience. To me, after a couple days of looking at this, it seems to be a completely seperate issue that has little to do with actually having homosexual characters in fan fiction.

I mean most of the fics with "Shash" in their description on FF.n came up on my search there because someone had a "Not Slash" descriptor in the header. I think most people are going to get the wrong impression from the word as it stands now, no matter what the term actually means.

When I mention the word gay is the first thought that pops into mind something thats lively and fun? Thats what the word initially meant but I doubt very many people use the word in that way now.

 

Uh, no, the 'not in practice' was because in theory putting '/' between any two names would be slash. In theory that's so. In practice, the use of the term tends to get reserved for male/male. I assume you are familiar with the practice in the English language of things not actually meaning what a strictly literal interpretation would have them mean, yes?

Let me give you an example. Daala/Kyp, while it has the mark, would not be called slash. Furthermore, a fic that included that pairing would be permitted on this forum provided it kept to the content restrictions. Kyp/Corran, on the other hand, would be called slash. And would not be permitted on this forum, no matter how mild it was. (And hey, it wouldn't be the first pairing that required some emnity to be overcome first. Mara wasn't exactly keen on Luke first meeting...)

I could write a fic in which any sexual content is completely offscreen, but where they make up their differences by falling in love and settle down to raise adopted young otters, and it would still be forbidden, because it is two males in a romantic relationship.

 

I understand those types of stories are not allowed.

What I am looking at is an attempt to examine some of the reasons why they are not allowed, reasons that may or may not be beyond views on homosexuality.

When a lot of people see the word slash all that comes to mind is sex. Your telling me that it doesn't have to be just about sex, none the less I think that perception still remains for a lot of people. Nothing I've looked at in the past few days really changes my point of view so I think in the end we will just have to disagree.

I do hope that TF.N revisits their policy on including homosexual relationships as acceptable part of fan fiction .

 

I think one of our moderaters read a vader/palpatine slash and was scared by it. I was left to wonder Why Vader/palpatine!

I shudder to to think of it....Of all the character shudder!

 

Oh god, that's bad.

 

And Jello worked so hard on that, too!

Just for my own two cents--I've generally had very little to do with fanfic of any kind, but thinking back, my impression of slashfic was never that it was inherently explicit, more just that it existed solely to pair two characters off fan service-ishly. Kind of like fanfic B-movies--sure, it could be adult-rated, but the defining characteristic was pairing for the sake of pairing rather than actually trying to write a worthwhile larger story. Likewise, I thought the TFN ban was specifically on homosexual content of any kind, without "slash" coming into it--meaning that even Revelation, say, with a gay couple on the sidelines, would've been against the rules.

 

I suspect you could probably sneak homosexual content by the mods if you were careful. A male character who's married to another male character but they never physically meet in the course of the story perhaps.

As far as non-prejudical reasons to ban slash fiction though - there is one that comes to mind. The existence of slash fics (and other gender-bending permutations) tends to be among the first things mentioned when published author's complain about fanfiction. It is, after all, one of the most deliberate and obvious ways to challenge and twist authorial intent regarding a character. Fanfiction can be split into stories that honor what the author created and into those that distort and attack it (not just slash mind you, I once wrote a novel-length Naruto fanfic whose central thesis was how screwed up the universe had become). Obviously the later makes authors mad much faster and more likely to send out C&D letters.

Now, I do not find this reason compelling. On the subject of fanfiction I'm more inclined to say that authors should get off their copyright-protected high horse, but since sites that host fanfiction have to be careful (FF.net has a list of authors who have successfully fanfics based on their work from appearing on the site) it is possible that a 'no-slash' policy could represent some sort of compromise along those lines - whether or not it holds in the specific case of TFN.