Your thoughts on yaoi

[schmevil]

Although I read (and sometimes write) slash, I've never really considered slash to be an important part of my fannish identity. I'm as likely to fall for a het ship, or femslash ship, as a slash ship, and it's even more likely for me to not ship much of anything at all. And although I have many friends in the slash community, I don't consider it to be my fannish home base.

So what makes a slasher? Are you a slasher? Why do you consider yourself to be (or not to be) a slasher?

[Poll #1347864]

Comments

[parsimonia.livejournal.com]

I'm more into genfic than anything else, but I will read slash on occasion. I'm not really into het or slash, smut or romance, to begin with. My tendency not to read slash probably stems from me usually being very canon-oriented, so I have a low tolerance for plots or pairings that I can't see happening in canon. But once and I while I'll read something different.

That said, being a member of s_d, I certainly enjoy contemplating the slashy subtext in things.

[schmevil.livejournal.com]

I'm very canon-focused in my fannishness too, but when I find a fandom that inspires me to write fic, I'm comfortable straying very far from canon. I've never been much for filling in the gaps - I'd rather take the story in another direction entirely. *g*

I guess I alternate between high concept AUs and domestic, character studies. In Smallville I wrote a story about Lex and Clark eating pie, but I also wrote a story about Lex finding religion and disassembling the universe. I think the main reason I don't write a lot of slash, is that I don't write a lot of romance, period.

Do you tend to stick to fic that reads as an extension of canon?

[parsimonia.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I tend to go for fill-in-the-gaps/behind-the-scenes type stuff, or ones that are based on current canon and kind of speculate from there.

Then again, if it's crack/comedy, I don't care if it breaks canon extensively.

I also tend to like short fics or drabbles, as I often don't have the time or patience to keep up with long or multi-chapter ones. One exception that I can think of, though, is shoebox_project (when I still read HP fic), but I think I started reading that before books 6 and 7, so it was technically less AU then.

[schmevil.livejournal.com]

My first love in Harry Potter was Snape. Then came Lily, Ron, Pansy and some other people, until I circled back around to Snape. As a result, I never did get around to reading Shoebox.

Tbh, I'm not a big fan of 'crack', because too often calling your fic crack seems to be an excuse to write a bunch of random, unrelated sentences, about fictional constructs that can't truly be called characters (so lacking are they in internal cohesion). The only fandom in which I'm comfortable diving into unreced crack is Stargate Atlantis.

When it comes to comedy, I have the same standards as I do for drama or adventure: it can break canon, but the characters have got to be IC.

[parsimonia.livejournal.com]

I can deal with a little OOC-ness for the sake of comedy, but nothing that goes so far as to make the characters unrecognizable.