resonant | Pure chance (Reply)

Why am I a slasher? Maybe pure chance.

I first encountered the concept of slash in the mid-'90s, in an article in some tech-industry magazine. The article described a Next Generation-related slashzine called Science Friction, and somehow even after reading the whole article, I ordered the zine expecting it to be mostly meta.

Uh-huh. There was a nude drawing of Data on the cover, and the content matched.

I doubt I would have ordered a zine that I knew to be erotic fanfiction, het or slash; I thought my erotica needs were being fulfilled by romance novels (poor fool), which are of course much easier to read in public than zines with drawings of naked androids. And I doubt I would have ordered a zine that I expected to be meta about het relationships, because in some ways 99% of my culture can be seen as meta about het relationships. It was the queering of the text that interested me.

However, the only story from Science Friction that I remember with any sort of pleasure was actually mixed het and slash. And when I had gotten over my shock (and acquired personal internet access), I went looking basically for all varieties of nu-Trek erotica, particularly Voyager. I read Paris/Kim and Paris/Chakotay, and Janeway/7 and Janeway/Torres, and I also read Janeway/Chakotay and Paris/Torres and Chakotay/7. Without knowing it, I had lucked into one of those rare fandoms that had multiple interesting female characters and multiple non-creepy het pairings.

But the inevitable happened. One ravenous fan can read faster than five hundred authors can write, and eventually, despite all the mailing lists I had subscribed to, on one doomed day I ran out of Voyager fic. And in my desperate search for something else to read, I happened upon

flambeau's recs page.

Now, here's what that means: When I read het, I was reading it fairly indiscriminately; I just opened whatever came over the list and read it for as long as I could bear it. But when I read slash, I read it with torch's guidance. I got the good stuff.

When I'd read all the good stuff in Voyager, I began to read it in unfamiliar fandoms. One of them was Sentinel.

Sentinel became the first fandom I entered via the fanfic rather than via the canon. It became the first fandom in which I actually made direct contact with other fans. (My first-ever fan letter was to

cesperanza. I was too shy to say, "This really turned me on.") And naturally it became my first writing fandom.

But it all could have been different. I wasn't particular as far as gender. Bad het is more painful to me than bad slash, for a variety of reasons, but I was just as ready to enjoy good het as to enjoy good slash. Suppose that instead of torch's page, I had happened upon a recs page with equally high standards that was het-oriented rather than slash-oriented?

Well, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have been in Sentinel, for one thing; Sentinel's het possibilities were very weak. A het reader would probably have wandered into X-Files and thence into Buffy; that's where the interesting women were.

A het reader would have different friends. A het reader would be writing different things.

Except -- here's the strange thing -- a het reader probably wouldn't have been poking around in recs pages to begin with.

I was perfectly ready to enjoy reading good het, but het wouldn't have interested me enough to make me order a zine, because I was surrounded by it. Het wouldn't have interested me enough to make me seek out fanfiction, because there's non-fanfictional het everywhere.

I'm sure there's plenty of het out there that's just as good as the slash I love. But I doubt it would have inspired me to change my reading habits.

So if it weren't for slash, probably I'd still be up to my ears in romance novels.