Some explanations are crass: ‘It gets them hot, and the same is true of straight men.’ Another strategy for explaining away feminine sexuality is to suggest that as the authors are usually adolescent straight women, they might only be familiar with heterosexual and heteronormative sex that is, the feminization part is a happy accident, and if these budding Jane Eyres were more familiar with masculine expressions of sexuality, they would include themselves along with their Mr Rochesters. Somebody is always bleeding or feverish or concussed or mutilated or amnesiac or what-have-you in these tales.’įan Studies scholars, fanfic writers and armchair psychologists alike have offered dozens of explanations about why this medium is female-dominated. In fact, so paralyzing are these worries and scruples and hesitations to the two characters involved that over and over again the lovers must be pushed together by some force outside themselves. ‘These endless hesitations and yearnings resemble the manufactured misunderstandings of the female romance books (themselves sexual fantasies for women). In her brilliant and prescient essay, ‘Pornography For Women, By Women, With Love’, Joanna Russ describes the traditional roots of the intense and stereotypically feminine pair-bonding that underpins most slashfic: Even when, as in the fantasy scenario aboard the starship Enterprise, the characters are male, slashfic tends to lack deep homoeroticism. These are not typically masculine expressions of sexuality. In some stories, a character even gets pregnant - works in this literary sub-genre are called ‘mpreg’ (male pregnancy). Slash emphasizes themes like nurturing, bonding (often telepathic), and intense, lifelong commitment. Surveys of slashfic also show that it is an inherently feminine expression of erotica. What captivates fans and Fan Studies departments alike about slash is that it’s principally written by and for frequently adolescent, cisgender heterosexual women. After all, who’s going to believe that Kirk would take Spock over…well, any female Earthling who moves? The couplings need not be true to life: usually they’re pure fantasy. It’s named for the slash between names that denotes the couple depicted (e.g., Kirk/Spock from Star-Trek, or Louis/Harry from One Direction), and it’s one of the most common genres of fanfiction. Slash is any fanfic that’s anchored in a homosexual relationship. In fact, one might argue that slash took center stage during fanfiction’s big moment. The general public became acquainted with concepts like ‘slash’.
Upload numbers were estimated to be well into the millions for stories about One Direction alone - and that was small compared to properties like Star-Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter or the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Fanfiction’s influence on the mainstream was staggering. It was also widely known that these weren’t exactly flukes. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey and Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instruments).
The New Yorker opined about fanfiction’s future, and even the ‘paper of record’ found something fit to print (several times).īy 2015 it was common knowledge that your fanfiction could score you a multimillion-dollar book deal or a blockbuster movie series (see: E.L. Jezebel and BuzzFeed both marveled at the Omegaverse, not once, but twice each. VICE commented on the ubiquity of fanfiction about the boy band One Direction and the impact of Fifty Shades, among other things. Vulture published ‘It’s a Fan-Made World: The Fan Culture Revolution’.
Finally, it wasn’t just the diehard fans who wanted to participate: it was everyone or, at least, what felt like everyone.
After nearly 30 years of hiding - first in handmade snail-mail fanzines, then in closed-off fan communities online, then on websites like LiveJournal, Fanfiction and AO3 (An Archive of Our Own) - ‘geek culture’ broke into the mainstream.įor a moment, fanfiction was everywhere. In the 2010s, fanfiction had a serious moment in the United States.