Slash Fiction - Definition and Ambiguity

Definition and Ambiguity

Of the diverse and often segregated slash fandoms, each fandom has its own rules of style and etiquette, and each comes with its own history, favorite stories, and authors. Slash cannot be commercially distributed due to copyright, and up until the 1990s was either undistributed or published in zines. Today, slash fiction is most commonly published on LiveJournal accounts and other websites online. Legal scholars promoting copyright reform sometimes use slash fiction as an example of semiotic democracy.

The term slash fiction has several noted ambiguities within it. Due to the lack of canonical homosexual relationships in source media at the time, some came to see slash fiction as being exclusively outside of canon. These people held that the term "slash fiction" only applies when the relationship being written about is not part of the source's canon, and that fan fiction about canonical same-sex relationships is hence not slash. The recent appearance of openly gay and bisexual characters on screen, such as Willow and Tara in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the characters of Queer as Folk, Jack Harkness in Doctor Who, and numerous characters in Torchwood, has added much to this discussion. Abiding by the aforementioned definition leaves such stories without a convenient label, so this distinction has not been widely adopted.

Some slash authors also write slash fiction which contains transgender themes and transgender/transsexual or intersex characters. As a result, the exact definition of the term has often been hotly debated within various slash fandoms. The strictest definition holds that only stories about relationships between two male partners ('M/M') are 'slash fiction', which has led to the evolution of the term femslash. Slash-like fiction is also written in various Japanese anime or manga fandoms, but is commonly referred to as shōnen-ai or yaoi for relationships between male characters, and shōjo-ai or yuri between female characters respectively.

Due to increasing popularity and prevalence of slash on the internet in recent years, some use slash as a generic term for any erotic fan fiction, whether it describes heterosexual or homosexual relationships. This has caused concern for other slash writers who believe that while it can be erotic, slash is not by definition so, and that defining all erotic fic as slash takes the word away from all-ages-suitable homo-romantic fan fiction. In addition, a number of journalists writing about the fan fiction phenomenon in general seem to believe that all fan fiction is slash, or at least erotic in character. Such definitions fail to distinguish between erotic and romantic slash, and between slash, het (works focusing primarily on heterosexual relationships) and gen (works which do not include a romantic focus).

The slash mark itself (/), when put between character's names, has come to mean a shorthand label for a romantic relationship, regardless of whether the pairing is heterosexual or homosexual, romantic or erotic.