strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Feb 11 03: in from the cold
Damn. It is freezing outside: at last report, 24°F/-4°C. I am presently a very slow typist as a result. I just came home from seeing Elena Faro, tax lady extraordinaire, who’s got me lined up for a refund. Shout oh yes!
notes from the doctors
Paul’s father has full function in his hand, which is a good thing. My own father is now back from the hospital as well, having had the other knee replaced last week. I look forward to going for a walk with him once he’s back up to speed, which admittedly could take a while but it beats where he’s been. Hi, Dad.subcultural moment
Just so we’re clear, Paul’s threats to write Tommy Walsh/Andy Kane slash were a joke. Don’t want y’all thinking he’s some kind of perv. But it is a funny idea.And for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about: slash fiction, a subgenre of fan fiction (aka fanfic), is one of those things that was stayed on the outer fringes of fandom until the advent of the Internet, at which point it stayed fringy but at least had a more universally accessible platform. By ‘fandom’ I mean that particular strain of mediaphiles devoted to science fiction and/or ‘fantasy,’ whether their specific passions were for television, paperback novels, comic books, films, or whatever. You know: geeks. Fan fiction is any fiction written (a) about characters from an established pop-culture continuity and (b) by somebody other than the continuity’s copyright-holders or his/her/its official ghostwriters/scriptwriters. It is generally written to be circulated among other fans, and nobody sees any profit off it.
To my knowledge slash was born amongst the Trekkers. Fanfic isn’t going to be televised and doesn’t have to worry about sponsors, time constraints, budgetary concerns, &c., so it gets to explore the source material’s themes and plot elements with more breadth, depth, and daring than the source does. Star Trek’s fanfic writers, and its female fanfic writers in particular, often used this opportunity to write about romance in the Utopian future. And because (a) this was the 1960s and (b) the show’s most prominent characters were male, you started to see a lot of male-male relationships. Suddenly there were Kirk/Spock stories and Sulu/Scotty stories. Some were tender romances; some were tawdry pornography. Presumably, the best of them were both.
And now? Your show isn’t a hit if somebody isn’t writing slash about it. Buffy/Willow? Check. Crichton/Dargo? Mais bien sûr.
Given that Changing Rooms and Ground Force are home-improvement shows, and as such don’t have much of a plot, they don’t really lend themselves to short fiction. But the net is as big, and as weird, as humanity’s assembled passions. If the first stories haven’t surfaced yet, there’s doubtless some hot-blooded obsessive working on a draft. I feel better just knowing that.