Re: Fan fiction in general was: MOVED from MAIN - "sequels" to the classics

[sistermagpie]

> > Magpie:
> > I totally understand. I remember somebody who always wrote about 
> > Sirius saying that after he died they said, "Big deal, I'll just 
write 
> > fanfic that's AU!" but then they found they couldn't. 
> > 
> > That's another reason I don't like her constant off-the-cuff 
facts in 
> > interviews. They really can shut doors in your imagination for no 
> > reason.
> 
> Carol responds:
> 
> "AU"? In book production, "AU" is how an editor addresses the author
> in a Post-it note attached to the manuscript. How are you using it 
here?

Magpie:
Sorry--"AU" meaning "alternate universe." Meaning the person would 
just write stories where Sirius hadn't died and pretended it was an 
alternate universe where that didn't happen. There's lots of 
different types of AU stories, some of which just take one event that 
went differently, some make other changes. Comics do alternate 
universe stories a lot.

Carol:
Thanks, both of you. Sometimes, I feel as if I'm wandering in an
alternate universe just reading these posts about fanfic! Which
reminds me, I just arrived at a brilliant insight: I'll bet that the
term "slash" fanfic relates to the slash between the pairings, as in
Sirius/Remus (Sirius-slash-Remus), in which case, Harry/Hermione
(Harry-slash-Hermione) ought to be "slash," too, yet it's merely a
SHIP (relationSHIP, right?) Or am I way off-base here?

Magpie:
That is how the term slash started and I have met a few people who 
try to claim that Harry/Hermione is therefore also slash, but that's 
not how the word is used at all in my experience. Where there are 
some questions is whether slash is always male/male, whether it's 
slash if you're talking about a romantic couple that's already 
canonically single-sex (for instance, Queer as Folk fic) or if it 
would be slash if you took a gay couple and wrote one of them in a 
straight relationship! 

For myself, I use the most common definitions I've always heard: 
slash=male/male pairings of characters who are not canonically stated 
as gay in canon, female/female pairings with the same beginnings is 
femslash. The term used to describe something like Harry/Hermione 
would be het. Iow, it's all ships, but if it's m/m it's slash, if 
it's m/f it's het.

-m