|
Stormcloude explained it rather well. Sorry about that; I didn't even realize I'd slipped into subcultural jargon.
For those who haven't looked it up, by the way, "slash" comes from the description of homosexual pairings as, for example, "Kirk/Spock", pronounced "Kirk-slash-Spock". At the time of the term's creation (there is some speculation that it may predate Star Trek), those matchups were by definition non-canonical. I don't write for, or generally read, anything particularly modern, so I'm not sure if that would be correctly used for fanfic about a canonical gay pairing, or what exactly one would call a story splitting up a canonical gay couple and pairing either or both with a heterosexual partner. Back when the whole concept was taboo on TV, that never came up.
I think the major point about fanfic that anyone should take away from this is that it embraces just about everything. Reading a random fanfic story on the Pit is no more a gauge of the quality of good fanfic than reading a random story on Smashwords is of the quality of good indie writing.
By the way, for the uninitiated, "the Pit" is short for "the Pit of Voles", which fanfiction.net is called by its detractors (and even its fans) for some reason I'm a bit unclear on. FFN is the largest public fanfic archive, almost totally unmoderated, and prone to demonstrating Sturgeon's Law to the utmost. I'm not sure what it says about me that you can find my writing there.
|