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brightknightie) wrote2014-09-06 10:06 pm
brightknightie) wrote2014-09-06 10:06 pm
Entry tags:
Fannish Vocabulary Trivia
(aka What do you call a gen story that sets the stage for a future romance? Anything?)
Is "pre-slash" still a significant genre label, or has it been subsumed into the orientation-agnostic "UST" label? If "pre-slash" is still in wide, active use, did it ever develop a het-specific equivalent? The nuances would be wrong for a precisely mirror term, I realize, as "pre-slash" often applied when building realizations or admissions from subtext rather than text, and het rarely requires foundation-up construction from subtext, but the precise use of words always interests me, and I've seen "pre-relationship" popping up more, too. How similar and how different are all these terms in today's general expectations? Has the emphasis shifted in recent years? Is it still "pre-slash" when the slash is canon?
(I've been reading OuaT, mainly Mulan/Aurora and Hook/Emma, so the question is primarily f/f-inspired now, though past experience with the term was primarily m/m from the sidelines of assorted other fandoms. The term never had wide utility in FK.)
Just curious!
Is "pre-slash" still a significant genre label, or has it been subsumed into the orientation-agnostic "UST" label? If "pre-slash" is still in wide, active use, did it ever develop a het-specific equivalent? The nuances would be wrong for a precisely mirror term, I realize, as "pre-slash" often applied when building realizations or admissions from subtext rather than text, and het rarely requires foundation-up construction from subtext, but the precise use of words always interests me, and I've seen "pre-relationship" popping up more, too. How similar and how different are all these terms in today's general expectations? Has the emphasis shifted in recent years? Is it still "pre-slash" when the slash is canon?
(I've been reading OuaT, mainly Mulan/Aurora and Hook/Emma, so the question is primarily f/f-inspired now, though past experience with the term was primarily m/m from the sidelines of assorted other fandoms. The term never had wide utility in FK.)
Just curious!
no subject
pre-slash has SOME proponents in the f/f category. There are those of use who doggedly tag things as "male slash" and "femme slash" to keep the male from being de facto and default?
no subject
I'm interested in your experience that UST "doesn't have to" "admit emotional entanglement"! I've never encountered it not doing so, but of course my few dearest fandoms, where I do most of my reading, are peculiar in many ways; in them, the emotional stakes around any new attraction and/or relationship are very highly charged by conspicuous mortality.
(I understand the unhappiness with the slash|femslash labeling issue. Similarly, and more pertinently in daily life, I feel, I detest friend|girlfriend, as privileging male friendship as the norm and degrading female friendship to needing the excuse of a special label (as well as contributing to confusion about whether the speaker means a platonic friend who is a woman or the woman the speaker is dating). Most of all, I detest the emergence of "fpreg" as a story tag, as if even "pregnancy" can't assumed to be a female experience by default!)
no subject
My experience is that it requires nothing but authorial intent. But mileage varies, I suppose.
DC Comic fandom was my playground for most of the years I was on Livejournal. There is a high percentage of non-emotional pairings over there (or people pretending not to have them) in the fic and art. So UST was commonly used on pairings based on "pretty/sexy" without necessarily needing to take them into "True Love" territory. (This may also have something to do with antagonistic pairings having a firm foot in the door.)
no subject
Ah! That makes perfect sense. Hero/Villain. I hadn't even thought of that, because it's so far from the norm in my own personal home fandoms.
(The UF is Hero/Villain, of course, but that's different. By present-day canon, there's nothing "pre-" about that relationship or "unresolved" about its tension, however we each choose to interpret the rest of it. ~grin~)
Below in this comment thread, Sholio makes an interesting observation that "UST" seems to be used more often to describe canon, while pre-slash and its spin-offs (apparently, pre-het and pre-OT3 do exist, although they're extremely rare; pre-relationship seems to be gaining more traction) are much more often applied to what the fanfiction is doing.
girlfriend
I have also noticed this usage. You know, once upon a time, it didn't exist: back in the sixties, "girlfriend" only implied romance/sex. When women started to refer to other women as their "girlfriends"—meaning simply friend-who-is-female—I found it seriously disconcerting. Still do, come to that.
no subject
In FK-terms, I would think it's maybe equivalent to Cousin?
What does UST mean, by the way? Haven't heard of that either.
Definitions
I've always understood UST to be primarily about emotions -- longing, pining, imagination, reflection, self-sacrifice -- rather than about sex, so I was a little surprised by Sharpest_Asp's note, above in this thread, that she's familiar with the term as applying primarily to physicality.
"Pre-slash" used to tell the reader: "This may look like a gen story, but it's actually not about a platonic friendship; it's about a budding romance." Generally, the term seemed to me to identify stories about two canonically heterosexual characters on their way toward a homosexual relationship. (This was from the days when there were next to no canonically homosexual characters in any public medium, so subtext was a constant question.)
I don't know whether the term is still used that way, or whether I ever truly understood it in the first place, which is why I'm asking.
Re: Definitions
no subject
Personally I've always felt a bit weird about the use of the term pre-slash, because if the pairing is strongly hinted with the implication that it'll develop further, then I think the story ought to be classified as that pairing (no "pre" about it), whereas if the pairing is so subtly implied that it can be easily overlooked, then I'd rather not have the author telling me that I'm "supposed" to be reading the story as pairing X/Y rather than gen. (Which applies to any sort of pairing, incidentally, not slash specifically.) And there's also a sort of double standard where people don't usually use pre-het anywhere nearly as widely, which I think goes back to slash being the "weird" case and het the default in terms of shipping. Still, I've occasionally found myself describing my own stories using that kind of terminology ("this can be read either as gen or as pre-whatever depending on reader preference") so it's probably hypocritical to object to other people doing it.
Personally I'd consider UST a more generic alternative -- and will consider using it for my own stories when necessary! -- but I also don't think it always applies to stories that are considered pre-slash (etc), since the characters themselves might not realize that UST is happening.
no subject
I think that you have an important insight there, where you speculate that "UST" may be used more often to describe the canon situation, while "pre-whichever" is used to describe the task set for the fanfiction story.
>"...whereas if the pairing is so subtly implied that it can be easily overlooked, then I'd rather not have the author telling me that I'm "supposed" to be reading the story as..."
Yes. I've often felt that if a pairing is implied, and the author instead wishes it to be explicit, then the author should rewrite the story to make the text do what the author wishes it to, and not try to make tags/labels/warnings outside the text force this interpretation for the reader.
But then I remember the widespread prejudice against gen.
It often seemed to me -- at least in years gone by; perhaps it's no longer like this! -- that some people were labeling their gen stories "pre-slash" in order to gain more readers. Gen stories got ignored. "Pre-slash" stories were almost as widely read as slash stories. The vast majority of readers wanted slash; and then the next demographic group down in population was the het readers; in so many fandoms, at least then, it seemed that only a slight minority genuinely desired gen.
>"...I also don't think ["UST"] always applies to stories that are considered pre-slash (etc), since the characters themselves might not realize that UST is happening."
You're absolutely right that "pre-relationship" (of whichever stripe) and "UST" aren't synonymous, although they very often overlap, depending on the fandom and the characters. The point you make here and the point Sharpest_Asp makes about Hero/Villain attraction in DC (above in this thread) both support that amply from completely different angles.
I do think that UST may also happen without the characters' conscious knowledge in some situations, though, equally as much as the characters may be unaware of "pre-relationship" unfolding around them. Especially for romantically inexperienced characters, or distracted or impaired characters, or characters with some obstacle from a belief system (honor, religion, code of conduct, etc.), the effects of UST may significantly affect their behavior before registering on their conscious perceptions.
So I suppose that the question of applicability, as we're defining the terms, comes down to who is supposed to know: the author, the reader, the characters. I think that we can dispense with the characters; they don't need to know what they're living through. ;-) I'd prefer the reader to know from the text, not only the tags. Some authors seem to want the reader to know only from the tags, though, not the text. Hmmmm.