Fannish Vocabulary Trivia

[brightknightie]

(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!

Comments

[pj1228]

I'm reading the term pre-slash for the first time here, so I can't contribute any wisdom to its significance.
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

[brightknightie]

"UST" is an acronym for "Unresolved Sexual Tension." For example, in FK's "Only the Lonely," you may interpret Nick's behavior toward Natalie as brotherly, as he claims, or you may interpret it as influenced by UST -- a strong attraction that is going unacknowledged by the principals. (Or both! Nick's complicated. ~grin~)

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

[pj1228]

Thank you for the explanations.