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

[brightknightie]

I find that I rather like "pre-relationship" as an available classification. But I'm not yet clear on the nuances of its use. Is it an orientation-agnostic evolution from "pre-slash," needing no canonical validation, or does it presume a canonical relationship on the other side of the fanfiction?

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!)

[senmut]

Is it an orientation-agnostic evolution from "pre-slash," needing no canonical validation, or does it presume a canonical relationship on the other side of the fanfiction?

My experience is that it requires nothing but authorial intent. But mileage varies, I suppose.

I'm interested in your experience that UST "doesn't have to" "admit emotional entanglement"!

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.)

[brightknightie]

>"... DC ... antagonistic pairings ..."

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

[greerwatson]

"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 [...]"

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.