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

[sholio]

I still see people use the term pre-slash from time to time, though I think it's rarer than it used to be ... or at least I thought so, but I just searched it on AO3 and got 15K hits, so I guess it's still pretty widely used! (For comparison, pre-het and pre-OT3, i.e. a threesome, got a couple hundred hits each. Pre-relationship gets around 20K hits; presumably all the different variations, pre-slash and so forth, are grouped under that search term. "Unresolved sexual tension" gets around 7700 hits, which is kind of a surprise to me - it seems like that one gets used a lot, but maybe it's just mostly when people are talking about canon, rather than fic!)

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.

[brightknightie]

Thanks for checking those tag totals! That's interesting data.

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.