All Change Here

[In this research work, I look at whether the tendency of romance writing to focus on heterosexual couples makes its plots predictable, and employ the medium of fanfiction to examine if a queer couple lend themselves better to a 'stereotypical' romance plot.]

4.1 Slash Fiction as Course Correction

As previously explained, slash fiction refers to any work of fanfiction centred around a same-sex pairing. Leavenworth (2015, p. 40) explains, ‘fanfic authors comment on and transform the canon through switched narrative perspectives, altered romantic combinations of characters, expansions of minor characters or scenes, or a play with the temporal boundaries in prequels and sequels.’ A majority of fanfiction is born out of a desire to rewrite elements of a story or media that would feel more satisfying to the author, either in terms of plot resolution, representation in characters, or both. In the case of slash fiction, it is overwhelmingly the latter, and there are various reasons why writing romance of a homosexual bent is so popular in a space dominated by women and queer writers (Lothian, Busse & Reid 2007).

There are many reasons women would turn to writing slash between two (often male) characters in a media over an established male/female romance within the same media: either because the romance is a foregone conclusion within the text by virtue of their genders (Jenkins 2012), or the reliance on heavily gendered tropes means there is an inequality introduced marking the man as dominant and the woman as submissive (Somogyi 2003). By effectively removing gender roles from the equation, the writer is allowed to develop a romance that feels more natural and defined by the established relationship between the two characters. This eventually becomes a key element of this particular investigation: whether the gendered tropes that persist in mainstream romances can still stand when rewritten as a queer romance, or if it negatively affects the protagonists and their relationship.

A common criticism of fanfiction—specifically fanfiction that includes original characters or those that are self-inserts or reader inserts—is the use of the term ‘Mary Sue’, which derives its name from an eponymous original character that was inserted into a piece of Star Trek fanfiction (Bacon-Smith 1991, p. 94), and according to Wikipedia is “a fictional character who is portrayed in an idealised way and lacks noteworthy flaws.” The Mary Sue term seeped its way into common fan discourse and soon became a justification for why fanfiction is considered frivolous, even narcissistic literature in some circles (Chander & Sunder 2007). However, owing to its origins as a powerful but invented female character, the term became synonymous with any female character in fanfiction that was the centre of her story and was ‘idealised’ and ‘too perfect’—traits that male characters have been given more leeway to be; because they are so prominent this perfect protagonist mould is expected from them, and is hardly noteworthy or taken exception to (Pflieger 1999). It makes the case for why female fanfiction authors would want to create these characters as a form of course correction: to give themselves agency and see more characters like themselves front and centre (Chaney & Liebler 2006), when there are so few female protagonists in mainstream media in the first place. 

Consequently, this extended to fanfiction writers who either insert original queer characters into a fictional universe or establish a canon character’s sexuality as queer. This correction of the absence of homosexuality in a piece of media can itself be defined as a form of Mary Sue writing (Chander & Sunder 2007). This extends to women that write slash fiction as well; to go against fixed notions of gender and affix a rare emotional element between two men, embracing the idea that sexuality is fluid once we move beyond these gendered boundaries (Jenkins 1992, p. 187–188). Kustritz (2003) explains that authors of slash fiction aim to ‘tear down the traditional formula of romance novels and films that negotiate the submission of a heroine to a hero by instead negotiating the complicated power balance between two equally dominant, independent, and masculine characters.’ Often this is a natural consequence of the formula several mainstream scripts follow: a male protagonist that is fully fleshed out with emphasis on his male ‘buddy’ character and the bond between them, whereas the female lead serves purely as a love interest with no real personality beyond admiring the male protagonist. It is no surprise then that slash fiction authors find little investment in the canonical ‘foregone conclusion’ male/female romance, and instead focus on developing an already existing wholesome bond between two men, by making romance a possibility. (Brandybuck 2004)

This breakdown of tropes employed by a film focused on a heterosexual pairing, and examining if they are too gendered to be sufficiently employed in a slash fiction or queer context, thus forms the backbone of the exegesis detailing the conception of the creative artefact.

4.2 The Resistance Against Queerbaiting

Wild (2020, p. 255) defines the practice of queerbaiting as ‘the trope of two male characters having a close friendship that can be read as romantic, but never crosses that line’. The BBC television series Sherlock has been most notoriously associated with this phenomenon, because the chemistry between its leads hasn’t gone unnoticed, with over 40,000 works on AO3 centred around the pairing of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Given our previous examination of why slash fiction authors prefer to develop an existing bond between two men (in this case, as opposed to the flimsy romance between Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler—who the BBC show introduced as being a lesbian, no less), a male bonding dynamic that has been in popular culture for over 250 years is fair game. However, the blatant hinting by the show’s script and writers that the two may exhibit some interest in the other, but never following up on it, caused the show to be openly accused of queerbaiting by both reviewers (Romano 2017) and fans (booksblanketsandtea 2017).

The showrunners and its cast have often dismissed the notion of the characters getting together as absurd, leading fans to accuse them of queerbaiting based on previous statements they made that suggested otherwise; in a 2010 interview, show writer Mark Gatiss calls the relationship between Holmes and Watson ‘desperately unspoken’, and showrunner Steven Moffat went a step further opining that fans’ readings of their canon might cause the show to derail (Click & Brock 2016). Though there is no confirmed fifth season for the show and its leads have engaged themselves with other major work, fans still hold out hope that the pair will get together in a romantic context owing to the ‘disappointing’ conclusion of the fourth season—which still posited them in their nebulous platonic intimacy. 

Ng (2017) demonstrates the importance of paratext and context in establishing why these queerbaiting accusations are made: in the case of Sherlock, as we have seen, author intent over the relationship of the lead pair was consistently unclear. This was coupled with some misleading promotional material for the fourth season suggesting Holmes would reveal a dark secret to his best friend, Watson—and that he was also in love with someone. For queer individuals within the audience, especially, this kind of queerbaiting might be viewed as a form of symbolic violence (Floegel & Costello 2019), denying them a chance to see a romance like theirs on screen; and writing fanfiction is a way to consume this largely heteronormative media in a more satisfying manner (Ng 2017). Thus, the push to write slash fiction centred around Holmes and Watson—or any other pairing in any other media of two same-sex individuals with a deeply close bond—can be viewed as another form of course correction, to counteract the suggestion that queer identities cannot be represented in the mainstream (Wild 2020). Roland Barthes (1967) in his famous manifesto repeatedly states that author intent becomes irrelevant once the reader begins to read and draw their own conclusions; the reader is the consumer, and fills in any gaps in storytelling with their own logical conclusions—and we can infer a minority reader would employ this same principle to fill in gaps in media left by not seeing characters that are the same as them. The art of writing slash fiction is thus a way to retaliate against queerbaiting, to grant power back to the reader over an author’s ambiguous intent and lack of representation—an author who is often straight, white or male, the opposite of the average fanfiction writer (Fiesler 2019).

There is plenty of existing research on slash fiction on its own, centred around the reasons for both its popularity and denigration. Not enough investigation has been conducted on its potential as a subversive writing device—mostly because the practice of writing slash fiction is still perceived as leisure done for cheap laughs (Wild 2020)—but there are reasons behind its popularity in female- and queer-dominated online spaces, owing to the dissatisfaction of these individuals over their representation in the mainstream. As a queer individual myself, it is thus clear that my contribution to this research would be to attempt this subversion based on these concerns other fanfiction writers have expressed; to justify readers who aim to highlight gaps in media by writing slash fiction. This also justified my methodology of choice being a practice-based autoethnography.