When the original just isn't enough

April 11, 2007 12:50 AM

When the usual fanfiction fare just doesn't cut it ... there's shipping and then there's slash, with coined terms such as squick and mpreg. The usual suspects are Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and the Phantom of the Opera - and then there's Kirk/Spock, Hermione/Ginny, Cloud/Sephiroth, and lots more. And it's not limited to recent works - there's also some Jesus/Judas Biblical action going on. (Mostly text, with the occasional NSFW jpg.)
posted by Xere (50 comments total)

What, no mention of doujinshi?

Cloud/Sephiroth fic is nothing, nothing I tell you, compared to the sheer crackiness of an fan-drawn comic in which Sephiroth and Pikachu are playing golf with Vincent Valentine as the stakes.

(Pikachu wins. Smexing ensues. Brain bleach not included.)
posted by Smilla's Sense of Snark at 1:02 AM on April 11, 2007

You also forgot the truly staggering amount of Stargate slash fiction presently online. This one, for instance, has hundreds of stories--most of which seem to have the Daniel Jackson character having ghey sex with someone.....
posted by metasonix at 1:19 AM on April 11, 2007

I knew this stuff existed; I've seen too many deviantart drawings of Sephiroth/Cloud bare chested and all upons. But I never read the source, the textual fount from which such fantasy bursts forth. For me, this post reassures me that it exists and is not some internet legend. Otherwise, I will not click through those ever, no no, no ever. Though, I think I read something that convinced me that Kirk/Spock slash actually could be pulled off in the science fictiony realm that it exists in via some pon farr hijinks. Or was that an essay about fan fiction that forced Trek characters to act out of character?

Smilla: zomg. ZOMG. ZOMG, Pickachu? (also, I didn't know that "smexy" came in gerund flavor)
posted by Mister Cheese at 1:39 AM on April 11, 2007

This is my favorite source of truly WTF-licious slash fiction.

Well, that and this.
(Most of the promised categories don't have links, but the ones that do are, ah, exactly as promised. )
posted by palmcorder_yajna at 1:57 AM on April 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

Sigh.

Back in my day kids only had Mulder/Scully, Mulder/Skinner, Skinner/Scully, Skinner/CSM, CSM/LG, Scully/Samantha, Krycek/Mulder, Mulder+Krycek/Skinner, WMM+CSM+LG+Mulder+Krycek/Scully, Melissa/Scully, Scully+Melissa/Covarrubias, Spender/hand lotion--to only scratch the surface.

(I never dared peek at any of those, either.)
posted by maxwelton at 2:05 AM on April 11, 2007 [3 favorites]

Mister Cheese: Yep, Pikachu tops! (Immediate link is work safe, but clicking through to the image links therein is perhaps not entirely safe for work, or sanity.)

Remember, kids, fandom is fucking funny Serious Business!
posted by Smilla's Sense of Snark at 2:09 AM on April 11, 2007

That Freud/Jung drabble totally made my day, palmcorder. That's got to be the funniest thing I've seen since the gal who was writing inanimate object pairings (Desk/Chair, Fork/Spoon...ending in a cutlery drawer orgy) and meta-slash, wherein one fandom molested another and gave birth to a crossover.
posted by Smilla's Sense of Snark at 2:17 AM on April 11, 2007

Onan/Onan

*snickers*
posted by lovecrafty at 2:33 AM on April 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

Goku/Anne Frank
posted by granted at 3:09 AM on April 11, 2007 [2 favorites]

Goku/Anne Frank Part 2
posted by granted at 3:13 AM on April 11, 2007

I would be remiss not to note all the lulz to be found at Very Wrong Slash -- a LJ community for such neglected OTPs as Thor/Cthulhu, Alton Brown/Mike Rowe, Azathoth/Nyarlathotep, or Ratzinger/Jesus.

Or how about Mac Hearts PC? Bill Gates/Steve Jobs? Or Daily Show/Colbert Report fic?

(Note that Real Person Fic/Slash is a somewhat divisive topic in fandom circles. It probably doesn't help that the tinhat brigade of Real Person ficcers are batshit insaneconvinced that their favorite pairing IS REAL. Although that's probably not any goofier than the folks who think they're married to their favorite characters on the astral plane.)
posted by Smilla's Sense of Snark at 3:44 AM on April 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

...convinced that their favorite pairing IS REAL.

Overheard on Slashdot: "You guys make Galaxy Quest look like a documentary."
posted by localroger at 5:06 AM on April 11, 2007

Don't forget The Cuming of Jizzus! The world truely needs more faith based porn.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:25 AM on April 11, 2007

Roy Orbison in Clingfilm: "If you have written any stories about Roy being completely wrapped in clingfilm please send them to me and I may put them up on the site."
posted by gimonca at 5:36 AM on April 11, 2007

I love how the Orbison-Clingfilm dude is like "I may put your story up on my site." As if he's in a constant deluge of Roy Orbison getting plasticed wrapped stories that he doesn't have the time to sort through all the unsolicited submissions he receives on a daily basis.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 6:23 AM on April 11, 2007 [2 favorites]

I used to threaten to write slashfic in which Lieutenant Fish arrests Tessio.

As it turns out, you could practically rob a bank with the threat of Vigoda-on-Vigoda fanfic.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:44 AM on April 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

Hee. It's so cute when outsiders discover slash for the first time...
posted by Karmakaze at 6:54 AM on April 11, 2007

The coding for 'slash' and 'ship' fan fiction was taken, with some modification, from sex story coding as evolved in the alt.sex.stories usenet newsgroup and its subsidiary communities, such as alt.sex.stories.moderated and the associated web-based portal (NSFW).

Since most readers of those stories are interested only in very specific sorts of sexual situations, these codes help readers zero in on the stories they would most enjoy and avoid those that would 'squick' them.

The system has developed several quirks over the years; one I find particularly fascinating and revelatory is the difference between the MFF code (pairing of two chicks and a dude) and MMF (pairing of two dudes and a chick). In the first some homosexual contact is almost invariably assumed, while in the second direct contact between the male participants is usually notated with an additional bi tag.

Why? It could be a statement as to the demographic of the A.S.S. audience, or it could be a simple reflection of the anatomical differences between male and female. More likely, it is a combination of both.
posted by The Confessor at 7:02 AM on April 11, 2007

Oh, Dear. Now my brain is locked on: Find Disgusting Topics For Slash Fic

I am forced to admit to myself that somewhere Bertie Wooster is already having it on with Jeeves and Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright and Alice in Wonderland has probably taken on the Walrus and the Carpenter, but the possiblities for historical character hook-ups is much more fertile ground for disgust:

Hitler and Einstein
Eleanor Roosevelt and Rin Tin Tin
Mother Theresa and Britney Spears
Jerry Garcia and Jaquilyn Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover

Ugh. Worst Parlor Game, Evah!
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 7:29 AM on April 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

Slash is one of those things that, if you don't know what it is, you don't want to know what it is.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 9:13 AM on April 11, 2007

If you want to see the most horrifying Real Person Slash Google for boy band slash or as it came to be known as: Pop Slash.

The majority of slash gets started with a TV or movie where there is at least two male leads, or an ensemble cast with a plethora of hot actors. And if said TV or movie has sci fi or fantasy elements, then you're really playing with dynamite. Try looking for Buffy slash - Google will collapse with all the hits.
posted by Ber at 9:57 AM on April 11, 2007

Secret Life of Gravy, I hesitate to mention this since it will not end well, but you can always start posting slash fan fics involving metafilter users. Do those belong in this thread? Or MeTa?
posted by jeffburdges at 10:15 AM on April 11, 2007

jeffburdges, that sound like a good idea, because I'm drunk.
posted by Anything at 10:59 AM on April 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

Shit, there's still none at MeTa either.
posted by Anything at 11:02 AM on April 11, 2007

Wait, didn't slash predate fanfic? I mean, slash is as old as Star Treck original flavor right? Fanfic broadened slash to include non-sexual scenerios - or am I totally off?

Please slash and fanfic fans, enlighten me!
posted by serazin at 11:32 AM on April 11, 2007

I can't believe I just wrote 'Treck'. Please set your phasers on 'kill'.
posted by serazin at 11:34 AM on April 11, 2007

Serazin--

Not sure, but for anyone interested in reading about K/S fiction from a cultural studies perspective, I recommend NASA/Trek, by Constance Penley. The overall thesis (applicability of slash as a theoretical model to the way NASA has constructed its identity), I found a little far-fetched, but the parts that dealt exclusively with Trek slash were great.

(After reading it, I became briefly fascinated by K/S mpreg stories, because they apparently are strongly disfavored, a ghetto within a ghetto. This caused my husband to marshall about a dozen of our friends and produce a K/S mpreg 'zine for me for my birthday. My whole party, actually, was K/S mpreg themed-- and one friend painted a large watercolor portrait of Kirk as the Madonna, holding a baby Jesus-Spock, with pantsless little Chekov and McCoy cherubs hovering behind them. Between the theme and the chocolate cake shots, it was a scarring, scarring birthday. The best and scarring-est birthday ever, actually. )
posted by palmcorder_yajna at 12:13 PM on April 11, 2007 [2 favorites]

pix, kthx?
posted by Anything at 12:32 PM on April 11, 2007

um. that jesus/judas link will take you to a livejournal community in which there is posted a story about jesus having sex with a whale that has inexplicably fallen from the sky. a whale. from the sky. that breathes fire.
posted by wreckingball at 1:05 PM on April 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

Ah. Fanfiction is truly the bottom of the barrel. Every sentence is a dagger in my brain.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 1:11 PM on April 11, 2007

This discussion has prompted me to query Wikipedia to see what exactly what it was I'm missing.

You people are all deviants. Sick, sick deviants.

::sobs quietly in the corner::

Touché, Steven C. Den Beste.
posted by Mayor West at 1:20 PM on April 11, 2007

Granted:

I actually found that story rather sweet. The subtext seems to be: "I have found a fandom that is beautiful and powerful and can save people! My fandom could have rescued Anne Frank and also could totally have kicked Hitler's ass!"

It's almost idealistic. It's like there's genuine hope in some of the icky things the kids do to gross us codgers out.
posted by palmcorder_yajna at 1:40 PM on April 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

I have found a fandom that is beautiful and powerful and can save people! My fandom could have rescued Anne Frank and also could totally have kicked Hitler's ass!"

If that were a little less coherent it could be a Wesley Willis lyric.
posted by oats at 5:17 PM on April 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

Palmcorder, I thought it was sweet, too. I wonder what Jeff Mangum would think?
posted by granted at 5:38 PM on April 11, 2007

Man, this is a thread that keeps on com giving. I propose:
- Q²: Q/Borg Queen
- Filthy Rich: Pigpen/Richie Rich
- Hello-Goodbuy: Hello Kitty/Crazy Eddie
- Trancefarmers: Sigmund Freud//Eddie Albert/Arnold Ziffel
posted by rob511 at 6:10 PM on April 11, 2007

Ugh. Worst Parlor Game, Evah!

Ah, SLoG, you'd have absolutely HATED the game some of my coworkers and I used to play. Before the popularization of Google Seppuku, our own little version of brain-bleach internet roulette was to try to come up with obscure porn fetishes and/or bizarre fanfic pairings that COULDN'T be found online. (I think the worst unfindable Unholy Grail was the suggestion of "Mama's Family" slash.

As for the history of fanfiction, if you're willing to include the publication of unauthorized sequels, etc., it can be argued to vastly predate Star Trek. Even if you stick purely to the modern era, the earlier part of the twentieth century had something of an amateur publishing boom, and as noted in the earlier Wikipedia link there were some authors like H.P. Lovecraft who published material in both professional and amateur publications -- and on the amateur side of things, some of these writers of weird tales, fans and published professionals alike, at times played with each other's creations, not unlike modern shared-universe fanficcers. But even if you skip ahead to the world of the mimeographed Star Trek fanzines of the 60s and 70s, "gen" and het stories seem to predate the first widely published Kirk/Spock slash by several years. (Which isn't to say that the stuff may not have been circulating privately before those early slashers got bold enough for fanzine publication.)

That particularly loathed badfic trope, the original "Mary Sue" (or "Gary Stu") character, also gets her name from Trek fanfiction, although in her defense that first named Mary Sue was a parody of the over-idealized/authorial self-insert character so often found in poorer specimens of fanfic (or, for that matter, professionally published media -- characters like Wesley Crusher or Anita Blake have often been criticized as "canon Stus" or "canon Sues"). But much like fanfiction itself, this character trope also seems to have a history that extends further back than modern media fandom -- in 150 Years of Mary Sue, Pat Pflieger links common traits in the depiction of modern Sues to the idealized creations of juvenile authors publishing in 19th century children's magazines.
posted by Smilla's Sense of Snark at 6:52 PM on April 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

I became briefly fascinated by K/S mpreg stories, because they apparently are strongly disfavored, a ghetto within a ghetto.

It's not just K/S mpreg -- some gen or het writers and readers really don't care for slash or femmeslash very much, and even within the circles of slash fans mpreg is far from universally loved. Mind you, its cliches can at times inspire some hysterical snark.
posted by Smilla's Sense of Snark at 7:06 PM on April 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

Years ago, The Geek Hierarchy pointed out that the very lowest sort of geek, the geeks at the very bottom of geek society, the geeks that every other geek can feel superior to are:

"People Who Write Erotic Versions of Star Trek Where All the Characters Are Furries, Like Kirk is an Ocelot or Something, and They Put a Furry Version of Themselves as the Star of the Story"

It's just now dawned on me that this was not mere comedic hyperpole: these stories must actually exist.

I'm now very afraid.
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 7:20 PM on April 11, 2007

Smilla-- Damn. I think I'm going to print that out and take it to the bar tonight for a dramatic recitation.

And again I say, damn.
posted by palmcorder_yajna at 7:22 PM on April 11, 2007

Isn't that a thing of demented beauty, palmcorder? Admittedly, I was desperately sleep-deprived and more than a little tipsy when I first found that discussion, but I laughed like a loon the first time I read it, and even on repeat readings phrases like "arsebiscuit" and "conveniently vague cancer of the, um, gloidulus" still reduce me to helpless gigglefits.
posted by Smilla's Sense of Snark at 7:28 PM on April 11, 2007

I wonder what Jeff Mangum would think?

Either he'd hate it, or it would cause him sit in a small, dark room poring endlessly over every Dragonball Z episode, like Henry Darger with a Dick and Jane book.
posted by palmcorder_yajna at 7:29 PM on April 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

...and a cursory search suggests that there is in fact no Vivian Girls fanfiction out there. Tsk, tsk, tsk.
posted by Smilla's Sense of Snark at 8:11 PM on April 11, 2007

mpreg? That's a thing?! Good God.

I thought I had seen everything when I discovered that there was a livejournal community devoted to Scrubs fanfic, and that there were hundreds of them, and that the overwhelming majority were JD/Dr. Cox slash.
posted by SoftRain at 8:38 PM on April 11, 2007

It's just now dawned on me that this was not mere comedic hyperpole: these stories must actually exist.


Well, hrm, the closest I've seen was multi-fandom and much heavier on Dr. Who and Blake's 7 than Trek. And they were all just regular cats...well, anthorpomorphised regular cats...not ocelots and stuff like that. And it was more of a romantic comedy where all the regulars including the self-insert characters got turned into cats for the sake of further silliness, not actual furry erotica.

But, um, yeah. I really, really would not be surprised in the slightest if there was honest-to-god furry Star Trek porn with a furry Sue/Stu lead. Because there is definitely weirder shit out there in Trek-land or Furry-land on their own, and smashing together genres and fetishes like that can definitely lead to some high weirdness.

I'm now very afraid.

You should be.

Be particularly glad I was too lazy to hunt down and link the Scooby-Doo/Thundercasts crossover porn I once found. Believe me, some phrases should never ever be uttered in the heat of passion, and "Jinkies!" is high on that list.
posted by Smilla's Sense of Snark at 8:56 PM on April 11, 2007

"People Who Write Erotic Versions of Star Trek Where All the Characters Are Furries, Like Kirk is an Ocelot or Something, and They Put a Furry Version of Themselves as the Star of the Story"

The hell of it is, that's about four years old, and in the intervening time, the nadir of What We Sons and Daughters Of Genre Are Capable Of Putting Forth has dropped, and dramatically. These days, the ocelot-Kirk Mary Sues are very nearly mainstream.

Now, in jolly old 2007, the kid chained beneath our collective Omelas would have to be something along the lines of:

People who believe they're soulbonded to Hurley from Lost, (only Hurley's actually a six-tailed, thirty-six nippled baby skunk, who can turn into a dragon) and who post on the Portal of Evil forums asking for advice, because they're worried that skunk-Hurley might be cheating on them, on the astral plane.
posted by palmcorder_yajna at 2:56 AM on April 12, 2007 [2 favorites]

Ayup. My husband (who is not on Metafilter) just sua sponte showed me an example of Pac-Man erotica (which is available for your reading pleasure in this fine periodical).

Anything you can think of, from Sherman T. Potter, to Mary Cheney, to Jell-O Dessert, has been incorporated into a sexualized fandom of some sort. Cheers!
posted by palmcorder_yajna at 4:08 AM on April 12, 2007

palmcorder_yajna: These days, the ocelot-Kirk Mary Sues are very nearly mainstream.

I'd just like to thank you for that sentence. That's put a bounce in my step all day now.
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 4:45 PM on April 12, 2007

a whale. from the sky. that breathes fire.

Objection! There is no actual fire-breathing in that story. I demand a refund!

only Hurley's actually a six-tailed, thirty-six nippled baby skunk, who can turn into a dragon

It's like we've met the same people, palmcorder!

(And I concur -- this thread is USELESS without linking to pics of your Trek nativity painting.)
posted by Smilla's Sense of Snark at 8:45 PM on April 12, 2007

Anything & Smila: A picture of the painting is coming. I'd be posting it now, but my husband and I are getting over some sort of vile cold, and neither of us can quite work a camera yet.

But fortunately, we can work the internets! And would you look at what I found! We've got soulbonds in the news today, here in Seattle.

Part of me wants to cackle like a fiend. Part of me remembers my early teens and thinks, "there but for the @#$ grace."

Bon apetit, gang.
posted by palmcorder_yajna at 1:07 AM on April 14, 2007

Awww, condolences...I've been fighting the crud myself, so no worries. The anticipation will doubtlessly make the Madonna-Shatner goodness all the sweeter.

Part of me remembers my early teens and thinks, "there but for the @#$ grace."

Yeah, back in my day, kids, we had to write our fics by HAND, or on a TYPEWRITER, and then we had to MAIL THEM OUT and SNEAK COPIER TIME to produce our zines, and PAY MONEY to get them. You have no idea how good you have it, you ungrateful whippersnappers! And get offa my RP LiveJournal! *shakes virtual cane, etc.*
posted by Smilla's Sense of Snark at 1:19 AM on April 14, 2007