lunabee34

Coming late to the conversation...

It's very interesting to me that you used that example, because the author actually ran that story past me before she posted it and we went back and forth for a while on whether or not I thought, and she thought, that it ought to be posted as a John/Rodney story or not. I adore the story -- it's really one of my (many!) favorite stories in the fandom, precisely *because* it does such a nice job with relationship ambiguity and there's so little of that out there. And personally, I do consider it to come down more on the gen than slash side because of the affirmation of the gen and very specifically not slash relationship at the end. (When she asked me about it, one of the main criteria that I applied in trying to figure out how I'd label it was, "Would a slash or a gen fan be more satisfied/affirmed by the ending?" And I think it's a fairly gen-affirming story.)

On the other hand, I hadn't considered your argument that experimentation stories are inherently slash (or, as the case may be, het) -- because they specifically deal with the characters working out their own position on the sexuality spectrum -- and I think there's a lot of merit to that!

The above discussion of slash as descriptor vs. slash as genre really strikes a chord for me, because I do think of slash as a genre more than a descriptor (I wouldn't call most published gay lit "slash", for example, because it doesn't follow what I generally consider slash genre conventions). I wonder if the way that an individual fan would categorize a marginal or gray-area sort of story is very dependent on where ze falls in the descriptor vs. genre continuum!