lunabee34

I don't think it would occur to me in general to classify stories based on their endings, but since this story is very specifically about two characters exploring their sexuality and relationship in a way that ultimately does not affirm a slash reading, I don't think it feels right to me to call it slash. I felt that it settled fairly decisively on a gen reading of the characters, ergo it seems more appropriate to call it gen. On the other hand, I don't really like having to fit marginal stories into hard-and-fast categories anyway -- it tends to end up feeling like very awkward hair-splitting.

Re: nuance - hahaha, yeah. It's not just a time-in-fandom thing, but also how your particular social circle uses the words. There's been a lot of debate about the definition of gen over the last few years, and I think the only thing that's really been established is that different people draw the lines in different places -- but I think that the same is true of different fans' personal usage of "slash" and "het" (as well as other common fandom terms: h/c, for example, or smarm, or amtdi).