slashgen or preslash

[jmtorres]

I wish people didn't feel like everything needed a pairing label. Also, just because you're slashing them in your own head, it doesn't necessarily come out that way in fic: Cas being a stalker is kind of canon, it's not necessarily a pairing thing. I say this because I am getting sort of frustrated at reading things that are supposedly a particular pairing and then nothing pairing-like happens. I've started getting excited at seeing NC-17 in the labels not because I'm particularly interested in reading about them having sex but because it means I can fairly reliably expect them to be having an actual relationship and not just burgers. Not that I'm not up for cute burger-eating fluff, but it's gen and it's misleading to claim it's not.

*sigh*

Comments

Re: Here via metafandom

[musesfool]

I've also noticed that in Supernatural fandom there is less labeling of fic as 'squint and you might see it subtext' or 'there if you want it UST' or even 'can be read as preslash' then I've seen in other fandoms.

Huh. My experience with SPN has been the exact opposite. I don't see it as often anymore, but "Wincest if you squint!" is one of my pet peeves, mostly because I feel like it's a way to grab two sets of not-necessarily overlapping readers (i.e., gen people who don't want Wincest and Wincest readers) that ends up alienating both, because the gen folks who don't want Wincest often really don't want it, and stories labeled that way re typically not Wincesty enough to merit the label in the first place so they're disappointing to a lot of Sam/Dean shippers. Basically, I don't feel the need for the author to tell me whether I should be seeing subtext or not.

Now I see a lot of "Dean & Castiel (or Dean/Castiel if you squint)" labels in the spn_gen community, but since I don't like Castiel and the pairing squicks me, I don't know how it shakes out in the actual reading.

So I guess I find the preslash thing kind of annoying as well. I mean, if I ship the pairing already, I'm going to bring that to a gen story regardless (every story in HP is a Remus/Sirius story to me, for example), but if I don't see the characters that way, even if nothing happens in the story, that label is probably going to keep me from reading it.

Re: Here via metafandom

[jmtorres]

I don't know how it shakes out in the actual reading.

They eat burgers a lot. I am not kidding. *G*

Re: Here via metafandom

[amaresu]

See, and I don't read Wincest so it could just be a pairing divide. Thinking back a few years to when I did read Wincest I remember getting annoyed at the number of fics with the 'Wincest if you squint' label. Because they often had less subtext then the show did. And anything with incest gets extra tricky because it is so very squicky to so many people.

I think if something is labeled with a subtext tag then the author needs to really make sure the subtext is there. (But that probably requires more self awareness then most authors have, sadly.) It's likely that people use it in the way you've mentioned, an attempt to get more readers and ending up with fewer.

I actually get almost all of my gen reading from recs (and they tend towards Sam and Dean being awesome brothers together) so I wasn't aware of that trend in Dean-Castiel fics. I like the & in general though because it (for me at least) says friendship and I like friendship fic. It's a bit of a neglected genre because it's still focused on the relationship between the two people, but without the pairing part and you get people who don't want to label it as pairing or gen.

I used to like the preslash label, back in my SG-1 days, but I've grown less fond of it the longer I'm in fandom. Nowadays I really only think it's appropriate on longer fics where the slash will eventually develop.