Slasher Authority
February 26th, 2008 by AbbySo, I have a few thoughts after tonight’s (most excellent) slash video screening that are largely related to the brief discussion we had a couple of weeks ago about the insularity of the slash community, i.e., should/do non-slashers have the right to view slash vids without a proper context/introduction and make what they will of them? (Apologies if I repeat some of the points I already made in my comment on Ariel’s post from awhile ago, but I feel like this topic was incompletely discussed.)
While I appreciate Lauren and Nicole’s close reading of the slash videos, I am not convinced that you need to have a specific, slash-oriented introduction to understand the videos. Eye contact to imply a relationship, the paralleling of violence and sexuality, the conjunction of specific song lyrics with characters and actions–all of these are things that a reasonable critical person could read out of a slash video knowing nothing about slash. Taking intro to film might help, but I don’t think even a “normal” (uncritical) viewer could mistake the meaning of a video like Closer, even if they knew nothing about slash.
To follow up on that, I think that “normal” people can produce slash, even if they are not working within the slash community, per se. I’m a big fan of the nonexclusivity of categories, so I (respectfully) disagree with Lauren’s categorization of “Brokeback to the Future” as being resolutely not a vid. Although I think the point about the different social/artistic traditions vids and parody-trailers come out of was a good one, “Brokeback to the Future” used many of the elements we discussed as being integral to slash-vids–they eye-contact between the characters establishing a relationship, their physical touching, the clever use of material outside of the source (in the other vids, the song lyrics; in this vid, the relationship to the “Brokeback Mountain” trailer)–all of these things scream “VID!” to me. There’s also nothing that indicates that the comedy troupe who produced this video did not have a slasher among them. If that were the case, would that make this a vid? Why can’t it be both a vid and a parody movie trailer, authorship aside (the same way Shakespeare, for example, is both a great classic and pop culture, depending on the tradition from which you read it)?
Finally, my impression about the controversy surrounding non-slashers viewing slash was that the problem wasn’t that non-slashers couldn’t understand the basic content of slash videos (who has a relationship with whom, is that relationship happy/sad/repressed/violent, etc.), but that they understood the videos perfectly well and didn’t like the way the characters were used and/or the way sexuality was expressed (violently, homosexually, for example). I’ve already elaborated my thoughts on this issue below, but to bring up a few that seem especially relevant now: At what point are you a slasher–when do you gain the authority to create a vid, view a vid, show other people how to view a vid? Is it even possible to define this category? Can we really categorically say that the Brokeback to the Future folks can’t interpret vids properly, when they used so many techniques of veteran vidders? Is every vid sacred? Why can’t we (“normal people”) look at vids that show violence against women and say, That’s not okay? Can only vidders themselves do this (like “Women’s Work”)? What about vids that show pedophilic relationships? Are we assuming that once you’re a “vidder” or part of that community (if we can decide what that means), you interpret these vids in the same way? Or is your opinion okay no matter what it is, just as long as you’re a vidder, and that’s what counts?
Posted in Screenings, Vids | 14 Comments »
Abby, I wrote this before I read your post, but I think it fits in very well. I respectfully disagree with you–I think I would have to learn how to read these videos in order to understand them.
But here’s my response to tonight’s screening:
While I was totally grateful for Lauren and Nicole’s presentation tonight, the extensive instruction and extremely nuanced way of looking at vids made me realize that fandom is not a democratic form at all. It is incredibly culturally specific and you have to be initiated to learn how to be a fan, which seems contrary to Henry Jenkins’ idea of a fan utopia where underrepresented peoples will take over the world through their subversive acts.
But only certain people are “allowed” to be fans, which I thought was interesting. It really seems like you can’t just walk into fandom—you have to be indoctrinated into the culture for years. Lauren and Nicole addressed this in the beginning of their presentation: “Like any unfamiliar mode of communication—from a table of statistical data to a post-structuralist essay-fan vids require training before they can be interpreted.” The modes of communication listed as examples are both those associated with academia and therefore are not at all “popular” modes of communication. I think the presentation on slash vids brings to light the fact that fandom, as Gray et al. bring up in their discussion of second-wave fan studies, repeats the hierarchies present within mainstream society: “The replication of social and cultural hierarchies within fan- and subcultures” is highlighted “as the choice of fan objects and practices of fan consumption are structured through our habitus as a reflection and further manifestation of our social, cultural, and economic capital.” (Gray et al. 2007, 6). Within the mini-society of fandom, to have cultural capital is to have the ‘know-how’ to read vids and to know what a “good” vid is. The economic capital is also reflected in the cultural capital in the use of Internet; if one does not have regular access to a computer or the Internet, s/he is not capable of reading the vids. I know my point is not groundbreaking or interesting, but I thought it was interesting how much the presentation really reflected the non-popular nature of fandom.
I just want to add in response to Bizzy’s comment that I agree that having an introduction to vids and a presentation on vid structure does help viewers see the artistry/expertise in the vid (and, as Bizzy said, maybe allows them to figure out what a “good” vid is, at least based on the standards of the person who introduced them to the world).
Well, okay, when Weird Al does parodies of Chamillionaire and Coolio, are his songs hip-hop? They use hip-hop rhythms and stylistic conventions. But to suggest that they’re actually of the same genre as the original songs seems a little silly to me. The same is true with the Brokeback to the Future vid: just because it uses the grammar of fanvids doesn’t make it a fanvid.
We’ve discussed before the tangle of concepts involved in parody and homage and genre (as in the Twin Peaks discussion with film noir and Tarantino’s movies) and I acknowledge that the lines are usually thin and blurry. However, I don’t think the comparison to Shakespeare is valid in this case, because the difference there is one of audience. Shakespeare was pop culture to his contemporaneous audiences and is classical literature to us. Brokeback to the Future, on the other hand, is parody to everyone and pure fanvid to no one that I know of.
Furthermore, there’s a background to ships that are in fanvids. When you see Clark/Lex vids, that means there’s also Clark/Lex fic and art. This isn’t just the topic of a video. While there is Back to the Future slash, this particular video was created entirely apart from it (regardless of whether or not anyone in the group actually is a BttF slasher, the video is presented as being solely the product of a comedy troupe).
Finally, I have to say something possibly controversial about slash. There is a difference between a character that is gay and a character that is slashed. Brokeback Mountain is not slash. It is a movie about gay men. Editing together a trailer to make it look like Back to the Future is like Brokeback Mountain is not, to my mind, slashing the characters; it is calling them gay. To elaborate: Slashvids live in the slash tradition of subtext, which (as ethrosdemon is quoted as arguing in this week’s fan artifact) is part of the fun of fandom. Slashvids point out subtext and create narratives from it. Brokeback Mountain does not. It is not the subtext of that movie that the characters are gay, it’s the plot. I would argue that, while the construction of Brokeback to the Future relies heavily on subtext within the original movies, the idea of presenting a movie as “Brokeback-esque” takes it out of the realm of slash and into the realm of presenting characters as homosexual. After all, the whole idea of a trailer is that it summarizes a movie, yes? So if Brokeback to the Future were an actual movie, it would not be a movie about two male characters who are slashed, it would be a movie about two male characters who are gay.
First of all, I think that while the shakespeare example is perhaps not perfect because the different meanings have developed over time and were probably never held by two people in the same room who could argue with each other, your example of Weird Al is also not analogous to Brokeback to the Future. Weird Al appropriates the style of hip-hop but not the content – I’m thinking of Amish Paradise, which is about pretty much the opposite of black urban culture.
But Brokeback to the Future is slash, not an assertion that those characters are gay. The humor of it is based entirely on our knowledge that the relationship between the two men is not homosexual. I’m thinking in particular about the “you wrote me a letter” clip. If I hadn’t seen “Back to the Future”, I would take that clip at face value as portraying a confrontation about the intimate nature of their relationship. The humor is there only because I know that in context, that clip is about time travel, not romance. The fact that they are not actually gay is essential to getting the joke of the vid. The comparison to brokeback mountain is a similar technique to the one used in the other vid we watched, in which two men were compared to Maria and Tony from Westside Story. You seem to be saying that juxtaposing heterosexual and homosexual readings of a text is what slash is all about, and that’s exactly what this vid did.
I agree with Steven’s point below that fans can get a lot out of a vid or other fan production even if they haven’t been initiated into the intricacies of a particular community. While I think you are right to point out that there is a context of other fan productions that vids are made in, that context is one that no one can really be initiated into any more (if they ever could) because it is on the internet. There are so many different individual slash communities on sites like livejournal and through listservs (and I’m sure in forms I’ve never heard of) that even formulating a comprehensive definition of their culture would be impossible. It is also anonymous and dispersed enough that I wonder how anyone could be introduced to it without stumbling upon some aspect themselves.
I think that disseminating slash without initiating readers is inevitable, but I also think it is a good thing. Fan production uses familiar texts to talk about society (such as asking why all these scenes of male homosocial intimacy look like S&M when we splice them up) in an accessible and most importantly fun way. How much easier is it to say that Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter’s mutual hatred and jealousy is kind of like sexual tension than to pull out our academic vocabulary and problematize the tensions of modern masculinity?
Ok, Ariel. Once again, I think this is our general difference in experience of slash that’s clashing here, but I respectfully disagree with your clear and unquestioning distinction between a character that is slashed and a character that is gay.
I also disagree with Jenkins’ assertions that slash characters are specifically *not* gay for that matter (I mention that in a comment to the next post).
Personal anecdote: After a long night of reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, I logged on to AIM at 4 AM only to find my friend L. logged on as well. She had been up *puking* because when she finished HBP, she couldn’t stand the thought that Remus Lupin could be in love with Tonks (a woman). Why? Because to her, he was a “Slash-Only Character.” In other words, L. viewed Remus as EXCLUSIVELY GAY. Moreover, her (and my) enjoyment of slash involving Lupin was rooted in our desire to see him as a gay character in Harry Potter canon.
Our reaction to Remus being in a heterosexual relationship was similar to some Beauty and the Beast fans’ ideas about the third season of the show, in that we were tempted to reject JK Rowling’s “heteroification” (a term we used implying that before Rowling’s explicit mention of characters in heterosexual situations, they could have been gay) of one of her characters, continuing to view him as gay or, in a pinch, bisexual, even as he married and had a child with Tonks towards the end of the series.
Yes, slash is about SUBVERTING a character that you believe the author may view as straight, giving them some sort of queer identity or experience, but it doesn’t necessarily imply an awareness on the part of the slasher that the author *does* conceptualize the character as straight.
If I wrote Brokeback Mountain fanfiction, I would not call it slash, but if Brokeback Mountain were serialized, and we were in an early episode, I would consider myself a slasher if I wrote a fic consummating the two men’s relationship.
What would you call it? Shonen-ai? Gay people fics? Same diff?
You know, as many articles about writerly and producerly texts as we read, I am always, always, always going to believe in the primacy of the creator’s intended meaning (sorry, Bob), and I say that both as a reader and a fan. From my point of view, when your friend saw Remus as exclusively gay, she was *incorrect*. This is why we even have a distinction between canon and fanon, or canon and everything else for that matter. According to the facts of the Harry Potter series, ie what Jo wrote and nothing else, Remus Lupin is sexually attracted to women. I mean, I can identify, certainly — the conception of Remus that lives in my head is bi and totally ends up with Sirius as evidenced in the last forest scene in DH, *however* that Remus lives in my head and is not the same as the Remus that lives in J.K. Rowling’s head and is, therefore, the “real” Remus. I’m perfectly aware that a lot of the things we’ve read would argue that my Remus is just as real as Jo’s, but I firmly disagree. After all, my Remus is dependent on the existence of her Remus, but her Remus’ existence is utterly independent of mine. (Yeah, I know, people would disagree with that one, too, and frankly I don’t care, it’s a matter of interpretation just like almost everything else we’ve discussed all semester.)
I can’t really wrap my head around the idea of making a movie serialized because movies are, to me, inherently *not* serialized (in and of themselves — I’m not talking about sequels etc.). So the idea of writing fic that takes place at, you know, 10 minutes into Brokeback Mountain only makes sense to me if it’s a missing scene *or* explicitly AU. However, I know what you’re getting at and I don’t really have an answer for you. I mean, there’s fic about Queer as Folk that’s generally categorized as slash even though all of the characters are canonically gay and sleeping with one another. I honestly have no clue what to do with that, because, as I’ve said, something that to me is integral to slash is the fact that it’s never going to be canonical (so I also don’t really know what to do with Dumbledore/Grindelwald, either, but I’m more comfortable calling that slash since a) she never said they had a relationship, only that the sentiment existed and b) they never appear together “onscreen” as it were, and certainly not as lovers). I wouldn’t call QAF fic het, certainly, and nor would I call it shounen-ai or yaoi, because those terms were created in a certain cultural context and I don’t think it’s productive to apply them to other things. I don’t think we have a way to talk about fic about canonically gay characters, because there’ve been so few, and even fewer who were interesting enough to write fic about.
I agree with you, Ariel, as far as the importance of authorial intent goes. While I have the utmost respect for the That said, I find it interesting that the slash community in particular seems to contain so many rules of interpretive practice. Assuming that the presentation gave a fair general picture of vidding practices, I find it somewhat ironic that the transformations of fan texts do not extend to a greater degree of openness regarding the interpretation of fan-produced materials.
I find it somewhat ironic that the transformations of fan texts do not extend to a greater degree of openness regarding the interpretation of fan-produced materials.
I’m not quite sure what this means– you’re surprised that we have only one way to interpret vids?
! I’m sorry if I gave that impression with my part of the presentation. (I think Nicole agrees with me, but I shouldn’t presume to speak for her on such a heated question of aesthetic philosophy.)
I believe that the “rules” I walked through with the close-reading of “Centerfold” was not so much a step-by-step guide to Decoding The Meaning As It Was Encoded By The Artist– I mean, if nothing else our reading about encoding/decoding a few weeks ago should have reminded me that unproblematic coding/decoding does not happen in human communication!
(Actually, one of my very favorite parts of vid-watching is– after I’ve watched a new vid several times and have drawn some conclusions about what it means– reading all the feedback OTHER vid-watchers left the artist. Often, they’ll talk about their own interpretations and their favorite moments of the vid. Watching it again with everyone’s different– sometimes very different!– interpretations in my mind is a much richer experience.)
Instead of articulating “rules” for finding the meaning in a vid– that is, instead, of telling you the received interpretation of a vid– I think Nicole and I tried to point out common tropes and styles in vidding, in order to give you a quick-and-dirty orientation in the genre, so you could start interpreting with something like native fluency– so you could start drawing your own conclusions.
Does that distinction make sense? It’s really important to me!
(And if I didn’t make that attitude come across in the presentation, it’s totally my fault.)
I’m not sure that I totally agree with the notion that slash vids are undemocratic. I think that knowledge enhances all aspects of fandoms, but I don’t believe that being familiar with the nuances of slash vids is required to be a fan of them. Undoubtedly, knowing the conventions makes it easier to interept what the author was trying to convey, but, you can derive a type of pleasure from slash vids than what other people usually enjoy. I thought Lauren and Nicole did an excellent job of presenting the different videos, but because I’m not a fan of the texts used I think I missed out on a little bit of the meanings. Because of this, I looked up some slash vids from something that I am familiar with and found a Harry/Peter vid from Spider-Man movies. Since I was familiar with both the characters and the songs, I feel like I was better able to follow the storyline (I also think that it probably used less of the subtle conventions described within the Heroes vid, or maybe I just missed some of it).
My first experience with slash vids was the Closer video, and while tonight’s presentation gave me some valuable background knowledge, I feel like I would be able to understand the Spider-Man vid relatively well regardless if I hadn’t been properly trained. I would have enjoyed it differently, but is that really any different than a person enjoy the Spider-Man movies, but not getting some of the comic book references. I feel like you can enjoy a fan vid even if you don’t understand the whole message, just like you can enjoy a movie without understanding all the jokes or references. Just because you enjoy aspects of a fan vid that are different from other fans of the vid does not make you less of a fan. It only makes you a different type of fan. That idea that people interept texts differently seems to be the point of slash vids in the first place. Slash vids show a relationship that doesn’t exist in the text. In order to make a slash vid, you may have to see something that the author did not intend. It could be just as valuable for a person to see something in the slash vid that was not intended.
Fandom seems like a fractal—it can go on forever (just put two mirrors in front of one another and you’ll see what I mean). The original fan vids are restructuring and re-creating meaning of the original texts, but the ways to read are multiple, and I thought it was interesting that we were taught ‘how to read vids as slasher vids.’ Similar to Jenkins’ 10 ways to re-write a show, this was a set of rules and conventions that we should look for. However, as Abby and Steve pointed out, there are ways of reading vids and instilling our own interpretations that are not related to what the producer wants us to look for. Interesting. The consumer has become the producer and the cycle continues forever.
As I said in class, I definitely believe that social hierarchies are recreated in fandom, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. Alex brought up a really good point about alternative spaces for social interaction. Yeah, hierarchies are recreated, but the fact that there is ANOTHER SPACE outside of the dominant (dare I say it, hegemonic) societal structures is something incredibly important to note. People could argue with me here, but I think all subcultures have rules that members have to subscribe to, but that doesn’t make them any less valid as ALTERNATIVE SPACES. However, in the creation of alternative spaces, there is an inevitable marginalizing of those perceived as being slightly more mainstream (whether or not they are).
hey! I’m really excited people are talking about this.
To some extent, Abby, I think your position– that slash vids don’t require any special grounding to parse– can be challenged by the fact that Nicole and I deliberately chose vids that would be as accessible as possible to non-fans viewing them for the first time. I challenge this class, for example, to take Origin Stories (from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to Aesop Rock’s “Coffee”) or Us (another multi/metafandom vid, to Regina Spektor’s “Us”) and parse either so easily!
At any rate, I believe that a good close-reading has served its function if by the end its readers find its observations totally obvious… so I also might decide to believe that you only found our vids so obvious to read because we did just a great job close-reading them for you. (Kidding! But also kind of serious!!)
AHEM HERE COMES A COMMENT SO LONG NO ONE WILL READ IT, OK SORRY.
With regard to the initiation/democratic question– I think everyone is making good points, and (with characteristic wishy-washiness) I want to say vidding is both democratic and hierarchical; both accessible to “normal people” and impossible for outsiders to parse.
After all, I came to vids as a “normal person”, around 2003. I was fascinated right away– mostly, I confess, because my introduction to fandom had been compulsively reading Buffy shooting scripts online, and not watching its episodes, so I was really into seeing fragments of the show’s actual footage. Can you imagine a more naive viewer??
Anyway, I downloaded as many as I could find. (On dial-up, too: this was dedication!) The reading strategies I talked about tonight were not something passed down to me by explicit instruction from older fans, or whatever– it’s a series of insights I gathered over the years as I watched and rewatched vids, finding more meaning in them the more I looked. I talked about vids with other fans, too, and noted that our interpretations were often on the same page– I made my own vids, and they weren’t incomprehensible to anyone, so clearly we were speaking the same language. But I was never given a list of vocabulary and techniques from more sophisticated vidders; I picked what I did up from context, or made it up and started circulating it myself.
Okay, here’s where I get sentimental–
I joked that vids are a lot like poetry, because they’re brief, dense, and best understood after multiple readings. I think the analogy bears extending. (Contemporary American poetry is the artistic tradition I know the most about, so it tends to be a touchstone for me.) Someone unfamiliar with the conventions of contemporary poetry might have a hard time understanding the poetry published in a lot of journals these days– they definitely would have trouble writing poetry that stood up to genre’s expectations. (Depending on how it came out, we’d call the work of a writer who had never read anyone else’s poetry either unsophisticated– if we didn’t like it– or outsider– if we did.) But anyone with patience, and privilege of access to venues of publication, could eventually orient themselves within the expectations of the genre. Over time, a naive reader would become a sophisticated one.
Something I love about fandom is that it’s really easy to get into. I don’t just mean it’s easy to love (it’s just as easy to revile, I suppose)– I mean that if you want to write fanfiction all it takes is a LiveJournal login or a FanFiction.Net account or a mailing list subscription or whatever three-click-setup public technological infrastructure is your flavor of choice. (*) The gift economy means fanfiction is free, reading it and writing it– and if you just stick around long enough you’ll probably acquire a circle of friends who praise your art and make art for you in return. In the process, a communal aesthetic is refined. And if you stick around long ENOUGH, and are dedicated and connected ENOUGH, you might make something as technologically dazzling/inaccessible to outsiders as Us; you might make something so popular you get a hundred emails, a thousand links; a hundred thousand downloads.
A hundred thousand downloads (this popular Harry Potter novel springs to mind– its hit counter reads 144,552) still isn’t beating the 4 million views that Brokeback to the Future parody had on YouTube. But, oh my god, guys, a hundred thousand downloads! This is what I can’t get over. A subculture of amateur artists commands that much attention. It organizes that much attention– Resonant (author of that novel) didn’t just release her writing into a void. Her story was brought to the attention of her 1400 LiveJournal subscribers; notice of it was circulated from journal to journal, community to community. I read it the night it was released and the stat counter said 28 downloads– I reloaded and (that same night!) the download counter was over 1000. So. Why do I care?
To contextualize my vehemence, let’s return to contemporary American poetry– the American Poetry Review, the internationally prominent poetry magazine for which I work, boasts no more than 15,000 readers worldwide. Breaking into the poetry industry– getting your poem placed in an issue of APR, which hundreds of people try to do every month– is almost impossible. It takes not just skill and patience but also nepotistic connection and also expensive education and also incredible, incredible luck. If your ambition is to write poetry you can know right know that it will probably never be read by more than 100 people. I’m a senior, so I’m about to leave Swarthmore’s protective, indulgent intellectual space; I think about a future in which my only connection to a community of artists is a figure-drawing class at some suburban recreation center and I get sad and freaked out. But fandom means that won’t happen.
So: fanfiction is free, fanfiction works according to a gift economy. This is an obvious observation, I guess. But, guys, when I think about how impossible it is to get into any kind of arts industry, how impossible it is to circulate one’s art according to official/capitalist channels, I get all misty-eyed about fandom. Yes, you need to be a fandom insider to understand a lot of what goes on– but you can BECOME a fandom insider, you can make CHANGES to what it means to be a fandom insider. It’s a pretty huge and pretty slickly organized community of amateur artists and critics, hierarchical, democratic.
(*) Aha, maybe you say: fanfiction can be written on a public library computer, but surely vidding requires expensive software and DVD access!!! Well, okay, so a vidder sprung for Final Cut Pro instead of the iMovie that came with her $2000 computer or whatever; fandom is a hobby available only to that elite population who possess personal computers and enough leisure time to mess around with them. otoh, an MFA in poetry might cost $30,000 a year.
I’m glad that you enjoyed the screening Abbey.
However, what I (and Lauren too I think, but she can chime in here with her own opinion) were trying show was not how the vids should be interpreted, but how they *would* be interpreted by slash fans. (Which I realize is a very large claim, and presumptuous, and could not possibly be 100% true for every fan, so perhaps it might be more accurate to say that we were trying to show how we as slash fans read those vids). Basically what I was trying to convey was my point of view as a fan of slash, what I was looking at and seeing and paying attention to when I was watching, and what conclusion this material made me draw. While these are things that may or may not have been picked up by a someone who watched the vids without hearing the lecture we gave, they were the things that we thought were important and wanted to make sure that they knew from *our point of view* they were important.
I would also (respectfully) disagree with your opinion that Brokeback to the Future was a vid, though for different reasons that Lauren. I looked at it as a parody, which obviously came out the tradition of false movie trailers. Although I realize that you argue that the two are not mutually exclusive categories, I also thought that the artistic choices that the creators made signaled that it belonged more in the trailer genre than the vidding one. The constant use of actual dialog from the films along with the heavy use of texts are things that are not common in vidding (I’ve actually never seen a vid that used that much dialogs from the film).
I’ve been thinking about it, and my final conclusion is that Brokeback to the Future *IS* slash, because as you mentioned it does have suggest a homosexual relationship between two characters. However it is not a vid because it is different from the artistic traditions that vidding has evolved (ie. the use of dialog). I think I would call it a slash trailer (although I would guess that that definition would be pretty specific to me).
As for your final paragraph, where you raise the point of when do you become a slasher, I would say whenever you (the generic you) say “Hmmm… I like the idea of characters being in a same sex relationship.” The question in my mind (and perhaps the question you are asking) is when do you become part of fandom (in this case where fandom refers to the specific internet related media fandom). And that one’s a lot thornier, and I don’t know if it can be defined. It would involve a large part of self definition again, but in my mind it would also require some interaction with the larger fannish community (even if the only interaction is reading (ie. I totally think of myself as being part of fandom despite the fact that I am a chronic lurker)).
I don’t think that the Brokeback to the Future people aren’t interpreting vids correctly, as I don’t think that they were making a *vid* in the first place. I also don’t think that non-fans shouldn’t be able to look at vids and have judgments about them. I am assuming that slashers have at least one similar point of view (that characters are in homosexual relationships) or they wouldn’t *be* slashers. This doesn’t mean that they come at everything in the same way, but it does mean that some things would be similar. It’s not being a vidder or being a slasher that is the only opinion that counts here, I’m just trying to show you what I think that these opinions would be and put forth an argument about why I think that they’re valid.
However, what I (and Lauren too I think, but she can chime in here with her own opinion) were trying show was not how the vids should be interpreted, but how they *would* be interpreted by slash fans.
yes– I love the way you put this.