Meh, slash fic

As I’ve mentioned, I’m not a slash fan. I tend to prefer when fan work sticks to canon, so I don’t really enjoy when the characters’ relationships are disrupted to suit an author’s personal preferences. But another thing that bothers me is how it encourages fans to interpret everything characters who are close to each other do through a lens searching for romantic possibility. This propensity in slash often leads to the invalidating of the notion that FRIENDSHIP CAN BE A POWERFUL AND MEANINGFUL RELATIONSHIP IN AND OF ITSELF. Of course, my making this argument at all is kind of missing the fact that slash is mostly porn. The assumption is made all the time that women don’t like or don’t use porn, which irks me for a lot of feminist reasons, and is obviously refuted by the existence of slash. So I don’t like to gloss over it, and that makes it a little less silly to bitch about. But still, there’s a big cultural concept going on that suggests that friendship is inferior to romantic connection. A girl who doesn’t want to date a guy is “demoting” him to friend status, for example. This is what pushes people away from making real connections with each other non-sexually or non-romantically, either because they think those relationships aren’t as valuable, or that they’re afraid that, since people assume romantic relationships are the only ones worth seriously pursuing, their attempts at closeness will be perceived as romantic interest. This is especially off-putting if there is a concern of making other think the person is gay. So we don’t get a lot of strong portrayals of friendship, or when we do, people wonder at the supposedly “romantic” undertones. :-P And in real life, we get lots of people who don't have any strong connections outside of their significant others, which leads to less emotional support in their lives.