Things I Hate About Slash---Part 1

I bet you were a little confused when you saw the title of this post. Well, here's my explanation for it: Slash isn't perfect. In fact it's far from it, just like everything else in the world. Now, don't get me wrong, I've come across some pretty flawless fics in my time, and in some fandoms finding one may be harder than others, but it's not impossible. Every fandom has fics that are basically perfection, you just have to be prepared to weed through a lot different fics to get to it. It's an exhausting process and on the quest to find the perfect fic you'll come across stories that actually aren't that bad, in fact some are pretty damn good. But with the pretty damn good and halfway decent comes the fics that were better off staying in the author's head. And, unfortunately, those fics are a lot more common than they should be.

Now, there are a lot of factors that could make a fic, well, bad for lack of a better word. Maybe the idea was good but the author fell short of the hype that idea entailed. Or maybe the author just didn't have a good enough grasp of the characters. Really, the list is endless, but you get the idea.

So, in this "Things I Hate About Slash" series, I will be highlighting some of the most common things from the aforementioned endless list. Now, bear in mind that most of this is based on my own (and a few others) personal preferences and opinions. But then again, this is a blog so I'm allowed to give my own opinion because, hello, I'm writing it. So, if you're not comfortable with that (the basic idea of blogging, basically), well you can go back to refreshing your Facebook page every 2 and half minutes.

With that out of the way, let us begin.

Pet Names and Nicknames: When they work and When they just fail.

When you write slash, more likely than not you're writing about a couple. Or a potential couple or whatever. And everybody who's ever been in a relationship knows that cheesy little pet names come with the territory, that's just how life is. However, fanfiction kind of defies laws of real life, so even if the characters are a couple in a long established relationship, pet names just tend to make things a little too cheesy.

But then again it all depends on how you use them and the pairing etc. As a general rule of thumb, here are some pet names that you should try to avoid using in slash fics:

Baby/babe(unless during sex)

Sweetie/Sweetheart

Darling

Dear

Hunny/Hun

Love (This one's a grey area. It can be sexy if used sparingly, and it also depends on the pairing. And if one of the guys are British or Australian)

These are just some of the basics. And the reason I say you should avoid them is they have a tendency to make the characters sound a little too gay. The problem with that is, usually the characters you're portraying in your fics aren't that gay. Most people would argue that they're not even gay at all. So it really just comes down to an in character/out of character issue.

Now on to nicknames. I don't have as much of a problem with nicknames as I do with petnames, but only if the characters actually use nicknames a lot in canon. Let me explain what I mean...

Take Jack and Daniel from the show Stargate SG-1. There are fics out there where Jack will refer to Daniel as "Danny" the entire time. Now, yes, Jack does call Daniel "Danny" maybe twice throughout the entire series, but I wouldn't consider that part of canon. Same goes for Dannyboy and Spacemonkey. Jack doesn't use it enough in the real series, so it wouldn't make sense for him to use it a lot in the fic.

But if you look at something like Lost on the other hand and the pairing of Jack and Sawyer, nicknames would be ok, because Sawyer uses them multiple times in the series. In fact, he rarely ever calls Jack by his real name.

This is also acceptable in RPS (real person slash) cases. Examples would be, Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus. Sean calls Norm "Normy" so that would be ok to put in a fic. Or Michael Johns calling David Cook "Dave" or "Davey" or "Cookie" (also if Dave calls Mike "Mikey") because it actually happened in real life.

RPS though is a whole different can of worms than regular fanfiction because now you're writing about real people as apposed to characters so the lines are a bit blurrier.

Like I said before, this is based on my personal preferences when it all comes down to it. So, if I insulted you in any way, my bad. I'm just trying to do my part to make the slash world a better place.

Catch You on the Flip Side!

~Allie