Originally posted by pixiedude
1) slash need not be graphic. Shy glances and wistful thoughts are fine. Sometimes I've seen such a fic described as pre-slash by the author, but any level of romantic involvement, physical attraction, or implication of same between two people of the same sex qualifies as slash.
2) I usually call it "f/f slash", because for some reason femslash sounds funny to me, but both are commonly used.
Xena/Gabrielle fandom is a special case. It was roughly the f/f equivalent of Kirk/Spock, the first big f/f fandom, and the women who began writing in it chose to call it "altfic", in part because they felt that "slash" was already so tightly associated with m/m that they needed a different word. So when you see "altfic" on a Xena site, they mean f/f slash, while "slash", at least a few years ago, was reserved for m/m pairings in the Xena-Hercverse, eg, Joxer/Iolaus.
Pink Rabbit, which has the most comprehensive list of f/f links I know of, has altfic in its url because it started out as a Xena/Gab archive. But the term never spread to other fandoms, eg, you'll never hear of a Buffy/Willow "altfic" site.
3) Mixed doubles: My first fandom was X-Files. The main pairing for the fandom overall was Mulder/Scully, and most M/Sc fans were quite squicked by the slash concept. And most slash fans were rather defensive in the M/Sc-dominated milieu of such places as alt-creative-xf on Usenet; they didn't want authors sneaking het in to a story with "slash" in the header. So there was no vocal constituency for fic that swung both ways.
The Gossamer Project, the Big Kahuna of XF fic sites, accepts everything, but in the late '90's, many archives which were not specifically for slash wouldn't accept it. So if you had a story with, say, Mulder/Skinner/Scully, or Scully/Skinner and Mulder/Krycek, etc, it would most likely wind up online in a slash archive. But such fic was a very small part of the overall content of the main XF slash archives, which have been combined over the years into
Down in the Basement.
I never thought much about this until I took over maintainance of the Roswell Slash Archive. Roswell and Buffy were the first shows I'd read fic for that had large ensemble casts of attractive, slash-worthy characters, which generated the "UC" phenomenon for all the pairings that weren't canon.
The archivist before me (when the site was called Slashwell ) indexed all fic sent to the Roswellslash list alphabetically by title only, if I remember correctly. The list's original guidelines said that fic with any hint of slash content was appropriate for the list, and among the first several stories posted to the list were Maria/Micheal/Isabel. The f/f archive Slightly Left of Venus was started as a protest, for purely f/f slash without boyfriends hanging around.
I continued archiving "switch-hitting" fic as slash until I was asked to archive
The War Bride. It's a Max/Maria AU, with about two lines out of around 100 KB referring to the married triad of Isabel/Liz/Michael. At the time, the most popular Roswell archive, whose name I forget, but whose slogan was "just good fiction, no sweaty friction", had an absolute no slash policy, regardless of whether sweaty friction was present (they changed their policy some months later). Those two lines were enough to cause the archivists to turn it down as slash, even though no slash reader would classify it as such. So I felt duty-bound to accept it as a "refugee", but I couldn't rationalize indexing it as slash.
That's when I set up the Slash Subplots index, which I further divided into mixed-sex threesomes and slash subplots. Besides The War Bride and some other stories where the same-sex relationship(s) are subordinate to the heterosexual ones, slash subplots include what I think of as "orgy fics", where indexing by couple could require listing, eg, eight different pairings.
It does create a catchall ghetto. The fics on that page are also listed alphabetically by title, and author's name, along with all the predominantly slash fics, but they are segregated from the partners index. My underlying assumption is that most of the site's visitors are looking for predominantly slash content.
I think this added dimension of indexing complexity is one reason there's not a Buffy equivalent to the Gossamer Archive. You'd need a relational database with its own considerable bandwidth footprint to index all the possible pairings. Instead, there are lots of sites devoted to specific couples.
The absolute simplest route is taken by the Unconventional Shippers List, which accepts all non-canon pairs, threesomes, etc from Buffiverse, and lists them by author's name only. The only way to tell who the story is about is to open the file and read the author's heading.
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