Karaoke Culture. Dubravka Ugrešić
done something rude), in destroying the idyllic setting in which a “fair maiden” spoke with a star and waited for her sweetheart. It was in the liberty of changing the meaning of the song, in “taking its undies off.” We were children and had no idea that our little gesture was fairly common in oral literary practice. Folk literature, myths, legends, fairytales, stories, fables, songs, puzzles, and nursery rhymes were all created in the telling and retelling, in the interaction between an original text, its narrator, and his or her listeners. In the retelling narrators either deliberately or accidentally modified the original narrative, something every parent telling his or her child the story of Little Red Riding Hood for the thousandth time well knows.
Fan fiction (fanfiction, fanfic, FF, or fic) is a term used for a new writing practice that has developed together with the Internet. Anonymous fans, their real identities hidden behind pseudonyms, intervene in an original source text, which is simply referred to as canon. These source texts are mainly gleaned from “trivial literature” (vampire and fantasy novels, gothic fiction, etc.), comics, graphic novels, and popular TV series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena Warrior Princess, and The X-Files. Ficers, writers of fan fiction, remain within the closed virtual communities of their fandoms, their “interventions” intended exclusively for other fans. The key assumption is that everyone in the fandom is familiar with the canon. When J. K. Rowling finished her seven-novel Harry Potter cycle, Harry took on a new life in fan fiction. Ficers continue to dream up new adventures for her hero and intervene in his old ones. This sort of thing is hardly new. Throughout the centuries anonymous authors have served up all kinds of reworked stories to hungry readerships, from unauthorized installments of Don Quixote, tales about King Arthur and his knights, and new stories from A Thousand and One Nights, to re-workings and parodies of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and the Sherlock Holmes stories. As a modern phenomenon, fan fiction is attributed to Star Trek fanzines, one of which—Spockanalia—is thought to contain the first examples of fan fiction.
Slash fiction is a genre of fan fiction in which fans write about the sexual preferences of fictional heroes from the world of popular culture. Fans get off on projecting, intimating, suggesting, and constructing lesbian and homosexual relationships between various characters. Most slash fiction writers (slashers) are said to be heterosexual women. Slashy is fandom jargon for homoerotic, and slashy moments are those in the canonical source text that a slasher implies are homoerotic. “Femslash,” also known as saffic (from sapphic) centers on female characters. Of course computer programs such as Photoshop have seen amateur artists let loose, doctoring downloaded photos to create sexual images of their idols. For the moment these idols tend to be the actors and actresses who play their favorite TV and film heros/heroines, but it appears almost any celebrity will do.
Slash fiction even has its own sub-genre known as real person slash (RPS for short), in which fans invent biographical details and fabricate stories about real people (musicians, actors, pop stars, TV personalities, famous sportsmen and women). RPS has a number of sub-genres, among them, popslash, musicfic, and actorfic. Although there are almost no limits on what can be invented, there is an unwritten rule that suicide, murder, and rape are all off limits.
RPS is an Internet variant of a folkloric form mankind has practiced since the beginning of time—gossiping or spreading rumors. The real people on whom RPS is based don’t protest too much. It’s never been clever to cut off the branch on which you’re sitting, and gossip, of whatever nature, is the most effective form of publicity. Also interesting to note is that slash fiction has attracted a lot of attention from academics who are interested in feminist, gay, and queer studies.
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