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[petronia]

So I was thinking about this... Slash normally uses / notation, A/B, hence the name. Yaoi uses x notation, AxB, borrowed from Japanese. It *was* as good a statistical indicator of a given fandom's philosophical tendency as any, if not necessarily of an individual author's. Now there's what I call Nu Slash, or Fifth Wave Slash or whatever other clever name one might give it, which - well, this could conceivably take an essay, but one mark is that it uses Lewis Carroll portmanteau word notation, i.e. scooshing the participants' names together for a pairing designation that sounds something like a computer virus or a small island in the South Pacific. ^^; This is something that's linguistically speaking far more intuitive in Japanese, because of kanji, and the Japanese do often write kanji-name pairings this way (like in IniD or Slam Dunk). The question is how it got started in English. The Japanese HP fandom have taken to writing their pairings in scoosh, although katakana makes it far less intuitive; the English HP fandom mostly doesn't, though, so that's one infection vector out. The first people I remember using scoosh were Bishink, in FF8, and AFAIK they came up with it as an independent act of whimsy. Is that where it comes from? Tell me what you remember of this. :P

(Other marks of Nu Slash: lack of self-imposed gender boundaries in pairing, meta-textuality, intuitive awareness if not necessarily adoption of doujinshi conventions. Yes, I'm being a total faux-litcrit wanker, but I've been predicating something like this for a few years, and am gratified to find it more interesting than I'd expected.)

Comments

[llamajoy.livejournal.com]

as far as bishink, i made up "saifuu" to use as a hotmail handle for my ff.net account, 'cause i was in love with the two of them and thought it sounded cute. scooshing as an independent act of whimsy sounds just right. *^_^* i corresponded a lot with uncreativity at the time, who wrote a lot of seifer/fuujin stories, and i think the two of us spread it around ff.net (inadvertently).

...as far as i can tell, anyway.

i would love to know other people's take on this; i certainly had no idea that it was a phenomenon when i started using it, but it certainly is a phenomenon now. maybe several people, working independently, did similar things? it's very interesting.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure you're the one who started it in TCOB, far's that goes. *g* I was mildly staggered by what I thought of as a Japanese usage spreading to Smallville of all fandoms, is all.

...Then again, considering the number of former WK writers in SV. T_T

[koanju.livejournal.com]

Nu Slash. That amuses me.

I think it really did descend directly from doujin pairings, first the discussion and then finally the fics. The first place I saw that actually used in a fandom, however, was Digimon.

...And sadly enough, it's spread outside of anime fandom. I found a site sometime last year, devoted to the HarPet pairing. That is, Harry Osborn/Peter Parker. From Spider-man. The comics. It scared me. I ran away very quickly.

[niqaeli]

*slow blink* HarPet? I am deeply disturbed.

On topic: I am guilty of having used the term 'Snarry' a few times, but by and large, I stick to the slashee/slashee format. It's accurate as anything I'm reading or writing these days is correctly referred to as slash; it's economical; and, it leaves no room for confusion.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

HarPet. Is that like Chia Pet? XD

I gather it's from anime fandom too. Probably a lot of people started using it independently, depending on whether they could get it to sound cute or not, and then it spread.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

And come to think of it, 'Snarry' is a blip as well. The English fandom doesn't say SiriRuu or HariDora like the Japanese do.

[luckykitty.livejournal.com]

I think the first time I heard "scoosh" style of writing pairings was in Weiss Kreuz fandom early on, via my sister, when she declared that she loved YouKen. But I have no idea if that was before or after FF8 or bishink, and I'd always assumed it came from Japanese WK fandom.

I've heard some squishing of other pairing names before and always thought it was random people doing it at the same time -- I remember having fun with trying to squash LotR pairings into little scoosh names... But other people used similar or their own versions of the pairing names that I saw, and I doubt it had anything to do with me.

I've been fascinated to watch the yaoi scene grow and change and I think with LotR and Harry Potter slash and yaoi are starting to merge. They'll probably always have a bit of flavor difference but I'm always amused to see little yaoi-quirks pop up here and there in those western fandoms.

As for being aware of doujinshi conventions and intentionally or unintentionally working those into fiction, etc... I found for me, a lot of that sort of awareness came from being on AMLA and following discussions there. It was really eye opening to have the things that make yaoi doujinshi yaoi doujinshi and the differences between that and western yaoi fanfiction and etc etc...and the articles at Aestheticism also had that effect. Also just getting more access to doujinshi these past few years, being able to study them and read translations and find out what I liked and didn't like-- to take from them as I would from any source that interested/inspired me. :)

Nuslash! I'd be interested in your ongoing observations in this...

[petronia.livejournal.com]

You're aware of dj conventions because you've given them some thought, as have I. *g* More and more I'm bumping into people who don't even know the words seme and uke, but who refer to the Height Rule etc. as a matter of course and a fact of life. It's the little quirks, as you say, which have been absorbed into the mainstream.

I think slash and yaoi have merged in HP as much as they possibly can, given that the cross-cultural interface resides somewhere alongside art piracy. >_< Well, whotthehell. They can't possibly pull a Tokugawa on us now, right? ...Right?

[sdavis.livejournal.com]

Took me awhile to realize what Clex was, as I squinted at the journals of Smallville's fangirls. Once I figured it out, I thought to myself, "Is that cute, or lazy?"

An outstanding event, in my mind, was when somebody combined Fuuma x Kakyou into fuxkyou. That was pretty darn clever, or maybe just too incredibly wrong to be shrugged off as token fangirlism. Whichever, it'd make a killer domain name.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

'Clex' troubles me profoundly. It sounds to me like the younger sibling of Klez, the one that spits out messages with "here's gay porn for you, username" in the subject line.

The odd thing is that it's a blip. I've yet to see any other SV pairing written in scoosh. (SV isn't much in the way of Nu Slash either.)

fuxkyou. ...Did they mean it, you think?

[metempsychosis.livejournal.com]

I've yet to see any other SV pairing written in scoosh.

As far as I was aware, /every/ SV pairing was written in scoosh. Clex, Clana, Chlana, Lexana, Chlex, Chlitney... the great thing about SV fandom is that the scoosh-names are all uniformly ugly. And bring home the fact that the characters have really silly names.