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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

[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.