We’re about to delve deep into the dark underbelly of geekiness here, folks, so you might want to strap yourselves in. Here there be dragons…<\/p>\n
First, the background: There is within many fandoms<\/a> a sub-culture of people who like to write their own stories using characters from whatever their favorite media obsession may be, and within this “fanfic” (short for “fan fiction”) scene, there is a sub-sub-culture of those who write so-called “slash fiction<\/a>.” In broad terms, slash stories take established, heterosexual characters and reimagine them in homosexual relationships with each other. The original such pairing (as far as anyone can determine) was between Star Trek<\/i>‘s Kirk and Spock in mimeographed stories that got passed around at early Trek<\/i> conventions back in the 1970s; the name of the genre actually originates with the way these particular stories used to be categorized (i.e., “Kirk\/Spock” or “Kirk-slash-Spock” stories).<\/p>\n All of which leads to my observation that some ideas never die:<\/p>\n