Girls who like Boys who like Boys – Ethnography of ... - Yuuyami.com

have that initial reaction to slash as well, though now she is very much a
fervid slasher and debater, with whom I can spend hours discussing
characters’ personalities and nuances.
SY: What was your first slash in? Your first impression of
it?
Barb: Well, I was reading Gossamer, an all inclusive X-
Files archive, which had a whole lot of slash, and so I
would come upon something not clearly labeled, and
stumble in, and say, “oh my God!” and stumble back out
again. […]
I don’t know how I got there, probably googling Quantum
Leap fics. So, I read Russet MacMillan’s Quantum Leap
fics…and then I went to her main page, and I think I read
her Sentinel stuff…and all of that stuff is slash, there are
only two gen stories. That [her usual work] starts really,
really low-key…it was like “oh of course they’re having
sex! Of course, of course!” and so it was really basic
SY: Did you have any visceral reactions to it that you can
still remember?
Barb: I skimmed the sex over the first month or so…and I
think it was just…I read stuff because I like the characters.
Having read Russet’s stuff, I liked the characters…and at
the time, the only archive she linked to was the Sentinel
slash archive. So I just ended up reading that because it was
what I found. To start out with. I don’t know what my
visceral reaction was, except that it [slash] was good stuff.
Barb did not share Red’s or my initial reaction of fascination to slash, but
required a gradual osmosis of the genre in order to learn to appreciate it. Once
she had absorbed enough of the material, she assumed the same appropriation
of it that she would over other literary texts. In a way, she did not go through
that period of “addiction” observable in so many slash fans, once they initially
encounter and accept the genre. When I brought up this first encounter with
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