Neil wrote:
It's worth bearing in mind that slash today is the current phase of a long process of evolution. Sarah Thompson or someone else who knows will have to correct me on this, but I gather there are essentially three phases to this:
Phase 1: the characters discover their homosexuality. That is, writers began to posit that the characters might be gay.
Phase 2: the gayness of the characters comes to accepted as a given, as a basis from which to develop their mutual attraction to each other.
Phase 3: the 3rd generation of slash then takes the attraction as a given, to concentrate on the dynamics of that attraction.
Each phase after the first therefore eliminates a lot of explanatory material that by Phase 3 is just unnecessary guff. If your first encounter with slash is at the Phase 3 level, then it's going to be a lot more disconcerting than if you'd worked your way through phases 1 and 2.
Also don't forget that slash is an evolving phenomenon across fandoms. While slashing B7 might have evolved in that fashion, I think a lot of shows that are transmitted now are slashed straight away, i.e. they cut straight to phase 3.
Una