Fiona asked (about slash):
how is
it valid to the character to read in a relationship which most people
seem
to agree isn't there-- including the people who write those stories?
I think we have to distinguish among various sub-fandoms here. Certainly a high percentage of B7 fanfic is slash, so it is a topic of great interest to readers and writers. Perhaps like cyberspace it's a consensual hallucination.
But the analogy I prefer is from geometry. There are certain postulates in Euclidean geometry, and points, lines, and figures behave in certain ways. Perhaps for fandom as a whole, the characters do not have same-sex sexual interactions. But if you treat slash as a non-Euclidean fandom, then slash stories are the "problems" worked out using the postulate A/B, G/V, or whatever, proving particular theorems.
-(Y)