From: Fiona Moore nydersdyner@yahoo.co.uk
Thing is, though, if we're talking about slash, most of what I've seen of
it
doesn't actually go beyond the sexual, and frequently seems to present the sexual relationship as a kind of "hey, presto!" explanation to the complexity of B and A's relationship.
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.
Neil