So, Andrew and I were discussing fanfic a while ago. He doesn't "get" it. He approaches fiction differently than I do, and his approach isn't conducive to ficcing. That's cool.

However, then he started asking about slash, because that really puzzled him (and since he's an outsider to fandom, slash is the Big Weird Thing that he hears about a lot). At first, I withheld from commenting on the grounds that I'm not a slasher. However, after another thought, I told him that I had written some slash - my Closet series featuring Willow/Cordelia.

When he asked me why I had written it, I explained how I thought the two characters had interesting interactions but that their relationship fell by the wayside in canon as the series went on. My fic is an attempt to fill in the gaps, as it were.

Andrew got that, but then he asked if it wasn't possible to do such a thing without the romantic element. You know, with them just as friends.

Well, that stumped me.

After some consideration, I fell back on the: "Well, they're just hot together" reason. Which worked for Andrew, but it didn't quite satisfy me (though it is quite true).

Now I've put more thought on it, and I don't know that I'd have ever written Willow/Cordy if I weren't in fandom. By that, I mean that fandom shapes the bounds of what I write as I'm all absorbed in fannish culture. Hell, a lot of fics would never have been written were I not in fandom, as they're often in response to or directed towards a fandom audience.

The Wordy is different, though, in that it's in response to fandom's romance-centric structure. Well, maybe narrow that down to the fanfic part of fandom. Fanfic is a ship-heavy arena. Archives tend to divide things up into pairings, and genfic's place is oft-debated.

Once I sussed on to that, the reason why I went the Willow/Cordy sexy-times route rather than the Willow/Cordy friendship route makes sense. Fanfic tends to default to romantic pairings in one way or another. So when I want to explore a relationship between two characters, the go-to way of doing so is to hook them up (I did the same with Robin and Spike in Intimacy, come to think of it).

This romance-centric aspect is to the point where a genfic written by a Spuffy fan would probably look different, have a different audience, and end up on different comms/archives than one written by a Bangel fan. Cause fanfic fandom tends to fracture around pairings (not to ignore the people who span the gaps, of course).

I found this all interesting. Now I'm pondering on the follow-up question of why fanfic tends to fall along such lines. My initial guess is that it's to do with it being female-dominated, but that seems a cursory answer to me. Join me in my mulling?