Saturday, December 04, 2004

SLASH DOT DASH

Gone are the days when, in order to truly "be" somebody in pop, you had to have had sex with Darren Day, or a page three girl, or both. Gone are the days when all you needed to be a successful pop star was a cheeky grin and a selection of shiny outfits. No, in this day and age, the one thing that stands as a sure fire sign that you've made it is when your fans start slashing you on the internet.

Slash, for the uninitiated, is fan fiction featuring two people of the same sex in a romantic or sexual relationship (the term "slash" coming from the punctuation mark used to separate the characters' names, e.g. Spock/Kirk Star Trek slash).

Having got all excited about the Girls Aloud tour on Friday, our thoughts began to turn to those unfortunate lads unceremoniously trounced by the Girls in the aftermath of Popstars Colon The Rivals, One True Voice. They're not getting an awful lot of sympathy, mind, because we happened across an old copy of Smash Hits the other day and found them on the front cover declaring "Forget the girls - we're going to be huge!" and inside adding "we've got more talent in one little finger than the girls have got in the whole band", which makes us think they had it coming, really - and besides, such cheap shots pale insignificance to the legendary (and infinitely classier) "Buy Girls - Bye Boys" campaign used by Girls Aloud.

So, we began to think, if people had cared enough to slash One True Voice, would that have helped? Perhaps somebody did, at some point, but clearly not enough people, because they're not here, and our above (and dare we say utterly watertight) argument proves that the level of slash your fans write is directly proportional to the level of fame you achieve.

We're not going to attempt to write One True Voice slash, largely because it would be icky, and also because we can't write witty slash anything like as good as flum's over on Talent in a Previous Life, but we just thought we'd throw this question out to our readers: if we were to consider writing One True Voice slash, who would be the OTV OTP?

(Again, a little help for the unfamiliar: OTP stands for "one true pairing", and is the coupling generally regarded by fans as the best for slash purposes. For example, the Girls Aloud OTP is widely considered to be Cheryl/Kimberley, whereas Busted's OTP was Matt/James for a long time, although a recent insurrection is trying to prove that it's Matt/Charlie, and that debate looks like it's going to go on for some time, but whatever the answer turns out to be, the chances are that Matt will be involved somewhere.)

So, we thought, why not have a little interactive vote and let our reader(s) decide? And when the winner is announced, well, we might have a go at writing some comedy porn to celebrate - although, to be perfectly honest, we probably won't.

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