For about a month now I've had a mini-survey up on my site, titled "How Did You Get Into Yaoi?" - with the original purpose of amusing myself watching "Heero and Duo" and "Hiei and Kurama" battle it out. Simple minds simple pleasures, sure enough, but to my surprise some of the choices I put up for laughs gave responses that merit consideration. For instance, my teensy, unscientifically-tallied-Pollit.com-be-damned sample was conclusive stating that website warnings don't work. (Which makes me glad I don't have one. ^^;) It also stated conclusively that Anne Rice warps young minds, but be that as it may. Room for a whole 'nother essay there.
As an aside, the poll gave that a goodly portion of the English fandom got into yaoi through the fanfic of shows they liked. Which is a bit of a "duh" result...
Initially.
Then I thought this: what in the name of Bob makes that yaoi?
I mean, I know it's yaoi. You know that it is, and you know that I know. But ask anyone to define yaoi and they go into this little spiel about Japanese acronyms and fan-drawn comics, ending with maybe a mention of salient characteristics - seme x uke, say. While the last person I asked to define slash said immediately, "it's m/m fanfiction of television shows," and modulo degenerate solutions of the general equation like oh Will sleeps with Grace or Harry sleeps with Malfoy, that's exactly what it is. And in English to boot.
So why isn't English yaoi fanfiction slash?
Well, it is. Partly. But only partly, because though it shares a medium with slash - and all the virtues/constraints thereof - its approach is different by virtue of its source material. And I don't just mean seme x uke, but the paradigm that made seme x uke a default mode for yaoi in the first place. The common or garden yaoi fanfic is a fascinating hybrid of East and West, and maybe - maybe - it's the way of the future.
Part one: the medium. Marshall McLuhan in despite, it isn't the message. But it goes a long way toward determining it.
The devil's in details when it comes to slash. Not only do all the rules of good writing apply, but the medium itself will fail the genre as long as it derives from live-action. There's nothing inherently legitimate about text; it doesn't encompass the original. No one will ever shoot a slash X-Files episode, but the canonical Fox Mulder is as much embodied in David Duchovny's on-screen physicality as he is in the lines of the Ten-Thirteen writers' stable. If the individual slash writer doesn't attempt a categorical description of that physicality (capital-R literary Realism), she has to at least try for psychological veracity, plotwise justification, accumulation of canonical references... simply to force recognition on the reader. It's not so much stylistic choice as exigency. Just reading isn't believing. Slash has to work for a living.
Yaoi doesn't have to work for a living. For one thing, half of yaoi is it's own canon, but even fan yaoi has an easy time of it. A dj lives and dies by WYSIWYG - what you see is what you get - which makes it hard to kill. Just seeing is believing. I assume that as many people draw dj badly as write fic badly, but it would take a very bad draftsperson indeed to render Duo Maxwell completely unrecognizable, because 99.9% of readers will obligingly suspend disbelief for you as long as you have the braid down. It comes in exactly the same format as the original, after all. Given the usual initial parameter of CWC (Copyright? What copyright?), who's to say SSN's Aoshi is less "right" than Watsuki Nobuhiko's Aoshi?
I mean, they're both pictures. No offense.
Therefore the frequent playfulness of yaoi, the Skipping To The Good Parts Without Regard For Consequence [tm], the addictive lightness of step that Italo Calvino included in his top five criteria for good literature. Yaoi doesn't need to be taken seriously. It already is.
Does that make yaoi better than slash? Actually, no. Not all fen live by lightness alone (sorry Calvino-sama), and why not celebrate the representation of physicality - Lieutenant Paris' backside, say - if that's part of what one found attractive in the first place? Though, of course, physicality itself is a rather violent matter of taste.
Which segues us oh so happily into...
Part two. The paradigm. If you're mad enough about animanga to like yaoi, there's a good chance it's replaced so-called Reality as your dominant aesthetic worldview. (Don't even bother slinking out of the hall now, we've taken your number. Besides which, you're reading this article but I'm writing it, so what does that say about me?)
Yaoi is a synthetic sexuality - synthetic in the Fantastic Plastic Machine sense - and its fans like it that way. It's no wonder glowing cones of screentone persist merrily even after the law was repealed. If I had a dollar for every time I've heard a yaoi fan squick at body hair or pores or penile veins, I could buy a subscription to Hana to Yume instead of having to wait on the Chinese version of Angel Sanctuary. But 2D makes the fantasy pretty and removes the threat, so that even straight men can feel safe reading yaoi (and some do). Even rape is clean; even shota is clean. It's the sexual equivalent of cartoon violence. The djkas can throw in as much semen and saliva as they want, because it might as well be coconut-flavor glycerin or badly-jelled agar-agar. You can't tell by the drawing.
If aesthetic and antiseptic is what yaoi's built on, then everything else plays second fiddle. Seme x uke's been around for so long everyone figures it for inviolate Law, the Japanese foremost, but at base it derives from the same considerations of "prettiness". That and convenience, because speaking as a writer, knowing who's going to top before you begin and no two ways about it is one mega headache less. It's not a philosophical statement, it's about what looks good and is easy to draw, and between that and oh say canonical characterization, Looks Good Easy To Draw will win nineteen times out of twenty. You can make up characterization is the idea, and all the requisite power play between'em, but you can't make up the way the characters look. If not that, why should you care whether the boys take turns? Why should anyone?
The attitude doesn't begin or end with yaoi, of course. Hentai's the same, not to mention the teeming masses of platonic Ayanami Rei-worshippers. Ikuhara Kunihiko, director of Utena no less, posited in interview that all Japanese pop-culture is "mangafied". J-pop or J-rock stars achieve the same hyper-stylized beauty through airbrushing, through photographic overexposure transforming powdered skin into porcelain. Like the doll-like geisha of ukiyo-e, they seem meant to be drawings to begin with. So it feels natural to turn a stage persona into a dj character. Similarly, it feels natural to write stories containing the same sort of dialogue as appears in dj, and that are textual extensions of what one would do pictorally. "Asoko" is just screentone fuzz in words.
So, now, you have yaoi fanfiction. In English. About television animes. The rules of good writing still apply, because it's text. Most everyone still tries for psychological veracity, preferably to canon though in great part to fanon - same old same old - and if they don't it's assumed they're either taking a break or Just Not Very Good. Like slash. But when it comes to physicality-
Physicality. That's where the animanga worldview takes over.
The only people who write anime fanfic in undiluted slash terms are week-ending slashers who're happy that anime provides more grit than Western cartoons, so they can deal with the stuff like any reasonable telly series. By ignoring the fact that the characters are 2D, if necessary. Whereas everyone else in the fandom believes to some degree that 2D men come more attractive than 3D, and so trot out the true-blue yaoi way of dealing with those 2D images: aesthetic and antiseptic. Thus, seme x uke. And fuzzy-screentone vocabulary. And body fluids that taste like coconut, don't think I'm kidding you've read it as often as I have.
And at the end of the day, it might just be that the aesthetic wins over the veracity to canon.
Interesting hybrid? Definitely.
The way of the future, I said?
Room for a whole 'nother essay.