Toxic Fandom: A Review of Slash

"Internet Rule 34: If it's on the Internet there's porn for it."

It's probably something we don't want to think about, but there's erotic fan fiction for pretty much everything.  Name a TV show, movie, book series, or celebrity and there's probably someone writing porn for it:  Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and I'm sure even Transformers.

Slash is an indie movie about a 15-year-old boy named Neil who writes erotic fan fiction for a fictitious book/movie series called Vanguard.  The titular character of that is sort of like Boba Fett with the body armor and cape and spaceship.

Neil is just writing this for himself until someone steals his notebook and the story starts getting around school.  But one girl named Julia actually likes the story and befriends Neil.  She also writes erotic fan fiction, only about something involving female elves.  She encourages him to post the story to a site called Rabbithole where there's erotic fan fiction of all types.

After he posts his story, Neil is chatted up by a member of the site and claims he's 18.  This comes into play when there's a contest for writers on the site to read their stories out loud at a convention.  Neil's story is picked over Julia's and so he goes to Houston with Julia for the convention.  After popping some Ecstasy at the convention, Neil and Julia have a fling in their motel room.

The next day Julia goes to see a comic book writer to appraise her work and he says she's not really that good but as an attractive woman she can probably get some work.  Which obviously is not what she wants to hear.  Meanwhile Neil meets with the guy who chatted him up, who turns out to be the site moderator.  Neil kisses him but then fesses up to only being 15.  Which disqualifies him from reading, though he tries to anyway.

With his hopes dashed, Neil returns home, a little wiser about the world.  He writes a new story that's what the moderator guy referred to as something like "curtain fic."  It's like if instead of having Gandalf and Dumbledore have sex they just go shopping for curtains at Pottery Barn.  I guess it's to appeal to older, domestic gay guys.  Makes me wonder if there are stories like that on Amazon; I could probably get into that pretty easily.  Anyway, he writes his story about Vanguard and his nemesis buying curtain together.  Ha.

This certainly had a lot of interesting things for me:  erotica, fan fiction, geek properties, and so on.  I thought it was a good movie despite the low budget and lack of any recognizable actors except comedian Michael Ian Black.  It mixes a coming-of-age story with a look at a part of geek culture most of us don't really want to imagine exists.  It's not the typical teen comedy or dramedy I guess.  Even if you're not a geek there's probably some good writing-related stuff in there:  don't use flowery prose, avoid alliteration, and so on.

I did write a gender swap story sort of like Transformers and sort of like GI JOE but never any actual erotic fan fiction.  All the fan fiction I wrote was strictly PG-13 at most.

You can watch Slash on Amazon's Prime Video (free with an Amazon Prime subscription) or they show it on the "Gravitas Channel" on Pluto TV, which is where I first heard of it.  That channel has a lot of interesting indie films all made by Gravitas Pictures, most of which are also on Amazon Prime.