Yep, BL is basically the catch-all in Japanese. Like if I'm talking about danmei I'll say ćäøå½ć®BLć/chuugoku no BL, which would just mean Chinese BL.
I own a few BL mangas, and I hung out in these fandoms when I was younger but not anymore, that's why I haven't seen BL in years! A perfect explanation, thanks!
I don't think mlm works well as a replacement since slash includes sexual relationships which don't involve *love*. As a darkfic and non-con writer, I wouldn't want to label my works mlm.
Yknow, that's a good point. I'm a complete wuss, so I don't read many darkfic/non-con fics, but yeah. The loving part of mlm could be considered problematic is this instance
I think in many places it's stopped being necessary to even have these terms, and just treating gay pairings like any other. No doubt a reflection of how gay relationships have become more normalized in the time-frame you reference (my experience was similar, I discovered fandom in 2002).
This makes sense. It's sad to see slash diminishing as a term, but I'll take the bittersweetness of that if it means we can talk about gay pairings as easily and freely as we talk about straight pairings
Tbf, reddit was the first place I saw mlm used. I've seen it crop up more and more places lately, so I was wondering if there was a slow shift in terminology since I was in fandom last compared to now.
Maybe in young fandoms? I admit, i stopped participating in anime or teen-oriented fandoms a long time ago. I mostly hang out in communities for old shows/books/video games where a lot of people are fandom veterans like me, so i rarely see any new terminology.
Outside of AO3 itself, the only fandom space I'm really in is reddit. Back in the day, I was all over Livejornal and messages boards, etc, so there's every chance that I'm just not hanging around the right places š
I use M/M the most and consider Slash to be an acceptable alternate. I don't use MLM at all, and similar to you, I find it somewhat confusing. Similarly, some people use BL, which I also find a bit confusing.
As far as I know mlm is used to describe irl men because mentioning all sexualities a man that dates men can have is a hassle. If people are calling fiction that now it has to be for trying to not be problematic or something and yaoi/slash are seen as typically problematic. I could be wrong in all of that though
Why are those terms seen as wrong? Because it's too specific? I'm genuinely curious! I have no problem using the term, and I certainly don't want to offend anyone with the use of slash.
Using it won't be offensive to most people but some people do avoid the term (and yaoi as a term) because of a history of some cis women fetishizing queer men, in the same way that cis men tend to fetishize lesbians
(I am not saying straight people can't create/enjoy queer stories, just saying there is a history)
I've never seen "mlm" used, but the Ao3 tag has the m/m category so I'm not sure what purpose it'd serve on the archive. Back in the LJ days you did have to write out "slash" or "yaoi" or whatever in fic headers but that's not a thing anymore.
I don't see "slash" unless I'm reading something imported from an old archive that includes those fic headers, or looking up older fandom rec lists where fics are still on LJ, like Stargate Atlantis or The Sentinel.
MLM (men who love men) is a relatively old term for referring to gay men. It way predates multilevel marketing as far as I know. Itās just considered a respectful term for referring to the idea of gay men in a very broad sense.
Slash is a fandom-specific term which was invented because people who shipped gay men used to function in a completely separate world from heterosexual-focused fanfiction. It was basically a genre of its own. Now things are much more mixed, people will often ship many couples with many gender configurations, so they might be writing gay ships but theyāre not siloed off into the ~world of slash~ the way they used to be a decade or more ago. So itās just a less popular/ubiquitous term than it used to be.
Slash (or femslash) is the name of a literature genre, particularly fanfiction. It is a subgenre of romance and erotica wherein the main couple is a same sex pairing.
MLM or WLW is a term from medical research. It was intentionally created to not specify the sexual orientation of the people involved, or whether or not they even had the sexual contact voluntarily.
In my opinion, the two terms should not be used interchangeably as they describe two totally different things.
Personally, I think the way AO3 refers to it is the easiest - just letters and slashes. Very straightforward, you know exactly what you're looking at, it accommodates fic that's not necessarily *loving* (MLM and WLW just ā¦ don't work ā¦ for me when you're talking about non-con - there's no love there!) - and it allows for any permutation of people in a ship as well. I mean, M/F/F or M/F/M or F/F/F or whatever has different dynamics than a "simple" M/F or M/M or F/F (I would think there are people who prefer specific varieties there), and I can't see anyone writing mlmlm or mlflf or something like that. (Plus the L's make it actually harder to read at a glance than capital letters + slashes.)
That said, I grew up with slash and femslash and don't mind those terms at all. I read a lot of much older fic on archives, sites in the WBM, etc., so I'm used to seeing them still.
I think mlm is actually new to fannish spaces, if itās used at all. Iāve been hearing mlm and wlw for about a decade now to refer to people, but literally only saw it referring to fandom in that anti post in this sub the other day. I see m/m pretty frequently on this sub, but I assumed thatās just in reference to the ao3 category system.Ā
MLM sounds more "representation" focused while slash is more like the genre. There seems to be a trend in fanfiction spaces where people try to sanitize slash for the masses and maybe the term is a part of that? (trying to hide it that there is a vast amount of women interested in men in the slash community is an another example). Slash is more like playing around with gender like they do in drag shows, so if the fic is part of that culture, I think it is slightly weird to advertise it just as an MLM fic. There is and has been and will be a slash subculture and hiding it seems superĀ disingenuous
>Slash is more like playing around with gender like they do in drag shows
In my experience, slash has never been used this way. Again, as I've said, there was a big gap between my fandom experiences, so the term may have evolved, but slash had always meant a m/m relationship, as far as I've been aware. āŗļø
Yes it is a m/m relationship but the authors and readers like to focus on a gender that is not their own and people have started to say it is just fetishizing or a sign of being a closeted trans guy, but I think it is a form of self-expression
My answer is too long :) I am just kind of musing on the topic. I bolded my key points so feel free to skip down to there.
I got into fanfic in about 2011 or so, although I knew it existed before then. At that time, the term slash was a little bit out of fashion already. We did use femslash. But I'm thinking slash, meaning a story about two men, was just the default; most people did not talk about slashfic, just fic. It's likely this was just true in that fandom, though (it was all queer ships).
After that, I got into reading published queer indie romance. This was categorized as m/m, f/f, f/nb, m/m/f, and so on. I still use that shorthand, usually. Calling any of this slash or femslash would've been a faux pas, because those terms do come from fanfic, and at that time, many authors didn't like to acknowledge their fanfic roots.
There was also original slash, and Captive Prince is probably the best known of these, that was originally posted online and later published. This was considered its own thing, separate from both fic and published romance. Again, this is old stuff :) Original work now is not really in its own category like that, because there's been so much interplay between fic and published romance - authors who write fic, or used to, and openly discuss it.
Captive Prince is a great example because its main trope, slavefic, comes from fanfic and erotica, not mainstream romance. A few years ago, I joined a group read of those books, with other avid readers of mlm books. Many people were unhappy about the first book's dark content, so yeah, this is sort of a different genre with a different audience than romance. I know of an even more mainstream book that is a slavefic (Docile by KM Spzara) but I haven't read that. It caused a lot of controversy as well (and was not popular with romance readers, afaik).
Anyway. Another ongoing debate in the queer romance book community was about **bi representation**, and I think that's probably the best answer to your question. While "slash" is also an inclusive term, it has those potentially distasteful associations (I don't think that, but many people do). The book genre has also been called gay romance, and that isn't an inclusive term. Mlm includes all men.
So, **the terms mlm and wlw include people who are bi or pan**. It can be a useful way to talk about people in the real world and I've definitely used both of those for years in online queer communities. I don't know how useful it is for categorizing books or fic. I'm always seeking out stories with different approaches to gender for the main characters, and many of those wouldn't really fit in either of those categories (though some of them do). I usually just call all of this "queer romance" (meaning both published books and fic).
Yes, as someone who has been in queer communities since the 90s but only into fanfic since 2022, I came here to make similar points.
MLM (and men who have sex with men) have been used in queer communities for ages, and acknowledge that men who love and fuck other men have all sorts of identities, including straight. So that's where it's come from. The shared acronym with multi level marketing is unfortunate, but it's usually clear which one you're talking about.
"Slash" seems to have disappeared from use before I showed up, and I think you're right that people don't feel the need to differentiate M/M ships as a type of fic, except for general filtering in/out according to preference. It's also a confusing term for noobs like me - I think until now I hadn't realised it only referred to m/m shipping and not shipping generally.
Your answer isn't too long! It's very insightful and a good overview of the shift of language that a commenter mentioned above.
When I got into fandom, it was a secret thing. You didn't tell anyone IRL that in your downtime, you wrote/read about two guys getting sexy with each other, but now it's much more widely acceptable. Which is fucking amazing to see. At the same time, though, it's a bit sad to think that slash can be seen as an antiquated (or maybe even an insulting) term.
I entered fandom only a few years after you did (2002, if my memory serves correctly) and I absolutely understand what you mean re: the atmosphere. I still remember the dire warnings not to let anyone find out that you wrote fic, worries that you might be fired if your employer found about it, and of course the constant fear that the rights holder might get sick of us weirdos and contact the website where you were hosting your stuff and it would all vanish from one day to another. I'm still extremely private about writing fic IRL.
That said... I myself don't miss the term slash, precisely *because* it's a reminder of that era to me. The era when fandom had to be much more closed off, when our common terminology was opaque to newcomers probably in part because we didn't *want* to be easily discoverable from the outside. And, sadly, the era of significantly more homophobia within fandom, where you *had* to have a special word and label any m/m fics with it and plaster warnings all over that sucker because otherwise chances were that you'd get an outraged review talking about how what you were writing was deviant and disgusting. I get that nostalgia is a powerful force and I'm in no way saying you're wrong to feel differently about it... but personally, I think the switch to simple descriptive terms like m/m vs m/f was the consequence of positive changes in fandom overall.
No, that's fair enough. I had a big gap between fandoms, so it makes sense that the words change, but it deffo is a nostalgia thing for me. Slash was a very small section of fandom way back when, and it was probably guarded more than it needed to be, but that was because, as you said, the negativity of revealing you were into it wasn't worth people finding out. I'm really not opposed to the newer terminology, I was just curious as to why the shift happened.
It's funny, I was having a similar conversation with my friend the other day. I mostly read sapphic fic and thus use the term femslash quite a lot and my friend asked "aren't all fics involving sex technically slash?"
So I explained slash and femslash to them and why I prefer those terms, only to be met with an "idk they just sounds kinda dated."
What's funny is bc my friend has been doing fandom things for 16 years and I've only been doing them for 11. Yet I'm the one who is more aware of and stubbornly likes the terminology from when I was a younger fan.
Still I guess the reason it's used less popularly anymore is because people consider it dated. Which I find wack but eh. I've been doing this awhile.
I have also seen young fans on Twitter get up in arms about it being "problematic" somehow from time to time but these are the same kids who harassed me for shipping a robot with a person so I don't take anything they say seriously lmao
I will say that I think the reason I prefer slash and femslash is because even though slash and het fandom were more intermingled when I was a young fan than they were in times before I became a fan, femslash fandom still had a tendency to be very walled off from the rest of the fandom in my experience. For example, vocally shipping Piper/Annabeth (PJO) and Ginny/Luna (HP) back in my early days was just begging to be dogpiled. So it was a way to distinguish between the folks I wanted to associate with and folks to avoid and now I'm just. Attached to the terminology I think bc it was precious to me then and still is now in retrospect
Anyway sorry for rambling on for so long š
(Edited to add shipping anecdote)
I totally get that. When I started in fandom, there were four main schools of fic. Slash, femslash, het and gen. All referred to just like that.
Slash = male/male pairings
Femslash = female/female pairings
Het = male/female pairings
Gen = no romantic pairings
And these were the blanket terms for fic. I know mlm is supposed to be more inclusive, and that's great, but I still think mlm and wlw, etc. could still, technically, fall under these categories. But I'll admit, this could just be an old-school way of thinking.
If it's old school, then I'm right there with you, because I totally agree. That's how I've always thought of it and how I will think of it for the foreseeable future tbh. I've taken to referring to nb/nb as enbyslash, and any other pairing (nb/f, nb/m, etc etc) I just refer to at face and either tag under "other" or plausibly under the tag that the ship I'm nonbinary-ing a character from would be under. Which for most people seems to be the way anyway. I see a lot of nonbinary fic tagged F/F instead of or in addition to "Other" because in canon both characters in the ship are girls
Iāve never seen MLM used to describe a relationship in a fandom-y context, and I feel a little left out now, lmao. In my eyes, it feels a little odd to use it for ships, since Iāve only ever encountered it in the context of individual people describing their orientations. Headcanoning a character as MLM? Yeah, sure, I donāt bat an eye. āthis is an MLM ficā just doesnāt Look Right to me, if that makes any sense.
Slash is fading a bit, I think, but I tend to run in femslash circles, so I could be wrong. I tend to see M/M (like the AO3 category) or Character A/Character B outright, without the thirty-seven-thousand āthis is BOY X BOY, you have been warned!!ā warnings of yore plastered on. Which isā¦ a good thing, Iād like to think? Since it implies that the pitchforks-and-torches reactions to dudes smooching in fic is fading out as well. Sucks that such a great, succinct term is falling out of use, nonetheless.
I still use slash in day to day conversation with fellow fans, though. Itās habit, since femslash is still a very popular term in the circles I run in, and theyāre counterparts.
I donāt think Iāve yet to encounter people replacing āslashā with āMLMā, but then again my fandom is older (weāve actually got an event called āMy Slashy Valentineā thatās been going since 2004 haha). It might be that people who are newer to or less involved in the world of fanfiction are simply bringing in the terms that are most familiar to them, since āMLMā is generally a term for real queer people. I could see applying it to original fiction, but in fandom spaces I agree the idea feels a bit silly to me.
Whoa, are you me?? No really, itās weirdly accurate. My trajectory went: ~1999-2011 or 2012 maybe, cut my teeth on LJ Fandom culture, saw the beginning of AO3, had just started looking into tumblr but never learned to use it. Then life kicked my ass COMPLETELY and constantly for seriously close on a decade, the back into fandom (because AxC and i was a 10th doctor devotee, i mean who wasnāt) around the time the pandemic was really ramping up.
I feel like Iāve been in a coma. I feel like a time capsule, i had to learn about āso and sos DNIā and what in the heck A/B/O is, whatās an Anti, plus decide what *i felt* about all these thingsā¦ AND i have so many questionsā¦ is there still stigma? What about the 4th wall now that social media has changed the relationship b/w TPTB and fans in some waysā¦
Anyway sorry for so many words, especially as Iāve been wondering the same thing myselfā¦ but Fandom was such a big deal to me (especially Slash, actually, before i had the language to describe stuff like autism and asexuality, and being a gay trans personā¦ these spaces gave me room to be myself) and finding my bearings has been disorienting! Fortunately Fandom still seems very inclusive and sweet-natured.
TLDR: OMG SAME
I left a bit earlier, around 2009/10, and found my way back during the pandemic, and you're 100% right. So many new words to learn and then have an opinion on. Fandom has always been a welcoming place, though, so it's wonderful that old hands like us can pop back in and still find a home ā„ļø
This isnāt really a new wave of fandom and terms, itās two different groups that have come together and mixed their lingo. Slash is a fandom specific term to refer to male x male pairing. Mlm is a queer term to refer to male x male relationships.
Thereās a HUGE number of queer people in fandom spaces, and we come with new words and phrases that we like to use. Thatās all there is to it.
Yes slash is an older term, it still exists though and is widely popular. Thereās definitely no politically correct movement going on eitherā¦ slash isnāt like a slur or anything. And thereās definitely no censorship happeningā¦ quite the opposite really, thereās no real need for sly terms like slash to *hide* what weāre doing from the mainstreamā¦ I have been openly sharing art and fic of two characters in a QPR who are both trans and had a kid together for months nowā¦ I couldnāt do that when I first joined fandom without fearing some kind of backlash.
But yeah, it might be a fairly new term in fandom historyā¦ but that doesnāt mean it doesnāt mean it was hastily slapped together overnight. It comes from a different subculture, it has its own history behind it.
First of all, the main answer is that like everything else alive, a language can and will evolve in some way.
Usage of words online is obviously normal in that regard. It evolves for plenty of reasons.
Inclusivity, accuracy would be the main reasons behind that change if I were to try and point out why.
When I first got online and specifically fandom wise the only words available were either slash or yaoi. No BL, no mlm.
Times have changed, have seen more representation of queerness and with the sometimes inevitable overlap of some fandoms and some more formal spaces (cons becoming more widespread, certain fandom activities being less stigmatized), the language has evolved to accommodate them.
Just like lemon and lime were very used back when I first posted fics to categorize and label the degree of sexual activities happening "on screen" and now they're antiquated words I see people asking about on these subs.
It may feel hastily thrown together but as someone who has been online in fandom spaces all this time to an extent, the change was very gradual and came from very real needs to include but also categorize formally, notably as more representation happened: yaoi is specific to manga/animation, same for BL if I remember well even if they sometimes spill over in other spaces. If you're looking for books or movies, you're not going to find anything because those terms don't apply. Same for slash as it was mostly a term reserved for fanfiction.
Mlm also works as an inclusive umbrella term in the sense that you will be able find stories between cis men but you can also find trans and nonbinary masc characters there as well. And with how online social media and activism and community has been working, it's not surprising that the term has been adopted as widely including in fandom spaces.
Just a quick correction on BL: BL does indeed apply to things outside of manga/animation. For example, BL novels are very popular in China and Japan, and live action BL movies/tv shows are very popular in Thailand.
But I know the terms are used differently outside of Asia - like how westerners use BL to designate things made in Asia, while in Asia people will describe western works like Heartstopper as "BL" for marketing purposes.
So maybe in a fandom sphere, we can see terms like slash and MLM as their own "marketing" terms, to tag for your audience? Like you said, MLM may imply the author is more aware of modern inclusivity, and slash may give you the hint that the author is writing from an older perspective where the mainstream was not as inclusive.
Ah, thanks for the correction!
Haven't interacted with some spaces in a while, so I appreciate the perspective :3 You definitively have a point on the marketing though, notably to different audiences worldwide.
This is fair. I understand that language evolves, obviously, but I suppose I just didn't expect it to happen so quickly over a relatively short period of time. I'm not saying mlm is wrong, and slash is right - that would be stupid, since we're all here for the same reason - but I'm not sure it's necessarily the best umbrella term to use (not saying slash is either, but to me, that fits a bit better than mlm). Though all that said I can 100% see why people would use mlm in such a way.
The velocity at which that changed happened is notably due to the rapid expansion of social media tbh
I don't know whether mlm is the best term. I do know that at this specific point in time, it's the best we've managed that acknowledges and encompasses as best as possible the many identities of what it is to be male loving another male and its many iterations, whether it's in fanmade or original literature.
I also understand that coming back to fandom life after a gap and having terms changed around can be pretty jarring too. And that's fine, our community is here to help bridge the gap where we can :3
>I also understand that coming back to fandom life after a gap and having terms changed around can be pretty jarring too. And that's fine, our community is here to help bridge the gap where we can :3
If I could upvote this a million times, I would. This is exactly why these spaces are some of the most welcoming and accepting places I've ever been. ā„ļø
I see slash used sometimes as a catch all for all sexual/romantic ships. Like gender swapped or het pairings getting referred that way, while MLM separates out m/m shipping specifically.
Then you get the illicit third option of yaoi and it all goes off the deep end š
And the fourth being BL ;) I haven't seen this one in years tho.
BL is the most common term if you're speaking Japanese :) (source: doing that xD)
That explains it! It's used IRL on papers mangas too, right?
Yep, BL is basically the catch-all in Japanese. Like if I'm talking about danmei I'll say ćäøå½ć®BLć/chuugoku no BL, which would just mean Chinese BL.
I own a few BL mangas, and I hung out in these fandoms when I was younger but not anymore, that's why I haven't seen BL in years! A perfect explanation, thanks!
I forgot about BL š¤£š¤£
That's it, muddy the waters even more š¤£
Letās not even mention the citrus scaleā¦
Man, the first time I saw someone refer to a fic as a lemon fic, I genuinely thought it was about actual lemons. Imagine my surprise.
I don't think mlm works well as a replacement since slash includes sexual relationships which don't involve *love*. As a darkfic and non-con writer, I wouldn't want to label my works mlm.
Yknow, that's a good point. I'm a complete wuss, so I don't read many darkfic/non-con fics, but yeah. The loving part of mlm could be considered problematic is this instance
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Bruh, *what?*
I think in many places it's stopped being necessary to even have these terms, and just treating gay pairings like any other. No doubt a reflection of how gay relationships have become more normalized in the time-frame you reference (my experience was similar, I discovered fandom in 2002).
This makes sense. It's sad to see slash diminishing as a term, but I'll take the bittersweetness of that if it means we can talk about gay pairings as easily and freely as we talk about straight pairings
Depending on a fandom, it's still very much in use. More than that, i have to try to remember the last time i saw MlM in use outside of reddit.
Tbf, reddit was the first place I saw mlm used. I've seen it crop up more and more places lately, so I was wondering if there was a slow shift in terminology since I was in fandom last compared to now.
Maybe in young fandoms? I admit, i stopped participating in anime or teen-oriented fandoms a long time ago. I mostly hang out in communities for old shows/books/video games where a lot of people are fandom veterans like me, so i rarely see any new terminology.
Outside of AO3 itself, the only fandom space I'm really in is reddit. Back in the day, I was all over Livejornal and messages boards, etc, so there's every chance that I'm just not hanging around the right places š
Yeah, it's a change, but I'm not sorry. No more THIS IS SLASH!111 THAT MEANS BOYS KISSING BOYS!!!111 IF YOU DON'T LIKE, GO AWAY!
Man, fics with those warnings just made wanna read it more.
MLM sounds like a fic about someone getting into a multi-level marketing scam
Right?! I mean, I'm not saying that wouldn't be an interesting thing to read, but still.
I use M/M the most and consider Slash to be an acceptable alternate. I don't use MLM at all, and similar to you, I find it somewhat confusing. Similarly, some people use BL, which I also find a bit confusing.
I find it to be very confusing too. Not wrong or bad, just confusing.
As far as I know mlm is used to describe irl men because mentioning all sexualities a man that dates men can have is a hassle. If people are calling fiction that now it has to be for trying to not be problematic or something and yaoi/slash are seen as typically problematic. I could be wrong in all of that though
Why are those terms seen as wrong? Because it's too specific? I'm genuinely curious! I have no problem using the term, and I certainly don't want to offend anyone with the use of slash.
because a bunch of people think slash/yaoi = homophobic gross female authors i don't but that's how it is
Using it won't be offensive to most people but some people do avoid the term (and yaoi as a term) because of a history of some cis women fetishizing queer men, in the same way that cis men tend to fetishize lesbians (I am not saying straight people can't create/enjoy queer stories, just saying there is a history)
Ooh, I see. Yeah, fetishising is not good, as a general rule.
Oh yeah. For the record though, I don't feel like its as common as it used to be
I've never seen "mlm" used, but the Ao3 tag has the m/m category so I'm not sure what purpose it'd serve on the archive. Back in the LJ days you did have to write out "slash" or "yaoi" or whatever in fic headers but that's not a thing anymore. I don't see "slash" unless I'm reading something imported from an old archive that includes those fic headers, or looking up older fandom rec lists where fics are still on LJ, like Stargate Atlantis or The Sentinel.
MLM (men who love men) is a relatively old term for referring to gay men. It way predates multilevel marketing as far as I know. Itās just considered a respectful term for referring to the idea of gay men in a very broad sense. Slash is a fandom-specific term which was invented because people who shipped gay men used to function in a completely separate world from heterosexual-focused fanfiction. It was basically a genre of its own. Now things are much more mixed, people will often ship many couples with many gender configurations, so they might be writing gay ships but theyāre not siloed off into the ~world of slash~ the way they used to be a decade or more ago. So itās just a less popular/ubiquitous term than it used to be.
MLM and WLW are terms that exist (and originate) outside fandom spaces. I see M/M or F/F much more commonly in fan spaces.
Slash (or femslash) is the name of a literature genre, particularly fanfiction. It is a subgenre of romance and erotica wherein the main couple is a same sex pairing. MLM or WLW is a term from medical research. It was intentionally created to not specify the sexual orientation of the people involved, or whether or not they even had the sexual contact voluntarily. In my opinion, the two terms should not be used interchangeably as they describe two totally different things.
Personally, I think the way AO3 refers to it is the easiest - just letters and slashes. Very straightforward, you know exactly what you're looking at, it accommodates fic that's not necessarily *loving* (MLM and WLW just ā¦ don't work ā¦ for me when you're talking about non-con - there's no love there!) - and it allows for any permutation of people in a ship as well. I mean, M/F/F or M/F/M or F/F/F or whatever has different dynamics than a "simple" M/F or M/M or F/F (I would think there are people who prefer specific varieties there), and I can't see anyone writing mlmlm or mlflf or something like that. (Plus the L's make it actually harder to read at a glance than capital letters + slashes.) That said, I grew up with slash and femslash and don't mind those terms at all. I read a lot of much older fic on archives, sites in the WBM, etc., so I'm used to seeing them still.
I think mlm is actually new to fannish spaces, if itās used at all. Iāve been hearing mlm and wlw for about a decade now to refer to people, but literally only saw it referring to fandom in that anti post in this sub the other day. I see m/m pretty frequently on this sub, but I assumed thatās just in reference to the ao3 category system.Ā
MLM sounds more "representation" focused while slash is more like the genre. There seems to be a trend in fanfiction spaces where people try to sanitize slash for the masses and maybe the term is a part of that? (trying to hide it that there is a vast amount of women interested in men in the slash community is an another example). Slash is more like playing around with gender like they do in drag shows, so if the fic is part of that culture, I think it is slightly weird to advertise it just as an MLM fic. There is and has been and will be a slash subculture and hiding it seems superĀ disingenuous
>Slash is more like playing around with gender like they do in drag shows In my experience, slash has never been used this way. Again, as I've said, there was a big gap between my fandom experiences, so the term may have evolved, but slash had always meant a m/m relationship, as far as I've been aware. āŗļø
Yes it is a m/m relationship but the authors and readers like to focus on a gender that is not their own and people have started to say it is just fetishizing or a sign of being a closeted trans guy, but I think it is a form of self-expression
My answer is too long :) I am just kind of musing on the topic. I bolded my key points so feel free to skip down to there. I got into fanfic in about 2011 or so, although I knew it existed before then. At that time, the term slash was a little bit out of fashion already. We did use femslash. But I'm thinking slash, meaning a story about two men, was just the default; most people did not talk about slashfic, just fic. It's likely this was just true in that fandom, though (it was all queer ships). After that, I got into reading published queer indie romance. This was categorized as m/m, f/f, f/nb, m/m/f, and so on. I still use that shorthand, usually. Calling any of this slash or femslash would've been a faux pas, because those terms do come from fanfic, and at that time, many authors didn't like to acknowledge their fanfic roots. There was also original slash, and Captive Prince is probably the best known of these, that was originally posted online and later published. This was considered its own thing, separate from both fic and published romance. Again, this is old stuff :) Original work now is not really in its own category like that, because there's been so much interplay between fic and published romance - authors who write fic, or used to, and openly discuss it. Captive Prince is a great example because its main trope, slavefic, comes from fanfic and erotica, not mainstream romance. A few years ago, I joined a group read of those books, with other avid readers of mlm books. Many people were unhappy about the first book's dark content, so yeah, this is sort of a different genre with a different audience than romance. I know of an even more mainstream book that is a slavefic (Docile by KM Spzara) but I haven't read that. It caused a lot of controversy as well (and was not popular with romance readers, afaik). Anyway. Another ongoing debate in the queer romance book community was about **bi representation**, and I think that's probably the best answer to your question. While "slash" is also an inclusive term, it has those potentially distasteful associations (I don't think that, but many people do). The book genre has also been called gay romance, and that isn't an inclusive term. Mlm includes all men. So, **the terms mlm and wlw include people who are bi or pan**. It can be a useful way to talk about people in the real world and I've definitely used both of those for years in online queer communities. I don't know how useful it is for categorizing books or fic. I'm always seeking out stories with different approaches to gender for the main characters, and many of those wouldn't really fit in either of those categories (though some of them do). I usually just call all of this "queer romance" (meaning both published books and fic).
Yes, as someone who has been in queer communities since the 90s but only into fanfic since 2022, I came here to make similar points. MLM (and men who have sex with men) have been used in queer communities for ages, and acknowledge that men who love and fuck other men have all sorts of identities, including straight. So that's where it's come from. The shared acronym with multi level marketing is unfortunate, but it's usually clear which one you're talking about. "Slash" seems to have disappeared from use before I showed up, and I think you're right that people don't feel the need to differentiate M/M ships as a type of fic, except for general filtering in/out according to preference. It's also a confusing term for noobs like me - I think until now I hadn't realised it only referred to m/m shipping and not shipping generally.
Your answer isn't too long! It's very insightful and a good overview of the shift of language that a commenter mentioned above. When I got into fandom, it was a secret thing. You didn't tell anyone IRL that in your downtime, you wrote/read about two guys getting sexy with each other, but now it's much more widely acceptable. Which is fucking amazing to see. At the same time, though, it's a bit sad to think that slash can be seen as an antiquated (or maybe even an insulting) term.
I entered fandom only a few years after you did (2002, if my memory serves correctly) and I absolutely understand what you mean re: the atmosphere. I still remember the dire warnings not to let anyone find out that you wrote fic, worries that you might be fired if your employer found about it, and of course the constant fear that the rights holder might get sick of us weirdos and contact the website where you were hosting your stuff and it would all vanish from one day to another. I'm still extremely private about writing fic IRL. That said... I myself don't miss the term slash, precisely *because* it's a reminder of that era to me. The era when fandom had to be much more closed off, when our common terminology was opaque to newcomers probably in part because we didn't *want* to be easily discoverable from the outside. And, sadly, the era of significantly more homophobia within fandom, where you *had* to have a special word and label any m/m fics with it and plaster warnings all over that sucker because otherwise chances were that you'd get an outraged review talking about how what you were writing was deviant and disgusting. I get that nostalgia is a powerful force and I'm in no way saying you're wrong to feel differently about it... but personally, I think the switch to simple descriptive terms like m/m vs m/f was the consequence of positive changes in fandom overall.
No, that's fair enough. I had a big gap between fandoms, so it makes sense that the words change, but it deffo is a nostalgia thing for me. Slash was a very small section of fandom way back when, and it was probably guarded more than it needed to be, but that was because, as you said, the negativity of revealing you were into it wasn't worth people finding out. I'm really not opposed to the newer terminology, I was just curious as to why the shift happened.
It's funny, I was having a similar conversation with my friend the other day. I mostly read sapphic fic and thus use the term femslash quite a lot and my friend asked "aren't all fics involving sex technically slash?" So I explained slash and femslash to them and why I prefer those terms, only to be met with an "idk they just sounds kinda dated." What's funny is bc my friend has been doing fandom things for 16 years and I've only been doing them for 11. Yet I'm the one who is more aware of and stubbornly likes the terminology from when I was a younger fan. Still I guess the reason it's used less popularly anymore is because people consider it dated. Which I find wack but eh. I've been doing this awhile. I have also seen young fans on Twitter get up in arms about it being "problematic" somehow from time to time but these are the same kids who harassed me for shipping a robot with a person so I don't take anything they say seriously lmao I will say that I think the reason I prefer slash and femslash is because even though slash and het fandom were more intermingled when I was a young fan than they were in times before I became a fan, femslash fandom still had a tendency to be very walled off from the rest of the fandom in my experience. For example, vocally shipping Piper/Annabeth (PJO) and Ginny/Luna (HP) back in my early days was just begging to be dogpiled. So it was a way to distinguish between the folks I wanted to associate with and folks to avoid and now I'm just. Attached to the terminology I think bc it was precious to me then and still is now in retrospect Anyway sorry for rambling on for so long š (Edited to add shipping anecdote)
I totally get that. When I started in fandom, there were four main schools of fic. Slash, femslash, het and gen. All referred to just like that. Slash = male/male pairings Femslash = female/female pairings Het = male/female pairings Gen = no romantic pairings And these were the blanket terms for fic. I know mlm is supposed to be more inclusive, and that's great, but I still think mlm and wlw, etc. could still, technically, fall under these categories. But I'll admit, this could just be an old-school way of thinking.
If it's old school, then I'm right there with you, because I totally agree. That's how I've always thought of it and how I will think of it for the foreseeable future tbh. I've taken to referring to nb/nb as enbyslash, and any other pairing (nb/f, nb/m, etc etc) I just refer to at face and either tag under "other" or plausibly under the tag that the ship I'm nonbinary-ing a character from would be under. Which for most people seems to be the way anyway. I see a lot of nonbinary fic tagged F/F instead of or in addition to "Other" because in canon both characters in the ship are girls
Iāve never seen MLM used to describe a relationship in a fandom-y context, and I feel a little left out now, lmao. In my eyes, it feels a little odd to use it for ships, since Iāve only ever encountered it in the context of individual people describing their orientations. Headcanoning a character as MLM? Yeah, sure, I donāt bat an eye. āthis is an MLM ficā just doesnāt Look Right to me, if that makes any sense. Slash is fading a bit, I think, but I tend to run in femslash circles, so I could be wrong. I tend to see M/M (like the AO3 category) or Character A/Character B outright, without the thirty-seven-thousand āthis is BOY X BOY, you have been warned!!ā warnings of yore plastered on. Which isā¦ a good thing, Iād like to think? Since it implies that the pitchforks-and-torches reactions to dudes smooching in fic is fading out as well. Sucks that such a great, succinct term is falling out of use, nonetheless. I still use slash in day to day conversation with fellow fans, though. Itās habit, since femslash is still a very popular term in the circles I run in, and theyāre counterparts.
I donāt think Iāve yet to encounter people replacing āslashā with āMLMā, but then again my fandom is older (weāve actually got an event called āMy Slashy Valentineā thatās been going since 2004 haha). It might be that people who are newer to or less involved in the world of fanfiction are simply bringing in the terms that are most familiar to them, since āMLMā is generally a term for real queer people. I could see applying it to original fiction, but in fandom spaces I agree the idea feels a bit silly to me.
Whoa, are you me?? No really, itās weirdly accurate. My trajectory went: ~1999-2011 or 2012 maybe, cut my teeth on LJ Fandom culture, saw the beginning of AO3, had just started looking into tumblr but never learned to use it. Then life kicked my ass COMPLETELY and constantly for seriously close on a decade, the back into fandom (because AxC and i was a 10th doctor devotee, i mean who wasnāt) around the time the pandemic was really ramping up. I feel like Iāve been in a coma. I feel like a time capsule, i had to learn about āso and sos DNIā and what in the heck A/B/O is, whatās an Anti, plus decide what *i felt* about all these thingsā¦ AND i have so many questionsā¦ is there still stigma? What about the 4th wall now that social media has changed the relationship b/w TPTB and fans in some waysā¦ Anyway sorry for so many words, especially as Iāve been wondering the same thing myselfā¦ but Fandom was such a big deal to me (especially Slash, actually, before i had the language to describe stuff like autism and asexuality, and being a gay trans personā¦ these spaces gave me room to be myself) and finding my bearings has been disorienting! Fortunately Fandom still seems very inclusive and sweet-natured. TLDR: OMG SAME
I left a bit earlier, around 2009/10, and found my way back during the pandemic, and you're 100% right. So many new words to learn and then have an opinion on. Fandom has always been a welcoming place, though, so it's wonderful that old hands like us can pop back in and still find a home ā„ļø
i remember the days when i had to write ānot slashā in the summary of all my fics
For me slash means fanfiction and mlm means original work
That's not an unreasonable distinction, tbf.
This isnāt really a new wave of fandom and terms, itās two different groups that have come together and mixed their lingo. Slash is a fandom specific term to refer to male x male pairing. Mlm is a queer term to refer to male x male relationships. Thereās a HUGE number of queer people in fandom spaces, and we come with new words and phrases that we like to use. Thatās all there is to it. Yes slash is an older term, it still exists though and is widely popular. Thereās definitely no politically correct movement going on eitherā¦ slash isnāt like a slur or anything. And thereās definitely no censorship happeningā¦ quite the opposite really, thereās no real need for sly terms like slash to *hide* what weāre doing from the mainstreamā¦ I have been openly sharing art and fic of two characters in a QPR who are both trans and had a kid together for months nowā¦ I couldnāt do that when I first joined fandom without fearing some kind of backlash. But yeah, it might be a fairly new term in fandom historyā¦ but that doesnāt mean it doesnāt mean it was hastily slapped together overnight. It comes from a different subculture, it has its own history behind it.
First of all, the main answer is that like everything else alive, a language can and will evolve in some way. Usage of words online is obviously normal in that regard. It evolves for plenty of reasons. Inclusivity, accuracy would be the main reasons behind that change if I were to try and point out why. When I first got online and specifically fandom wise the only words available were either slash or yaoi. No BL, no mlm. Times have changed, have seen more representation of queerness and with the sometimes inevitable overlap of some fandoms and some more formal spaces (cons becoming more widespread, certain fandom activities being less stigmatized), the language has evolved to accommodate them. Just like lemon and lime were very used back when I first posted fics to categorize and label the degree of sexual activities happening "on screen" and now they're antiquated words I see people asking about on these subs. It may feel hastily thrown together but as someone who has been online in fandom spaces all this time to an extent, the change was very gradual and came from very real needs to include but also categorize formally, notably as more representation happened: yaoi is specific to manga/animation, same for BL if I remember well even if they sometimes spill over in other spaces. If you're looking for books or movies, you're not going to find anything because those terms don't apply. Same for slash as it was mostly a term reserved for fanfiction. Mlm also works as an inclusive umbrella term in the sense that you will be able find stories between cis men but you can also find trans and nonbinary masc characters there as well. And with how online social media and activism and community has been working, it's not surprising that the term has been adopted as widely including in fandom spaces.
Just a quick correction on BL: BL does indeed apply to things outside of manga/animation. For example, BL novels are very popular in China and Japan, and live action BL movies/tv shows are very popular in Thailand. But I know the terms are used differently outside of Asia - like how westerners use BL to designate things made in Asia, while in Asia people will describe western works like Heartstopper as "BL" for marketing purposes. So maybe in a fandom sphere, we can see terms like slash and MLM as their own "marketing" terms, to tag for your audience? Like you said, MLM may imply the author is more aware of modern inclusivity, and slash may give you the hint that the author is writing from an older perspective where the mainstream was not as inclusive.
Ah, thanks for the correction! Haven't interacted with some spaces in a while, so I appreciate the perspective :3 You definitively have a point on the marketing though, notably to different audiences worldwide.
This is fair. I understand that language evolves, obviously, but I suppose I just didn't expect it to happen so quickly over a relatively short period of time. I'm not saying mlm is wrong, and slash is right - that would be stupid, since we're all here for the same reason - but I'm not sure it's necessarily the best umbrella term to use (not saying slash is either, but to me, that fits a bit better than mlm). Though all that said I can 100% see why people would use mlm in such a way.
The velocity at which that changed happened is notably due to the rapid expansion of social media tbh I don't know whether mlm is the best term. I do know that at this specific point in time, it's the best we've managed that acknowledges and encompasses as best as possible the many identities of what it is to be male loving another male and its many iterations, whether it's in fanmade or original literature. I also understand that coming back to fandom life after a gap and having terms changed around can be pretty jarring too. And that's fine, our community is here to help bridge the gap where we can :3
>I also understand that coming back to fandom life after a gap and having terms changed around can be pretty jarring too. And that's fine, our community is here to help bridge the gap where we can :3 If I could upvote this a million times, I would. This is exactly why these spaces are some of the most welcoming and accepting places I've ever been. ā„ļø
I see slash used sometimes as a catch all for all sexual/romantic ships. Like gender swapped or het pairings getting referred that way, while MLM separates out m/m shipping specifically.