The resurgence of ass-old Harry Potter wank on my dash right now is mostly just reminding me that I still, to this day, despite making every effort, reading the fanlore entries, and asking people who helped invent the term, do not understand what “intellislash” is.
Sam I was about to reblog this and ask what intellislash is, and then I reread your post and realized that might be a pointless pursuit.
Yeah, a few people were like “I’ll bite, what is it?” and I’m like
¯_(ツ)_/¯
I’m more confused now than I was at the time because of information that has come out since then, in fact, but I’ve been thinking about it since I made the post so I’m going to try and talk my way through it.
I came into Harry Potter fandom in late 2003, after a lot of the social groups in a very socially-regimented fandom had been established, and I never really fitted into one specific group – which didn’t matter because I honestly just kind of assembled my own community as I went along (very much “building the car while driving it”, god I was young). But I knew people from various groups, so I got little chunks of gossip and cross-culture here and there.
Me in the Harry Potter fandom, only less aware of what was coming.
Sometime in 2004 or 2005 the term intellislash came up and I asked what it meant. It was partially explained to me as slash that involved only metaphorical sex, or that involved only spiritual romance. Actually the example I was given was literally “Sirius is eating a hot dog when he drops some on the sidewalk. Remus sees it later, and hides from it. That’s intellislash.” There was also something about the explanation of intellislash not really working unless you could be there to see certain hand gestures.
Looking back I think the explanation meant to imply that intellislash was a form of fanfic (not really limited to slash, just referencing it because slash was what people did in HP fandom) that aligned itself with the hierarchical structure of literary fiction. I think intellislash was to slash as literary fiction is to genre fiction if you are a conservative septugenarian lit professor. In other words, intellislash incorporated aspects of symbolism and metanarrative in the same way literary fiction tends to do, as opposed to ordinary slash which was ostensibly just concerned with adventure stories and porn.
Here’s where it gets a little convoluted because, combing back through fanlore, it’s listed there as a derogatory term for someone else’s fanfic – it’s listed as something one group of fans (call them Group A) used to denigrate the writing of another group of fans. Intellislash appears to have been considered “putting on airs” or pretending to a sophistication that didn’t exist given we were ALL writing about characters from a children’s book having sex with each other. But by the time I met members of Group A, they were using it to refer to their own writing as well, which is what confuses me about the current Fanlore definition.
I was only ever on the fringes of any of this, mind you. And almost all of what I’m saying here is speculation based on hazy memories of conversations that no longer exist, accounts by other people at the time who had axes to grind, and fandom oral history, which is not always terribly trustworthy.
Escaped that fandom nearly unscathed!
But I think in the end Group A initially began using Intellislash to identify stories they felt were putting on airs for attempting to incorporate aspects of literary fiction. And in my personal experience a little later on, Group A had begun 1) using Intellislash in a joking sense when referring to their own work and 2) writing “Intellislash” fanfics as a way of mocking someone else’s work. Or at least some of them were; I was (still am) friends with some people in this circle and it was not the monolith fandom historians would like it to be.
I can’t be sure of these things at any rate – I didn’t notice it at the time, which means little as I’m not the most socially astute, but because I’m not the most socially astute I can’t be sure what, in the end, their motives were. They may be a lot less conscious than I’m painting them here. And who fuckin’ knows, anyway, it’s mostly ancient history that is only sometimes tangentially relevant to modern fandom.
Nobody understands fandom, Castiel. Nobody.
I think what makes intellislash so difficult to comprehend, especially looking back, is that in the past ten-fifteen years, fanfic has been more widely recognized as a legitimate art form that has some really interesting things to say about narrative and ownership, so we respect fanfic and we view “literary” fanfic as legitimate and worthwhile without a second thought.
That was not always the case, or rather it was not always the case in some fandoms. Which may have been why I had a hard time understanding the use of the term at the time as well. I had come up in fandom in The X-Files, that was where I absorbed fannish culture, and the fandom that you come up in matters, because each fandom’s culture is different. While we weren’t exactly a placid and cooperative bunch, we always respected fanfic as fiction with its own inherent value. I think that in parts of Harry Potter fandom – vast and sprawling, with its own microclimates – this was not the case, and Intellislash was a term used to separate people who engaged in fanfic but didn’t acknowledge its worth from people who saw no boundary between literature and fanfiction and thus treated fanfic as a literary endeavor.
That jives with some of the toxicity in that fandom which I did notice, so it makes sense. But I can’t prove it, and really I can’t realistically even assert it – I can only speculate. It’s weird to see how history one lived through is treated, a decade-plus down the line.
Mooncustafer 