Yaoi and slash?
At the risk of someone starting up a ‘dumb question category’ especially for me, I’m going to dare to ask anyway, because I’m really keen to know the answer. And that is, what is the difference between yaoi and slash? Until I joined this forum I had no idea that yaoi was anything other than Japanese art, like manga. From the searches I’ve done on the net it says slash is based on live action tv series and yaoi is taken from art, but what about the original stuff? How does one differentiate original slash from original yaoi fiction? Or is there any difference at all?

Let's discuss it again, I still don't get it.

Hmmm yaoi is a genre in Japan (manga, anime, art, whatever) whose content is love between two guys. Slash is fanfiction that is usually between two guys. In both cases sex is optional?

Yes, I recommend doing a search, because we've discussed this at length in other threads. The reason people may not get it because it's like discussing the difference between the Democratic and Republican parties - nobody can agree on definitions. :) The oldest definition of slash is fan works based on live-action media, in which male characters who are heterosexual in the original story are imagined as being attracted to one another - but this definition is only being used these days by fan video makers, as far as I can tell. The most common definition of slash today is male/male or female/female fan fiction, fan art, or fan videos. A minority of folks also include original works that are published for slash fans - this is called original slash. Yaoi started out as male/male fan manga and fan art for professionally published Japanese manga. That professionally published stuff turned very early on into *canonical* male/male manga, mainly because the canny Japanese publishers (unlike their American counterparts), said, "Hey, readers like this sort of thing," and hired as many fan creators as they could. (There's also a female/female equivalent, yuri, but it's not as popular.) Because of this, the word yaoi has long since been used for male/male original art and original fiction that is published for yaoi fans. Some people confine it to sexually explicit male/male works (with the non-explicit works called shonen-ai), while others use it to refer to amateur works or to all Japanese-style works. Trying to define slash and yaoi more narrowly than this just gets you into trouble, because there are overlapping themes between slash and yaoi. Pretty much any yaoi theme is likely to turn up in some sort of slash story, so I can't conclusively say, "This story about an older, dominant teen and his younger, submissive boyfriend - both of whom are beautiful and androgynous - must have been written by a yaoi author." The reverse isn't true, though; I can look at a story about two muscley geriatrics and say, "It's unlikely this was written by a yaoi author." So yaoi is much more bound by certain literary/artistic conventions than slash is. Slash ranges from yaoi-ish works to gay-ish works, with its own distinct flavor in between those two. What slash and yaoi have in common is that their storylines are both centered on emotions and relationships, and they both tend to be written and read by women. In that respect, they're much more alike than different.

We should also add that some mangaka will do their own doujinshi (manga that looks like fanfiction/fanart) under different names. The lady who did Graivation did Gravitation Remix where she had all sorts of smutty fun with her boys. The REAL confusion comes when comparing domestic orignal yaoi with orginal slash. I COULD get on some soapbox and spew what I think is a clear difference and get all indignent and shit, but for the most part, I think it boils down to what are the main influences in the writer's life. Yaoi brought me into the realm of m/m fiction. I adore yaoi and thus I identify as a domestic yaoi writer.

And I'm just a whore.. does that mean I need to do trix for kix on santa monica. Slash and Yaoi tend to be defined by angst. Gay fic may have angst but it is generally more culturally driven then relationship driven within the story (not that the fish don't swim back and forth in those ponds alot) but I guess it's a flavor. Chocolate Ice Cream Tastes different then chocolate Ice which is different still then chocolate Frozen Yogurt. There's chocolate in all of it...but it ain't quite the same. It's often an "I know it when I see it" issue. my completely unhelpful 2c

Thanks for making that clearer for me. I spent a while searching Google for an answer, but I never thought of doing a search on the forum. I now quite fancy writing something yaoi-ish, seeing as I love the artwork, and all my characters are fairly angst ridden, I’ll just have to write them prettier, shave a few years off their ages, and put them all on a bit of a diet :)

Oh yes if only it were that easy. I’d be booking myself in for a course of treatment too :D

Oh yes, yaoi has angst and "painfully beautiful" men. There are various degrees of yaoi and traditional yaoi can include downright feminized bottoms. Yaoi bascially comes in two flavors--angst and fluff. Mangakas (the artist/writer who does the manga) will often draw the men wrapped in bandages and bleeding even for the artbooks. Many stories do not have a happy ending. Fluff (and to the extreme crack) mangakas will put a variety of "sweet" things in with their artbook works. When it comes to prose yaoi which we're starting to import from Japan (thank you Tokyo Pop Blue!) the cover art can usually tell you what kind of flavor this yaoi is. In traditional yaoi there aren't any versitale men. The position (top "seme" or bottom "uke") plays a very important part in character design. Some modern Japanese yaoi is toying with allowing the men to switch roles, but that's also incorporated in the character design. I got my hand slapped by a reader of Full Circle because it wasn't yaoi enough in their eyes. Kendrick and Byron switch and that kicked it out of yaoi for them. What I failed to convey was that Kendrick and Byron are both semes (alpha male with alpha male). Other readers found it to be perfectly within the realm of yaoi. Yaoi also puts a heavy emphasis on the asthetics of the scene. Sometimes the beauty of the surrounding will overpower the true meat of the scene. In traditional yaoi, there's a lot of symbolism with color and flowers. Not just the type of flowers, but what the flowers are doing (potted, natural and especially falling petals). All of this gets somewhat incorporated into domestic yaoi. Social status also plays a huge role in yaoi. Japan birthed the genre and I think that the importance of social status stands to reason. Yaoi is complicated and that's why publishers who put out a call of submission for yaoi titles specify that if you don't know what yaoi is then this probably isn't a good place to submit. It's very much one of those know-it-when-you-see it things.

"Mangakas (the artist/writer who does the manga) will often draw the men wrapped in bandages and bleeding even for the artbooks. . . . In traditional yaoi, there's a lot of symbolism with color and flowers. Not just the type of flowers, but what the flowers are doing (potted, natural and especially falling petals)." Not to mention bandages and bleeding with falling petals. :)

Ok so now I’m really keen to read some Yaoi, so would somebody be kind enough to point me in the right direction of a good publisher, preferably an e-publisher.

Also there's Yaoi Daily which is a scanalation group on LJ (so far still there). They take the orginal japanese Manga and put in translations. It's not quite "legit" but the Publishers tend to turn somewhat of a blind eye b/c they take down titles that get licensed in English Speaking countries and they generate fans of the Gener who find the Japanese too daunting.