Whether you were looking for it or not, at some point anybody who spends more than five minutes on the internet will have stumbled across some form of pornography. From an innocent Google image search for tits the bird, you perv to looking for fan videos concerning Sonic The Hedgehog, it's practically impossible to navigate the world wide web without accidentally finding something people like to pleasure themselves over. Spend a further five minutes on the internet, meanwhile, and you'll find some of the earlier examples of smut the information superhighway had to offer. Fan fiction remains a booming market, even more so given the options fans have of places to publish their work stories inspired by their favourite TV shows, books, films, or adolescent pop stars can appear as blog posts, LiveJournal entries, on forums, tweets, or even get produced as thinly-veiled analogues in commercially available eBooks. And obviously, the most popular or at least the most notorious form of fan fiction is the sexy sort. And the most popular/notorious subset of that genre is slash-fiction, the designation given to stories where non-canonical same-sex relationships are explored in detail from the hand-holding to the disturbingly tentacle-centric. And where did that whole sub-genre spring from? Where did it get its name? Trekkies. Slash-fiction originally referred specifically to fan fiction about Captain Kirk and Doctor Spock doing the horizontal mambo aboard the Enterprise. Perhaps the widest and most little-known thing Leonard Nimoy has unexpectedly given the world? Slash-fic.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
