our classification language is pretty much useless in describing "passionate friendship" or non-sexual romance, and I know that as a writer I've been frustrated by it. How on earth do you tag a "so married but not doing it" story? Where do you post it?
I'd classify it as being slash/ship fic at heart, but I suspect a lot of slash readers would think of it as gen, as would some gen fans. For my part, though, I'd be annoyed to read a "gen" fic and discover that it contained a romantic friendship that broke up my OTP, because I'd have the same "No, A loves B the best, not C! You can't make C more important to A than B! You can't!" reaction I have to OTP-breaking pairings where they're sleeping together. Which means I'd be reacting to the fic emotionally the same way I react to slash or het.
If they're not doing it because you think that would tarnish their friendship, then it's called smarm, but otherwise I'm not sure there's really a term. Starsky & Hutch fic used to have a lot of romantic friendship type stories, though (as did Xena, I'm told). I've heard people joke that most S&H fic is basically slash -- you have G to PG-13 rated slash, which is labelled "gen," and then you have R or NC-17 rated slash, which is labelled "slash," and if you pulled the sex scenes out of an NC-17 rated S&H slashfic, pasted them into a PG-rated genfic, and switched the fic headers, no one would be able to tell. (Then again, with Starsky and Hutch, writers pretty much had to get to the point of kissing with tongue before they got a scene that you couldn't have put right into one of the episode scripts).
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I'd classify it as being slash/ship fic at heart, but I suspect a lot of slash readers would think of it as gen, as would some gen fans. For my part, though, I'd be annoyed to read a "gen" fic and discover that it contained a romantic friendship that broke up my OTP, because I'd have the same "No, A loves B the best, not C! You can't make C more important to A than B! You can't!" reaction I have to OTP-breaking pairings where they're sleeping together. Which means I'd be reacting to the fic emotionally the same way I react to slash or het.
If they're not doing it because you think that would tarnish their friendship, then it's called smarm, but otherwise I'm not sure there's really a term. Starsky & Hutch fic used to have a lot of romantic friendship type stories, though (as did Xena, I'm told). I've heard people joke that most S&H fic is basically slash -- you have G to PG-13 rated slash, which is labelled "gen," and then you have R or NC-17 rated slash, which is labelled "slash," and if you pulled the sex scenes out of an NC-17 rated S&H slashfic, pasted them into a PG-rated genfic, and switched the fic headers, no one would be able to tell. (Then again, with Starsky and Hutch, writers pretty much had to get to the point of kissing with tongue before they got a scene that you couldn't have put right into one of the episode scripts).