Put 'slash' into the popular search engine at Webcrawler, and you'll come up with a long list of sites with slash fiction and other related material. Browsing through, you will find a great deal of them have "Star Trek", "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", "X-Files", and "Xena: Warrior Princess" slash in great abundance. There are, of course, the more rare and obscure fandoms out there, but these are the ones I see on most every site I visit, along with the ever-popular "Highlander" slash.

Taking some time to browse through a few sites, I checked a few directories, and even sampled a few stories from fandoms that I don't absolutely detest. (For some reason, *NSync slash gives me the creeps, but to each his own, right?) But no matter how hard I searched, no matter how many sites and webrings I looked in, I found absolutely no WWF or wrestling related slash. I'll admit, I've looked around, and wrestling isn't one of the more popular fandoms except for within a select group of people who know each other and are familiar with each other's work. Most of the fan fiction I find, however, is usually het fic filled to the brim with Mary Sue stories and het fic out the wazoo with made up characters that are flat, uninteresting, and provide no real depth to the story.

Frustration quickly set in. Everyone writes a Mary Sue fic to start out with. My first endeavor into the world of fan fiction is a four part story with a character who leans more toward the line of Mary Sue than not, but I'm not ashamed of it. In fact, I had no idea what a Mary Sue was when I started writing it, so I can at least claim ignorance on that one. Not to mention the fact that those stories were written before I even knew what slash was. Once I was introduced to slash by the literary stylings of Katherine Ramos and her astounding slash fiction, I knew I was never to return to the land of het fic.

By this time, I was ready to give up. I was tired of searching high and low for wrestling slash fiction other than that of the people I've met through the WWFSML mailing list. That's when I stumbled upon The Complete Kingdom of Slash and was finally clued into what was going on.

Let me first say that this is an incredible site, with an extensive list of slash fiction from every possible fandom you could ever want to read. (Some things you might not want to read, too.) I spent a good deal of time browsing through the site and its contents, again not finding any wrestling slash, but letting it go since I'm so used to it. I finally decided to look at the submissions guidelines to see if I might send in some of my wrestling slash to get a section started, and that's when I saw it.

Wrestling slash is apparently considered real person slash where real people are used instead of characters, and that sort of thing isn't widely accepted in the fan fiction world. This is the personal preference of the webmaster at the site, but it seems it is the personal preference of every slash archive out there, save for ones dedicated to wrestling fiction alone. Real people slash is a big no-no it seems, and the only reason I've got a problem with that is that I don't see how it can be considered that.

Let me explain myself here. The WWF is sports entertainment consisting of outrageous characters and twisted plot lines that are wholly unlikely and completely fictional. The wrestlers portray characters, or gimmicks rather, that while might be a reflection of their true personalities, are, for the most part, CHARACTERS. Just like the characters in the shows that are slashed on a regular basis. His real name isn't Triple H. Kane wasn't really burned by fire. The Undertaker isn't really the Lord of Darkness. It's all fictional, and taking it for anything else but fiction is absolutely ridiculous.

Real person slash? I think not. Now, granted characters like the McMahon family are real people, but they also play characters within the grand soap opera we call the WWF. Each is given a set of characteristics to play out. The storylines do involved a real family, but the events that take place are fictional. It's just like any other drama or sitcom on television--it's just grown men in tights beating the tar out of each other.

Besides that, every wrestling fiction I've ever written has contained a disclaimer at the top of it, as do most of the ones I've read. Each disclaimer says (in some shape, way, or form) that the characters being portrayed are the property of WWFE and the person themselves. The events depicted did not happen, and no assumptions about the true sexualities of the people being used are being made. It's all fiction, hence the name FAN FICTION. Fiction by fans.

My only hope is that more people will start to recognized wrestling slash fiction and embrace it the same way other fandoms have been celebrated across the net. It's a wonderful fandom to be apart of, and I wish more people would realize that. I'm proud to write wrestling slash fiction, and I'll keep on writing it until I can't write anymore. I hope by then, it's more widespread and more people are enjoying it.