An avatar, like a goddess, cannot properly function without a mythos--the collection of stories that make the world and the avatar's relationship to the world become clear. In each virtual setting, there is a different mythology surrounding interactions and enabling the telling of stories. Some of the spaces an avatar visits are new worlds, created by the participants--but many have a more familiar ring.

Today’s publicized and popular stories take the role of folklore, and by building their own stories on top of this popular folklore, fanfiction writers contribute to their own evolving mythos—“As more and more amateur works have entered into circulation via the Web, the result has been a turn back toward a more folk-culture understanding of creativity. Historically, our culture evolved through a collective process of collaboration and elaboration. Folktales, legends, myths and ballads were built up over time as people added elements that made them more meaningful to their own contexts” (Jenkins “Star Wars”). The collaborations and cultural exchanges of online writers in the Harry Potter community as well as other fan communities have led to the formation of a subculture creating a mythos of "slash fanfiction." Fanfiction writer "Celandine Brandybuck" defines slash as:
a genre within fanfiction, conventionally defined as the romantic and/or sexual pairing of two characters of the same sex, who in the original work are heterosexual. Within this genre, slash can take on a number of forms, from mild romances that limit the characters' interactions to tender looks and perhaps a few kisses, to adult-rated stories where the primary point is the depiction of explicit and graphic sexual encounters, to (rarely) stories of a more general nature (action, humor, drama) in which the characters happen to be homosexual, but this is not the primary theme of the story. To outsiders, it is the explicit stories that typify slash. While this is an oversimplification, it is true that a large proportion of slash is rated as adult material" (Brandybuck par. 4).
Such fanfiction is confined only by the desires of the author. Canon is abandoned or ignored--canon being the "original" text, which in the case of Harry Potter is defined as the original Rowling texts. While these canonical texts are the inspiration for a virtual mythos of storytelling and role-playing interactions among avatars, they merely offer a world: the freedom to play is inherent and through this play the new storytellers are taking ownership of texts to make them reflect personal desires.

Fanfiction featuring male/female pairings is readily available in the world of Harry Potter fandom: whole archives exist devoted to every pairing from Hermione and Ron to Hermione and Snape. Even though such stories often put romantic involvements at the center of the story, and contain content ranging from the romantic to the explicit, concerns about adult material in fan communities usually center squarely on "slash." As Brandybuck notes, outsiders immediately make the association with "mature sexual content," and even when such content isn't present, a writer posting a slash fanfiction on a major archive can look forward to at least a few anonymous reviews informing them that "slash is evil."

Of the male/male pairings dominant in the slash world, one of the most popular is the relationship between Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter. No textual argument can be made to justify this relationship: JK Rowling has never made indications that these enemies could manage friendship, much less the tense to loving relationships attributed to them by fanfiction writers. The Harry/Draco livejournal community explains the pairing: "You may have heard of the saying 'each to their own', and really the same goes for character pairings. Some people prefer certain characters together. The Harry+Draco ship has many pros to it, and although it may not pertain to the canon, it has become increasingly popular. Harry and Draco have such a strong contrast about them that it could only bring about the whole 'opposites attract' theory."

Writers within this community devote hours to the creation of elaborate scenarios where Harry and Draco discover their love with the help of potions, Severus Snape, Death Eaters and the occasional Mary Sue--a fanfiction term for a character who is essentially an idealized projection of the author in the work. Most of these writers identify themselves as female, like Celandine Brandybuck. Putting this question of the woman behind Draco Malfoy another way, the first question becomes, why does this woman "perform" the role of a gay man for the purpose of storytelling? On the one hand, the motivation of the writer is at issue--why write a piece where female characters are delegated to the sidelines in favor of a relationship between two male characters? The self identification of these writers is predominantly female, though that assumption only carries as much weight as one's belief in the authenticity of such self identifications. The expectation of an outsider might be that the writers reshaping these characters into gay men would themselves be gay men, reclaiming a cultural icon for their own use. However, nonacademic surveys of the community have noted with surprise that the main writers of these stories are not gay men but rather women. In an article for Newday, Diane Werts quotes media theorist Henry Jenkins for his reaction on this trend: "'Our culture loves passionate friendships between men that are more glorious than any man would have in real life,' he says. 'On 'Star Trek,' Kirk loves a girlfriend-of-the-week that he abandons at the end of the episode. But if Spock is in trouble, he'll risk everything in his career to go save him. It doesn't take a PhD in comparative literature to see the real relationship there'" (Werts).

The first judgement implicitly made here is that a distinction can be clearly made between a woman and a gay man, or simply a woman and a man. That binary is one taken for granted when it is in fact a socially determined distinction itself: “The category of ‘sex’ is, from the start, normative; it is what Foucault has called a ‘regulatory ideal’” (Butler 1). Categorization is most easily set in the physical world, where biological aspects generally set the standard for what sex someone "is." But the physical body does not transfer through to the virtual world, which is in part what makes it difficult to determine the sex of a fanfiction writer. Nothing innate in his or her online avatar is revealing; self-identification is the only indication.

[Regress]