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Someone asked me what the PGP romantic story is. This I hadto think about. I concluded that the typical PGP slash story hasso many fantastic elements that it wanders away from romance properand becomes a fairy tale.
I suggest "Snow White" as the prototype. Avon-in-a-coma isSnow White (the white, white skin! The black hair! Yeah, I knowit's really brown, but we're talking about fanfic, not television).A miraculously resurrected Blake (or, in a few cases, Tarrant) isthe Prince. The rest of the crew are the Seven Dwarves, allgathered around mourning Avon. Servalan is the sexy wicked witch,of course. The magical device that finds Avon so attractive isOrac. ("Orac, Orac, who's the prettiest/smartest/meanest one ofall?" says Servalan, and she doesn't like the answer.) Eating anapple is a traditionally appropriate metaphor for committing mostany kind of sin, such as shooting your friend, for example.There's a magic kiss, with Avon on the receiving end for a change,and they all live happpily ever after. Yes, definitely a fairytale.
There are also a good many romantic PGP variants on "The SnowQueen," though those are as likely to be straight as slash. That'sthe one where Avon is in thrall to the evil queen because of thesliver of ice in his heart, and the one who truly loves him (Cally,Dayna, Vila, whoever) has to figure out how to melt it. It worksespecially well as a straight romance because the originalfairytale is one of the few with a strong female protagonist.There are also some rather kinky slash versions in which it isBlake rather than Servalan from whose evil enchantment Avon mustsomehow be rescued. I even read one in which the diabolicalmastermind dominating hapless sex-object Avon turned out to beVila; in that one Soolin was the savior.
As I said back at the beginning of the original article, thevariety and wild inventiveness of B7 porn are just amazing. Forevery generalization there is a counter-example. It's a tribute tothe power of certain archetypes that there are any discerniblepatterns at all.
I wonder if anyone has ever tried applying the Aarne-Thompsonsystem of categorizing folktales to B7? You could do it witheither the show or the fanfic or both; I expect the results wouldbe interesting. I've seen it done with tabloid newspaper stories(Harold Schlechter, The Bosom Serpent: Folklore and Popular Art,Iowa U.P., 1988), and I once read a very funny, and very on-the-mark, folkloric analysis of the first Star Wars movie (by Daniel F.Melia, in the March-April 1978 issue of Harvard Magazine).
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