I Am Your Worst Fear, I Am Your Best Fantasy

This book uses slash fan fiction produced for the CW television series Supernatural to propose two new slash typologies: paratopia and monstropia. A case is made for the usefulness of paratopia and monstropia as frameworks for understanding the ‘other worlds’ that slash inhabits — worlds beyond the reach of existing ‘topias’ romantopia (Salmon & Symons 2001) and intimatopia (Woledge 2006). Paratopic slash is centrally concerned with psychological change or geographical repositioning and realises, like romantopia and intimatopia, potentials of homosocial desire. Monstropic slash is centrally concerned with perversity and realises potentials of homosexual panic; it is a genre of slash until now unexplored by scholarship. Supernatural slash is chosen to illustrate both paratopia and monstropia as the series, the book argues, canonically promotes homosexual panic as much as it does homosocial desire. Further, the book proposes that Supernatural slash that would ordinarily be classified as romantopic or intimatopic, is better understood as paratopic due to the changes necessary to negotiate the characters’ homophobia and authentically present them in either sexual or intimate love.