However, according to many fans, the primary appeal of the series lies not in its macho trappings, but in the extraordinarily intense relationship between protagonists Sam and Dean Winchester.

l "is fueled past its failings almost entirely by the chemistry between the two principals, the boys who, like Mulder and Scully, generate enough sexual tension to power a small city" (note 1).

The majority of scholarship about slash is, understandably, grounded in audience and reception studies and focuses on fans' "appropriations" of presumably heteronormative material to tell the stories they wish to tell. Slash scholarship often celebrates slash's transgressive, subversive, resistive potential: slash resists the compulsory heterosexuality not only of a given source text, but also of the culture at large.

Indeed, the negative responses to "Monster" provide an interesting case study in the context of increasingly intimate relations between television producers and viewers, an intimacy that, generally speaking, is highly desirable to fans. What interests me particularly is that in some cases this increased intimacy is not desirable; for some fans, and in some contexts, distance is preferred.

While previous scholarly attempts to characterize slash generically have linked it to fantasy/science fiction, romance, and a genre termed intimatopic, I prefer the descriptive power of melodrama as a type, a narrative style, and a cultural mode. As I will explicate further below, many slash stories dwell on situations of intense pathos, scenarios of emotional surfeit nearly unmatched in any other form of narrative.

In short, melodramatic identification cannot be restricted to an affective relationship with a character or plotline; rather, it is a relationship to a continuous interweaving of texts—including both fan fiction and the narrative of the fan herself—into a greater text that the fan knows as "my show.

Look, I get the idea that there is One True Standard of aesthetic goodness. What I don’t get is the further conclusion that if we only got rid of the dreck we’d have more of the good stuff. I guess it’s yet another expression of the romantic idea that Art comes out of nowhere, rather than in reaction to the creator’s surroundings.

How important are small written ephemera such as notes, especially now that we create an almost incalculable number of them on digital services such as Twitter? Ever since the Library of Congress surprised many with its announcement that it would accession the billions of public tweets since 2006, the subject has been one of significant debate. Critics lamented what they felt was a lowering of standards by the library—a trendy, presentist diversion from its national mission of saving historically valuable knowledge. In their minds, Twitter is a mass of worthless and mundane musings by the unimportant, and thus obviously unworthy of an archivist’s attention.

As any practicing historian knows, some of the most critical collections of primary sources are ephemera that someone luckily saved for the future.

But let me set aside for a moment my optimistic disposition about the Twitter archive and instead meet the critics halfway. Suppose that we really don’t know if the archive will be useful or not—or worse, perhaps we are relatively sure it will be utterly worthless. Does that necessarily mean that the Library or Congress should not have accessioned it?

Humanities/Teaching Practices and Principles Inefficiency Thinking and reflection from a humanities perspective is anything but efficient. It's not about the straightest path to a goal, it's about exploring the various twists and turns along the way. Tell all the Truth, but Tell it Slant / Success in Circuit Lies. Specs/schmecs In the humanities, we want to open up as many possibilities as we can. Explore. Take a random path and see what happens. Your final draft of an analysis will always be very different from what you first thought you were going to produce. Complexify When's the last time you heard a humanist say or write, "I'd like to simplify that idea."? It's just not what we do. We like to "complicate the idea", "explore the nuances", "unpack the implicit assumptions". "Complexify". Scope-creep One of the hardest things to explain to a student in the humanities is what, exactly, it takes to move from writing a B paper to writing an A paper. If you are bold and tenured, you might tell them that they need to give "a certain 'je ne se qua'", to which the most likely response is, "WTF?". I think that what we want is scope-creep. Go beyond what we've covered in class. Explore things that you think are suggested in the assignment, but aren't explicit in the assignment. Move beyond the specs, and power through sorting out the consequences of doing so. Scope-creep is the bread-and-butter of the humanities. Maybe of any pursuit in academia, for that matter?

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