One of the great things about fan fiction is the freedom to take it wherever you want to take it. I personally don't care for slash, and I can't even bring myself to write graphic sex scenes, het or slash, 'cause it's just not what I'm comfortable doing. However, I've read some of both that blew me away with how well they were done.

And BlueEyedBrigadier is right...what is canon exactly on a show that only went one season? We know the setup of the pairings from what we've seen, but we have no idea what direction things would have gone (although I can't really see Joss having the men or the women shagging each other just for the hell of it). Maybe NONE of the original pairings would have stuck and we'd get a bunch of new characters introduced at some point to take their places? Who knows...we just have to make it up ourselves, I guess (sigh...).

I guess it comes down to the question of "what's canon?" concerning Serenifly. Officially, the canon relationships in Firefly and Serenity are Mal/Inara, Kaylee/Simon, and Wash/Zoe. However, I like to point out it's Joss. Nothing stays completely static, so the canon pairings we became familar with could have been merely temporary had the series lasted longer.

Slash is something that exists in all kinds of fanfiction, I find. I am not a strong purveyor of said subgenre, but I can appreciate the kind of effort that gets put into these stories (or at least the ones possessing enough plot to explain somewhat successfully the pairing). Kaylee & Inara are like sisters, but people would have said early on that Angel and Cordelia would have never hooked up, based on watching their interactions from the first couple of seasons of "Angel." So alterations in personal dyanmics in Whedonverse shows have precident. Just gotta wonder how Joss & co. would have handled things had they been given a chance...

Really, I think stuff like slash and "non-canon" pairings all come down to the eye of the beholder. There's a ton of Browncoats who support Mal & Inara or Kaylee & Simon shacking up and having a complex and enriched relationship. However, there's also a ton of Browncoats who see merely a couple of bad cases of UST that would lead to relationship experiments that eventually collapse, allowing for new pairings. Me, I like Rayne. Why? Cuz I personally see a kindred nature between River and Jayne concering being a lot more complex and good-little-children-made-killers, along with being appreciators of the physical world. But others like yourself see such a pairing as creepy or mismatched. I saw we shrug, chock it up to unique worldviews and just enjoy what Joss & crew were able to give us before Fox came along and once again killed off a show that was brilliant but not quite..."normal."

;D

BlueEyedBrigadier