Today I pondered the existence of Godel/Escher/Bach slash fiction.
Not for any length of time, mind you, but for just a moment, the thought wandered across my mind and I gave it my focus. And then I let it go, cast off. I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to think about the nature of it. Even moreso, I didn’t want to think about the possibility that somewhere on the deep, dark corners of the Internet, such a thing actually exists. The horrifying idea that someone had the same thought before me, but liked it and decided to put their time, energy, and imagination into making it come into being. I choose not to think about it. We all choose not to think about it.
That’s really the crux of it. We love the Internet. We use it all the time. We extol its awesomeness, its freedom, its free-flowing cat pictures, web comics, worktime time wasters, and multiple ways to buy movie tickets. Yet all of us above average users know without saying it that for every shining part of the internet we love, there are those places. Places where people are exercising their freedom to talk, create, and build a community over things we’d rather not think of.
Of course, some of its subjective. What you might not want to think about might be different than mine; we might be disturbed by different examples of Rule 34. But the web still contains so much that is just uncharacteristically strange that it’s hard to fathom. It may not be actually disturbing to us, more the strangeness that someone thought of, created, and conveyed it to others in good faith is mind blowing. This ranges from the more common, such as Cookie Monster depicted as a drug addict (for cookies) to the exceedingly rare sorts, such as Harry Potter slash fiction where the author was inspired by the Legend of the Overfiend so that Harry is a hundred feet tall with multiple fifty-foot long dongs destroying the city to find the place where Malfoy has kidnapped Ginny and turned her into a demonic sex slave cyborg Mary Sue. No matter how odd, strange, perverse, or disturbing you find some internet mashup of things, you can be sure that somewhere there’s something worse. Those of us smart enough stop when we are wide-eyed in WTF moments. Those unwise enough continue will find themselves sleepless and exclaiming that they don’t want to live on this planet anymore.
And such is the dual nature of the Internet. There is the Internet we know and love, helpful in actual practicality or in its ease of wasting time with. And then there is the dark side, never out of reach. Only a few clicks or a typed URL away. We are using the same internet that has this deep dark strangeness, but we look away. It’s always there, waiting in parts of the internet we refuse to look at or explore. Our browsers might as well be stamped with Here Be Dragons. But only in the strangest moods do we look or click on links from that whacked out friend. And what we see may make us laugh, confuse us, or downright disturb us. But that is humanity. Ladies and gentlemen, that is your internet, in all its glory. That is the thing you use every day. And on it, there are Dragons.
Also, slashfic of dragons.
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