Slash pairing qualification: beating the holy hell out of each other

This week, I'm going to shift gears on Homoerotica Friday -- that is, an illustrated discussion on what makes a character appeal to slash fans. (And if you're coming here from Scans Daily, a lot of these scans are going to look familiar. For that, I apologize.)

One of the biggies is if two characters fight all the time. And I don't mean that married-couple bickering, either. I mean really wailing on each other. Something about a couple of fellas getting all sweaty together and resolving their issues with brute strength and phallic objects.

Can't say as I blame them.

This is the sort of thing slashing Oliver Queen is built on (it's a long standing belief in fandom that Ollie punches everyone he wants to have sex with). But this week's example of this principle comes to us from The Outsiders, issue #11.

This is after Roy's taken five bullets to the chest in an earlier issue. He gets disabling flashbacks to the incident when confronted with guns, and is considering retiring. (It's a bit hard to be a vigilante when any punk with a gun can make you panic.)

Roy's in the Outsiders "danger room," shooting at practice targets to see if he still has it. Dick, watching Roy practice, challenges him to a fight, and tries to help him work through his problem with guns... in the special kind of way that can only come from being raised by Batman.

Warning to dial-up users: these pages are roughly 200KB each.

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The second panel on the third page:



You want to know why I read Outsiders, despite all its flaws? That's it, right there.

That's the stuff fics are made of, kids.