I like reading slash. It's entertaining, it's fascinating, it's fun, it's angsty, it's often very well written. Some of the best pieces of Les Miserables fan fiction on the internet is slash-related in some form or another.

But.

But there are times when I read one slash story, then another, and another, and certain things about them, especially slash involving Enjolras, begin to annoy me.

First of all, there's the fact that many Les Mis fans out there scoff at the "Patria" stories in which the Patria Enjolras mentions at the barricades is a real girl that Enjolras is in love with, declaring that of course Enjolras isn't in love with a woman and whining about the fact that the stories are of the Mary-Sue genre. Sometimes, these same people write stories in which Enjolras is in love with/having an affair with one of Les Amis (usually Grantaire or Combeferre). They wave the flag of "he did not know there was a being on earth called woman" while ignoring "before anything but the Republic he chastely dropped his eyes." Now, to me this smells of hypocrisy.

Not that I'm a Hugo purist. Far from it, as a matter of fact. I could give you an extremely long list of things I've taken poetic license on. But I do think that if you are going to say it's okay to interpret Enjolras how you want to, other people need to do it however they want to.

To me, though, Enjolras' "purity" is a vital part of his character because it shows his devotion to the Republic. In one sense, Enjolras is celibate to show his devotion to the republic just as priests and nuns are celibate to show their devotion towards God (no cracks about the recent Catholic church scandals, please *cough*).

And that brings me to my next point. It recently came up in a conversation that one of the reasons that Enjolras is so often slashed is because it allows the writer to ignore the political parts of his character, which take a lot of research that most of us do not have the time to do. It makes sense: develop a relationship for him and you can write a story with Enjolras in it without having to read Rousseau or sift through thousands of historical events. There's only one problem: Enjolras is politics. He is the republic. Take the republic, the obsession with politics, the idealism, "The Cause" out of Enjolras and you create a completely new character. It may be an interesting, fascinating character, but it no longer feels like Enjolras.

One of the biggest problems with writing fanfiction is finding the balance between your own creativity and the source material, no matter what fandom it may be. In writing this, I am not trying to preach. I am not saying "you can only write characters a certain way". Half the fun of reading fanfiction is finding the variety of ways a character is shown so that each person's type of one person becomes a totally separate, completely believable entity in your mind. On the other hand, because we are basing our writing on someone else's, we are working with a skeleton, but what gets added to the skeleton is up to you.

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