Is that a stealth weapon in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? Luckily for me, I will never hear Antonio Prohias’ Spies utter such awful pick up lines, as they live in a world of pantomime.

I was most discontent the day I found out that Spy vs. Spy slash (which, if you don’t know, is homosexual fan work) existed.

There I was, innocently perusing DeviantART’s ZADR club for some particularly bad Invader Zim slash to bukakke my best friend with, when I happened upon a comic strip in their favorites gallery. This comic depicted several cartoon characters and their reactions to seeing their slash fan fiction and art on the internet. (My favorite is Captain Jack Sparrow staring off contemplatively and musing, “Perhaps it’s time I told Will about my syphilis.”) There, among all the pairings I already knew to be established, were Agent White and Agent Black, showing a mutual belief that the only way to rectify the damage caused by what they had just seen would be their own deaths.

It had never occurred to me that such a thing might exist. Part of it, I suppose, is that I am a Prohias Purist. I prefer his inked lines to Kuper’s spray paints, I despise seeing the Spies in color, and I see no point in liking one over the other. They’re the exact same character, each just the mirror of the other.

Which is also why Spy slash bothers me. Very rarely is there equality in any slash pairing. It almost always follows the seme/uke set up, wherein the uke ends up submitting completely to the seme’s dominance. As equals in battle, neither Spy ever allows the other to tip the power scales. Even in strips where one is completely at the mercy of the other, the captive Spy only shows fear towards whatever is threatening him, never the other Spy.

Of course, I’ve always been that anal-retentive twat who reads too far into these things and ruins everyone’s fun. When I decide I like something, I like to know everything there is to know about it. So it’s a natural reaction for me to believe, with something I like as much as Spy vs. Spy, that very few people have studied it more than me. So I went looking, giving the fandom the benefit of the doubt, hoping to find some slash wherein the stalemate was maintained.

As I suspected, most Spy slash fans ignored canon and went straight for the seme/uke combo. What surprised me, however, was that practically every example of it had White as the uke. The only one that I found that didn’t states in its author notes that “once in a while we allow White his bitchy payback,” which suggests that he’s still the uke, even if he’s moonlighting for the moment.

As with anything, there are exceptions, but I generally find that the uke is cuter, shorter, younger, and more innocent than the seme is. It’s practically natural order for the uke to bend to the seme’s more forceful will.

But Black and White have no personalities, no ages, or differences in appearance. They are complete equals in every respect. The only difference between the two is their allegiance to opposing color factions. Color factions that are just as identical as the Spies representing them. From all appearances, there is no explanation for why White would be made the uke every single time.

I have a hypothesis, however.

Archetypically, the color white denotes goodness, purity, virtue, and all that angelic happy crappy. Black signifies the exact opposite: evil, death, etc. As such, a common misconception about Spy vs. Spy was that the Man in White was the good guy and the Man in Black was the villain.

Further, most often, the villain in a slash pairing is also the seme, due to their generally more formidable natures. If you need proof and can stomach all the gayness, go to DeviantART and run a search for any popular show, movie, or videogame you like and the word “slash”. More often than not, the antagonist is the one who gets to do the fucking.

I’m not saying that Spy Fans believe Black is the bad guy. I’m saying that since it’s a default reaction for slash artists to want to fit characters into traditional roles and they have nothing to go on, they made the decision based on the only distinction they could make. The color of their clothes and the archetypical suggestions that went with them.

I did find something else, however, that made perfect sense. Spy/Leader slash.

This was something wholly unexpected (well, slightly less so than the fan fiction someone alluded to that featured El Hombre Siniestro as part of a love triangle, but that’s a whole 'nother article). This was something I could understand. It fit the canon information almost too well. The Spies were always very respectful, if not afraid, of their Leaders and the Leaders themselves were even more vague on the personality traits than the Spies are. One could make an assumption about their sexual orientation without any information to the contrary.

Even the strips wherein the Spies are courting women could easily be negated by their devotion to their cause. They could still be straight even if they were allowing a Leader’s advances. After all, if a commanding officer says bend over, you ask how far forward, right?

What I think I’d really like to see is something in which the equality is maintained. Something where the stalemate wouldn’t be compromised by one Spy dominating the other. If I’m really lucky, maybe one where the mutual hatred is preserved as well. Maybe, just maybe, even something that follows Prohias’ old formula for the strips: one Spy thinking of something to destroy the other with, then having that plan backfire do to the other Spy’s ingenuity.

That seems a fairly reasonable request? I mean, it’s not like you couldn’t work all the bondage interrogation scenes into something like that, right?