Hard-Light Drives & Slash

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I had a bit of a shower thought this morning. It seems to be universally accepted that Doug & Rob decided to write Legion, and Rimmer getting his hard-light drive, mainly because writing around his physical limitations as a hologram was too irritating, or had gotten tiresome for them. I wonder though, what if they hadn't just shrugged their shoulders and given him a corporeal form? What if Rimmer, all the way up through series X, was still soft-light and couldn't touch anything? If Rimmer had never been written as hard-light, would slash have ever happened?

This is probably a tough "what if?" question to answer, because I don't know if any Red Dwarf slash existed prior to the airing of Blue, and Rimmer was already hard-light by that point. Part of what makes the dynamic between Lister and Rimmer interesting (for me), is the fact that for so many years, they wouldn't have been able to touch one another, and then suddenly? Flood-gates open. Not to say that this is the only part of their dynamic that matters, but for me, it just gives them a strong push in a slashy direction. You already have them as the only two humans left in the universe, even though Rimmer is technically dead. You already have two people who have had a tumultuous relationship, but who ultimately clearly care about one another. Anyone who reads Lister and Rimmer's relationship as two people who just hate one another, clearly is not paying close attention to how they behave with one another, especially in their more vulnerable moments (Rimmer in Thanks for the Memory, and Lister in Blue immediately springs to mind). The show is also set in the future where who knows what the attitudes might be towards non-hetero relationships, so it's a bit presumptuous to just assume that the two of them are 100% heterosexual without it ever being explicitly stated on the show. Contrary to popular belief, bisexuality is in fact, a real thing. ;-)

If Doug & Rob had never taken it upon themselves to make Rimmer corporeal, I wonder if people writing fanfic would have done so on their own? Rimmer was clamoring to get a physical body, essentially as soon as he became a hologram. People could have easily used that as a springboard to come up with their own way to make Rimmer solid. Maybe he eventually would have met the Quagaars, and they WOULD have had the means to give him a new body (albeit that of a roast chicken). Bodyswap also lays some interesting seeds for the idea of minds being transplanted from one body to another. Perhaps they could have discovered another derelict space station that was experimenting in creating human bodies from scratch. I mean we already have the capability to grow certain body parts and organs, it doesn't seem too unlikely that in Rimmer and Lister's immediate future, they might have the means to grow a full body and implant Rimmer's memory into it.

I suppose I'm just curious how much people think the hard-light drive had to do with setting off the RD slash community, or if it's something that would have happened anyway regardless. There's always pre-accident fics, and soft-light angst, but I feel like the majority of RD slash is set post-Legion for good reason. It's hard for me to think of RD and removing the idea of Rimmer being hard-light, because I watched the show so quickly, and discovered the slash before I even got to Blue. It's hard for me to think if I would have been tempted to ship Rimmer with Lister if I hadn't known that at some point, Rimmer was going to be touchable.

Any thoughts? Also, I just realized this technically goes along with RD series weeks, since the hard-light drive happened in series VI. Yay me for being topical. ;-)