most of it is about shipping him with members of NSYNC, and usually from the perspective of someone whose primary fandom is NSYNC

and usually he's portrayed as a heel. often an abuser and homophobe.

there is some stuff that is more interesting, though

one i found particularly curious was an AU which swapped Em with Chris Kirkpatrick(-you-can-git-yer-ass-kicked)

so in this universe, Eminem was a white battle rapper who'd been recruited to join N*SYNC, while Chris became a pioneering white rapper working with Dr Dre and detested for his homophobic lyrics

and it's fascinating because it makes a pretty sharp and sacrilegious point about the ultimately arbitrary nature of talent

in our universe we know Eminem can barely sing and Chris Kirkpatrick certainly would never be able to pen a song as ghoulish as Kim

it's like genuinely hilarious to think about Chris from N*SYNC rapping about (as he does in the fanfic) taking LSD and flashing back to being beaten up by his abusive stepfather

just as it's legitimately hilarious to think about Eminem singing 'baby bye-bye-bye'

in the comments, the writer says that she thinks this universe would be better than the real one - Chris would get the recognition of his brilliance he deserves, and Eminem would not have his rage encouraged and instead would be surrounded by friends who loved him

which is obviously pretty horrible (essentially it means she thinks Eminem would be happier surrounded by white people)

and retroactively VERY BAD now we know about Lou Pearlman. but I won't hold that against her

but the best chapter in the fanfic is the one that focuses on Chris Kirkpatrick giving an interview with Spin. It's a pretty direct rewrite of an Eminem interview. The first part is the article the journalist sent to clear with Interscope, and the second part is the version that came back from PR with everything homoerotic removed

with notes saying 'make him seem tough in accordance with how we sell rappers'

and I think that is a genuinely insightful comment about how Eminem's media image wasn't any less massaged and artificial than N*SYNC's was

while also drawing attention to the fact that Chris and Marshall had ridiculously similar backstories

so that's the stuff by people who were primarily N*SYNC fans who also liked Eminem

the stuff by the Stans is somewhat more sympathetic towards Em's talent, beauty and existing retinue, as you can imagine

in particular the main point of fascination for the Stans is the fact that Em dressed as Britney for the video of The Real Slim Shady

this gets brought up constantly

he fucks Proof in the Britney suit. fucks Dre in it. A lot.

fucks Justin Timberlake in it. I have not been able to find one of him fucking Britney in it, which seems obvious

there's fic of him jacking off in the outfit while thinking about Britney

extreme Wall Market vibes that everyone is in love with the idea of a pissy, insecure little blond jerk dressing as a girl! i will say little more

some of the slash is very racist. and not just by White Boy Of The Month omission

that definitely is a problem even today, where pretty much the entirety of the Eminem AO3 page is about him banging Machine Gun Kelly

written by Kells fans bringing in Em as... not a heel this time, but as a very verbally mean old dad who Kells has to win over

my fave Eminem/MGK fanfic is an AU which casts Colson as a mental health nurse, looking after Slim Shady, a strange madman who murdered his wife

because it skips all the tedious tabloid parasociality and instead engages with both artists' body of work in an intelligent and uncomfortable way

in particular, Colson gets caught up in Slim's orbit because he keeps poaching his antipsychotics to get high

it bridges Kells's mental-health-boy emo rap with the slasher Grand Guignol of some of Eminem's work...

...though, reliably, the one thing missing from the fic? All of it?

Eminem's sense of humour

None of the stuff lets him be funny. Even back in 2003 he's portrayed as being tortured and brooding

even if the fic is going into his Shady mythology, it's never the Looney Tunes Slim Shady of My Name Is - it's always the gothic horror Slim Shady of his imagery

Eminem himself did go into more explicitly horror material with Slim, but in material much later than this fanfic was mostly written. Although the EMGK fic I mentioned above was definitely inspired by Relapse, it's still specifically the blond Slim Shady, in the white t-shirt, with his murdered wife in the trunk

there's even some EMGK material inspired by Encore, Eminem's most explicitly wacky album... you can imagine the alter-ego possession and the mass shooting is played to be deadly serious rather than the cartoon knockabout it comes off on the album itself

once again i ask myself - do Americans just simply not understand that Eminem is funny? because i see people a LOT say that he's this anguished, angst artist, despite the fact that out of his initial trilogy of albums, two of them are outright comedy almost the whole way through, and the third one is... about a third of it is comedy

and two thirds of the fourth one is comedy. the fifth one is horror rather than comedy but it's still very absurd. even the sixth one, his most serious album, is full of funny dick jokes and that's, like, by now we're in 2010

i find Eminem's particular sense of humour extremely internet. it's the same kind of 'shit i have suicidal depression (cop starts breakdancing)' thing that just feels natural to me now

Encore on particular is a better representation of Shitposting Through It than literally any other work of art I have experienced in my entire goddamn life

i was just gonna ask about D12 but i see you mentioned proof which i guess makes sense as the D12 member they would ship him with

I'M CURIOUS ABOUT THE TOPPING ORDER, like do the fics have strict topping hierarchy and if so is em usually top or bottom?

there actually isn't that much shipping Em with black people as opposed to his boyband foes, though there is some of him with Dre, Proof, and 50

I would absolutely love Eminem/Canibus slash because their beef was funny as hell but there we go

a lot of the fic shipping him with black people is extremely racist so I don't think we've missed out on that much

(lots of skin colour contrast, writing out the black guy's accent phonetically and not Em's...)

As for topping order, Em is almost always on bottom except in the EMGK fics

in the EMGK fics he's always, specifically, into getting his dick sucked.

which makes sense considering the constant blowjob imagery in Killshot

generally speaking, in the 2003 fics, he's portrayed as a defensive angry bottom who needs to have the pissing and moaning fucked out of him

lots of him crying during sex and refusing to be comforted

in the modern fic he's generally the emotionally stable one and Kells is the tearful inept mess with the emotional issues

though Kells is presented as being sad and needy, while Em was portrayed as being like 'fuck you bitch, you don't know me!! (crying)'

can we all just enjoy the fact that the man who wrote the song Kim is now considered to be the emotionally stable one

that's two decades of maturation right there

someone pointed out to me the other day that out of all the legacy rappers, it's Eminem and Snoop Dogg who now have the least controversial personal lives, and that this is insane

Jay-Z cheated on goddess Beyonce, Kanye........................... Kanye.

literally fucking jay z has a more dramatic personal life than eminem, it really is wild to contemplate

meanwhile Eminem is a stay at home dad who spends his money buying toys for childrens' homes and is affirming to his nonbinary kid

getting off drugs, figuring out he was autistic and deciding to not be the most famous person in the entire fucking world any more was so good for this man's mental health. he and Kim will never be together (good) and are friends (good). i am tremendously proud of him

honestly the most dramatic thing in Em's personal life in the last decade was people saying one of his albums was shit

that's extremely good!!

though he did suddenly write a bunch of songs about a married woman cheating on her husband with him and then going back to her husband, which is generally speculated to be based on his personal life, but he isn't saying names any more because he learned his lesson about that one in 2001

(well, he does mention her name - Michelle. it's just we don't even know if that's her real name. generally it's speculated to be his makeup artist, since he has a bit of a rep for banging his female staff)