At some point over the past several years, I began using “(para)textual” rather than “textual and paratextual analysis” as a sort of shorthand to describe my own analytical approach to how fan and industry relations play out across and between a wide array of media texts, social media platforms, news stories, promotional materials, and fan texts and discourse. This was less an attempt to avoid clunky prose than to visualize and convey what I perceive to be a growing intimacy between text and paratext in our contemporary media landscape. In retrospect, though, perhaps para/text is more appropriate. Not only does the slash visually evoke the tradition of tagging the central relationship explored within a given fanfiction story (e.g. Kirk/Spock), it also suggests the centrality of audiences and their individualized interpretive practices to any broader understanding about how paratexts function. Much as the slash in fanfiction is utilized to convey the act of bringing two characters into contact, audiences are the ones that ultimately put paratexts and texts into meaningful cognitive conversation. If the parenthetical seems to imply a hierarchical relationship between text and paratext, then the slash conveys a distinct dynamic, an evolving relationship, or a unit that demands further exploration.