cimorene | Rereading Highlander in the modern world

I found a fandom to reread: Highlander! I think this is working for me well partly because the last time I reread this fandom in any big way was years ago, but also because it's been quite a while since I reread any fandom this old.

(Definitely more Old Fandom than Due South, which to me marks a watershed point in the evolution into more modern media fandom. Highlander is in the same era/category as The Sentinel, I'd say. Smallville and SG1 overlap with Due South but for the most part feel less modern to me. There's a whole world of older fandoms too, of course. Star Trek springs to mind, but the online availability of the old stuff is pretty low. The Professionals is probably the most widely-available example, because they had that whole archive meticulously transcribed from old print zines, and now that's at AO3.)

When I looked at my bookmarks on AO3, there were only 4 in Highlander. In the past I've had tons more than this, bookmarks originally from the pre-archive era sites that I moved first to Delicious, then to AO3. I didn't realize so many had been lost in there - but a lot more old fic has made it to AO3 in recent years, so I'm looking for half-remembered fic now.

But I have found myself reading half or two thirds of something and then failing out (usually because the idea of a 400-year-old man dealing with m/m sex or sexual thoughts for the first time keeps reducing me to giggles and breaking the mood), when I know that I read it all the way through in 2004 and probably somewhere around 2009 (I didn't find that PLAUSIBLE in my 20s; I just enjoyed reading it to the end anyway).

The other thing that keeps distracting me, although not preventing me from reading, is remembering that Peter Wingfield retired from acting and is now an anesthesiologist. This fandom didn't really need any more sources of chuckles, but there it is.

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From:

princessofgeeks

Fascinating! I would love more recs and if you do bookmark the ones you still enjoy that would be great.

I had no idea about Peter Wingfield. There for a while he was showing up EVERYWHERE.

I read Due South after getting deeply into SG1 and I'm curious what you think differentiates an old-school slash fandom from a newer one? Elements of the shows themselves? Fanfic tropes? Writing styles? It's a great question. I'm not widely read in enough different fandoms to have a sense.

From:

cimorene

Oh, I'm definitely talking about the writing styles in the body of work of slash fanfiction. And for the most part it just moves forward in time, but because of the fact that trends spread from person to person I guess, and each fandom has a subset of people and not all of them have the same connections to other fandoms, the dominant elements of writing style for that time often vary slightly from fandom from fandom. (Maybe always?)

Time is obviously a continuous sequence, and there isn't REALLY a "premodern" and "modern" period in the... gestalt style of fanfiction writing of the moment, because it changes gradually and hasn't had any huge dramatic shocks like the things that occured in, you know, architecture and art and philosophy that distinguish the modern and premodern (and postmodern). So when I said modern, I just meant 'more or less like now', and as opposed to Old Slash. The idea of 'old slash' and 'vintage fic' etc is commonly bandied about and I guess we all have an idea of what people mean by it, and when you read a great deal of fiction from a bunch of fandoms going back in time you can see that they get more like that (... old slash-ish) as they go back in time, but at some point in the past they reach a point where, I guess, they feel (to me) more like an older version of the contemporary style, and less like a more recent version of the old style?

So I guess what I mean is that the various changes in stylistic trends towards the stylistic trends of now and away from the style of "old slash" feel, to me, like they sort of... changed faster or something maybe in Due South fandom? Or that Due South fandom is the oldest fandom I can think of where overall the fandom style started to (although not at the beginning of Due South fandom I think) feel more like a more or less contemporary style than like Old Slash to me. DS aired 94-99 while SG1 aired from 97-2007, but for whatever reason (I think the advent of internet filesharing which made fannish redistribution way more accessible when previously canon was shared on VHS and burned dvds), DS had a truly HUGE "second wave" around... 2002-2004ish, when SG1 was also going strong, but around that time I guess SG1 fandom felt a little more old school to me. Not in all ways, really, just in some of them... perhaps driven by favored fanon and tropes primarily, but also some of the other, more superficial trends in style, voice, structure, and meta worldview assumptions (like about how important safe sex is to fic, and how a sex scene typically looks, and how the slashed characters relate to their own sexuality and sense of self, etc)...

I think this comment's getting discombobulated, so I'm going to increase my blood sugar. Feel free to point me in one direction or the other in response!

(RE: Peter Wingfield, I think I learned this random fact on Tumblr, but I could be wrong. Also I have this vague idea that Wax already knew it. Earlier this week I was saying something like "He's a doctor isn't he?" and she'd go "He's an ANESTHESIOLOGIST, that's the guy with the drugs. At [hospital I've forgotten now]."

From:

stranger

Each show's fandom seemed (to me at the time) to have a subtly different flavor and style, ST from S/H from B/D from HL and SmV and so on, based on the show's structure (tight buddies vs new-met couple, teens vs old guys, SF vs cop action vs, in Sentinel, SF *and* cop action), setting, and the fans who wrote it, especially early in the fandom. All the same, there's a fair body of slash that's often enjoyable, but is so focused on a relationship that the character details may matter but the setting doesn't.

I would say, however, that there has in fact been a huge 20thC to 21stC change that affects slash as a genre, in the social attitudes toward gays and gender norms. This showed up over about 30 years (and is still changing, woah!). There are hints more on the surface than subtext in Due South and Babylon 5 and Xena, in the 90s. By the 00s, with same-sex marriage legal in Canada, SGA fans' slash could show that as canonically plausible; slash in purely U.S. settings increasingly did the same. Slash as taboo-busting became slash as, often, an acceptable romance or fling or hookup as seen by other characters in the source. There's a much wider set of options now.

From:

cimorene

Agreed! I mean, agreed that:

§ every fandom has a subtly different style (well, most of the time anyway - I suppose they're not ALWAYS big enough to really develop their own culture)

§ fandoms whose canons share important genre features (ie buddy cops or whatever) often share stylistic and fanon elements (probably from the larger genre the canon belongs to as well as from other slash fandoms)

§ social attitudes about coming out, gender norms/gender-related self-image, marriage, the amount of taboo in the characters' minds etc, have shifted in slash over this period as society changed and that was a huge deal for society and the people in it

... but I still see a lot of commonality between different slash fandoms, stylistically, with fandoms for the most part representing sort of subgenre/variants with a clear relationship between them. This was true in old paper zine fic too, although probably less so in the earliest zines. And it's the changing character of this constellation of common stylistic features that I was thinking about here.

And finally, as monumental as the overall societal changes have been cumulatively, I still don't regard the change in that constellation of styles as having gone through a profound and total discontinuity like that described by the difference between "modern" and "premodern". The amount of taboo navigated by the characters has changed a lot and particularly expanded to include a larger thread of stories that don't touch on homophobia and gender taboos; but slash as a genre is still a body of work largely concerned with self-realizations and coming out, thematically. But perhaps more importantly, the stylistic aesthetic, particularly things like voice, point of view, structure, and popular tropes are independent of those features, and those provide a strong continuous tradition in the genre.

multi-fannish American queer cat & bunny owner in Finland

Rereading Highlander in the modern world

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