Rereading Highlander in the modern world

[cimorene]

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.

Comments

[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.

[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]."

ps

[cimorene]

I will happily make a recs post on here after I've read a bit more - I still don't even have 10 bookmarks yet, even counting the old ones. Here's one I laughed out loud at last night though, a solid example of fic revolving around making fun of historical romance novels, which is a trope I particularly enjoy:

Fiction (5531 words) by Aria
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Highlander: The Series
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Duncan MacLeod/Methos
Characters: Duncan MacLeod, Methos
Additional Tags: Episode Related, First Time, Podfic Available
Summary:

"Oh God, you found Carolyn's book," Duncan said, sounding at least five hundred times less mortified than Methos had hoped.

Bookmarker's Notes:

I love this type of trope, and I love how this story flips the reader's and Methos's expectations by having Duncan surprisingly unembarrassed and Methos surprisingly affected.

[phosfate]

I have a VERY old Trekzine, Courts of Honor, as a MOBI file if you (or anybody reading this) want a copy. There is some paper-only Trek that's been digitized, but I've lost track of a lot of it and need to go looking again.

[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.

[funkyreunion]

I’ve always found it fascinating that Peter Wingfield dropped out of med school to pursue acting and then went back to med school in his late 40s (2011). As of 2020 he’s a board certified anesthesiologist. I wonder if any of his patients ever recognize him.

[cimorene]

Hmmmm... I don't think I've seen that one, though I've read some digitized zines before... sure!

[cimorene]

Surely they must, right, unless he sees them only infrequently? No idea about the work load in anesthesiology actually. At least it should happen less than to a lot of other doctors who do more consultation.

[princessofgeeks]

When you get to this part of your reply:

"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)..."

That is what I am keenly interested in -- your take on what specifically you are defining as Old School Slash versus the newer one.

It makes perfect sense that Due South could be a or the transitional fandom, but I'm really interested in the specific elements in the fic that let you categorize it one way or the other.

In short I wish to subscribe to this newsletter.

[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.

[cimorene]

Oh, cool! Well, I am very interested in that! I haven't been reading DS or SG1 that much recently - well, like... 3-4 stories of each in the last couple of weeks, but some of them were actually much newer stories.

But going through Highlander like this should enable me to collect a lot of wild examples of the features I recognize as "old slash"!

On the superficial stylistic level, a lot of things that made old (printzine era) slash primarily (but netfic too, just... less over time) read more like paperback het romance novels are among these:

-specific (now clichéd) phrases tending towards the purple, usually things regarding physical descriptions of beauty like "flowing locks" or descriptions of the physical/mental sensations of attraction/arousal/falling in love

-romance-genre-derived terms (euphemisms) for body parts and sex acts like "his sex", "his hardness", "his member" (some of these go out of fashion and others don't, though. I feel like "erection" has stood the test of time and remains in current usage)

-the compulsory notion femmeification/heroineification of the POV character in the slash story, which used to include a whole fanon catalog of conventions about how much more physically delicate/inept/unmanly he was as well as how much more mentally/emotionally stereotypically-gendered-female he was (caring, knowledgable about food preparation, in touch with his own emotions, etc). Things like the compulsory (in het romance genre) passages introducing the heroine's appearance and establishing that he doesn't think he's that physically attractive/beautiful (even if he is actually). The also-blatant fanonification of physical description so that characters are beautiful, flawless, ripped, MCU-style-casting versions of themselves with 6-packs and bulging defined muscles, even when the actual actors in canon aren't. (This still happens, obviously. It's gone out of fashion, though, so the style is to be a bit more subtle about it now, and also it's less widespread.)

-sex scenes have evolved over time and the accepted conventions for how realistic and how safe the sex they were having was have evolved too. In the oldest fic, there was little concern with realism; stamina, refractory period, how comfortable a sex position would be, the existence of prep. At some points, the safe sex practices were so normative that they showed up in contexts/fandoms where they were implausible (would they know?), impossible (they couldn't have got that lube/condoms) or unnecessary (they're magical/immortal/whatever and can't feel pain or can't get diseases or whatever).

... But I'll collect some examples as I keep reading and probably make more posts later!

[which_chick]

I read... a lot of HL slash fanfic back in the day. Fond memories! But yeah, tropes of the genre are like ... you can kinda radio-carbon-date slash fanfic by the plots, practices, and terminology showcased therein. Oh also, here's a link. I have remembered it fondly and kept track of it through all its various internet homes, so... yeah.

[cimorene]

Thanks! I don't recognize it from the summary, so I'm curious to see if I've read it before. I used to read like... almost everything in the whole archive back in the day, but then, HL was never centralized in one archive back then.

[which_chick]

Also the whole shebang starts here which is probably a better place to start. I was bereft of coffee this morning. Sorry.

[stranger]

You're right, of course. A lot of slash follows established slash genre styles; it varies more now with the huge variety in sources and the huger number of fics, but it's still recognizably slash/slashy/fanficcy as a genre.

The GLBT-acceptance factor for 1980s vs 2010s is also blurred by fanfic in which same-sex couples were accepted -- in the idealistic future Trek Federation, or in slightly-fantasy historical settings, or just declared okay by a forward-looking boss in an otherwise very 1980 workplace. (I recall the latter in B/D, in particular.) It was blatant idealism at the time, but it let the writer focus on the love story and action plot. So, there's been slash that simply ignored gay politics from early on, alongside the stories that worked with late-20th-century taboos, and slash writing that now doesn't (much) have to.

[stranger]

The fanon conventions about making one of a m/m couple smaller and shorter, in particular, always made me roll my eyes. (And overt feminization sparked backlash and mocking among some slash fans.) I don't recall much of it in HL, but I look forward hopefully to your HL retrospective.

[cimorene]

Well, the emotional intelligence diffeential goes both ways in Highlander, I think, depending on the fic. It doesn't have a clear consensus fanon there. Methos actually is more slightly built, and Duncan actually is muscular, but there isn't a lot of over exaggeration, really? Going by my memory as well as the stuff I have read in the last few days.

I do remember a lot of really sad and angsty Methos needing to be reassured and emotionally fixed by the Healing Cock of the Scottish Highlands, as my friends and I used to call it in like... 2005. That isn't really a universal trope though. So far the most pathetic Methos I've seen is the frequent "didn't dare to ever hope he'd look at ME", but by itself that isn't too ridiculous to stand.

[cimorene]

Yeah, Star Trek canon is completely divided on whether we're actually past bigotry in the 24th century or not, so I can't really blame authors whichever way they jump on that one, and I've definitely seen both. And similarly, I'm sure there's value at least in principle in the subgenre that very obviously just uses the world as it is and imagines it as exactly the same but without homophobia. Like as a political statement if nothing else (I can't say that a great deal of that in The Professionals - I think that's the B/D you mean? - was like, thematically focused on pointing out the irony or injustice of actual homophobia or whatever).

[princessofgeeks]

This is utterly fascinating; thank you.

Definitely we saw the stereotyped feminization of Daniel Jackson in SG-1 in the early fic. And some writers really didn't like it as the seasons went on and he got haircuts!

I am interested in any amount of observations from you like this. The evolution of slash as a genre fascinates me.

[princessofgeeks]

can I rec this post?

[cimorene]

I've started saving quotations and when I collect a good round number, I will post them with commentary!

[cimorene]

Oh, sure!

[cimorene]

💜 Noted, thanks!

[cimorene]

You are likely familiar with my favorite example of this, The Professionals, where Bodie and Doyle are literally so exactly the same size in reality that they can share clothes but in fanon Bodie is like a hulking caveman and Doyle is actually portrayed as literally or compared to, in multiple fics by multiple people, a fairy or ballerina (they seem to mean an actual female ballerina though since male ballet dancers are uh... usually significantly more muscular than Bodie)

[stranger]

Oooh, yeah, B/D in Pros (since neither is named John or Jack, it's a little easier to still use B/D, but most pairings now need a more specific tag just because initials are finite) had a bad case of it. I recall that Martin Shaw as Doyle was given curly hair to make him visually different from Bodie -- but the curls definitely tipped him into being the "girl" if someone wanted to map them onto m/f, and at that point many fans did have that mindset.

And, and... OMG, I was re-reading some LJ slash discussion from 2004 or so (house-cleaning, checking out old boxes...), and it mentioned exactly that same thing, comparing Doyle to a ballerina, for the same someone-has-to-be-the-girl reason. The comparison does have a (tiny) basis in the show! There's a scene in which Doyle, in his deadpan dare-you-to-believe-me way, says that as a kid he went to dancing school. It's one throw-away line. In context, it could be total put-on from Doyle, or true. Fanon just leapt from there to ballet, as well as citing the elf AUs that were something of a fanon trope as "fairies". The thematic connection is just painfully Victorian (when ballerinas were "fairylike" and fairies were childish tiny things) overall.