Some awkward moments while rereading old fandoms that you haven't looked into in some years

[cimorene]

- "Hey, this pseud rings a faint bell. What do I know about them? ... Wait a second... hey, Wax, is this the person who took all their fic offline and made an entire password-protected website where you had to join a mailing list and then solemnly swear you were not Anish Kapoor, were not associated with Anish Kapoor, and were not going to in any way leak the contents to Anish Kapoor in order to get the password? And the reason was because the Anish Kapoor in question was accused of stalking them?"

"Hmm... I think so, yeah."

- The last time I was here there was this quaint little coffee shop au where nobody is an alien or in space at all and I read a couple but it wasn't my thing. Since then apparently hundreds of new writers have written takeoffs of it, some of them spinning off their own sub-aus as if it was the fucking cthulhumythos and not a contemporary restaurant setting. They don't all use the same tags. They don't all use any tags at all. It's impossible to filter them out. Sometimes there's almost a whole page of results filled with them.

- Enough time has passed for there to be fanfiction for this fandom that originated in the 1990s by people who clearly don't know what answering machines are or how they work.

- A notable fan writer wrote this one piece of meta that an army of young enthusiastic writers have since taken as gospel. This new fanon doesn't appear naturally, as if it were canon information; it's celebrated in ways both twee and uncomfortably fetishizing. And occasionally it appears normally as well. But that's not the majority.

- I see that cultural sea change since the 2000s has converted the annoying plurality fanon from "overcoming his internalized homophobia" to "he's a wise queer elder who is so queer that it retroactively renders him out and flamboyant in canon from their perspective" here in this fandom too.

- As fanon goes, one of the most pointless as well as one of the most baffling is just pretending one of the principal characters had a tail in canon too. I'm reminded of that Pros writer who only wrote independent (of each other) aus where Illya had glasses and a ponytail and a history of CSA. This is definitely less weird, but the fact that it's a whole bunch of different writers is maybe weirder. But I mean, fine. Fine! It's not like it changes anything, right? I can just read these and ignore any mentions of the - "He flipped his tail against the floor". Nope.

- Somehow this never bothered me very much at the time, but now that I'm reading this stuff again twenty-five years post finale, I'm turned off by this whole huge subgenre of the fandom based on an alternate interpretation. I definitely used to read these, but I find them fundamentally uninteresting now.

- Some new writers: "What if this character had this personality trait that they actually clearly are shown to have in canon but I apparently didn't notice, but instead of being thoughtfully expressed in a way conditioned by their environment and upbringing and the society they are from, it was expressed exactly the way it is in modern teenagers, and also used the same terminology they use about it on Tumblr?"

- Over time I had forgotten that a huge portion of work in this fandom is just written in an au version of canon where everything is just the same except it's not a comedy and there's no magical realism, which is a bit like getting an au version of a chili dog from a fast food drive through that is just a hotdog bun without anything in it, which once happened to my aunt, or a hamburger that is just a beef patty in a bun without any of the toppings, which once happened to my dad. If only there were some way to filter that out.

Comments

[lilysea]

Which fandom is this for?

[cimorene]

This is about a mixture of Due South and Deep Space Nine!

[laurajv]

Ohhhh I remember that author. I thought it was frankly silly but then again I wasn't the one dealing with an aggressive troll.

[cimorene]

Wax used to talk to Tritorella sometimes. By the time I asked her about it the whole thing was years in the past, but I think she said something like... it wasn't clear that any stalking actually occurred.

[phosfate]

Oh, I remember that name, but it's been so long that I don't know if I read any of their fic.

I just remember DS as the fandom where you were expected to warn for the presence of an actual regular character in the show, because she was an icky girl.

[cimorene]

I never knew that that was an expectation! I wasn't there in the original wave of fandom though. I've probably seen the warnings, but you see those in lots of fandoms 😐

[phosfate]

This was before AO3 was even thought of, in the mailing list/make your own fic site days. People would voluntarily warn for the presence of Margaret Thatcher.

Happily I missed most of the Ray Wars.

[cimorene]

Yeah, the mailing lists were already losing a lot of ground to LiveJournal and websites when I started reading, and that was also before ao3 was a plan.

[anatsuno]

Oh man, this evokes both 'I feel ya' feels and an irrepressive curiosity to know which is which :D

[cimorene]

1. Due South. AuKestrel, aka Audra, vs Tritorella.

2. Deep Space Nine. Can't remember which person wrote the original, but the shared (?) verse is called 'Deep Dish Nine'.

3. DS

4. DS9, an essay about some hypothetical genitalia and sexual behavior for Cardassians based heavily on snakes and lizards

5. DS, Kowalski

6. DS9, Cardassians with tails

7. DS, post-finale fic where the characters stay in Chicago

8. Both DS9 (Bashir) and DS (Fraser); being autistic

9. DS

[princessofgeeks]

Thank you so much for providing the legend; will go back and reread the post now with even more enjoyment because I KNOW BOTH THESE FANDOMS WOW.

[cimorene]

😆

[cathexys]

Another Thank you! I recognized that one was dS, but I wasn't sure about the other one :)

[laurenthemself]

I THOUGHT 4 and 6 sounded familiar.

[princessofgeeks]

And now that I have read both the post and the footnotes: I guess in one sense it's great that these closed canons have continued to be popular and have had so much written about them, even after the heyday!

Re due South: Did you feel the canon strongly implied that Ray and Fraser stayed in Canada after their quest?

Re DS9: I missed entirely the Cardassians with tails things. Amazing.

Due South had such range. It was such an amazing show and had such wonderful m/m slash ships, but of course in that era it was all subtext. It's funny that people have retconned Kowalski into a Wise Gay Elder.

[cimorene]

I felt that canon strongly implied just that they lived happily ever after together, to be strictly accurate, but I think most of the people who read it that way have assumed it would be in Canada because Fraser seems like he wants to move back there at the end of canon. That seems like the likeliest outcome to me as well. But it's also just a matter of the narrative needing to feel like it's going forward, and without paying careful attention to what you're writing, setting a story back in Chicago after the finale can seem like they've gone backwards, losing the stuff that happened in the finale. It wouldn't actually mean that necessarily in reality, but Due South was very Narrativey. If you ignore that shapiness in your writing, the story doesn't feel like Due South. It's still legit for fanworks not to feel like canon - to deliberately feel like something quite different in fact - but the feel of Due South is what I like about it, so I'm not really interested in those. They're not exploring or capturing the stuff that I'm there for.

Cardassians with tails was never a thing until quite recently! I'd say the last time I went through the fiction systematically like this was probably... Maybe about 12-15 years ago, at most? And maybe five years ago minimum. And I saw the idea then, but it wasn't popular, wasn't even a real trend.

I don't think everyone has done that, but there's definitely a critical mass of like, out to himself in his own head, well-adjusted queer guy who already knows tons of queer stuff from back in the day. I've seen this type of character interpretation as a rising trend over time in various fandoms and I see the same dies and molds being put to use here.

[stranger]

This all is, sadly and hilariously, typical of How Fanon Works. Lovely analysis and summaries. I am particularly baffled by coffeeshop AUs, but ehh.

Other examples:
* Mag7 has a long-running, more or less coherent, sub-genre of the show's characters as an emergency-response team in what was the present day when fans started writing them.
* Hockey fandom seems overly prone to making some or all characters werewolves (or straight-up Alpha-Omega AUs). (I suppose that was a pun, sorry.)
* SGA had a puzzling year or two of comedic animal-transformation stories. I wonder if the idea was inherited from Sentinel, where the canon basis made it all but inevitable. And, OMG, the same in Professionals fanfic, again when a noted writer started it with a thoughtful story, and then the theme burgeoned out of control.
* Oh yeah, and the Sentinel-Guide dynamic as, apparently, an international governing structure for Sentinels (always capitalized), has been adopted across numerous fandoms. That's impossible to filter out if I'm looking for a classic Sentinel story of old and don't have title-author info.

[princessofgeeks]

That Sentinel/Guide thing became like catnip for crossovers of all kinds. Dasha wrote a great one and there were countless others. It seemed to fit into just about every fandom irresistably, even for people who didn't watch the show.

[cimorene]

I think it's the whole institutionalized SYSTEM of it that makes that happen. It provides like a pretty elaborate framework for the universe but one that still leaves plenty of space to imagine your own characters in it, like Star Trek or Harry Potter. And I used to see sentinel and guide aus before they took off like that, without the whole... oppressive authoritarian juggernaut part, just like, these are two kinds of magic you can have!, but they got way more popular with the more elaborate society stuff.

Also of course it's two mystically matched up roles, a bit like the omegaverse concept, so it almost automatically leads into predestined soulmate stuff, which always has been a big hit in shipping fandom.

[stranger]

Oh yes, this is exactly it. The elaborate hierarchy stuff is obviously attractive to some readers, and sometimes me, but taken one step too far it flips into my squick zone. And, that seems to be the goal of some stories, that a lead sympathetic character is constrained or threatened by overzealous or corrupt hierarchy. Which is story conflict, true, but not very subtle.

The complementary magics by themselves just add a layer to how romance develops -- "do I like-like this person, or is it just liking our great work-together vibes?" And does the answer always have to be soulmates? For some fans, yes it does. Fandom being about what each fan likes...

[stranger]

It did work in the "Imperfections" series, which expanded out from Sentinel canon pretty organically. The later samples I've stumbled onto are effectively AU from The Sentinel canon as well as from whatever show provides the characters and setting. This is merely fandom making its own fun, but I could wish for separate tags for Sentinel-the-show, and the Sentinel-Guide-as-institutions-AU.

Meanwhile, when I'm looking for that funny little story where Jim and Blair go out for ice cream, which I can't quite remember details of, it's a stray tree in a big forest.

[princessofgeeks]

I think Lemon Drop wrote that one about the ice cream!

[stranger]

That sounds like the right author name. Will check AO3. Thanks!

[cimorene]

You might mean this one too.

A Long Time Looking (11478 words) by Anna S
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Sentinel
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Jim Ellison/Blair Sandburg
Additional Tags: First Times, Plot What Plot
Summary:

A trip with Jim and Blair to a plotless wonderland of ice cream and sex. With yuppie trappings.

[stranger]

I'm not sure this is the one, but it looks like a good story, so thanks!

[cimorene]

I suspect that animal transformation was a continuation of the body swap, age regression, and other transformation trends that had come into media fandom from popslash around that time, plus conscious and unconscious borrowing of the types of plots seen in Star Trek canons and fandoms.

[stranger]

Popslash was acres of fun; often it being on crack *was* the fun.

I didn't quite bring that mindset to SGA, but the on-crack subset of the fanfic was... umm... really kinda similar. (Did you see the one where a Starbucks opens somewhere in Atlantis and everyone is trying to find it in search of the fabled Pumpkin Spice Latte?)

(Was it popslash or SGA where Lance-or-Rodney transformed into a bookcase? Or a sofa?) (Hmm, in SGA there's the gimmick of Ancients Tech to justify these things, but in popslash, it just happens... because. Because, I suspect, the boys are bored between tours and their frustrated fans' collective manna generates magic... or something.)

[cimorene]

I might have skipped the Starbucks one. It doesn't ring a bell. There's definitely one where Rodney turns into like... a lamp? And one in bandom where Spencer Smith turns into a belt.

[stranger]

I'll have to re-read Torch's "About a Lamp", even though it's probably not that story. I never quite got the point of it, even though it's very readable, and maybe you're right and I didn't realize what was going on -- Torch can write anything.

[cimorene]

I don't think that's the one I'm thinking of. Her stuff is much more... deliberate? But I don't think I want to reread any inanimate transformation to confirm...

[cesy]

There was definitely a sofa one in popslash.