What I Read on Monday (5/26 - Memorial Day) TS, HL, B/A, SV

[djinanna]

If you've been reading along at home and trying to figure out the difference between a "very recommended" and a "highly recommended" and, you know, rankings and stuff ... there mostly aren't any. The modifying word to "recommended" is just an indicator as to how enthusiastic I was feeling at the moment I wrote the review -- and also me trying to

Comments

[drc1]

Hi,

I’m very sorry it took me so long to reply to your post. Work and other RL stuff kept getting in the way, so maybe you have long forgotten about me.:-)) Also, I think I should warn you about my tendency to get rather long-winded when writing about something that makes me think.

Re: Then, about 2-1/2 years ago, I got my laptop and started reading Highlander gen and het on the web. Oddly enough, since my own writing has always had slashy characters in it, I resisted slash fic. Until I'd read every single gen and het story featuring Methos that was in the 7th Dimension HL Archive. Took me about six months. So I've been reading slash for about 2 years (and on LiveJournal, thus *commenting* on slash, for about 1 year).

Anyway, that's why and when I started reading slash fanfic for the first time. (Well, except for that Luke-as-sex-slave/Han zine back in '79....) Started with Highlander. Then added X-Files. Then Due South and The Sentinel, kinda simultaneously. From that point on, it became a gigantic snowball rolling downhill.

The first time I heard about fanfiction was when I became completely obsessed with a TV show (before BtVS) and found a web site that had, among other things, links to fanfiction sites and stories. Before that, I didn’t even know that ‚ordinary fans‘ would write there own stories based on characters they know from shows or movies. Even then, I never thought of reading it because I didn’t think it would have the quality professional writers achieve. Then I discovered Buffy and - after watching the famous Spike eps Crush and Fool For Love - zero’s site and board at jamesmarsters.com. However, it was only when lots of posters there kept raving about a fic titled 100 yrs of Solitude that I thought I should give it a try.

I guess the reason why that fic worked for me was that it was set in the future and AU and only remotely based on the show’s premise. After that I became obsessed with S/B. Not interested in slash, though. On the one hand, because I just didn’t see the characters that way (and wasn’t looking for the subtext, either ;-)), on the other hand because every time I tried it turned out to be some violent vampire PWP, and not even well written at that. Then, someone on a list I belonged to at the time recommended Chocolatey Goodness for its quality, the emotions, the beauty of the writing - and I was done.:-)) By now, I’ve read hundreds of S/X stories and downloaded even more.

A couple of things still haven’t changed for me, though: usually, I avoid fics that are meant to fill ‚gaps‘ or to rewrite scenes, or stories that are based on vampire lore that is more Anne Rice than BtVS. Like the whole biting and feeding which on the show is clearly a bad thing whereas in fics it tends to be something erotic. It makes me wince every time I read about Xander or Buffy asking Spike to bite him or her as a sign of love. And my favourite settings are still AU and future fics because it allows the characters to change in ways or deal with each other we would never have seen on the show. And because my take on the show and characters often differs from the writers'.

Re: There are some good S/A and X/A out there. I don't have any top-of-my-head recs for them, though, because I'm a OTP kinda girl and S/X is my OTP. Though I do read Xander slashed with other people. But I almost never enjoy fic featuring Spike slashed with anybody but Xander ... it's a strange thing.

I love Estepheia’s S/A fics and like Kay’s X/A fics a lot (Not Just Another Human or Healer). Kay’s writing may not be of the highest quality but she always comes up with original plots to make X/A believable, given the dislike or even hatred Xander always felt towards Angel.

As for Spike: He is definitely the most interesting and intriguing character, and if well written he can be paired with almost everyone else. Did you ever read All Purpose Spike by Indri?

more in pt.2