Fandom, Slash & James Marsters
(This is a little more fun than my last entry. I wrote most of it yesterday morning, ready for posting today.)
Here's the story of fandom and me, prompted by a wish to clarify why I got so very squeeful over James Marsters' appearance on Torchwood.
I started this LJ in January 2009, but this story begins a little earlier.
My BFF, BookGeekGal, introduced me to Buffy the Vampire Slayer in December 2007. It was my last year of culinary school, and I was working a university-related job, which meant I had an actual vacation between semesters. I watched the first four seasons of Buffy in about three weeks, then watched season five over the next couple of months. BtVS, of course, had been off the air for a few years by then. S2 of Torchwood, meanwhile, was first airing while I was tearing through Buffy DVDs.
(I waited until late summer 2008 to watch the last two Buffy seasons. As I got closer to graduation and didn't have a “real” job lined up, I became desperately depressed, to the point of losing interest in everything except obsessively applying for jobs. Given the general mood of S6, I think it's just as well that I didn't watch straight through.)
It was probably May 2008 - once I graduated, and landed an awesome job at my current place of employment - that I first started hunting up Buffy fanfic. I'd been in fandoms before, but not Fandom, with all its canon-blending, meta-writing, p0rn-loving, slash-happy glory. I don't think I even knew LJ existed.
Let me go back to BtVS for a minute. There were so many things for me to love about the show: the humor, the feminism, the friendship between Buffy and Willow, Angel's search for redemption, everything about Giles, the intriguing hotness of Faith... and the intensity of the Spike/Angel subtext in S2.
So. I made my way to the internet, and then to the Buffy Fanfic Archive. And then I discovered the 101 (and I swear there used to be more) Spangel fics in the archive.
It wasn't just me.
Spike and Angel weren't the first guy-slash pairing I shipped, by any means. But they're special to me, by virtue of being the first slash pairing that I learned other people shipped, too. I wasn't being weird or imagining something that's not there; I was picking up on something lots of other people noticed, too.
(And then I encountered a (now-defunct) Buffy/Willow fanfic site, and I started writing Buffy fanfic. Then I found buffy_fanfic , and facets_of_faith , and a few months after that, I started this here journal and began actually posting my fic. The rest is history.)
Back to Torchwood, then: the interaction between Jack Harkness and John Hart is what you always think should be happening, just off screen, between Angel and Spike. To actually see it, as a real part of the canon, is fantastic. Oh, I know the characters are not the same - Jack and Angel are different more than similar; and though John Hart has traits in common with Spike, he's a distinct character and Marsters is a good enough actor to make that clear. But even so, the dynamic is similar. The hero is reformed, now trying to do the right thing and protect the human race. Marsters' character is a sexy antihero (or are we supposed to see him as a villain?), coming back to remind the hero of how much fun they used to have in the old days, when they were both amoral badasses. And I could happily watch them interact all day.
Here's the story of fandom and me, prompted by a wish to clarify why I got so very squeeful over James Marsters' appearance on Torchwood.
I started this LJ in January 2009, but this story begins a little earlier.
My BFF, BookGeekGal, introduced me to Buffy the Vampire Slayer in December 2007. It was my last year of culinary school, and I was working a university-related job, which meant I had an actual vacation between semesters. I watched the first four seasons of Buffy in about three weeks, then watched season five over the next couple of months. BtVS, of course, had been off the air for a few years by then. S2 of Torchwood, meanwhile, was first airing while I was tearing through Buffy DVDs.
(I waited until late summer 2008 to watch the last two Buffy seasons. As I got closer to graduation and didn't have a “real” job lined up, I became desperately depressed, to the point of losing interest in everything except obsessively applying for jobs. Given the general mood of S6, I think it's just as well that I didn't watch straight through.)
It was probably May 2008 - once I graduated, and landed an awesome job at my current place of employment - that I first started hunting up Buffy fanfic. I'd been in fandoms before, but not Fandom, with all its canon-blending, meta-writing, p0rn-loving, slash-happy glory. I don't think I even knew LJ existed.
Let me go back to BtVS for a minute. There were so many things for me to love about the show: the humor, the feminism, the friendship between Buffy and Willow, Angel's search for redemption, everything about Giles, the intriguing hotness of Faith... and the intensity of the Spike/Angel subtext in S2.
So. I made my way to the internet, and then to the Buffy Fanfic Archive. And then I discovered the 101 (and I swear there used to be more) Spangel fics in the archive.
It wasn't just me.
Spike and Angel weren't the first guy-slash pairing I shipped, by any means. But they're special to me, by virtue of being the first slash pairing that I learned other people shipped, too. I wasn't being weird or imagining something that's not there; I was picking up on something lots of other people noticed, too.
(And then I encountered a (now-defunct) Buffy/Willow fanfic site, and I started writing Buffy fanfic. Then I found buffy_fanfic , and facets_of_faith , and a few months after that, I started this here journal and began actually posting my fic. The rest is history.)
Back to Torchwood, then: the interaction between Jack Harkness and John Hart is what you always think should be happening, just off screen, between Angel and Spike. To actually see it, as a real part of the canon, is fantastic. Oh, I know the characters are not the same - Jack and Angel are different more than similar; and though John Hart has traits in common with Spike, he's a distinct character and Marsters is a good enough actor to make that clear. But even so, the dynamic is similar. The hero is reformed, now trying to do the right thing and protect the human race. Marsters' character is a sexy antihero (or are we supposed to see him as a villain?), coming back to remind the hero of how much fun they used to have in the old days, when they were both amoral badasses. And I could happily watch them interact all day.