Comments | purna: navel-gazing and the tilde

purna

navel-gazing and the tilde

May 23, 2006 02:15

I was thinking today about how I first found out about slash, because it was through a somewhat odd set of circumstances. It was '97-'98 and it was because of the internet (surprise). I may have been in the first wave of people who found it themselves on the 'net, rather than being "pimped" into slash by someone ( Read more... )

Comments 5

20thcenturyvole May 23 2006, 10:58:06 UTC

Wow. I suppose that makes me first-wave, too. My introduction to slash was... ignoble, to say the least. I really did stumble upon it by accident, in my first flush of internet love when I was, oh, thirteen? Fourteen? A big Buffy fan. I'd followed a few links to fiction archives looking for some Spuffy fluff, maybe some Lord of the Rings as well, and you have to understand that in those days I still didn't get that a slash denoted a pairing, let alone tasty gayness (I got a big surprise when I tried looking up some Spike-Dawn gen fluff, typed in Spike/Dawn and got a Great Romantic Epic With Baby). At the time, I'd never even thought about tasty gayness. It didn't register on my radar. So when I stumbled across a Star Wars Qui-Gonn/Obi-Wan story, didn't know what it was, and started reading, I ( ... )

purna May 23 2006, 22:23:53 UTC

Wow, you young whippersnapper. Fourteen? Dude. I forget sometimes that so many slashers today grew up with the internet, while I didn't find it until college. Yeah, now I feel like an old 30-something. :)

The first time I read slash, one part of me went, "okay, that's an odd thing to do," (using already defined TV characters was what I found odd, I think) while most of me was going, "holy crap, I've been doing something like that in my head since I was a kid!"

I found Mary Renault at an early age, and loved The Charioteer and The Persian Boy instantly. I also read Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Catch Trap at 13 or 14, so I suppose I've always liked slashiness in published fiction before knowing what slash was.

carnadosa July 11 2006, 22:23:45 UTC

I'm always amazed that people have such clear memories of these things. Because, like you, I've always done that in my head (although, I do have clear memories of turning HP into a girl to put him with Snape before I started reading slash or canonical homosexual relations). I'm pretty sure that I stumbled upon slash due to the manga Demon Diary. I think I was trying to find if it had a sequel or something (where they had hot sex) and wandered into fanfiction.net. I picked up fandoms as necessary (or dragged kicking and screaming) from there (four years ago I think?)

But my reaction was definitely, wow this is so cool!

Was Sime~Gen good? I'm always up from a different vampire take.

carnadosa July 11 2006, 22:24:38 UTC

Or maybe it was because of FAKE? Um, both? Hmmmm...

purna July 12 2006, 01:21:18 UTC

Yeah, I'm not sure why this is such a distinctive memory for me. Perhaps because it led me into taking the step from constructing stories in my head to actually getting them down on paper (pixels?). And it totally just filled some slot, especially when I hit due South (and now SGA).

Was Sime~Gen good? I'm always up from a different vampire take.

Hmmm, you know I loved the books all through high school, and there's an almost slashy vibe about them in the sheer intimacy between the male characters. The first things I ever read were the published books House of Zeor and Channel's Destiny, which are really good. I still have copies of both, so they've held up pretty well, too ( ... )