Rambling to relax to....

[silvercobwebs]

Showers are the superior way to bathe. Truly. And in order to capture the full experience, you must listen to Classic FM...mmm...Lovely. However, please feel free to be amused (if you're me) that 'relaxing classics at 9.00' are immediately illustrated by Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkeries'. A classic to relax to, I think not. A classic to invade

Comments

[rune_vampyr]

I hadn't even *heard* of Slash until 1999. When a friend recommended I join a Slash list, I thought she meant it was for excessively violent fic... ya know, slash, hack, that kind of thing! hee hee. Got a bit of a shock when Spike went down on Angel...

Brief interlude while Rune's eyes glaze over and the whole S/A scene replays in her mind....

(cough)

Anyhoo... That was the SpikeNAngelfic list. The first few fics I read were Saber's and one of Vixen's, then later on, Esmeralda's 'Stranger Things' series and the totally awesome 'Clockwork Vampire' by the lovely Naughty Spirit. Exclusively Spike/Xander fic didn't seem to really kick off *that* much until after Angel buggered off to LA. Or maybe I hadn't been looking in the right places ;) I think NummyTreats, Nemi's list, was the first S/X list that I discovered.

I do remember trawling through links and such desperately trying to find more - it was pretty hard to find unless you knew where to look. And as for sites, I recall very few way back when - but specifically I remember Saber's personal archive and then Lar's 'Eterniata' and another which was called (I think) 'City of Angels and the Hellmouth' or something like that. It had a nice cartoon of Angelus as it's splashpage, if I recall.

There were a scattering of other sites, all folk that were known to each other on the lists, like Avarice and Jess and Donna and such. Then all of a sudden, the whole thing kinda took off. Lar's BuffyImprov List did an awful lot to bring authors together in one place, and you could more easily find archive sites ect.

I must admit it's been strange seeing how quickly the Buffy Slash community has grown from a virtual 'hidden village' to a metropolis. I remember going to my first Con and if you mentioned that you wrote Slash, folk either looked at you in disgust or had no idea what you were talking about. Now, it seems that at least seventy percent of the folks I meet at Cons are Slashers or at least have heard of/read it.

We've came a long way, people ;) I must admit to a certain smugness, though, that I was there in the early days and got to watch how the authors progressed, seen sites and fads come and go - even if I didn't open MIB until later - it's only been around since Halloween 2000.

I think that the emergence of 'Smallville' spelled The End for a lot of the authors who've been around since the beginning - or maybe it was the direction that BtVS and Angel was taking, I don't know. But in the last couple of months especially, there's been a huge exodus of 'old hands' and an influx of 'new blood'. But a change is as good as a rest, apparently. However, I can't help wondering how much longer the Buffy Slash community will survive. I guess time will tell.