Torchwood Fandom, The Early Days

[dmarley]

To keep myself distracted from the gloomy world outside, I've been combing through old torchwood-three posts for stories I haven't read. Which are many. (Seriously, I thought I was keeping up with Torchwood fandom back then.) Even though I was involved in the fandom at the time, and remember a lot of this stuff while it was being discussed, in retrospect it's a

Comments

[kel_reiley]

that's really interesting
i didn't actually start reading fic (i didn't view the episodes, actually) until just after "End of Days" aired - i watched them all pretty much in a weekend then read a little bit of fic
i think it was skewed for me, b/c i already knew the basic big plot-points and who was doing what with whom and how it all ended
so, when i started, i didn't read, or see, much besides jack/ianto
i do agree that gwen/owen was much more prominent in series 1 than jack/ianto (which stayed pretty much in the background, even in series 2) or jack/gwen (which i, personally, didn't get much a sense of in series 1 and sort of came out of nowhere in series 2)
strange how fandom shifted so drastically

[dmarley]

Wow, I bet that was an interesting perspective. You're right, by then Jack/Ianto was pretty well established, and Jack/Gwen, while not exactly de-bunked, had taken some hits

[kel_reiley]

yeah, it definitely would have been different if i'd been watching weekly as the episodes aired, but i think i got a taste of that during series 2 and the long wait for CoE
it might also be my biased opinion, but after 'Ghost Machine' i just really didn't see any jack/gwen, at least not romantically - i thought, and hoped, they were setting them up to be a really good partnership in a friends way, where jack would be all... JACK about things and gwen would be the one pushing him to change (which they did to a degree, but they sort of lost me when they started the UST up again in series 2)

i really, really want a strong m/f friendship in a tv show, without any romantic or sexual tension :(

[neifile7]

As someone who only came into the fandom after S2 aired, I find this fascinating. I've meant to go back and look at old reaction posts from S1 (I've seen more from S2); does T3 still have those links?

I think an early preponderance of one-shots (episode tags, missing scenes, PWPs, etc.) is pretty normal in any fandom; writers often don't want to invest in multi-chapter stories until canon has reached something of a critical mass and some of the character dynamics are better established.

One thing that really interested me when I got here was the emergence of Jack/Ianto-centered time travel epics -- long, multi-chapter works first posted as WIPs. I think these became a big thing after S2, once it was clear that (a) team members might be killed off, (b) fan writers became more interested in the possible future of J/I, and were looking for ways to get around the problem of mortal/immortal relations, not to mention the rest of TW's dysfunctions. I'm curious if you can think of any examples from S1 that fit that pattern, because I

[kel_reiley]

the very first fic i read was actually written and posted BEFORE TW series 1 had aired - it was after DW s1 ended and TW had just been announced, but this one was all about Jack
i think the 2nd fic i read, also before the 1st ep aired, only promo shots had been released, was a jack/ianto fic that was just so... surreal - if i could find the link, you'd see how strangely some ppl predicted the dynamics of the show (i think this fic was based on 'this is jack's team and OH there's pretty boy')

[dmarley]

I'd forgotten all about that! I think the cast photos came out or something, and I was rolling my eyes at the people who were already pairing Jack and Ianto just because Ianto was gorgeous. Shows what I knew. ;)

[kel_reiley]

i think it's really funny how that happened (would have been hilarious if it had gone jack/owen or jack/toshiko, b/c those are 2 pairings that i hardly ever see - not that i really ship either of them)