I'm spamming your f-list for no apparent reason.

[eilowyn]

Heh. Found this in the glossary of one of my Buffy research books:

"'Shippers. Fans who favor the sexual pairing of two particular characters in a television series. For example, "B/A 'shippers" refers to fans who believe Buffy and Angel are perfect for each other. Such a fan is said to "'ship A/B" or to "'ship B/A." Occasionally 'shippers will

Comments

[evangelin1202]

HELL YEAH! We rock it and we do it with class too!

[gryfndor_godess]

FUCK YEAH WE DO. This post makes me ridiculously happy. I may have to add it to memories.

[eilowyn]

Glad to add a little sunshine to your day!

[xlivvielockex]

It just cracks me up because how could you be online and NOT know this? I know that FYSpuffy has over 600 members, maybe close to a 1000 by now. Have to ask the mods. And then all of the little pockets of websites, forums, etc. Not a surprise to me at all.

If this was a locked post, I would say something else but maybe I will just PM you on Tumlbr or something.

But I totally remember that. And then people had Spuffy icons that said that. And fans of another pairing accused Spuffies of rigging the polls. I just rolled my eyes at that.

I said it once to Nikkiwawa and I will say it again. Spuffy fans are legion.

[xlivvielockex]

Okay, I asked Mari (coalitiongirl) about how many members at FYSpuffy and my numbers were WAY OFF. I am going to quote her exact response:

"We’re pushing 1600, and I’m pretty sure that there are at least 1000 more who don’t follow fyspuffy. (Because it’s mostly reblogs, some people never even find it, but I have over 3000 Buffy fan followers on this blog and the majority seem to ship Spuffy or at least support it.)"

[eilowyn]

The author in question, Mary Kirby-Diaz, is a sociologist who edited a book on the online fandom of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, so her statement/definition may take into account only the online fans. She actually did a great deal of methodological polling in her work studying "story-oriented" vs. "series-oriented" fans (what I've taken to translate to "'shippers vs. gen fans"), and explains the methodology of her survey in her article "So, What's the Story? Story-Oriented Fans and Series-Oriented Fans: A Complex of Behaviors." However, I think you can qualify a statement saying that Spike/Buffy fans are some of the most active in the fandom, with the FYSpuffy tumblr having 600-1000 members (according to xlivvielockex above, and I could check on the membership of seasonal_spuffy vs. the I Will Remember You Ficathon, though with seasonal_spuffy's recent move to Dreamwidth, I don't know if the membership has gone down as compared to recent years.

[infinitewhale]

She conducted that analysis years ago, before Tumblr existed much less became popular. IIRC, I participated in that around 2005 or 2006 right before the start of fandom decline.

It was pretty even-handed, if I remember and the choices weren't isolated. Rest-assured, makd was not a Spuffy shipper.

[elisi]

*points to icon*

*is smug*

[eilowyn]

That icon is such truth!