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Stayed up to 2 last night reading an old semi-formatted Eroica fic from 1995. Left a bad taste in the mouth for Reasons, most of which had to do with the fact that I wasn't writing it for my own pleasure but to try to appeal to the Eroica slash fandom. Whoever was talking over on tumblr about the early days of fandom and the joy of being all thieves together in this pocket universe that only fans knew about is, well, maybe that's the fandom she knew. I just kept running into gatekeepers with a rigid definition of what's permissible-- like that other famous essay that likened slash fandom to a potluck where everyone wound up bringing hummous because that's what was expected when you brought stuff to a potluck.
It was such a relief when there started to be yaoi fandoms over here because there were no rules in yaoi.
This is doubly odd because my comfort reading for the past six weeks has been another unfinished Eroica story that I started in 1996, worked at with increasing difficulty through '97 and '98, and gave up because I wanted it to be yaoi-- and as far as it went, it certainly was-- but Eroica fans wanted it to be slash, which it wasn't and couldn't be. I thought it a hot mess when I finally dropped it but now it reads better than any other of my Dorians including the ones I sweated blood to give a plot to.
Of course, now I skip the sex scenes because the hormoneless don't see the point of them, which leads to the odd experience of reading a yaoi fic, which is all about the sex, but skipping the sex when it happens. Such are the paradoxes of age.
It was such a relief when there started to be yaoi fandoms over here because there were no rules in yaoi.
This is doubly odd because my comfort reading for the past six weeks has been another unfinished Eroica story that I started in 1996, worked at with increasing difficulty through '97 and '98, and gave up because I wanted it to be yaoi-- and as far as it went, it certainly was-- but Eroica fans wanted it to be slash, which it wasn't and couldn't be. I thought it a hot mess when I finally dropped it but now it reads better than any other of my Dorians including the ones I sweated blood to give a plot to.
Of course, now I skip the sex scenes because the hormoneless don't see the point of them, which leads to the odd experience of reading a yaoi fic, which is all about the sex, but skipping the sex when it happens. Such are the paradoxes of age.
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Oh god yes. The ingredients, the ingredients! A generation has arisen that never learned what TMI really means.
Back in zine days there were fewer WPIs because editors didn't accept them but go back to APAs and yes, there they were.
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I consider myself lucky to have started writing fic very late, in the Livejournal era, and when the Henneth Annun Tolkien fic archive was up. I was never part of a community in that sense, so I didn't run into that "gatekeeping" phenomenon. I just wrote what I felt like and posted it, and if people liked it, that was lovely, and if they didn't, that was their problem not mine.
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There are plus and minuses to not being in a community, certainly. I began in Japan pre-internet-ish so there was no possibility of one. But I missed having fannish company, is the only reason I was trying to please the Eroica fandom.