Past and present fannishness

[luzula]

Various people are writing about their fannish history. I thought I'd done a more recent such post, but the last I can find is from 2011, back when I was in a stable long-term relationship with due South. I won't rehash that previous post, but I wanted to talk a little about what's happened since then and where I am right now. Obviously also fueled by thoughts of my recent new obsession with Flight of the Heron.

I fell out of due South fandom in late 2013/early 2014, because I fell (unrequitedly) in love with someone in RL, which left no room for fannish feelings. Or more specifically for shippy feelings: it turned out that despite writing all sorts of things in the fandom (gen, m/f, f/f, m/m), the strongest driver of my fannishness was my Fraser/Kowalski feelings (and Fraser feelings in general).

Since then I have been unrequitedly in love for six years (well, not as intensely all the time, obviously). My fannishess went into reading a lot of books, and I did write a little fic, but there have only been two pairings I wrote with the clear motivation "ooh, I want to get these characters into bed together". The first was William Laurence/Napoleon Bonaparte from Temeraire (late 2016). I had fun with that, but it didn't stick because seriously...Napoleon Bonaparte...*facepalm*. The second was Cassian Andor/Bodhi Rook from Star Wars (late 2017 and sporadically ongoing). That could've stuck; I think the reason it didn't was that I didn't connect with the rest of the existing fic (fluffy coffeeshop AU:s for that pairing, really?).

So now Ewen Cameron/Keith Windham in Flight of the Heron: an out-of-print book from 1925 set in the 18th century with a tiiiny fandom. I have not felt like this for many years, though: this completely besotted feeling which lowers your work productivity and makes people look at you weirdly on the bus because you're sitting there with a foolish smile on your face writing fic in your head. Also, despite the fandom being tiiiny I have already had more meaningful fandom interaction for this than I had in the huge fandom Star Wars (thank you Hyarrowen for being so welcoming and giving great beta feedback!). I am really enjoying the writing, too: the style is obviously old-fashioned, but I like it a lot. The writing process feels different; I have to do a lot more tinkering on the sentence level than I'm used to. Looking forward to writing sex scenes in that style, too. : )

I've been thinking about pairings I have shipped, and there are some pretty clear patterns here:
Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalkski (cop partners)
Nate Fick/Brad Colbert (modern military officers)
William Laurence/Napoleon Bonaparte (19th century military, also enemies)
Cassian Andor/Bodhi Rook (military in space)
Ewen Cameron/Keith Windham (18th century military, also enemies to start with)

Okay, I'm being a bit selective here--I have also shipped Aziraphale/Crowley, for example, before I got into due South. They are technically enemies, but otherwise don't fit the pattern. And of course there's also a part of my fannishness which is not about this kind of shippiness--some of my best writing is about other things entirely.

But still. Of course, it's not exactly news that that slashiness turns up so reliably in stories of police or military: that homosocial environment combined with danger, loyalty, honor, duty, and repression of emotion. It's catnip to a lot of fangirls, including me. I guess I'm...a little bit conflicted about it? Add in historical settings and you get other things to feel conflicted about, such as Ewen Cameron in Flight of the Heron who is a Scottish Highlands laird. I mean, I'm not conflicted about Ewen as a character, he is lovely and so is Keith. ♥ ♥ But the Scottish Highlands is obviously a historical society which has been heavily romanticized--in reality it appears to have been feudal and elitist (they were allied with the French Bourbon kings, after all...). But it's a novel, not actual history, and I guess I am sticking with the depiction in the book (where actually Keith Windham is Not Impressed about the Highlands, so there's a counterweight there).

If I were going to fall for a wartime ship, why not characters in the Spanish Civil War or something where it could actually intersect in a meaningful way with my political interests?? Oh well. I guess I will just go on doing union organizing while simultaneously writing starry-eyed fic about enemy military officers, and accept that humans don't always have to be consistent. Also, it will be interesting to see if my newly shippy state edges out my feelings about my RL crush.

Comments

[regshoe]

this completely besotted feeling which lowers your work productivity and makes people look at you weirdly on the bus because you're sitting there with a foolish smile on your face writing fic in your head. Oh, same! What is it about this book... I can vividly remember when I was first reading it walking along the corridor at work grinning foolishly to myself and thinking, okay, this is silly, I need to calm down (and then not calming down, at all). Great stuff.

I know what you mean about historical military type settings being great shipping material, too. Besides all the loyalty and hurt/comfort and emotional repression etc., I love exploring what happens to relationships caught up in conflict and war: characters who love each other but have to be enemies, characters who are enemies but end up loving each other. It's what I find so compelling in Rosemary Sutcliff's stories about Roman soldiers, too.

I find I can ignore the often-present issues with settings like that as long as they're not directly relevant to these characters and their stories—I mean, Flight of the Heron is pretty much, we're all gentlemen here, honour and the decent thing and all that, and I don't have to think about what was happening to the peasants as long as they're not actually there in the story. But YMMV, of course.

[jesse_the_k]

Oh well. I guess I will just go on doing union organizing while simultaneously writing starry-eyed fic about enemy military officers, and accept that humans don't always have to be consistent.

Hooray for consistent inconsistency and self-acceptance.

Thanks for the details on a British gentleman's lack of pants. I wonder how they spun and wove the linen, though, that people wore it next to their skin. All the linen fabric I've touched has been quite coarse (tho I did recently find a linen/silk scarf which I could imagine wearing as a nightshirt).

[ride_4ever]

Eeep. I clicked on that link to your 2011 entry and got reminded of my 2011 entry when I was such an incautiously overenthused baby fangirl. (BTW though, it's still true this many years later that you are one of my fave fic writers and podficcers.)

Moving along...on your rec I hunted down and bought D.K. Broster's The Jacobite Trilogy, which includes The Flight of the Heron. Wow, that is a lot of pages and in a very small type-face. Hope to be joining you et al in that fandom, but it's gonna take me a hella long time to read the canon.