A request for the Hurt/comfort and fan history people

[wickedwords]

Hiya!

As many of you know, I am helping with Fanlore, and one of the things we talked about at our last meeting was how we wanted to bring in more fandom-related history. And personally, I can't think of anything more 'fandom' related than the history of Hurt/comfort fandom.

Unfortunately, since it's a panfandom metafandom that has existed since the dawn of time (i.e., back when media fandom first broke off from science fiction fandom), it's way the heck too much for any single person to do. Seriously, if I were the type of person to work on a phd in media studies? This could be my dissertation.

So I'd like to get some people to work on the History of Hurt/comfort fandom. Things I'd like to know would be: What were the big Hurt/comfort stories in your fandom? Did any of them have huge impact? Can someone talk about 'brain damage' stories, and 'illness hurt/comfort'. The Teddy Bear stories in Highlander, "Gentle on my Mind" in Sentinel and it's follow-up by a different author. What was Hurt/hurt called back in the early days? Was it really 'get 'em'?

All I have is oral history, man. And y'all know my memory is crap.

Comments

[duskpeterson.livejournal.com]

It's hard for me to compare what's going on in original slash with what's going on in other fandoms, since I've only participated in a few. Original slash writers come from a variety of fandoms, and we have no canon to unify us, so there isn't any single fandom tradition influencing us. The trend in original slash, during the time I've known it, has been to divide along the lines of subgenre - that is to say, the original darkfic writers would get together, or the original slavefic writers would get together, and they'd draw upon the traditions in the various fandoms they came from to create original stories within that subgenre. So, for example, at the time I came into slashdom, Juxian Tang (http://juxian.slashcity.net/) - one of the most noted original slash authors then - was heavily influenced by yaoi stories, whereas I was reading lots of Phantom Menace tales . . . but we both ended up writing original slash darkfic, flavored by what we were reading.

Until I read your post, I hadn't thought about the impact that this multifandom background would make on original slash, but yes, we have no equivalent of this (http://www.loose-id.com/detail.aspx?ID=748) in original slash - that is to say, a storyline that is so familiar within the fandom that, if you tried to file off the serial numbers, it would still be immediately obvious that the person writing it came from our particular fandom (as opposed to the fanfic community as a whole - that much would probably be obvious). However, if more stories like "The Slave Breakers" catch readers' interest, we may find certain, distinctive original slash storylines recurring.

By the way, being a compulsive links collector, I collected every single original slash and original yaoi site link I could find in 2003, and I also wrote up a "state of the fandom" post for the slash-writers list around that time. If you folks at Fanlore ever decide to expand your original fiction section, I could pass on that source material.

[wickedwords.livejournal.com]

Go to fanlore, set up your account, and then go ahead and start adding things. The wiki is supposed to be a shared resource, so please! go ahead and add your point of view to it. I don't want to hold up anything getting added to the wiki, simply because my RL or the newest shiny thing to me gets in the way.

And man, I remember Juxian! That's another entry that needs to be made.

[duskpeterson.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the advice, but I have a severe Internet addiction, and it's heavily fed by doing nonfiction historical research, especially for a multi-author project where I'd have to check on stuff like formatting. If you can't make use of the information yourself, feel free to toss it aside. (*Waves you off to your newest shiny thing.*)

[wickedwords.livejournal.com]

No problem! I will be quoting from this on fanlore, though, just so you know.

[duskpeterson.livejournal.com]

Great!