![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I've been pondering doing meta on this for a while, and finally decided to write down my observations/ponderings, prompted mostly by the recent waves of slash discussions and a few ship-rivalry style comments I've recently seen people make.
One of the things that been brought up tangentially in the discussions of waves of slash is the evolution of individual ships - from a new, rare pairing, where every fic has to do the leg work of justifying why these people are together, to a commonplace fanon concept, to the kind of over-arching dominant paradigm McShep has become in SGA fandom, where the pairing is so normativised (for lack of a better word) that people can seriously consider McShep fics to be gen (as a sometimes-gen-fan, I boggle at this; I suspect part of the issue there is a lack of understanding of what the term "gen" actually means, as with those people who think non-canonical het can be "slash").
People have been discussing the "how" of ship evolution, and I'm going to go on a slight tangent from this and discuss the "how" of ship formation and ship conversion (i.e. the process by which a pairing becomes accepted, and by which fans begin shipping it).
( If you write it, they will come )
So, now that I've gone on and on with my "long first-time fics are what convert people to a pairing" theory and my entirely anecdotal evidence for it: Are there any pairings that you've become a fan of based on fic? And if so, was there a particular fic that made you "see the light?" (bonus points if the fic contains h/c and you can provide a link). Don't feel that you have to keep silent about it if it's not an objectively good fic, either. The Weiss fics I linked above, for example, are things I loved when I was 19 and haven't read in years, so they may be brilliant or they may be godawful (Sunhawk's 1x2x1 stuff, however, is gloriously epic h/c that I reread at least once a year).
One of the things that been brought up tangentially in the discussions of waves of slash is the evolution of individual ships - from a new, rare pairing, where every fic has to do the leg work of justifying why these people are together, to a commonplace fanon concept, to the kind of over-arching dominant paradigm McShep has become in SGA fandom, where the pairing is so normativised (for lack of a better word) that people can seriously consider McShep fics to be gen (as a sometimes-gen-fan, I boggle at this; I suspect part of the issue there is a lack of understanding of what the term "gen" actually means, as with those people who think non-canonical het can be "slash").
People have been discussing the "how" of ship evolution, and I'm going to go on a slight tangent from this and discuss the "how" of ship formation and ship conversion (i.e. the process by which a pairing becomes accepted, and by which fans begin shipping it).
( If you write it, they will come )
So, now that I've gone on and on with my "long first-time fics are what convert people to a pairing" theory and my entirely anecdotal evidence for it: Are there any pairings that you've become a fan of based on fic? And if so, was there a particular fic that made you "see the light?" (bonus points if the fic contains h/c and you can provide a link). Don't feel that you have to keep silent about it if it's not an objectively good fic, either. The Weiss fics I linked above, for example, are things I loved when I was 19 and haven't read in years, so they may be brilliant or they may be godawful (Sunhawk's 1x2x1 stuff, however, is gloriously epic h/c that I reread at least once a year).
Tags: