Deena - it's here . She writes wonderful, wonderful Buffy/Spike. Wonderful. And she took on several Badfic cliches to see if they could be done well (Time travel Buffy/William, PregnantBuffy, MomBuffy, AmputeeBuffy...) and spun the most wonderful stories. She's splendid. I've been in love with her stories since she wrote Manhattan Nocturne off the cuff in Bitchfic. Way to delurk!
To try and be on-topic, why is it that nobody understands when I try and explain that I don't like Buffy/Willow because it's too het, too canon, too possible?
bemused.
See, I'm okay with things being het, canon and possible, and indeed any combination of the above. Fond though I am of slash. I'm a bit foxed by your reasoning, though, I must confess. Is it that a big part of the appeal of slash for you is the sense of subversion?
I don't think I understand the "het" part of that position intuitively-- but it sounds very intriguing. Would you like to articulate it further?
Well, it's a twisting of conventional terminolgy to fit something that's very individual.
Roughly, when I consider various hypothetical pairings, (pretty much unaffected by the quality of the fic I've read, more in the spirit of 'what kind of fic would this make if I wrote it?') , I mentally group them into categories: canon, mainly hetrosexual ones that have occured on the show (Buffy/Angel, Willow/Tara, etc); het, ones that haven't occured on the show but are what people expect as possible (Willow/Angel, Buffy/Xander); and slash, ones that haven't occured on the show and wouldn't occur as possible to ordinary people in my meatspace life (Spike/Xander, Buffy/Faith). Some are in the extension category of monkey-crack-slash (like Angel/Clem) but that's doesn't concern us here.
What I mean, then, by Buffy/Willow feeling het is that having established Willow as canonically gay, any pairing that is 'slash', homosexual romance, involving Willow, feels 'possible within canon without Willow having issues about her sexuality'. And, in the case of Buffy/Willow specifically, the possibility has been so close to explored within canon ("That's Willow. She's gay." "Your girlfriend?" "No! No, we don't... gay"--paraphrasing from, um, blinvisible Buffy epsiode, you know the one. Gone?), that it feels the natural and canon equivalent of Buffy/Xander, ie. het.
Does that make sense, or the sort of sense that's not?
Edit to answer Fay:
Is it that a big part of the appeal of slash for you is the sense of subversion?
Yes. Yes, that would be a big part of it. I guess I could say that Buffy/Willow doesn't feel like a subversion.
ones that haven't occured on the show and wouldn't occur as possible to ordinary people in my meatspace life (Spike/Xander, Buffy/Faith)
Hmm. Don't know of your meatspace, but ME put subtext into B/F, so I don't think it's that out there.
ita, Buffy/Faith may have been a bad example-- Buffy/Anya, perhaps.
Although, to clarify: my meatspace-- very slow on the subtext.
Oh, Deena, read Herself right now. Immediately. Everything. She's how I became a Buffista, bless her.
And Buffy/Willow is not canon. Not not not. Wrong wrong wrong.
(Mind you, I feel this way about Buffy/Xander too.)
Laura Shapiro will indeed share her vids, but you have to ask, and she asks you to promise not to distribute them, i.e. make copies on CD/mail the files/put up in FTP/put on Kazaa for your friends or the general public. (Showing them to your friends on your laptop is fine.)
And Buffy/Willow is not canon. Not not not. Wrong wrong wrong.
I didn't say it was canon. I said it was obvious and therefore boring.
But Buffy/Faith and Angel/Lindsey are pretty obvious -- does that make them inherently boring?
I didn't say it was canon. I said it was obvious and therefore boring.
And I think it's rather-- I wouldn't have said obvious, but I would have said has a fairly fertile ground provided by canon (which is nearly what you mean, I think), which is what makes it particularly exciting for me.
Willow/Faith, for example. It's most exciting when I see the show providing premise: S4BTVS!Faith/Willow leapt off the screen, for me, and that's why I like it, and that's why I'm writing in. In fact.
Obviously, we look at, and prioritise, slash and 'shipping differently. Which is okay! Diversity being the spice of fandom.
