"It's not me you really want to screw."

But I guess I'll accept the 'eye of the beholder' clause.

I think Angel/Lindsey is just as obvious as Buffy/Faith -- but that doesn't mean I find both of them inevitable (I see what points to B/F, I just don't feel it).

Any pairing in a good writer's hands can be magic. And I'm trying to only read good writers. There isn't a scenario (see Herself's and PMM's "badfic") that's broken, in my books. It's just the instantiations that may tend to be.

Heh. X-post.

But I do agree that the idea of Buffy/Willow leaves me totally flat. I haven't thought about why, though, as you obviously have.

One, Angel/Lindsey is not obvious

Am-Chau, I think YMdefinitelyV on this, because a whole hell of a LOT of people think it is.

"It's not me you want to screw."

So says Darla. Who is crazy, and untrustworthy, and generally... Darla. I don't see it, except in rare fic; I don't believe her, generally speaking.

Edit: Yes, Steph. I did conceed that at the end of my post. YMV. Enough.

Any pairing in a good writer's hands can be magic. And I'm trying to only read good writers.

You sane, sane person. I still occasionally get grabbed by a pairing and Google for it.

I don't find obvious boring in the slightest.

Buffy/Faith, while generally poorly written, has a ton of potential. Clark/Lex? Hell yeah.

Blair/Jim (cue theme music in the other room)? Give momma some sugar.

It all depends on the writing. I have to be able to believe it, and in that sense, wildly UC pairings have more to prove to me, the reader, than less wildly UC pairings do.

A writer would have to work *harder* to convince me of Buffy/Willow than of Buffy/Faith, because except for Faith, Buffy has never seemed attracted to another woman, and Buffy/Willow would seem creepy and incesty. (I'm going to ignore that I've written Buffy/Willow, because that was a remix, and it made sense at the time.)

So says Darla. Who is crazy

She wasn't at the time, though, was she?

The more canon/conventional the ship the more likely I am to want to read about it, usually, but Buffy/Willow is one of those pairings that makes me go "Buh?" Kind of like Spike/Xander, except with that one I have actual logical arguments and B/W I just feel very very confused.

Buffy/Faith I like. Angel/Lindsey I ought to like, but it doesn't do it for me, probably because I'm not big on enemy slash. (Mulder/Krycek doesn't work for me either, outside of the porny aspects.)

Blair/Jim (cue theme music in the other room)? Give momma some sugar.

God, the attitudes toward women on that show, though. I'm glad the reruns are almost over, because seriously if I see one more assertive woman who learns her place I'm going to throw something at the screen.

But damn, the boys are cute together.

What excites me about fandom is the interaction of the fan-written texts with the original text. A 'ship like Riley/Lindsey will almost never get me hot and bothered, intellectually, because it doesn't seem to have that much relation with the original text. Things like that have to be written brilliantly and beautifully in-character to convince me of their viablity.

Or: fairly recently, I read a Faith/Kate piece by nautibitz. I couldn't say it was something I'd rec, because it wasn't *so* amazing and I hated the Willow voice, but what was interesting about this story was that it was a retelling of the Buffy/Angel(us) arc: Faith as the souled vampire with a curse, and Kate as the new slayer. It was fascinating to me because the story worked as a comment on the characters of the series, shifting them over and turning them around a little bit: Faith as a centuries-old preturnaturally-young-and-beautiful woman, plauged by guilt for her past of murder and sadistic torture, working towards redemption, Kate as a emotionally- closed-off young woman in love for the first time, her mother dead, her father in denial about many things, including her Slayerdom.

Riley was Xander. Tara was Willow. William was Giles, and Anya Jenny. Buffy was Spike and Willow (in an insufferable baby voice-- insane-baby voice) was Dru. It was neat. In fact, if the plotting had been a trifle tighter and the Willow parts had been written by someone like Jane St Clair, it'd have become one of my favorite fics.