See, historically there have always been people who saw an extra layer of gayness on certain pairs of fictional people (you just thought of several), and people Back Then even wrote their own fanfic (or as they were called at the time, "pastiches"), but the first widespread queer fanwork to really define the fanfiction genre was KIRK AND SPOCK. Kirk/Spock. K/S. The very first slashfics.
Why this work was vastly, overwhelmingly written by straight women is a discussion for another time, but it was, so that's the main perspective I'm gonna consider here.
How do you - a statistically middle-class, 30+, stay-at-home wife and mother - how do you write slashfic ao3-style in the 1960's before the internet?
Carefully.
Through letters with friends, phone calls, pen pals, and sometimes - sometimes - clandestine meetings of small groups. Whole novels were written communally, round-robin style, by sending typed or handwritten additions chapter by chapter to each other. These were all underground, some deep underground; even the early Trekkie fanzines of the time wouldn't touch them.
And keep in mind, few of these stories were explicitly even sexual! But they were all about a very, very close relationship between two men. In the 1960's.
Guess how cool everyone else was about this.
Actually, for their part, Gene Rodenberry and the other writers were fine with it, saying that they had deliberately written the characters to be two halves of a whole, and if you wanna read it that way, yeah sure, go right ahead. Shatner and Nimoy took it all in good humor, and seemingly still do, each guy basically gesturing to the other and chuckling "I mean, who wouldn't?"
(CORRECTION: At least, they did until Nimoy passed away in 2015. Thanks @richie-is-rich!)
But elsewhere there was vicious backlash against The Premise, and not just within the fandom. This was still at a time in the US and UK when various "sodomy" and "decency" laws made no distinction between homosexual sex acts and just, like, directly lighting another man's cigarette with your cigarette in public. (That, sadly, is not a fucking joke.)
It was probably the closest some suburban cishet women came to understanding the pain of being in the closet. They had to protect this secret from their friends and family at all cost. There were cases of divorces where women lost custody of their children because their writing had come to light.
Can you imagine having such a burning desire to write for your OTP that you were willing to lose everything over it? Even if you were never caught, you still had to be willing to wait weeks, months, to receive a letter in the mail that you had to carefully intercept, read in secret, and then add your own chapter t, also in secret, and then send off, perhaps never to be seen again.
These people were goddamn heroes, and they laid the foundation for the world we live in today. A world where we can read, write, comment on, or share - in a matter of seconds! - literature about two background characters from two different franchises enjoying a really specific kink involving vacuums or something. And that's objectively amazing.
Raise a toast to our fanfiction elders, who simped in the darkness so we could simp in the light of day.
everybody trying to be the main character and i just wanna be THE fairy main character. the one who's living in the woods just enjoying doing nothing and reading her silly little books, cooking and painting
hey guys unpopular opinion but you’re not a bad person if you don’t care about every bad thing happening in the world all the time, or if you do care but you’re not constantly reblogging posts spreading awareness and information
it’s okay if you’re just on tumblr to have fun and reblog things you like or that make you happy.
humans aren’t made to process trauma and suffering on a worldwide scale without any breaks whatsoever & the internet has created an unprecedented access to bad news so please never feel guilty for scrolling past it because you can’t process it! and you’re not doing anything wrong & there’s no need to feel guilty
My most stereotypically white person habit is I really do LOVE saying “looks like we got here at the right time” if a place gets crowded after we’ve been seated
‘ard’ is a real suffix in the english language just like ‘ly’ or ‘ify’, it just isnt common enough for us to notice its usage. ‘ard’ means ‘too much’ or ‘too easily’
so ‘mustard’ is something that is ‘too pungent’, just as ‘wizard’ is someone who is too wise, ‘coward’ is someone too easily cowed, and ‘drunkard’ is someone too often drunk
this implies that ‘bastard’ is someone who is too ‘bast’ and this needs experimentation and research
This is pretty much correct. According to the OED bastard is from Old French and the bast- part means “pack saddle” which was used as a bed by mule drivers, giving the phrase fils de bast, a child conceived on the pack saddle instead of the marriage bed. In English it becomes bastard, the -ard being a pejorative. It is the same one as wizard and coward and drunkard.
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