Dedication inside the Blake’s 7 fanzine The Forbidden Zone.* Blake’s 7 was a British TV show from the 1970s that had a significant following in the US. In the late 1980s, the fandom fractured irreparably when for profit convention organizers attempted to take over the fan run convention circuit in the US. The slash component of the The “Blake’s 7 Wars” has entered into fandom urban legend while the larger for profit motivations, the breaking of the Fourth Wall and the intrusion of TPTB into fannish activities have been largely forgotten.
From Fanlore, the fan run non-profit about media fandom:
*The Blake’s 7 Wars were a series of events taking place in the late 1980s in the Blake’s 7 fandom community. It goes by many names, including “The Fannish Controversies,” “The Controversy,” “The Feud,” and “The Blake’s 7 Slash Wars.”
The events disrupted and divided the fandom community, leading to what some believe was the mass migration of fans away from Blake’s 7 fandom. It also created ripple effects of fear and uncertainty that eventually transformed into fandom urban legends…
…..Slash and gen writers and readers had co-existed for many years with large number of slash fanzines being published during the 1980s. Still, as with other large media fandoms such as Star Trek and Star Wars, slash fandom was not universally accepted and many fans raising religious and moral objections to the genre.
That changed in 1989 when one of the Blake’s 7 actors and a segment of the fan community raised objections to the slash community and attempted to force it back underground. Many believe that slash had little do with with the real issues and that it was used as a pretext by fans battling over access to the actors and the ability to run for-profit conventions.
By most accounts, slash was peripheral to the main debate of fan run vs. professional conventions and actor vs fannish bruised egos. Certainly in many of the contemporary LOCs at the time[1], fans focused on the ‘for profit’ conventions and whether the actors should be paid first, and only then moved on to the topic of slash.
That being said, negative attitudes about slash did play a role in the Blake’s 7 wars. Given that the genre has always been a major flashpoint for media fandom, it is not surprising that years later the Blake’s 7 Wars are now known as the “Blake'7 Slash Wars.”
*The dedication in The Forbidden Zone is ironic: It reads “Forbidden Zone Issue One is dedicated to the liberation of fantasies and resistance to those who would suppress our dreams.” The themes of liberation and resistance were core elements of the Blake’s 7 canon. On the show, the main character Blake was falsely accused of child molestation and imprisoned in an effort to quell political resistance.
Happy to reblog some fan history. With the Hevelin Collection unboxed, I’m going to ocassionally reblog posts from SF and fandom that resonate with me. If you are a fan of Blake’s 7 and you’re ever in the neighborhood, please stop by and see our extensive holdings of Blake’s 7 fan materials.
Reblogging the reblog because Iowa has a great collection of Blake’s 7 materials donated by Sandy Hereld and many other fans. In fact the original papers that were used to write up the history of the Blake’s 7 Wars on Fanlore were donated to Iowa in Jan 2014 by one of Sandy’s friends and are now part of Sandy’s collection. I don’t think the papers have appeared in the online finding aide as the last update was in 2011.