livejournal, fanfiction.net and ao3 which one were you?
those quizilla ones where you play spin the bottle and end up making out in a closet with either orochimaru or troy bolton
THREE generations
THREE generations!?
fucking HELL goddamn USENET LISTSERV TRANSFORMERS FANFIC jesus christ
motherfucker HAND MIMEOGRAPHED FANZINES DELIVERED BY THE POST OFFICE THROUGH MAILING LISTS
with SHITTY SELF INSERT MONSTER MOVIE FANFIC BY FORREST ACKERMAN IN THE 40s and then later SAUCY KIRK / SPOCK SEX IN THE 70s
GOD DAMNED SHERLOCK FANS TITTERING IN SALONS ABOUT THEIR OWN VERSIONS OF ADVENTURES WITH THEIR FAVORITE DETECTIVES
FUCKING DANTE WITH HIS SELF INSERT BIBLE FANFIC
AND FINALLY VERGIL, COOING OVER HOMER
GET OFF MY LAWN*
* note: i was actually not part of this generation of fanfic, but it makes me mad when people forget that fandom as we know it today has existed since at least the 1930s and that fannish behavior and transformative works are AS OLD AS GODDAMN TIME
spacemohawks get in here and be salty with me about these youngins who don’t even know about 1970s gay-ass Kirk / Spock fanfic GODDAMN THE Y OUTH OF TODAY
My friend airy-minotaur actually wrote her thesis on fanfiction/fandom history. So maybe give that a read!
And OF COURSE if you ever have questions about K/S, fandom history in general, or whatever really, you can always send me an ask.
RESPECT YOUR ELDERS. Know your fandom history.
With love,
Mommy Mohawks
Weren’t “lemon” and “slash” kinda concurrent for a bit before everyone just decided to go with “slash”?
Nope. ‘Lemon’ was for explicit porn of any gender combination and was used in (English-speaking) anime fandom. It comes from the title of a hentai anime, Cream Lemon (which is from the 80s, but I’m not sure when it became known to English speakers). The term was most common from the 90s through the mid 00s, I think. Lime/citrus/etc. were an 00s addition to the terminology. You still sometimes see any and all of these used, especially on sites that anime fandom was using back then and is still on (ff.net, mediaminer.org). They were also more common when there were still major sites that had them in the name, like the Sakura Lemon Archive.
‘Slash’, in contrast, just means m/m; there’s no specific level of porn implied. It was coined in the 70s or early 80s. (”K/S”, which it comes from is definitely pre-80s, but people saying the word “slash” out loud to mean any m/m fic pairing didn’t start immediately. I know some people on Fanlore have been combing through old letter zines to try to find the first mentions of “slash” as opposed to “/”, so we know how people were imagining it was pronounced–and the results are more 80s than 70s, I think?) Some anime fans do use the term, but anime m/m fic in English has traditionally been labeled ‘yaoi’ for smut and ‘shounen ai’ for non-explicit romance. These days, I see more use of just ‘yaoi’ without a distinction between ‘yaoi’ and ‘shounen ai’ and more use of ‘BL’ (because that’s what commercial m/m is actually labeled as now in Japan).
Different meanings, different eras, different communities.
