Sexy mermaid controversy? I think I need details please!
Oh, man. Well, usual caveats about my failing memory, etc. etc.
I don’t remember exactly when I saw the first Sexymermaid story – it may have been as early as 2003-2004, but it might have been a year or two later. She started out writing Spike/Illyria (or at least, that was the one I saw first). As I recall, that first story wasn’t too bad. The prose was competent. The characterization was a bit iffy in places, but probably no more so than a ton of other fics. She soon switched to writing Spike/Xander, though, whether because she realized that she had a larger audience there, or because she liked m/m slash better, or both, I don’t know. And she started making manips to go with her stories.
Several things became obvious very quickly: She was incredibly prolific, she was not that good at making manips, and she had a huge kink for D/s slavefic featuring an uber-feminized, uber-submissive Spike. Stuff that hit the kink buttons of a sizeable portion of Spander fandom too, apparently, and hit them hard. At the time, Buffy fandom had seen very little like it; there were human AUs, but nothing quite like what she was doing. She became MASSIVELY popular. She was soon cranking out half a dozen multi-chapter fantasy slave AU epics at once – in the first and most famous one, Spike was a geisha in some kind of faux-Japanese Orientalist setting, and Xander was a gardener who… I dunno, I only read like half of one chapter, realized that it was Not My Thing At All, back-buttoned out, and politely ignored everything else she ever wrote.
I actually can’t remember if she was responsible for the Fairy Spike thing or not, but it sounds like the sort of thing she was into. Again, it took place mostly in communities I was not a part of, but I gather that it started out with someone, possibly Sexymermaid, posting a manip of a teeny Spike with butterfly wings pastede on yay, perched on Xander’s erect penis. This apparently set off a flood of Fairy Spike Spander manips and Fairy Spike Spander fics, which made the old school Spander slashers livid with annoyance. However, it also led to Shapinglight’s very funny Fairy Spangel parody ficlets, so it wasn’t all bad.
The massive popularity seems to have gone to her head. Success did not make her humble; quite the opposite. As her volume increased, her quality went down, but she refused to get a beta, because she felt that a beta would have diluted her unique vision. And when people asked her to please put her manips behind a cut, ostensibly because Think of The People On Dial-up (there were still people on dial-up in those days) but really, I suspect, because the subject matter squicked the hell out of people who didn’t share her kink, she flat out refused. There was apparently a major flame war between her and her followers and the people who didn’t like her stuff on a locked Spike-smut community on LJ – I only heard the echoes of it. I think she got accused of racism at one point, because of her ‘exotic’ settings. She accused her detractors of just being jealous of her popularity and talent.
(My personal opinion is that yes, her detractors were jealous of her popularity, but they weren’t wrong: her stuff was often objectively bad. Imaginative as hell in some respects, but poorly crafted.)
Anyway, the feud flared up periodically for the next several years, until finally Sexymermaid flounced from the fandom. Last I heard, she was successfully cranking out original m/m erotica for some internet publisher somewhere, which is honestly where her niche probably was all along.
ETA: I forgot, I’m pretty sure she was the one who started the “Darker_FillInTheBlank” community fad on LJ. It started out with darker_spike, and then there was darker_wesley and darker_this and darker_that. At one point there were at least a dozen of them. Ostensibly they were for any darkfic, but for all practical purposes they re-defined darkfic to mean only D/s slavefic.