Off the Cliff

Stayed up to 2 last night reading an old semi-formatted Eroica fic from 1995. Left a bad taste in the mouth for Reasons, most of which had to do with the fact that I wasn't writing it for my own pleasure but to try to appeal to the Eroica slash fandom. Whoever was talking over on tumblr about the early days of fandom and the joy of being all thieves together in this pocket universe that only fans knew about is, well, maybe that's the fandom she knew. I just kept running into gatekeepers with a rigid definition of what's permissible-- like that other famous essay that likened slash fandom to a potluck where everyone wound up bringing hummous because that's what was expected when you brought stuff to a potluck.

It was such a relief when there started to be yaoi fandoms over here because there were no rules in yaoi.

This is doubly odd because my comfort reading for the past six weeks has been another unfinished Eroica story that I started in 1996, worked at with increasing difficulty through '97 and '98, and gave up because I wanted it to be yaoi-- and as far as it went, it certainly was-- but Eroica fans wanted it to be slash, which it wasn't and couldn't be. I thought it a hot mess when I finally dropped it but now it reads better than any other of my Dorians including the ones I sweated blood to give a plot to.

Of course, now I skip the sex scenes because the hormoneless don't see the point of them, which leads to the odd experience of reading a yaoi fic, which is all about the sex, but skipping the sex when it happens. Such are the paradoxes of age.