Erin
Giles/Anya? Stop scaring me, Josh, and Netflix yerself some Firefly!
Ok, so “loving” fanfiction is an exaggeration, but seriously, the stuff is crackalicious.
It all began so innocently. I had just finished watching the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD, and was idly wondering where the Mona Lisa smile Buffy wears in the show’s last scene might lead. This led to some aimless poking around on websites, which in turn led to a link to Chosen, a “virtual season 8” of the series. After this came a few other series-continuation stories, and then some character studies, and before I knew it, a week had passed and my eyeballs were drying out from all the reading. When you read parodies of fanfiction and get the jokes, you know you’ve read too much.
Henry Jenkins describes fanfiction as a field that “blurs all boundaries between producers and consumers, spectators and participants, the commercial and the home crafted, to construct an image of fandom as a cultural and social network that spans the globe.” More than just a wacko hobby for obsessives with too much free time, fandom allows people to build very real communities and identities around shows (as well as movies, books, etc.) that move them, and fanfiction allows them to gain a level of ownership over the meaning of these texts.
What fanfiction does most of all (for me, at least) is fill in gaps in the characters’ emotional lives. Good fanfiction is more than just “The Continuing Adventures of the Scoobies;” it gives you insights into the thoughts and feelings of the characters, filling in gaps in your mental image of them, and possibly even changing your opinion of them. If TV is about seducing the viewer with a promise of narrative closure that can never be fulfilled, then fanfiction seduces not only by promising the closure that TV couldn’t give you, but by offering a plethora of readings and interpretations. If you don’t like the way things went on the show, you can read a fic that changes it around. If you don’t like the way a particular character is written in that fic, there are a hundred more out there that are more sympathetic.
And of course, if you think two characters had undeniable sexual chemistry that the producers wasted, there’s an entire universe of ‘shipper and slash fiction out there that I haven’t quite been able to bring myself to read. Although if anyone out there knows of some really good Giles/Anya stories, I might be, y’know, open to suggestions.
Giles/Anya? Stop scaring me, Josh, and Netflix yerself some Firefly!
I disagree - the Giles/Anya part of the memory loss episode in Season 6 ('Leave Randy alone!", and other such beauts) was great! An interesting combo, if a little scary (for Giles) - I'd go for more of that story line. :)
What a coincidence: I just got the first disc of Firefly from Netflix last week, and promptly forgot to pack it; it's been waiting patiently for me to get back from Portland. I'll be sure to write something up once I've gotten around to viewing it.