Current mood:	thoughtful
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Entry tags:	bandom, fandom, geekery, harry potter, slash, sweet nostalgia, thinky thoughts

Thinking out loud
There is a Remus/Sirius love and nostalgia fest going on in the comments of this post, and I've been reading some and thinking a lot.

Harry Potter wasn't my first fandom by any stretch of the imagination, but Remus/Sirius was my very first slash pairing. Prior to my shift into HP, I'd been frequenting fandoms where the canon was too delicious to resist, and where slash was either a non-issue (such as in Buffy, because Spike was the only one I cared about in a ficcy sense, and Buffy had that area covered) or it was just mind-boggling (Inuyasha, because I've never really been jiggy with the incest pairings and the second biggest slash pairing was Inuyasha/Sesshoumarou, brothers). It never got into my head that I could pair the girls, possibly because I as a general rule find the male characters in any narrative more interesting than the female, sad though it may sound.

Anyway, Sirius Black and Remus Lupin were hilarious to me. When I found that pairing I laughed for five minutes straight, because it was just that ridiculous to me. And then I started reading and one thing lead to another. It was the first time I fell in love with a pairing that wasn't canon-compliant as such. As much as we might hope and as much evidence we might find, I sincerely doubt JKR is going to roll up and say, "oh, by the way, you know that werewolf who was too nice to say no and that stonking prat of a friend of his, Black? Yeah, they were shagging each other senseless."

The interesting thing to me with this pairing is that it marked what could possibly be called my downward spiral. I started out with only canon het pairings, veered off to non-canon slash pairings (dirty canon-twisting fiend that I am) and then managed to tumble all the way down to RPS (stalker!).

But never mind. Reading these old fics and drabbles and shit I keep wondering if I've somehow matured since then or deteriorated. Because while I love the pairing dearly still, most of the OMGSOAMAZING fics do nothing for me. And this is a little bit of a problem for HP fandom in my experience. I like angst, and I like a little poetry to my prose, but this pairing is utterly ridiculous. Never have I ever stumbled over so many "his sounds garbled with something etheral, fleeting, deep like moss and gasps like rain, leaves" and "nudge of a smile to meet a smile, inky kiss of crossword-puzzle clues" and it's beautiful, of course it is, but it isn't what I read fanfic for, personally.

I don't need for fic to be a melting pot of metaphors and symbolism and color and pretty words. I feel the same way after reading those fics as I do after eating too much candy -- there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and I have an unusually low threshold for both sugar and floral prose.

What pulled me into Sirius/Remus in the first place, to use this pairing as an example, is the fact that, yes, their story is tragic, but more than anything, their backstory is amazing. I love the Marauders. LOVE them. I love it when they're BOYS and running wild through Hogwarts, I love their stupid pranks, I love them being prats and I love it when Sirius is a raving lunatic. I love that they knew how to laugh and have fun and be morons for seven years before the war and Harry, and I love that they had this mischief to shape them all into the people they would become.

For me, however, the biggest drawback of Sirius/Remus and in fact the entire HP fandom, and the reason why I never stayed for longer than a couple of months, was the fact that it's awful static. I love AUs. I love cracky ideas, I love a certain amount of lunacy and utter randomness (which is why I still love the Shoebox Project), and -- surprising no one, I'm sure -- I love sex. With Sirius and Remus and the Marauders in general, if you wanted cracky, you had to amuse yourself with four sixteen year olds making asses of themselves in the common room in Gryffindor tower and torturing Snape, because the moment they graduated from school you entered Adultville and there almost everyone was busy choking on the angst.

I was a nomad for the first year and a half of my fandom career. I settled into various fandoms for what felt like FOREVER to me, read the fic, got updated on the wank, got bored, moved on, always one foot out the door and the bags packed. Oh, and speaking of wank, guess which was the one I managed to catch once in like every fandom? Oh, yes. In the war of warnings, no resolutions are ever made, only restless truce. But that's neither here nor there. What it all really culminated in was bandom.

Now, bandom's been interesting for me. I've stuck around for almost two years at this point. TWO YEARS. That's about a year and a half longer than I've ever stuck around anywhere else, and I wish I could say it's because this fandom is the best I've ever been in or that you guys are amazing -- you ARE and this fandom certainly is less wanky than you'd expect and I love all of you and it dearly -- but the truth of it is, I just got a big old boner for ficcing about real people.

The canon constantly shifts, the universe is OURS (and the real world doesn't have many limitations), so we can do what we want with it, we confine ourselves to a timeline, but not to a set canon, and ultimately, this is alive in so many ways that HP or SGA could NEVER be. In this fandom, crack and AUs and lunacy are commonplace, both the canon and the real people in question are fantastically malleable, and sure, there is angst, but not to the point where I feel I have to dig my own grave already, because there is no point to life, my soul is a black hole, I'll never be happy again, etc. (I have, at times, a very negative and problematic reaction to angst. It's an issue.)

Not to mention that it's a lot easier to get with the fucking here. It turns out people in their 20s and early 30s are a lot easier to handle than boys in their teens and dudes in their forties. Or at least, for me they are. Suspension of disbelief, all that noise. Also, I don't have to worry about Voldemort OR Don't Ask Don't Tell, so yay for me and my fandom, I say.

In short, I love Remus/Sirius and I loved being in HP, but I wouldn't give up my big, cuddly, malleable, pretty boy fandom for nothing, no matter how emo or srs bsns it gets.