When I stumbled upon fanfic years ago, I thought it was ridiculous. That people would have the audacity to take established characters and throw them into stories outside of canon … scandalous, really.
Then came the final season of Star Trek: Deep Space 9.
When the series began wrapping up, I didn’t know where to turn. I needed my DS9. That’s when I turned to the glorious guilty pleasure of fanfic. Here were all those characters I knew and loved continuing their lives and adventures. What fanfic writing often lacked in polish and cohesiveness, it made up for in gratuitous angst and delicious melodrama. Some stories were absolute shit, yet some would have made perfect episodes themselves. Back in those days, nearly 10 years ago at this writing, there was plenty of it around to choose from. I remember a particular Warf story, titled, “Son of My Youth”. I enjoyed it. And after reading to the end, I learned that story was incomplete, the final chapter never posted. I don’t remember the story beyond the title now, but I still recall my disappointment at not knowing the ending.
Fanfic, written by fans, often took characters in directions that a show’s real writers would never take them. By this I’m talking slash. At first, I avoided it like the plague, then it was all I wanted to read. And what kind of slash? Garak/Bashir, of course. There something both alluring and hilarious about man on man/cardassian love. When the series ended and Bashir ended up with Dax, I was disappointed not only because I hated the new Dax, but also because I knew that he belonged with the Cardassian tailor.
I remember drawing Cardassians in my college notebooks. It was an odd time. I didn’t have many friends back then. That was many years ago and my fanfic phase only lasted a few months. I have a short attention span. I’ll be surprised if this blog lasts much longer.
Anycase, the other day I was googling for DS9 fanfic [specifically G/B slash, since it is the most entertaining]. Where the hell did it all go?
One site I went to had thousands of links to stories from Enterprise and Voyager and TOS and Next Gen, but only a few hundred for DS9. What the hell? Deep Space 9 was the best of them all. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Voyager and Next Gen (never got in to the other two), but they don’t hold a candle to DS9.
And most of the few piddly sites I found for DS9 fanfic were dead links and if the links weren’t dead, the stories were dated from the ’90s. With one shining exception.
http://prelocandkanar.livejournal.com/
In all the internet, there’s at least still one person out there who knows the value of a good old fashioned angsty G/B story.
There’s probably plenty of people out there still writing G/B slashy goodness. Google just hasn’t been my friend in finding them.