I might still finish my Giles-faces-a-succubus-while trying to free his father story after all...the second part got kind of slow so I threw it out.But I think I could do it better now. And I wrote that because Giles' explanation for leaving in season 6 never felt sufficient.Writing Giles was a big challenge and forced me to dust off vocabulary I never knew I had. As well as being a radically different voice than mine.

Not much of a fan ficcer, but sometimes the re-dos are wonderful. I recommend CICATRIX (sp?) to anyone interested in a really dark re-thinking of the post-season 1 Buffy-verse.

Sadly, I don't have a link, but I suspect it should be easy enough to find.

Great to hear all your interesting views on the fanfic thing. I see now that the whole phenomenon is a lot more complex than I originally thought.

I guess I brought it up because the whole nature of intense fandom is a new thing for me -- didn't think it would happen at my age. I aint exactly a teenager anymore. (Though I guess it's no weirder than being obsessed with teams of overpaid spoilt sports mercenaries who just happen to play soccer really well.) There's no-one I know who I can talk to about this sort of thing -- my friend who introduced me to BtVS has now totally gone off it and when I mentioned fanfiction to her, she thought it sounded really icky. Must be my dour Scottish Presbyterian upbringing, but there's part of me that has trouble accepting that I have an obsession with a TV show and that I'm exploring that obsession by reading things that other similarly interested fans have done to tease out the edges of it. But I guess that's why I've ended up here -- at the Buffista Home for Weirdos. Where maybe I belong.

t bangs cup on table "One of us! One of us! Gabba gabba hey!"

Must be my dour Scottish Presbyterian upbringing, but there's part of me that has trouble accepting that I have an obsession with a TV show

No, I have one of those and one of those but not one of those.

Translation: dour Scottish Presbyterian upbringing; obsession with a tv show; no trouble accepting said obsession with said show

Indication that I am a Buffyholic and not an X-Philer

"My Krycek has two arms! So there, Chris Carter."

My immediate thought was: "Four, or only three?"

the whole nature of intense fandom is a new thing for me -- didn't think it would happen at my age

I feel exactly the same way...although if any of my friends dares to give me lip about Buffy, I can always point to the far crappier things that they invariably like.

but there's part of me that has trouble accepting that I have an obsession with a TV show and that I'm exploring that obsession by reading things that other similarly interested fans have done to tease out the edges of it

Oh, I think a lot of people go through the 'but, isn't it kinda, y'know, strange?' and the 'Oh, God. I'm just like a Trekkie. I should be greeting people with the Vulcan hand-thing and learning Klingon' phases. Or that might just have been me--but either way, there's definitely a cultural predjudice about being fannish about something which doesn't involve the movement of a roundish object about a big field, and it can be intimidating. For my first year of Buffy obsession I had very clear rules about what I wouldn't do and reading fanfic was most definitely on the forbidden list, because I could recite quotes from almost every episode (even though I hadn't seen three-quarters of them) off the top of my head, but reading fanfic?--well, that would make me weird. I don't really remember what made me give up on that idiotic notion, but I suspect it was the combination of some very good authors writing some very beautiful porn.

First they came for the ficcers, and I did not speak up because I was not a ficcer...

Hee.