Band of Brothers

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Name: Band Of Brothers
Abbreviation(s): BoB
Creator: Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, et al.
Date(s): 2001
Medium: television (cable miniseries)
Country of Origin: USA
External Links: HBO official site; IMDB
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Closely based on real-life events and the book of the same name by Stephen Ambrose, Band Of Brothers follows the WWII experiences of E Company ("Easy Company") of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, United States Army 101st Airborne Division, from Easy's basic training at Toccoa, Georgia to the end of the war. It aired in 10 parts, with a special documentary at the end of the series called "We Stand Alone Together: The Men of Easy Company," which put real faces with the names of those still alive at the time of filming.

While the series follows many of the soldiers in Easy's wartime history, the primary focus is on Maj. Dick Winters (played by Damian Lewis), and Capt. Lewis Nixon, (played by Ron Livingston) Winters's close friend and the unit's intelligence specialist. The two became lifelong friends after their service.

The series was hailed by critics as one of the best programs ever made about war and one of the most accurate depictions of the harrowing effects of combat, as well as the camaraderie built by the men who served.

For a list of related fandoms, see List of Military Fandoms.

Fandom

BoB has always been a small fandom, but it's size is more than made up for by its persistence; two decades after the show's first run on HBO, new fics are still being posted daily. It has a fairly heavy slash fandom base, probably because there are few female characters in the course of the series and because the homosocial nature of wartime is heavily emphasized in the series. BoB is also part of the broader fusion HBO War Fandom.

On the Archive Of Our Own, the most popular ships are Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters (Winnix), Joseph Liebgott/Kenyon Webster, Babe Heffron/Eugene Roe, Carwood Lipton/Ronald Speirs, and George Luz/Joseph Toye.[1] Given the ensemble nature of the show, however, pretty much any pairing imaginable has at some point probably been written.

Originally, as some of the primary characters of the series were still alive when Band of Brothers aired, many fans who have trouble with accepting RPF or RPS did not create fanworks for the series, particularly slash fiction. One way many of those fans attempted to deal with that issue was by focusing on the characters as they were developed for the mini-series. Enough changes were made to the information presented factually in Ambrose's book in order to make the stories more cinematic that it allowed fans to distance themselves somewhat from the stories of the real men. As an example, Dick Winters was irked by scenes created in the show that portray him as having difficulty coping with killing a young German soldier, especially when he's on leave in Paris. This didn't happen in real life, but fanfiction has been written around this particular episode precisely because it is such a great dramatic device. Fans also concentrate on the performances of the actors--they may say that they're not writing about Dick Winters per se, but Dick Winters as portrayed by Damian Lewis in the mini-series, thus keeping the focus on the slightly fictionalized creations.

Several of the cast members — including Damian Lewis (Life, Homeland, Billions), Tom Hardy (Inception, Peaky Blinders, Venom), Jamie Bamber (Horatio Hornblower, Battlestar Galactica), Simon Pegg (Hot Fuzz, Star Trek Reboot), Richard Speight Jr. (Justified, Supernatural), and James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender (X-Men: First Class) — later appeared in other media of interest to fandom, so Band of Brothers has a lot of crossover potential.

Challenges

Communities

LiveJournal:

Dreamwidth:

Band of Brothers has several stories on Yuletide, as well as its own Secret Santa exchanges in 2003 and 2004:

As of 2018, Band of Brothers was not eligible for Yuletide[3], and the easycotroopers community hosted its own holiday exchange: Easy Co Troopers 2018 Holiday Fic Exchange. In 2019, the DDSherman community hosted a holiday exchange: DDSherman Holiday Exchange for BoB 2019.

Notable fanworks

Fannish Resources

References

  1. ^ Filter sidebar results on the Band of Brothers works page, 15 April 2019.
  2. ^ {admin}: Community Deletion, Archived version
  3. ^ According to Fail_Fandomanon, 2018-12-11
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