My God, what a concept!
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| Title: | My God, what a concept! |
| Creator: | The Divine Adoratrice |
| Date(s): | October 27, 1997 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | My God', what a concept!, Archived version (1997) |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
My God, what a concept! is a 1997 essay by The Divine Adoratrice.
The topic of the essay is netfic vs. fic in zines. For more on this topic, see Zines and the Internet.
It is part of a series of essays.
From the Essay
I've mentioned before that my first exposure to slash was through the Internet. A few months after I started this little hobby -- okay, obsession -- I saw a few comments from older fans about how much fandom had changed with the influx of online people, and the change wasn't always for the better.
Being the sane, reasonable person I am, my immediate reaction was a calm and considered (and, fortunately, trashed before I had the poor judgement to actually send it) "Well, screw you, too." Who were these people to judge me because my only access to fandom was by keyboard?
I think the situation is now officially reversed. Recently on one of my lists, someone made a comment that she didn't believe another party was a real writer... after all, she didn't have anything posted on the Net, did she? And I winced to see the elitism going the other direction. Has fandom become primarily a cyber-phenomenon, with zines merely something that writers can send stories to when they want their fiction to have pictures?
Okay, that's probably going too far. After all, go to any mailing list and you'll see ads for zines, and requests for zines, and reviews of zines. If anything, the Internet has almost certainly expanded the audience for zines. I just went to look at my checkbook, and without getting into dollar amounts, we can just say that I'm doing my part to support the zine industry.
And, of course, that wouldn't be true if not for the Internet. I'd have never developed such a greed for new stories that I'd be willing to cut back my book budget to almost nothing some months (not to mention the risk of my friendly mail carrier putting the package in the wrong mailbox).
Besides, it can't be simply the desire for new stories that leads me to order zines. Do you have any idea how many megs of unread stories I have sitting on disks and my hard drive? No, I order zines for reasons besides "must... have more... slash!" Part of it is aesthetic. Yes, the pretty pictures are a big draw, but it's more than that. There's something undeniably satisfying about holding something that you know is complete unto itself; not just the work of the writers and artists, but have you thought about the people who do the actual physical production? I've never been involved in putting out a zine myself, but we're talking about a major expenditure of time and labor. For me, at least, the fact that someone cared enough about the stories inside to go to that much trouble adds to the reading experience. Besides, we've all been through the following scenario: you get home at night. You're tired, you're cranky, the cat was sick all over your new shoes. All you want is to sit down at your computer and read some slash... but you can't log on, or your provider is down, or worst of all, no one has posted anything. But all isn't lost if you have a pile of zines waiting for you.