Talk:Blake/Avon
On the prevalence of slash vs het, the numbers here [1] were crunched by me directly from Sarah Thompson's and are complete from the start of printzine fandom to May 2001 (when zines pretty much died out in B7). The stats refer to complete zines not stories, but until the mixed zine came along, het & slash never mixed, though some het was published in gen zines and het pairings will thus tend to be underestimated. (They also exclude B7 stories in multimedia zines.) According to these figures, slash first appeared in 1983, and didn't really overtake het until the late 1980s.
So I don't think B/A can have been the most popular pairing in the early fandom -- I suspect the most popular pairing was Avon/Cally until at least the mid/late 80s. I was in offline B7 fandom in the early–mid 80s and I never so much heard of slash until getting online c. 1998 and finding Space City. Espresso Addict (talk) 22:27, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
- This is very interesting, thank you - I'll edit further to reflect this. I'm also genuinely surprised at how many more gen zines there are than either het or slash. Aralias (talk) 20:13, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
- That staggered everyone except Sarah T! Slash is so much talked about that it's easy to forget how much gen (and non-explicit het, which used to be included in gen) dominated many fandoms until relatively recently. I'll take another look at the article, but generally I think you're doing a superb job! And thanks for the link to the Chris Boucher interview -- fascinating! Espresso Addict (talk) 07:41, 19 July 2013 (UTC)
I don’t know if you would like to mention this in you B/A entry, but EPS "Mindfire" was written in 1979 and features Blake/Avon or at least strongly implies it. This is the earliest B/A known of, I think. There is a fanlore entry for the zine that describes the content in more detail. The zine wasn't "published" for sale at the time of production and instead circulated privately among the writer’s friends. They were enjoined not to make more copies but inevitably it did happen. Later the zine was properly bootlegged and sold in the States, much to the authors annoyance.
"Mindfire" was only “officially” published in 1998. According to Judith Proctor's editorial in the 1998 edition "It's one of those legendary zines that many people have heard of, but few have ever read. Copies are said to circulate in the USA in xeroxes so many generations down that whole sections of pages are illegible and yet it is still read." EPS' own new introduction to the 1998 zine states that "one person - and one person only - was given permission to make one copy. All other copies - thirty or so all told - were gifts to my friends, and all came with conditions about not making a copy or passing that copy on, or even, for that matter, letting anyone else read it without my permission".
It should be noted that I have no personal knowledge of early B7 fandom, having only taken an interest in fannish things fairly recently, so I can only take on trust any information picked up from the internet or old fanzines/newsletters! Guiser (talk) 01:19, 18 July 2013 (UTC)