The Curly-Toed Boots of Justice
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| Title: | The Curly-Toed Boots of Justice |
| Creator: | McSwain! |
| Date(s): | October 1, 2002 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | Fan Fiction, Elf |
| External Links: | The Curly-Toed Boots of Justice, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
The Curly-Toed Boots of Justice is an essay by McSwain!.
It is part of the Fanfic Symposium series.
Excerpts
With those four words, all joy and love was banished from my life this morning. Granted, I wasn't in the most splendid of moods to begin with, but I nourished the hard seed of hope within my heart, foolishly thinking that if I just held on a little longer, I might manage to dig myself out of the swampy morass of despair that claimed me last night as I lay weeping and singing along angrily to Aimee Mann songs.
Something you may not know about me is that I'm a sometime writer of fanfic. I write slash fanfic, actually, which has been reviled by fanfic fans and regular fans alike, more than once, but as I will explain, there's worse out there than that.
The "Jim." line comes from a story written in "The Sentinel" fandom. Some of the more... fanciful... of its writers believe that Garrett Maggart-- the actor who played Blair Sandburg on the show-- is elfin in appearance. Consequently, when they're feeling particularly hostile and insane, they sit down and write long, mawkish, incomprehensible stories in which Blair either discovers he's an elf or reveals it to Jim-- his roommate-- who then becomes his lover, if the story is slash. (If it's not, I have no idea what happens to Jim and Blair, but I bet it's pretty stupid.)
I wish I could blame Mr. Maggart's DNA for this problem, but all of fandom is infested with elf stories. If one of the leads doesn't have a vaguely effeminate hairstyle, pale skin, or slightly slanted eyes, elf story writers (or "weirdos") pull an explanation out of their asses. They can't write dialogue, they can't plot, and they can't string words together into a decent sentence, most of the time, but by god, they can tell you why Starsky left Elfwood in 500,000 words or less.
I used to think it was stupid, or scary, or sad, but today, thinking about the scene in which Blair explained his dilemma to Jim, I imagined how it might've gone if it had happened on the show, and for the first time ever when thinking about elf stories, I laughed.
I saw Jim's expression of disgust, and once he realized that Blair really believed this unlikely claim, his pathetic attempts to seem receptive to the idea, even though he was secretly thinking that the kid had finally snapped, and trying to remember the name of that hot cop psychologist. Finally, I saw his retreat to the loft, muttering "Ooookaaaaaaaay, Sandburg," while Blair danced a jig in the living room in a misguided effort to change Jim's mind.