Toy Soldiers

Fandom
Name:	Toy Soldiers
Abbreviation(s):
Creator:	Daniel Petrie, Jr. (director, screenwriter) David Koepp (screenwriter)
Date(s):	26 April 1991
Medium:	film
Country of Origin:	United States
External Links:	Toy Soldiers at Wikipedia
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Toy Soldiers is a 1991 film. It is notable within fandom for starring Sean Astin, who would a decade later portray Sam Gamgee in the The Lord of the Rings films, and Wil Wheaton, who concurrently starred as Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Astin and Wheaton's characters, Billy Tepper and Joey Trotta, form the fandom's main slash pairing.

Fandom

irisbleufic writes in the Billy/Joey ship manifesto in January 2004:

There has to be something online, I thought. There has to be. Surely someone else has noticed this, and surely they've written it. And the heartache, I can't deal with that. Surely someone's written comfort fic. Pre-canon. Anything.

To make another long story short, dozens of web searches turned up nothing.

So we did something about it, and started writing.

[...]

Perhaps the timing was right, or perhaps we just got lucky. With both of us [irisbleufic and jennaria] writing and posting on our respective fic journals, people who had also seen the film and thought about it perked up and took notice. Before long, we had enough readers to consider starting a community – and so, we did. Eventually, a few other started writing, too, and even drawing. The present body of work is small, but the fandom, amazingly, has kept everyone who came to it, and a more dedicated, creative community, I've hardly ever seen. There are about forty people in the community, and the mailing list has nearly sixty, though it's very quiet in comparison to the community. Even the community is quiet, and although I remain the most active writer, followed closely by jennaria, I'm amazed at the group's tenacity. It's not just the little fandom that could, it's the little fandom that did. I hope it will survive, because these boys deserve it.

Example Fanworks

• Broken Toys by Astra (July 2002), a multi-part crossover series between Toy Soldiers and The Faculty
• Brave Hearts and Rebellious Souls by sgflutegirl (August 2009), a J2 story based on the plot of Toy Soldiers, written for the 2009 Supernatural and J-Squared Big Bang Challenge!

Links & Resources

• Toy Soldiers (1991) at Archive of Our Own
• Toy Soldiers, 1991 at FanFiction.Net
• Against All Odds, a Billy/Joey ship manifesto by irisbleufic (2004)
• Fandom Overview: Toy Soldiers by irisbleufic at crack_van (2008)
• billyjoeyslash, a LiveJournal community
• ToySoldierSlash, a Yahoo! Groups mailing list
• Toy Soldiers recs at crack_van