Yahtzee

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Fan
Name: Yahtzee
Alias(es): XFScully, yahtzee63
Type: fan writer
Fandoms: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel the Series, Harry Potter, Joan of Arcadia, X-Men, Alias, Lost, The X-Files, others
Communities:
Other:
URL: website: (Yahtzee Genre Edition)
yahtzee63 (LJ)
Yahtzee (AO3)
Yahtzee (ff.net)
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Yahtzee is an author in many fandoms.

She is probably best known for her Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, Alias stories.

Yahtzee writes a substantial amount of gen and het, but occasionally writes slash.

I have written stories for several different universes, ranging from plot-driven epics, NC-17-rated love stories, and crossovers that can only be called bizarre. My philosophy as a fan author: above all, stay true to character. [1]

Interview

Fannish History

Early Fandoms

Yahtzee was active in fandom in the mid-1990s. Her earliest fandoms include The X-Files, the classic Star Wars trilogy and Star Trek: The Original Series.

These fics can be found at Yahtzee: Thought Brackets with the statement: "Archived here are the first fanfiction stories I ever wrote. Among them are stories about "The X-Files," the classic "Star Wars" trilogy and "Star Trek." Some of these stories haven't stood the test of time or experience, but are archived here under the principle of full disclosure. Others, I think, stand up very well and are worth reading. I'll let you decide which are which, though."

Buffy and Angel

Yahtzee was a prolific and highly popular writer in the BtVS/AtS fandom in the early 2000s.

Her BtVS AU novel Phoenix Burning won several awards and is among the most frequently recommended works in the fandom. Her AtS AU novel As Time Goes By was also widely recommended. She also co-wrote two popular AtS novels with Rheanna. Yahtzee was still publishing Buffyverse stories up until 2004.

Alias Fanfiction

In late 2003, Yahtzee began writing Alias fanfiction. Her first Alias story was The Thought That Counts. This story established some of Yahtzee's key interests in Alias fandom, namely, the complex web of relationships between the members of the show's central family: Jack Bristow, a CIA agent, his daughter Sydney Bristow, also a CIA agent, and his ex-wife Irina Derevko, initially a Russian agent but later a power-broker with her own agenda. In later seasons of the show, the 'SpyFam' would grow to include Irina's sisters, Elena Derevko and Katya Derevko, and Nadia Santos, Irina's daughter by Arvin Sloane. These characters, along with Sydney's fellow agent and lover Michael Vaughn, would be the core group on which many of Yahtzee's stories focused.

Although the show was primarily driven by the conventions of the spy thriller (double agents, disguises, missions, hi-tech gadgetry), it also utilised a strong SF/fantasy element through the inclusion of Milo Rambaldi, an inventor/genius strongly modelled on Leonardo da Vinci. In Alias' reality, Rambaldi was responsible for creating a number of inventions far in advance not just of Renaissance science but of modern-day technology as well. Acquisition of Rambaldi objects and knowledge was a frequently used plot device, and coincidentally also provided a useful mechanism for introducing science fictional elements into stories. Yahtzee's Alias fan novels The Prophet's Right Hand[1] and Irenicon [2] are both excellent examples of this, using (respectively) time travel and immortality as key plot elements.

From 2004 onwards, Yahtzee began to write prolifically in Alias fandom, her output ranging from fan novels to numerous ficlets and drabbles on the Alias 500 LJ community. Her longer Alias stories include AUs (The Prophet's Right Hand), canon-based stories (The Thought that Counts [3]), humour (Jack Bristow at the Edge of Reason [4], an Alias/Bridget Jones' Diary crossover), darker fic (What Julia Knew [5]), 'Five Things' fic (The Twelfth of Never [6]) and lighter adventures (Bristow's 11 [7], a heist fic loosely based on Ocean's 11). The most common pairings in Yahtzee's Alias fics are Jack/Irina, Sydney/Vaughn, Sydney/Weiss; after the introduction of Nadia Santos' character, Yahtzee wrote a number of fics, including Evergreen [8] around the "WowWrongBadHot" pairing Jack/Nadia. The strained but deep father/daughter bond between Jack and Sydney Bristow is also at the heart of almost all Yahtzee's Alias stories; writing in the point of view of Jack Bristow, a character for whom a moment of huge emotional expression will typically involve giving a small nod, presents a particular set of challenges to the fan writer.

Yahtzee continued to write Alias fanfiction up to and beyond the show's cancellation at the end of its fifth season in 2006.

Other

Since 2003, Yahtzee has branched out into writing in several other fandoms, including Harry Potter, Joan of Arcadia, Lost, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Ugly Betty and X-Men. She has also written popular stories across numerous small fandoms, including I, Claudius, Jeeves and Wooster, Lemony Snicket, Rear Window, Remington Steele, Sense and Sensibility, Twin Peaks, and X-Men: First Class.

Since 2015, she has written fanfiction less frequently, focusing of pro fic.

Some Comments by Yahtzee

2001

From the interview, The Darker Side of Sunnydale Interview with Yahtzee:

Well, I write AU fics as well, but I do find the episodic fics the most challenging, by far. I do try to balance the way-out-there stuff with the very canonical stuff as much as I can.

When you write an AU, you have license to do anything you want. You can justify any act, any relationship, any sequence of events. Who's to say it couldn't happen in an alternate universe? Sometimes this is enjoyable and imaginative, but sometimes I just find myself staring blankly at a story, totally unable to relate the version of Angel or Giles or Cordelia on that page to the Angel or Giles or Cordelia I've seen onscreen. (The worst offender I ever saw was in XF fandom -- someone had written the first part of a story in which Mulder and Scully, instead of being FBI agents, were paired together as a figure-skating duo.) I'm not interested in people who just share names and faces with my favorite characters. I'm interested in the characters themselves, their histories and motivations and individual voices -- all information we get from canon. So even with my AU stories, I try to root the characters very firmly in canon.

Also, trying to write something episodic really requires some discipline -- it makes you stretch. Joss Whedon and Tim Minear and company are truly geniuses at mingling the humor and the horror, the action and the romance, etc. I think trying to create a story that has that same feel to it is both really difficult and really rewarding. The absolute, best feedback you can get, IMHO, is a note that says, "I could imagine this happening on the show."

Finally, I try to write episodic fics because I think they're something pretty much everyone can enjoy. I mean, if we didn't like the framework of ATS or BTVS episodes, we wouldn't be into the shows in the first place, right?

2008

From Why? -- A Not-Remotely-Complete Investigation of the "Why Slash / Why Het / Why Femslash" Debate, an essay by Merlin Missy:

I don't know that the things I enjoy about writing het are any different than the things I enjoy about writing gen or slash, which I also do. Really, for me, I *don't* see a big difference between the two. If you're writing about two people in love (or in lust), the plumbing is really just a detail, isn't it? The bigger leap is between writing canonical relationships versus noncanonical ones (which most slash is). If I feel like I'm getting at something vital within each character and in their relationship to each other, I'm happy.

[...]

The things that drive me crazy about het itself are that it's so much harder to keep out the detritus of societal ideas about gender and male/female relationships. Some author -- I forget who -- said that no writer could truly know herself until she'd tried to write dialogue for a man and a woman in a rose garden. The call of stereotype and cliché is very strong, no matter how hard you try to recognize it. In some ways, I became (in my opinion, anyway) a much better writer of het only after I also started writing slash. With slash, you can't fall back on those ingrained ideas about "well, this is what the guy does, and this is what the girl does." You have to ask yourself, what would this person do? And once I'd trained myself to always ask that question, I was able to ask it when writing het as well. The things that drive me crazy about fandom's perception of het: The idea that it's 'schmaltzy,' 'stereotyped,' 'babyfic,' etc., at least compared to slash. Fact is, if you want to find schmaltzy, stereotyped Mpreg slash, there's plenty of it out there. And if you want to find good het, that's out there too. The thing that drives me absolutely BATTY is the sometimes-slash-rationale, 'I want to write about relationships between equals.' The idea being that this is somehow liberating, when in fact it's writing off the whole idea of women being equals in their relationships with men. I find that profoundly depressing.

Example Fiction

Other Works

References

  1. ^ Fanfiction.net: Yahtzee (accessed 9 February 2012)
  2. ^ Katta's Fanfic Recs (accessed 9 February 2012)
  3. ^ a b c Polyamorous Recommendations (accessed 9 February 2012)
  4. ^ Espresso Recommendations: Angel/Buffy (accessed 9 February 2012)
  5. ^ Chandler's Field: Fan Fiction Recs by LJC (accessed 9 February 2012)
  6. ^ Television Without Pity Forums: Fan Fiction (accessed 9 February 2012)
  7. ^ Katspace: Yahtzee (accessed 9 February 2012)
  8. ^ thefourthvine@dreamwidth: 217: Popular Fiction (accessed 9 February 2012)
  9. ^ it would have been nice to have had unicorns (accessed 23 July 2013)
  10. ^ Rec by PhoenixFalls at 221B-Recs on LiveJournal, posted 23 May 2014.
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