verushka70 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
verushka70) wrote2024-04-22 06:57 pm
verushka70) wrote2024-04-22 06:57 pm
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ds30below history week (late) - a very long history of my dS fannishness (Fannish Fifty #17)
How did I get into due South? well, it has a lot to do with Forever Knight - my first fandom.
I watched Forever Knight in its original broadcast on CBS - because from the 1st season of Forever Knight, I was a HUGE fan. I watched Forever Knight faithfully -- when CBS didn't jerk us fans around, moving it to different late night time slots for the entire 3 year life span of the show, sigh. (Doesn't that sound familiar, dS fen??)
Forever Knight was broadcast in the short-lived "Crime Time after Primetime" slot at 10:30pm at night, after the news on CBS, because it was considered too salacious for any other time slot. Personally, I always thought it was because it was so. Overtly. HOMOEROTIC. And in a time when AIDS was very much in the public's mind, and ACT-UP protesting in cities across the US and the world, that was kind of controverial.
Anyway, when everyone else was watching Johnny Carson, I was watching FK (Forever Knight). THE NICK/LACROIX SLASH WAS SO BREATHTAKINGLY FUCKED UP I simply could not help myself. THAT was why I fell in love with FK in the first place, LOL. Fucked up sire/progeny m/m vampire slash, and a couple of OT3 m/f/m possibilities? I was so there.
The Internet was very new and no one else I knew -- except my brother (a computer programmer) and my younger sister in a work study program at UW Madison -- was on the Internet at the time. (I didn't know the history of fandom yet at that point, or about hard copy zines; I only had my own subjective likes -- always slashy stuff -- like Kirk/Spock, and Charles/Sebastian on the very PBS first Brideshead Revisited with the young Jeremy Irons. I had no idea other people were into m/m stuff, because I didn't even know what slash was yet.
On the new World Wide Web, I discovered FK fandom, and fanfiction, and slashfic. I was like, OMG this is FANTASTIC! people write their own versions of the obviously homoerotic vibe Nick and LaCroix have, only they take it to the full NC-17 place I wanted it to go? who came up with this idea!? it is genius!!
A bunch of Forever Knight fen were also into due South, or got into it because some dS actors guest starred on FK (Catherine Bruhier and Christina Cox). I would surf someone's FK fic/pic web page and see pictures of a Mountie. I thought, Wellllll, he's handsome. But I didn't pay it much attention, because I was there strictly for the Forever Knight vampires Nick and LaCroix - and the slashy pics and fics of them on people's early web pages.
Then CBS broadcast the S3 Forever Knight episode "Outside the Lines" - in which CKR guest starred. When I saw that episode, I thought, Christ, this guy [CKR] is unbelievably charismatic; the camera loves him. He just had this crazy charisma, and I couldn't take my eyes off him. I had no idea who he was, other than a guest star on Forever Knight.
So I thought, I'm going to find out who this guy is, because he is so charismatic, there's no way he's not going places in the world. Well, I looked up that episode on imdb.org (back then, imdb.com and imdb.org were two different domains and web sites; imdb.org was like wikipedia -- built by movie and TV fans/geeks). And I learned that he was going to be the *lead* actor on this show called due South coming, in the third season.
So once I knew he was going to be on due South, then I started trying to find dS on - once again - the crap network for quirky Canadian-produced shows, CBS! They moved it around the schedule, but I caught a couple of episodes in re-runs.
After seeing a couple of re-runs of dS, I was sort of like, Well, the Mountie's handsome, and it's quirky, but it's a little too "family oriented" for me. I was a big fan of Northern Exposure at the time (not fannishly though), but although dS had a bit of that vibe from what little I could tell from two re-run eps, it was set in Chicago - not Canada or Alaska or anything like that.
I didn't know due South was made in Canada and shot in Toronto. I just didn't know anything about it, but what I saw wasn't that compelling to me. I think the couple of episodes I saw in reruns were Diefenbaker's Day Off and Pizzas and Promises... kind of ho-hum dS episodes, certainly family-friendly. I was into anything but family-oriented TV shows at the time. And although Northern Exposure was promoted as such, under the surface, it was really very sly and humorous.
But I didn't know due South was that way yet, and those two episodes didn't really give me that feeling. Plus I wasn't actually watching them closely.... it was more, oh, let me put this TV show on in the background while I do other stuff. The Huskie was beautiful, but - kids and dogs? Uh, I was in my mid-twenties. I was not about kids. Dogs, yeah. Kids, no. (Still not into kids - at least, not my own; FRTDNEATJ, I don't have any. Just trust me when I say that the RTDNEATJ are good reasons.)
Anyhoo, coming from Forever Knight's Nick/LaCroix heavily angsty father/son vampire m/m relationship -- and the Nick/Janette/LaCroix angsty m/f/m OT3 canon backstory -- plus the potential Nick/Nat/LaCroix from the episode "Valentine's Day" -- plus the general darkness and angst of Forever Knight, you really can't blame me for thinking due South looked like a boring, non-slashy prime time G-rated family-oriented show.
I was also reading Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles at that time. Way before Twilight, way before vampires were suddenly cool again, when there was no Twilight, no True Blood... at a time when vampire shows were attempted and failed. Forever Knight - like due South, I later learned - got canceled at the end of every season (sound familiar, dS fen??). Kindred the Embraced barely got started as a series before it was canceled quickly.
These shows tried to ride the coattails of Neil Jordan's film of "Interview with the Vampire" - but the world wasn't ready yet. Certainly network TV wasn't ready. It would take a few years - and the growth of the Internet - and Buffy the Vampire Slayer for teenagers - and True Blood on a premium cable channel - to splash vampires all over magazine covers... but those shows hadn't yet begun. Take a look at the hit TV shows of 1993, and you'll see why Forever Knight didn't fare well.
I was falling in love with the X-Files but I was afraid to invest in it because I was afraid it would be canceled because it seemed like no one watched it but me. And honestly it never occurred to me to look for others online who were into it because, again, the Internet was still pretty new... and not that many people were on it, and I just had no concept of the fandom possibilities of the Internet. I was still in only my first fandom!
I was bored and I wanted another show to get into. While consoling myself with the FK Nick/LC slashfic, I saw the promo photos started coming out for S3 due South. And although they weren't fantastic, I was like, Oooooohh, there's a nice slashy vibe here in these pics. (They were being posted on the web pages of people into both FK and dS -- usually with some cranky or bitchy comment about "the new guy.") Well, I didn't know anything about the show, really.
After I found out that CKR's character was going to be Ray, and this Mountie hottie was Fraser, and I stumbled onto pqlaertes' Acharnement. At the time I knew pqlaertes, not in RL but on the web, from her FK web page, by her real name (we were so innocent then! no one was on the Internet yet, really, so people used their real names! we never envisioned how it would permeate people's lives, later!).
Acharnement was the very first dS fic I ever read - slash, of course. But because I didn't know the existing Ray, I read that fic picturing CKR as "Ray" and PG as the RCMP Mountie, with nothing but promo pics to base it on). It's a great, angsty fic, and though I later realized it was Fraser/Vecchio. So the summer before the 1997 premiere of S3, Burning Down The House, I started dipping my toe in dS Ray/Fraser slash, except picturing CKR as Ray and the Mountie I had seen in those couple of episodes as Fraser.
At the time I read it, I was like, Oh, damn, MORE slashfic, YAY!! Except a lot of stories described a balding Italian detective, and I got very confused, because I honestly hadn't really noticed him in the two eps I had seen. Hey, man - "something red moving fast always draws the eye." What can I say.
So I'm anticipating the S3 premiere because the little hottie, CKR, from the Forever Knight episode Outside The Lines was gonna be on it. So when it came, I watched BDTH and I was like, where is the charismatic hotness of the dude in the Forever Knight ep Outside The Lines with the spiky blond hair? Why did they fuck up his hair and make it flat dishwater blond? I mean, he's cute, but he's not blasting the camera with his heat like he did on Forever Knight. But I thought: fuck it, I thought: I'll give it a chance - he has really nice hands (*g*), nice eyes, and a great smile plus he's kind of an inherently angsty character \o/.
So then the next ep was Eclipse and I was like HOLY FUCK THE SLASH OMFG WTF a;sldkjfal;skdjfal;sdjfasdlfjk (except of course omfg and wtf didn't exist as abbreviations back then). Ray "'do you find me attractive?' he asked the Mountie" Kowalski was so slashy and angsty - and, although lacking the dark edge and the vampires - I thought OK, I can really work with this slashy vibe!
So they finally got CKRs hair right in ICBAD and I was like, YES! THIS is the dude from the ForKni ep... and Oooooh, more slashiness... and then the next ep after that was Strange Bedfellows, where CKR not only gets to be all angsty, but he also got to have all those jilted, jealous, angsty, but also sexy dancing/kissing/romantic scenes with Anne Marie Loder (with whom I always thought he had amazing chemistry -- which might have been his first? or some of his earliest? romantic scenes, except for a couple made for Canadian TV things with Molly Parker that I hadn't yet seen).
And I was like, OK, stick a fork in me, I'm DONE... I was already doing the online fandom thing for ForKni, so I just kind of slid over into dS fandom. Huzzah!
But pretty much as soon as S3 began, the Ray wars began. And that was bad. RayK fans had to create their own space because we got pretty shit on in the main dS fandom. But in the MEANTIME, we were all just gushing and drooling over CKR on a near-daily basis because the hotness and the hands and the hair and the eyes and the hands and the chemistry with PG and the angsty role - and then people started copying some of his other made for TV stuff, and we FINALLY got our hands on HCL, and THEN we were all like, OMFG, Joe/Billy FOREVER...
But anyway, yeah. S3 of dS with CKR began in August or September '97, which was like half a year or a year after S3 of FK was canceled. I *think* that CKR actually probably began filming S3 dS not that long after he was on FK. But those S3 dS eps weren't actually broadcast until later.
This was all around the 94-96 time frame when CKR did stuff like FTWHTWD and HCL and his career had really started to pick up. But in economic terms, "those markets were closed to us" American fans, so there were long delays before we saw most of those -- and mostly when we did, it was because of the tape trees some Canadian fen had started to do because they thought he was a hottie too, and they had all the access to CKR, and we down here didn't.
HCL hadn't even gotten video distribution in the US in '97 when S3 dS was originally broadcast, because none of the distribution companies gave a shit about it until Tarentino's company picked it up. I bought it as an import VHS cassette the first time - I think that was mid-way or 2/3 of the way through S3 (S3/S4) dS. It wasn't until '98 or later that Tarentino's company FINALLY made HCL available domestically on DVD in the US. Somewhere around then.
Because remember, both FK and dS were the two little Canadian shows that could... and then couldn't. Both kept getting canceled at the end of each season, and then somehow revived. But each only managed to get revived after 2 cancellations. After the 3rd season of each, the networks involved (CBS on the American side) chose not to revive them, despite massive fan efforts, letter writing campaigns -- hell, for Forever Knight, we fen donated $$ to take out *billboards* in LA that could be seen by people driving in for work. All for nothing; it was never revived. And there was no Netflix to take it on, as has happened in recent years of great shows canceled by networks.
Anyway. I had written only one Forever Knight fic in all the time I was so heavily into the fandom. I read tons of it, at the time, though. And I had made a solo trip to Toronto to see the various locations where significant Forever Knight episodes and scenes were shot. Now I had another Canadian show to fall in love with - because of course, then I started asking on email lists if anyone had any due South episodes from previous seasons to share... and a kindly fan in Toronto, I think, whose name I can't recall - this was decades ago, the memory starts to fade! - sent me pivotal episodes from S1 and S2... and, well, then I really fell for the Fraser character, especially after seeing Victoria's Secret 1 & 2.
Man, I remember discovering all the slashfic for Forever Knight online and being like, ohmygod, I have hit the *jackpot* here... it's all mine... and all these people walking around have no idea people are freely trading explicit erotic m/m stories about fictional vampires online for fun - how cool is this?!
Like many, I sought asylum on the long-gone Asylum email discussion list, where it was all Fraser/Kowalski, all the time, with none of the Kowalski-hate that was routinely spouted during the 3rd season (S3-S4 was broadcast as one long season in the US, in the original broadcast). I was bitter for a while, but since the Ray Wars, I've seen the same thing happen in other fandoms, and learned of pre-dS fandoms where the same thing happened, and come to realize, that kind of character/actor bashing is fairly (sadly) typical in fandom.
And after a bunch of Asylum dS fen moved to LJ, all this Ray/Ray and Ray/Fraser/Ray fic started being written... and then DW came into being and people moved to DW and continued the Ray/Ray... and since I never hated Ray Vecchio (unlike the Kowalski-haters), of course I read some... and then I wrote some myself, both way back when, as well as more recently here and here. That helped me get over it.
And, like many veterans, that's about as much as I want to talk about it. I'm glad it's long past and it's not okay to character or actor bash anymore. (Although it still happens, but at least it is frowned upon now.)
Now, there were two other things that were really frowned upon when I first found dS fandom: RPF/RPS, and bad!Ben AUs. To the point that people shared these things secretly and you would only learn of these fics if you knew someone or they knew you would probably like it and wouldn't 'out' them. Back then, making "OFM" (Our Favorite Mountie, a common nickname for Fraser) into a bad guy was very, very frowned upon and a rather fringe-y thing to do. And there was no AO3 at the time.
If you like when Fraser isn't 100% good/upright/moral/nice/polite... or even when he's justifiably angry, then the bad!Ben fic page is still available via Wayback Machine.
Yes, I know it looks like nothing is there, because it's light text on a light background. To make the text come up:
1) if you're on a laptop, hit the Ctrl-A key sequence to highlight the entire page's text - et voila, bad!Ben fic to explore.
B. If on a smartphone, touch any faint word you can see, and then slide your finger down the entire page until all the text is selected, and presto: bad!Ben fic!
The authors of the bad!Ben page also created a dSc6d RPS page too... you can bring up the page text the same way (Select All).
I've even traveled because of my fandoms: my first trip to Toronto, alone, not even a dog - my dog had died, and I hadn't yet gotten another one - in the rally 90s was because of Forever Knight and an online "FK points of interest" list that I printed a hard copy of, and drove around and found all the points of interest SBD filming locations on my own. Wish I still had that, but it's lost to the sands and winds of time.
My last trip to Toronto was for due South RCW139, and that trip and another one were for fancons (although I am not a huge con-goer, I do occasionally go to cons... very occasionally). In between, there were a couple trips where I visited both FK and dS filming locations. I've made fandom friends - some who live very close to me, geographically; some who I met long ago and lost touch with countless computers and email accounts so - and I've just generally had so much fun and derived so much enjoyment from fannishness. And I have some bucket list items that I probably wouldn't have if it weren't for Forever Knight and due South. Yay!
So thank you, ds30below, for prompting this trip down memory lane. 💜😊
I watched Forever Knight in its original broadcast on CBS - because from the 1st season of Forever Knight, I was a HUGE fan. I watched Forever Knight faithfully -- when CBS didn't jerk us fans around, moving it to different late night time slots for the entire 3 year life span of the show, sigh. (Doesn't that sound familiar, dS fen??)
Forever Knight was broadcast in the short-lived "Crime Time after Primetime" slot at 10:30pm at night, after the news on CBS, because it was considered too salacious for any other time slot. Personally, I always thought it was because it was so. Overtly. HOMOEROTIC. And in a time when AIDS was very much in the public's mind, and ACT-UP protesting in cities across the US and the world, that was kind of controverial.
Anyway, when everyone else was watching Johnny Carson, I was watching FK (Forever Knight). THE NICK/LACROIX SLASH WAS SO BREATHTAKINGLY FUCKED UP I simply could not help myself. THAT was why I fell in love with FK in the first place, LOL. Fucked up sire/progeny m/m vampire slash, and a couple of OT3 m/f/m possibilities? I was so there.
The Internet was very new and no one else I knew -- except my brother (a computer programmer) and my younger sister in a work study program at UW Madison -- was on the Internet at the time. (I didn't know the history of fandom yet at that point, or about hard copy zines; I only had my own subjective likes -- always slashy stuff -- like Kirk/Spock, and Charles/Sebastian on the very PBS first Brideshead Revisited with the young Jeremy Irons. I had no idea other people were into m/m stuff, because I didn't even know what slash was yet.
On the new World Wide Web, I discovered FK fandom, and fanfiction, and slashfic. I was like, OMG this is FANTASTIC! people write their own versions of the obviously homoerotic vibe Nick and LaCroix have, only they take it to the full NC-17 place I wanted it to go? who came up with this idea!? it is genius!!
A bunch of Forever Knight fen were also into due South, or got into it because some dS actors guest starred on FK (Catherine Bruhier and Christina Cox). I would surf someone's FK fic/pic web page and see pictures of a Mountie. I thought, Wellllll, he's handsome. But I didn't pay it much attention, because I was there strictly for the Forever Knight vampires Nick and LaCroix - and the slashy pics and fics of them on people's early web pages.
Then CBS broadcast the S3 Forever Knight episode "Outside the Lines" - in which CKR guest starred. When I saw that episode, I thought, Christ, this guy [CKR] is unbelievably charismatic; the camera loves him. He just had this crazy charisma, and I couldn't take my eyes off him. I had no idea who he was, other than a guest star on Forever Knight.
So I thought, I'm going to find out who this guy is, because he is so charismatic, there's no way he's not going places in the world. Well, I looked up that episode on imdb.org (back then, imdb.com and imdb.org were two different domains and web sites; imdb.org was like wikipedia -- built by movie and TV fans/geeks). And I learned that he was going to be the *lead* actor on this show called due South coming, in the third season.
So once I knew he was going to be on due South, then I started trying to find dS on - once again - the crap network for quirky Canadian-produced shows, CBS! They moved it around the schedule, but I caught a couple of episodes in re-runs.
After seeing a couple of re-runs of dS, I was sort of like, Well, the Mountie's handsome, and it's quirky, but it's a little too "family oriented" for me. I was a big fan of Northern Exposure at the time (not fannishly though), but although dS had a bit of that vibe from what little I could tell from two re-run eps, it was set in Chicago - not Canada or Alaska or anything like that.
I didn't know due South was made in Canada and shot in Toronto. I just didn't know anything about it, but what I saw wasn't that compelling to me. I think the couple of episodes I saw in reruns were Diefenbaker's Day Off and Pizzas and Promises... kind of ho-hum dS episodes, certainly family-friendly. I was into anything but family-oriented TV shows at the time. And although Northern Exposure was promoted as such, under the surface, it was really very sly and humorous.
But I didn't know due South was that way yet, and those two episodes didn't really give me that feeling. Plus I wasn't actually watching them closely.... it was more, oh, let me put this TV show on in the background while I do other stuff. The Huskie was beautiful, but - kids and dogs? Uh, I was in my mid-twenties. I was not about kids. Dogs, yeah. Kids, no. (Still not into kids - at least, not my own; FRTDNEATJ, I don't have any. Just trust me when I say that the RTDNEATJ are good reasons.)
Anyhoo, coming from Forever Knight's Nick/LaCroix heavily angsty father/son vampire m/m relationship -- and the Nick/Janette/LaCroix angsty m/f/m OT3 canon backstory -- plus the potential Nick/Nat/LaCroix from the episode "Valentine's Day" -- plus the general darkness and angst of Forever Knight, you really can't blame me for thinking due South looked like a boring, non-slashy prime time G-rated family-oriented show.
I was also reading Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles at that time. Way before Twilight, way before vampires were suddenly cool again, when there was no Twilight, no True Blood... at a time when vampire shows were attempted and failed. Forever Knight - like due South, I later learned - got canceled at the end of every season (sound familiar, dS fen??). Kindred the Embraced barely got started as a series before it was canceled quickly.
These shows tried to ride the coattails of Neil Jordan's film of "Interview with the Vampire" - but the world wasn't ready yet. Certainly network TV wasn't ready. It would take a few years - and the growth of the Internet - and Buffy the Vampire Slayer for teenagers - and True Blood on a premium cable channel - to splash vampires all over magazine covers... but those shows hadn't yet begun. Take a look at the hit TV shows of 1993, and you'll see why Forever Knight didn't fare well.
I was falling in love with the X-Files but I was afraid to invest in it because I was afraid it would be canceled because it seemed like no one watched it but me. And honestly it never occurred to me to look for others online who were into it because, again, the Internet was still pretty new... and not that many people were on it, and I just had no concept of the fandom possibilities of the Internet. I was still in only my first fandom!
I was bored and I wanted another show to get into. While consoling myself with the FK Nick/LC slashfic, I saw the promo photos started coming out for S3 due South. And although they weren't fantastic, I was like, Oooooohh, there's a nice slashy vibe here in these pics. (They were being posted on the web pages of people into both FK and dS -- usually with some cranky or bitchy comment about "the new guy.") Well, I didn't know anything about the show, really.
After I found out that CKR's character was going to be Ray, and this Mountie hottie was Fraser, and I stumbled onto pqlaertes' Acharnement. At the time I knew pqlaertes, not in RL but on the web, from her FK web page, by her real name (we were so innocent then! no one was on the Internet yet, really, so people used their real names! we never envisioned how it would permeate people's lives, later!).
Acharnement was the very first dS fic I ever read - slash, of course. But because I didn't know the existing Ray, I read that fic picturing CKR as "Ray" and PG as the RCMP Mountie, with nothing but promo pics to base it on). It's a great, angsty fic, and though I later realized it was Fraser/Vecchio. So the summer before the 1997 premiere of S3, Burning Down The House, I started dipping my toe in dS Ray/Fraser slash, except picturing CKR as Ray and the Mountie I had seen in those couple of episodes as Fraser.
At the time I read it, I was like, Oh, damn, MORE slashfic, YAY!! Except a lot of stories described a balding Italian detective, and I got very confused, because I honestly hadn't really noticed him in the two eps I had seen. Hey, man - "something red moving fast always draws the eye." What can I say.
So I'm anticipating the S3 premiere because the little hottie, CKR, from the Forever Knight episode Outside The Lines was gonna be on it. So when it came, I watched BDTH and I was like, where is the charismatic hotness of the dude in the Forever Knight ep Outside The Lines with the spiky blond hair? Why did they fuck up his hair and make it flat dishwater blond? I mean, he's cute, but he's not blasting the camera with his heat like he did on Forever Knight. But I thought: fuck it, I thought: I'll give it a chance - he has really nice hands (*g*), nice eyes, and a great smile plus he's kind of an inherently angsty character \o/.
So then the next ep was Eclipse and I was like HOLY FUCK THE SLASH OMFG WTF a;sldkjfal;skdjfal;sdjfasdlfjk (except of course omfg and wtf didn't exist as abbreviations back then). Ray "'do you find me attractive?' he asked the Mountie" Kowalski was so slashy and angsty - and, although lacking the dark edge and the vampires - I thought OK, I can really work with this slashy vibe!
So they finally got CKRs hair right in ICBAD and I was like, YES! THIS is the dude from the ForKni ep... and Oooooh, more slashiness... and then the next ep after that was Strange Bedfellows, where CKR not only gets to be all angsty, but he also got to have all those jilted, jealous, angsty, but also sexy dancing/kissing/romantic scenes with Anne Marie Loder (with whom I always thought he had amazing chemistry -- which might have been his first? or some of his earliest? romantic scenes, except for a couple made for Canadian TV things with Molly Parker that I hadn't yet seen).
And I was like, OK, stick a fork in me, I'm DONE... I was already doing the online fandom thing for ForKni, so I just kind of slid over into dS fandom. Huzzah!
But pretty much as soon as S3 began, the Ray wars began. And that was bad. RayK fans had to create their own space because we got pretty shit on in the main dS fandom. But in the MEANTIME, we were all just gushing and drooling over CKR on a near-daily basis because the hotness and the hands and the hair and the eyes and the hands and the chemistry with PG and the angsty role - and then people started copying some of his other made for TV stuff, and we FINALLY got our hands on HCL, and THEN we were all like, OMFG, Joe/Billy FOREVER...
But anyway, yeah. S3 of dS with CKR began in August or September '97, which was like half a year or a year after S3 of FK was canceled. I *think* that CKR actually probably began filming S3 dS not that long after he was on FK. But those S3 dS eps weren't actually broadcast until later.
This was all around the 94-96 time frame when CKR did stuff like FTWHTWD and HCL and his career had really started to pick up. But in economic terms, "those markets were closed to us" American fans, so there were long delays before we saw most of those -- and mostly when we did, it was because of the tape trees some Canadian fen had started to do because they thought he was a hottie too, and they had all the access to CKR, and we down here didn't.
HCL hadn't even gotten video distribution in the US in '97 when S3 dS was originally broadcast, because none of the distribution companies gave a shit about it until Tarentino's company picked it up. I bought it as an import VHS cassette the first time - I think that was mid-way or 2/3 of the way through S3 (S3/S4) dS. It wasn't until '98 or later that Tarentino's company FINALLY made HCL available domestically on DVD in the US. Somewhere around then.
Because remember, both FK and dS were the two little Canadian shows that could... and then couldn't. Both kept getting canceled at the end of each season, and then somehow revived. But each only managed to get revived after 2 cancellations. After the 3rd season of each, the networks involved (CBS on the American side) chose not to revive them, despite massive fan efforts, letter writing campaigns -- hell, for Forever Knight, we fen donated $$ to take out *billboards* in LA that could be seen by people driving in for work. All for nothing; it was never revived. And there was no Netflix to take it on, as has happened in recent years of great shows canceled by networks.
Anyway. I had written only one Forever Knight fic in all the time I was so heavily into the fandom. I read tons of it, at the time, though. And I had made a solo trip to Toronto to see the various locations where significant Forever Knight episodes and scenes were shot. Now I had another Canadian show to fall in love with - because of course, then I started asking on email lists if anyone had any due South episodes from previous seasons to share... and a kindly fan in Toronto, I think, whose name I can't recall - this was decades ago, the memory starts to fade! - sent me pivotal episodes from S1 and S2... and, well, then I really fell for the Fraser character, especially after seeing Victoria's Secret 1 & 2.
Man, I remember discovering all the slashfic for Forever Knight online and being like, ohmygod, I have hit the *jackpot* here... it's all mine... and all these people walking around have no idea people are freely trading explicit erotic m/m stories about fictional vampires online for fun - how cool is this?!
Like many, I sought asylum on the long-gone Asylum email discussion list, where it was all Fraser/Kowalski, all the time, with none of the Kowalski-hate that was routinely spouted during the 3rd season (S3-S4 was broadcast as one long season in the US, in the original broadcast). I was bitter for a while, but since the Ray Wars, I've seen the same thing happen in other fandoms, and learned of pre-dS fandoms where the same thing happened, and come to realize, that kind of character/actor bashing is fairly (sadly) typical in fandom.
And after a bunch of Asylum dS fen moved to LJ, all this Ray/Ray and Ray/Fraser/Ray fic started being written... and then DW came into being and people moved to DW and continued the Ray/Ray... and since I never hated Ray Vecchio (unlike the Kowalski-haters), of course I read some... and then I wrote some myself, both way back when, as well as more recently here and here. That helped me get over it.
And, like many veterans, that's about as much as I want to talk about it. I'm glad it's long past and it's not okay to character or actor bash anymore. (Although it still happens, but at least it is frowned upon now.)
Now, there were two other things that were really frowned upon when I first found dS fandom: RPF/RPS, and bad!Ben AUs. To the point that people shared these things secretly and you would only learn of these fics if you knew someone or they knew you would probably like it and wouldn't 'out' them. Back then, making "OFM" (Our Favorite Mountie, a common nickname for Fraser) into a bad guy was very, very frowned upon and a rather fringe-y thing to do. And there was no AO3 at the time.
If you like when Fraser isn't 100% good/upright/moral/nice/polite... or even when he's justifiably angry, then the bad!Ben fic page is still available via Wayback Machine.
Yes, I know it looks like nothing is there, because it's light text on a light background. To make the text come up:
1) if you're on a laptop, hit the Ctrl-A key sequence to highlight the entire page's text - et voila, bad!Ben fic to explore.
B. If on a smartphone, touch any faint word you can see, and then slide your finger down the entire page until all the text is selected, and presto: bad!Ben fic!
The authors of the bad!Ben page also created a dSc6d RPS page too... you can bring up the page text the same way (Select All).
I've even traveled because of my fandoms: my first trip to Toronto, alone, not even a dog - my dog had died, and I hadn't yet gotten another one - in the rally 90s was because of Forever Knight and an online "FK points of interest" list that I printed a hard copy of, and drove around and found all the points of interest SBD filming locations on my own. Wish I still had that, but it's lost to the sands and winds of time.
My last trip to Toronto was for due South RCW139, and that trip and another one were for fancons (although I am not a huge con-goer, I do occasionally go to cons... very occasionally). In between, there were a couple trips where I visited both FK and dS filming locations. I've made fandom friends - some who live very close to me, geographically; some who I met long ago and lost touch with countless computers and email accounts so - and I've just generally had so much fun and derived so much enjoyment from fannishness. And I have some bucket list items that I probably wouldn't have if it weren't for Forever Knight and due South. Yay!
So thank you, ds30below, for prompting this trip down memory lane. 💜😊
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Also sometime I want to natter at you about Forever Knight. I did a livebloggy thing when I sat down to watch it during lockdown--I caught some episodes of it when it aired because my sister was into it and into vampires in general, Anne Rice and all--so some of it was new and some of it was a revisiting of it. Some of it aged fantastically (most of seasons 1&2) and some of it aged really poorly (there's a couple of s3 episodes where I was like WHUT).
Fans feeling the need/desire to push others down in favor of their preferred characters is indeed something that's still a thing, though I like to think most people grow out of it. Or at least learn what is and isn't good to be aired in public, which amounts to the same thing.
Also looking at that list of top shows of 1993 just about took me out, lol. I remember there being controversies over Murphy Brown at the time, too. I'm glad we've come so far but I wish we could have gotten here a little faster, you know?
Thank you for this, it's a great got-into-fandom story!
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Duplex: The House With Two Faces by
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also, thanks for those links! bad!Ben isn't my cuppa, i'm too sappy even with my angst, but the RPS stuff—um, yeah, I'm into that, much as it still feels awkward to admit.
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So much has changed, yet much of it is still the same (all the great fic and fanart, for one thing!). 🙂
Enjoy the RPF/RPS!