by Ari
One of my beloved pastimes is falling down wiki rabbit holes. TVTropes is an eternal favorite, Wookieepedia will sometimes do it for me, but in the past year I’ve been spending more time on Fanlore.org, an OTW-run wiki for cataloging 50+ years of fandom.
Often, I start somewhere in the “whump” corner. I babysit the whump page, tweaking it, cleaning it up, slowly trying to make it longer, more specific, more useful. The origins of whump as a fandom concept are particularly fascinating to me. When was the term “whump” first used? (In the Stargate SG-1 fandom in the ‘90s.) When did the term “caretaker” originate? (On Tumblr, less than five years ago.) I love poking into other corners of fandom, looking for other whump-adjacent terms like Mulder!torture and “get ‘em”. It was on a Fanlore deep dive seeking new juicy tidbits of fandom history that I discovered a page with the title, “Timeline of Hurt/Comfort Meta”. The history of whump as a fandom concept intrigues me, and here was a neatly organized list of essays and articles unpacking h/c tropes! Perfect! Just up my alley.
Only two pieces pre-1990 are listed: an article by Star Trek TOS queen of zines Connie Faddis and fanwriter Becca Oroukin, and a critical meta-fic by filk singer Leslie Fish. (Alas, it lacks any recent content from Tumblr. If we tried to include all of the excellent meta that’s appeared on Tumblr in the past five years, of course, the page would swell beyond a useful size.)
In true wikiwalk fashion, off I headed to the page for the Faddis/Oroukin article which was entitled, “To Slay or Not To Slay?” The fanlore page included intriguing quotes like, “We “hurt” Spock or Kirk or whoever, because they replace/represent the person(s) we really want to get back at,” (we do?) and “ultimately, good tragedy and drama are not usually concerned with the suffering itself, but with the dignity with which it is endured, or the strength with which it is conquered.” (Yes! Yes, that’s it!) What it didn’t include was a link to the entire article.
“Wouldn’t it be cool,” I thought to myself, naively, “if Wince could archive this?”
The innocent passive tense there obscures the fact that I was setting myself up for a considerable amount of work. The article wasn’t available online. Scans of Interphase #3 are not online. Left and right, dead ends. I am neither an archivist nor a historian and, as I am sure you remember, the world of November of 2020 was still in the throes of a pandemic. I couldn’t exactly waltz into a nearby university library and request their assistance. The zine library at the University of Iowa was running on a skeleton crew and only offers limited digital access, even in Precedented Times.
I turned to a beloved librarian friend who, while not a whumper, has always been extremely patient when I bring up my proclivities, and to haich-slash-cee, my go-to person for rambling about fandom history. As far as we could tell, there were two barriers to publication: first, acquire article. Second, find out if we could publish it.
After a few more dead ends I went back to Fanlore where I’d started. I cold emailed the fanlore user who’d originally posted the featured images of To Slay…., guessing that if anyone had scans of the whole article, they would.
They didn’t, but they had something better: a fandom friend who not only had scans but was in contact with Connie Faddis. “She usually says yes to this sort of thing,” I was told, “but you might have to wait a while for permission.” While I waited, she sent me scans of the whole article for personal use.
I read it, I thought about it, I read it again. Aspects of it surprised me. There were more excerpts than I’d anticipated. They mostly leaned towards Spock!whump, which surprised me for the mundane reason that I personally prefer Kirk!whump. (What can I say — the recent reboot films made many mistakes, but casting Chris Pine as Captain Kirk was not one of them.) Our fandom mothers, on the other hand, seemed very preoccupied with Spock, his green blood, and making the latter substance appear on the outside of our poor Starfleet officer. “Yes, yes, yes,” I kept thinking as I reached near the end of the article. “Vulcans have green blood. We get it. We know.”
When the initial excitement of acquiring the earliest whump meta I was aware of wore off, I set myself to the arduous task of transferring four thousand words from scans to editable, searchable, copyable text. “You’ll need to do a lot of copyediting,” I’d been warned. “Image-to-text converters don’t like this font very much.”
The image-to-text converter particularly hated the word “Spock”, unfortunate given that it appears 42 times in the article. I spent hours wading through words that looked like this, ironing the transcription program’s output back into readable English:
Far too late, I considered whether or not it would have been easier just to type it in manually.
A few days later, Connie got back to me and gave Wince permission to archive To Slay. (You can read it here, if you haven’t already.) Several rounds of edits later (from both Claire and myself, mostly looking for transcription errors while reformatting the quotes and excerpts for WordPress), the essay went out to a fresh audience for the first time in forty years.
It seems to resonate with people, both on points of analysis and also as an artifact of the early days of whump, before we even had that term. My not-so-secret agenda is hoping it awakens an interest in fandom history in more whumpers That it sparks joyful introspection of why we like what we like, and how our understanding of that has grown in the past forty years. I hope the brutal descriptions of Spock’s various tribulations also further inoculate us against quaint ideas about what middle aged women, left by themselves to the exercise of fandom, are really interested in.
I want to add more to this early canon of whump writing. Partly, I find it fascinating on a fandom history level, but I also find it validating. The darkfic, the brutality, the catharsis, the introspection, the question of why we are creating this content in the first place — they’ve been around since the birth of modern fandom.
If your interest has been piqued, the biggest way you could help is by putting us in touch with people who have written h/c adjacent meta that’s not available on the internet (or only via the Internet Archive). (This might include contacting us directly, if you’ve been creating fandom content for a while!) It’s not just zine content that interests us but early webring / mailing list era writing, or even works published on Live Journal.
If you’re interested in fandom history but aren’t super interested in re-typing a 4,000 word article you spent three months tracking down, elbows-deep in copyediting descriptions of green blood, that’s totally fair! We’re also interested in publishing reflections on early fanfic. If you’re down for examining a piece but aren’t sure where to start, I would be happy to send you a list.
Ari is the founder and head editor of Wince. They’ve been whumping since they were a teeny thing and talking about it on Tumblr since 2014. While not managing Wince they work in science communication. They would not take a one-way ticket to Mars, but they would take a two-way option.
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