Yknow what I LOVE about the Star Trek fandom? It’s ANCIENT. I had a talk with a nice old lady at the old persons home that my great grandma is in and she noticed my Spock shirt and was like “oh I love that show I thought the premise was lovely” and you all know THE PREMISE is trekspeak for spirk and I was like “do you accept the premise because I do” and she looked at me with the eyes of someone who is reliving their otp moments and she said “the premise is all I wrote about, dear” and we just talked about spirk for a hella long time and I just love how age doesn’t matter in this fandom you can be ninety and still be the biggest spirk bitch ever how rad is that
I was today years old when I learned that particular euphemism
I was also today years old. Fandom codes man
Reblogging to spread knowledge about the Premise, because I absolutely love that bit of fandom, and I want to make sure that it survives. (and yay to everyone who is part of today’s 10,000!)
Fanfic culture as we know it today owes so much to older fans, especially older women, who were obsessed with The Premise.
This was a world before widespread internet, before sites like fanfiction dot net let alone anything like AO3, and long before queer media became more widely acceptable. The Hays Code, which forbade Hollywood from depicting “sexual perversion” which gay representation was considered, was only repealed in 1968, and many still unofficially stuck to it and that part especially for longer. Original Star Trek was canceled in 1969, the same year as Stonewall. But in the early 70s, fans were collaborating and making fan zines containing writings about The Premise, distributing physical copies at conventions and creating mailing lists. Later came private email chains.
In a world with so many factors working against it, large groups of fans decided they were so invested in the idea of these two men together that they would MAKE ways to share their work and acquire new content from others.
Transformative fiction existed in ways before. Adaptations of other stories have existed about as long as stories have, and I’m sure people had written their own little reimaginings and “headcanon” side stories for themselves and friends before. But the culture of spreading it far and wide, of collaborating to do so… If it hadn’t been Spirk, maybe it still would have developed similarly later/slower, but we can’t be sure. In the world we have, though, we owe old ladies who loved The Premise everything. 🙏