There's a bunch of iddy (such a good word) S/X, but I never found as much iddy A/S. Sometimes I think it has to do with the feasibility of the ship. If you're gonna ship S/X, might as well go whole hog. If you're gonna ship Sam/Dean, you probably had that initial "uh, but can I hack that it's incest?", you realize that it's not going to happen on the show, usually if you're reasonable you don't even want it to happen on the show, and so there's this whole world of, "I JUST WANT THIS TO HAPPEN IN MY HAPPY PLACE, where there are elves and knitting." That's my take on it, anyway. I feel like for SPN, the crack spreads to other things, because the inception of the fandom (and so, for a long time, the mainstay of the fandom) was total and utter crack to begin with.

But that's just my impression.

Dean/Cas is the ship I can see but not feel. Sam/Dean is the ship I feel but can't support.

Funny thing, I was just thinking this through today, so forgive me if I get a little carried away.

I ship Dean/Cas but I get your point. I think I latched onto them out of sheer frustration. No ship was particularly appealing to me and I loved this show so much at that moment - it felt strange. I am capable of adoring a series/movie/book/whatever without having a strong shipping preferences but when I get fannish about something, usually along comes the OTP. Sam and Dean are the powerhouse of SPN and I do understand the vigorous enthusiasm some people ship them with. Personally, I find their relations so deliciously complex that I don't really need sex coming in-between. I am invested anyway. But I couldn't support them as a stable ship regardless - the incest angle is one thing (the biggest, actually; as I am squicked by it), my reading of the sexuality of the characters is the other.

Brief summary of my conclusion: it would be at best one-sided and even more dysfunctional than it already is. Basically, I read Sam as very hetero and the only crush he could have had on Dean would have been in his teens, than would have probably disappeared by the time he hit 13. Dean (who seems to me like a very very repressed bi or at least bi-curious) being in love with Sam I could sort of wrap my head around, with great effort, but all of his canon feelings for his brother mixed with sexual desire - his poor head would explode and not in the funny way. I admit having read few Wincest fics but they were always twisted and unrequited. And as much as I normally enjoy darker and angstier ships, I love this boys to much to wish this kind of heartbreak for them or myself.

Dean/Cas is not puppies and rainbows either, but I can contemplate the romantic and the ugly sides without having to worry about that damn incest. And it's as close to canon as it could get on a male-oriented, hetero-sexist (well, it's unfortunately true) show. I am grateful - although I would prefer if there was a fleshed-out lady for me to pair with Dean. Dean/Lisa is my second favourite thing, for lack of an alternative.

Edited at 2012-03-01 02:22 am (UTC)

LOL That's true about SPN fandom. I actually remember that Jared/Misha prompt.
Or not. Who knows if I've actually seen it. *shifty eyes* But you're right. For all that fandom loves its hardcore, we really, really, really like sappy drama too.

BtVS fandom went through its big human AU boom a few years back (and it's still really popular in Spander) but outside of a few weirdities like penguin AUs and the Fairy Spike craze, I don't think we've had anywhere NEAR the amount of sheer cracked-out WTF that some of the newer fandoms have. I think that cracky AUs came into their own with SGA fandom, though I could be wrong.

(Being an old fuddy duddy, I'm not convinced we're missing that much.)

My extremely faulty memory says that human AUs existed while the show was on, but they didn't get super-popular until the show was over. Maybe 2004-5-ish? I remember reading one that was serialized on a mailing list back when the show was on and thinking that it was very unusual. However, I could be wrong about that.

There were a few big subgenre booms like that, most noteably a period where you couldn't spit without hitting a slavefic, but for reasons that elude me, they seem to be more popular and long-lasting in m/m slash pairings than in het pairings, and least popular in f/f pairings. (Maybe because there are so relatively few f/f stories that people who are fans of them don't have the opportunity to exhaust more conventional scenarios and get bored and jaded?)

I don't see the Katherine=Angelus, TBH, other than that they both cause trouble and sometimes kill people.

But Katherine was never good, where Angel sort of was. Tell me what you think about Angelus comparisons later, lol.

If anything, I think Katherine's more like Darla.

Hmm, it's hard to draw straight lines between the two fandoms, I think? It's not like BtVS doesn't have, "And then Spike brings Buffy soup" and whatnot.

But I think SPN and SPN RPF invites a greater variety of Weird Stuff. Maybe it's because of the kink meme communities (which give people safe space to do whatever, whether it be hardcore sex stuff or werepanda h/c fluff, which can then be popularized and moved into the more "respectable" areas of fandom proper?). Actually, that would fit in very well with what you're saying about id, since places like blindfold (now gone!) and the kink meme had/have people requesting *exactly what they wanted* anonymously in a place where shaming, etc. wasn't allowed. So, there could be someone else going, "YES! I've always wanted to write the fic where Sam's sideburns achieve sentience!" And it just goes from there?

It's funny...but my pie!fic is plenty weird for Spuffy and pretty humdrum for SPN (and I think when I wrote it, I either wasn't reading SPN or had just started reading Dean/Cas, which would not have been the kind of Weird we're talking about, so I don't *think* I was influenced, there). My plant baby thing is basically nothing on the grand scale of Weird.

1. PLEASE ELABORATE LOL