"Kinda twisty and weird": queering the heterosexual romance in Buffy shipper fanfiction

Fanfiction, especially that which focuses on romance (otherwise known as shipper fic), has been so far mostly ignored by literary studies. However, shipper fic as a textual form can be rife with literary allusion, compositional complexity, and creative analysis worth examining. Instead of performing its analysis in essay form as literary criticism would, shipper fic creates narratives that add to, delete from, and transform already valued and rich hypotexts, combining the critical with the creative in a blurring of genres. By examining shipper fic about Spike and Buffy (or Spuffy) from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I argue that Spuffy shippers use their critical attention to heterosexual romance and their purposeful misreading of the canon hypotext as both creative (re)reading and (re)writing. The fic "West of the Moon, East of the Sun" does so to queer Buffy and the popular romance to fit Spuffy shippers' desires, and to make conventional structures subversive. But shippers can still perpetuate and create problematic norms and structures of their own. The fic "P-p-p-pick up a Plot for Vengeance" uses absurdism in its self-aware critique of its own fandom in ways that amplify the inevitability of dialogic influence. By examining these two pieces of shipper fanfiction, I hope to demonstrate the critical and creative depths and complexity of fanfiction, shipping, and popular romance. Both pieces work to "queer: their hypertext and its generic modes, showing that fanfiction and romance can have textual complexity worth more closely examining literarily, and that fanfictional shipping and readerly attraction to romance can be so much more than a simple misreading of the hypotext.