Just a Curious Question (re: Buffy fanfic)

[Epsilon]

I've been tryig to branch out into non-anime fanfic recently. I read a lot of Buffy stuff. One thing I noticed: Xander gets all the love. I mean, he gets to be a Jedi, a warlock, a superhero and on and on...
Most of the time, this is via the conceit of using the Halloween episode (you know which one)...
BUT...
I have yet to read a single story where Willow, Buffy or any of the other cast ever get anything interesting out of the Halloween episode hijinks. Does anybody know one where someone else, other than Xander, has their life changed by that episode?
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Epsilon

[drakensis]

There's a recent one, can't recall the name off hand, where Dawn gets turned into Illyria.
There are quite a few where quite a number of people (Xander included) get affected - a personal favorite is:
Xander-Hog Day
www.grandt.com/XanderZone...TohonomikeD for Drakensis
Contagious, rampant insanity isnt against the rules.
D for Drakensis

You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.

[Guest]

www.fanfiction.net/s/2520472/1/
Ethan Rayne's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
In which EVERY SINGLE member of the Scooby Gang, including Joyce, Jenny, Giles, Cordelia, and Jonathan, get permenatly changed by their costumes.

[Xenoproctologist]

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There's a recent one, can't recall the name off hand, where Dawn gets turned into Illyria.

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Perhaps you mean Blue Dawn by Wise?

[CattyNebulart]

Dawn dresses up as Kirika. Arjen rewrote black sunrise and will rewrite the other suposedly, and he has markedly improved since the first time I recomended him.
www.fanfiction.net/s/1917383/1/
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

[jpub]

*blink* WTF?!

Umm, you're aware that the Xander-fic community is like a microscopic dot compared to the Spike and Angel communities, right?
Really, there's way more fic for like *any* major character in the show than there is for Xander.
And to be brutally honest, most of the Xander fic out there is Spike/Xander Slash. (Shudder)
--
Christopher Angel, aka JPublic
The Works of Christopher Angel

[drakensis]

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Perhaps you mean Blue Dawn by Wise?

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Yes, exactly.
D for Drakensis

You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.

[Custos Sophiae]

On ff.net, there are 111 pages of Xander fics, 323 pages of Spike fics, but only 20 pages of Xander/Spike fics. For comparison, Willow has 94 pages out of 1152 total.
Obviously, the precise ratios will differ in different archives and not all ff.net fics are correctly labelled, but it looks like Xander-centric stories are a respectable chunk of the fandom, and the majority of them aren't Spike/Xander.
I don't know off-hand of any stories centred on someone else's Halloween experience, but then as the only main character to end the show nominally normal, he's the one who most in need of a power-up - or so it would seem, quite falsely, to the many authors who don't get the point of his character.

[WengFook]

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20 pages of Xander/Spike fics.

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for which we can thank the our individual deities for this small favor..._______________________________
We are the swords in the darkness, the watchers on the walls. The fire that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn. The horn that wakes the sleepers. The shield that guards the realms of men. -The Brothers Black
_________________________________
Take Your Candle, Go Light Your World.

[Bob Schroeck]

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Dawn dresses up as Kirika.

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Oh yeah. I liked this; I just wish Arjen would start up again, as he seems to have just dropped off the face of the planet.
-- Bob
---------
...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...

[ECSNorway]

I had a brief e-mail on Arjen's Yahoo list earlier claiming that he is, in fact, still around and writing, and has new stuff coming 'soon'.
On another note, I've been enjoying Naitch03's Star Wars / Buffy crossovers. Buffy and Willow end up scattered through the SW galaxy by Glory's portal, and end up causing some fairly interesting changes to history. Buffy as Mace Windu's padawan is a precious, precious, darling thing to consider...
--
"I give you the beautiful... the talented... the tirelessly atomic-powered...
R!
DOROTHY!
WAYNERIGHT!
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[jpub]

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On ff.net, there are 111 pages of Xander fics, 323 pages of Spike fics, but only 20 pages of Xander/Spike fics. For comparison, Willow has 94 pages out of 1152 total.

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Bolded for emphasis. FF.net is *never* a particularly good indication of a fandom because they:
a) Don't like songfic.
b) Have a tendency to drive away authors.
c) Don't allow smut.

Based on my experiences with various communities in the Xander fandom, it's fairly obvious they're the minority. They're just a very *vocal* minority.

--
Christopher Angel, aka JPublic
The Works of Christopher Angel

[Custos Sophiae]

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FF.net is *never* a particularly good indication of a fandom because they:
a) Don't like songfic.
b) Have a tendency to drive away authors.
c) Don't allow smut.

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None of those would favour one character's fandom over another. It's not as if people are significantly more likely to write songfics about Spike than about Xander, or as if ff.net goes easy on Xander-fic authors. Smut is allowed on ff.net within limits, which are broad enough to encompass much slash - e.g over 200 pages of M-rated Harry/Draco stories.
For comparison, Google says there 64,000 pages for the search "Xander fanfic -Spike" and 263,000 for the search "Spike fanfic -Xander". Not all these pages are actual fanfics, but the fraction that are looks pretty similar, and the Xander-fic/Spike-fic ratio is fairly close to that for ff.net,
especially since I didn't attempt to exclude Spike in AtS fics.
Certainly, there are some archives where Spike-fic is overwhelmingly more popular than Xander-fic and some where he is rarely seen outside Spike's bedroom, but those archives are not necessarily a representive cross section of the fandom, even if they happen to be your main source of Buffy-fic. There are other, slightly smaller archive where Xander-fic predominates, and never the twain shall meet.
For all its many faults, ff.net does at least give a fairly representative random cross-section of the Buffy fandom.

[Bob Schroeck]

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On another note, I've been enjoying Naitch03's Star Wars / Buffy crossovers.

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Huh. Weird and compelling. I like, even if the writing quality's a little uneven.
-- Bob
---------
...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...

[Evil Midnight Lurker]

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I don't know off-hand of any stories centred on someone else's Halloween experience, but then as the only main character to end the show nominally normal, he's the one who most in need of a power-up - or so it would seem, quite falsely, to the many authors who don't get the point of his character.

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Thing is, the Xander-is-Everyman bit is driven home so much that people who would normally write self-insert fics are drawn to Xander-Sue instead.
And as for Halloween: in-canon, X is the only character who is shown to have retained some of the skills of his altered persona, long after the occasion. It crops up on several occasions. So the default assumption is that he's got some kind of minor mojo that let him and him alone hang on to the costume -- in light of which, swapping just his out seems like a logical spot for a divergence.
--Sam
"This is graveness."

[Epsilon]

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And as for Halloween: in-canon, X is the only character who is shown to have retained some of the skills of his altered persona, long after the occasion. It crops up on several occasions. So the default assumption is that he's got some kind of minor mojo that let him and him alone hang on to the costume -- in light of which, swapping just his out seems like a logical spot for a divergence.

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To be fair, Xander is the only character who actually got any sort of skillset out of it. What skill set would Willow (a ghost) and Buffy (a useless princess) have acquired?
And we don't know what (if anything) some of the others went as.
So, the answer to my question seems to be "Nope, except for a pair of fics, they're all Xander-Sue". Ah well.
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Epsilon

[Valles]

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To be fair, Xander is the only character who actually got any sort of skillset out of it. What skill set would Willow (a ghost) and Buffy (a useless princess) have acquired?

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Usually French, at least for the latter. Needlework, a couple times, I think.
Most of the fics I remember make a throwaway reference to that effect.
Ja, -n
(of course, there's always Provocation...)

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"

[Evil Midnight Lurker]

The one I want to see is "What if Cordy bought her catgirl suit at Ethan's shop?"
~
--Sam
"Egad! Too much anatomy!"

[ECSNorway]

The Vathara fic pointed to above (Ethan Rayne's No Good Very Bad Day) has Cordy buying a ... different ... costume, from Ethan's shop.
It's quite good, do check it out.--
"I give you the beautiful... the talented... the tirelessly atomic-powered...
R!
DOROTHY!
WAYNERIGHT!
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.