I've come full circle.

 So I ended up setting aside my worries about spoiling Raising Steam for myself and my worries about not being familiar enough with the characters anymore to properly appreciate the fics and decided to go ahead and read the discworld fics I was interested in from my reading page, and I started with this one.

I immediately became attached to the Vetinari/Drumknott ship.

This is. Uh.

Okay. Let me paint you a picture of my first encounter with slashfic, way back in 2003 when I had just learned that fanfiction was a thing on the internet, and not just in my mom's star trek zine best-of compilations. (They were published books, and as such had to pass muster at Paramount, and as such could do no more than... imply things that I was too young and too autistic to catch.)

I was raised in a conservative Christian sect, and for the most part, I didn't see a reason to question the stuff they were telling me.

One of my friends was like "hey, you know they have fanfiction of stuff online?" and handed me some het final fantasy fix-it fic he was fond of. I did not get into it, having not played the games, but I was. Really into Discworld at the time. 

The first slashfic I encountered was Vetinari/Rincewind, and I was majorly squicked.

Looking back, this was probably because I uhhhh... don't like Rincewind very much. I enjoyed the Wizards books, but some of Pratchett's characters - Rincewind and Moist von Lipwig in particular - seem to me to be more of a vehicle for interesting events than actually interesting characters in and of themselves.

However, at the time I was like "Oh. This is what slashfic is. It is gross."

Therefore, my first posted fic ever on this earth was an extremely embarrassing in retrospect, quite pointed meta-ish piece about how Vetinari just needed to meet the right girl.

I mostly read and wrote gen fic for the next few years, and wrote more than I read. Once ideas for my Amazing Maurice fic petered out, I drifted away from Discworld fic and didn't really look back. The only really shippy thing I posted during that time was a firefly fic featuring River Tam/Fess Higgins.

Then, in 2012 I was reading gen Avengers fic and I encountered a pre-slash ficlet for The Right Slash Pairing.

I mean, it probably helped that I had just gotten divorced and was questioning a lot of things I had thought I'd known about how life and romance worked. But also it was just a magical combination of two characters who I looked at and went "Yes. They should kiss."

So frostiron took everything I was questioning and gave it clear answers, like "this feeling, when you look at stony art, that is the notp feeling, not a reaction to the concept of slash itself." and "yes, you really do think same-gender relationships are totally okay."

I've done several big slash fandoms since then, gotten into polyamory as a concept, and also discovered that I myself am queer as fuck, agender aromantic, currently once again questioning the exact term for my weird fluid slice of asexuality.

Then this year, sixteen years after my entirely embarrassing freakout of a first posted work, sheith art led me to Voltron, Voltron led me to Ina Leifsdottir, who I headcanon as not really reading a lot of fiction but loving the Tiffany Aching series to bits, that led me to reread the Tiffany Aching series, and when tumblr did its distasteful policy change and I came here, I thought, "ooh, Discworld content, I would like to seek out some Discworld content again" and here we are.

A story in which my favorite character of all time in the Discworld, Sam Vimes, looks at Vetinari having a romantic relationship and is squicked. Where he is led to question his assumptions on the topic. 

Where Vetinari is shown having a relationship with a man and it's straight up adorable to me. It makes me squee the way my favorite ships do, and I'm not even that up on my Vetinari/Drumknott dynamics anymore.

Anyway, it's a real weird juxtaposition that brings into focus just how much my attitudes have changed since I last considered Vetinari as a character in slashfic.