I seek a fandom lost to the ages

[kitewithfish]

 This weekend I watched SPEED (1994) for the first time and holy shit, this movie demands a fandom. Where. Where is the fic? 

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

I suspect it's like Footloose -- everyone cites it or uses it for fusion fics, but hardly anyone writes directly for it.

[kitewithfish]

Weirdly, I think that fandom may have missed the trope fest that this film was! And, to be fair, I have missed Footloose, so I think that it's entirely possible for me to have been missing references to that film in fic for... basically my entire life. (Footloose predates me.)

(and here's where I get indulgent with my curiosity - bear with me!)

I did some Fandom Science, aka, I played with the filters on AO3, and it looks like there are only about 5 fic that use the tag "Speed (1994)" without using the main canon pairing "Anne Porter/Jack Traven" - https://bit.ly/2X1HtsR (a couple seem to be using the Speed characters but not tagged correctly)

So, 5 fic is still not nothing, and I'm going to bet that only the most faithful of tropey adaptations actually bothered to tag for Speed as a source. Footloose (1984) has 13 fic on AO3 (including the source material's characters) so, yeah, maybe there are lots of untagged tropey fic out there that are just relying on us to pick up the themes without tagging.

I suspect I have just missed the boat for the fandom on this movie - it is from 1994, so it predates Livejournal, as well as AO3, so it's entirely possible that the majority of the fandom for this fic was IRL or mailing lists or zines.

[yourlibrarian]

I came up with 7 but the point remains. I think that Footloose has remained more popular for various reasons -- it was a musical, it has been remade, it was a theater production, and it gets cited regularly in other works (for example, Guardians of the Galaxy).

However Speed has an important factor working against it that probably mitigated any fandom works even from the late 90s -- there was a sequel but it broke up the pairing because Keanu Reeves wouldn't return. And back in the 90s slash was still considered controversial, meaning that most fandoms would have written primarily if not exclusively for the het pairing. So that not only reduces the amount of fic that is available, the lack of recurring characters and the break up of the main pairing pretty much sinks it.

[kitewithfish]

However Speed has an important factor working against it that probably mitigated any fandom works even from the late 90s -- there was a sequel but it broke up the pairing because Keanu Reeves wouldn't return.

Yup - this is an important element. I am clearly going to have to ignore Speed 2 to make this pairing work.