100 days of enemy recs: 83. Fake News

[melannen]

Fake News fandom was a HUGE part of my fandom life for quite a long time - a show with new episodes four nights a week will do that for you - hell, my default icon is still from that fandom. And yet, weirdly, I when I sat down to think of recs, there were very few fics that actually stuck in my memory? I guess, retrospectively, it was a fandom that was very much about the actual show, and about the people, for me, but there wasn't really all that much in the way of fanfic. And was there was, was nearly all short fic on tds_rps, which seems to sadly be long gone.

Anyway, for people who don't remember those halcyon days when we thought George W. Bush was the worst that American politics could possibly get, "Stephen Colbert" was the host of a comedy news show where he played a parody of a conservative pundit. (I suspect these days he would not even read as an exaggeration anymore...) His show was a spinoff of the Daily Show, a left-leaning, substantially more reality-based comedy news show, which is still going, but was then hosted by Jon Stewart. (Did Jon leaving the Daily Show put a curse on American politics? Look I'm not *not* saying that okay.) The real Stephen and Jon were good friends. The "character" Stephen was a deeply, deeply repressed gay man who had an obvious crush on Jon which he was in severe denial about (this was show canon) and Jon put up with him, for some reason. Obviously people shipped it!

Anyway, it looks like very little of the fic has made it to AO3, and all my old bookmarks are broken links to deleted LJs, and a lot of what is still up is very, very embedded in the time it was written and very specific show references, so this isn't going to be much of a recs list, but here is the fic that was linked in the one old bookmark I had that still worked:

• How Stephen Colbert Proved Jon Stewart Is a Lady (4853 words) by sarken
  Chapters: 1/1
  Fandom: Fake News RPF, Real News RPF, The Colbert Report FPF - Fandom
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: "Stephen" Colbert/Jon Stewart
  Characters: Keith Olbermann, Anderson Cooper, Jon Stewart, "Stephen" Colbert
  Additional Tags: Humor, lgbtfest, Report 'verse, Denial, gender issues
  Summary:

  Stephen says he "doesn't see gender." But he can't possibly be gay, so when he discovers he is attracted to Jon, Stephen concludes that Jon must be female.

Comments

[erinptah]

Well, if any of your broken bookmarks are also in my Jon/"Stephen" bookmarks...I have saved copies, in case that's helpful.

[ratcreature]

Before googling the connection just now I never realized your icon comic source was a Colbert Report thing!

[ivyfic]

Oh, I remember when "fake news" meant *this.*

[lannamichaels]

I am honestly annoyed that the term got re-defined to mean something else.

[lannamichaels]

And was there was, was nearly all short fic on tds_rps, which seems to sadly be long gone.

:(

This whole fandom was so much fun. Although every so often, one of the folks involved would mention knowing about slash, so there was a lot of locking going on to maintain the fourth wall.

(I suspect these days he would not even read as an exaggeration anymore...)

iirc he was even having that problem while the show was on the air. He started off as Bill O'Reilly and had to transition into Glenn Beck, and he constantly had problems with Poe's Law. I think one reason he ditched that character for good was because of that; at some point, you cannot escalate anymore.

[pauraque]

True story: At the time the show was running, I worked in a touristy location that sold souvenirs and T-shirts and novelty gifts and such, and among the books we had I Am America (And So Can You). One day, a customer came up to me with the book and said, "I have a question. We're visiting from Australia, and when we were in our hotel room we saw this man on TV. I thought he was a comedian and it was all a gag, but my wife thinks there are people who really believe this stuff. Which of us is right?"

I would have loved not to have had to tell him that they were both right.

[lannamichaels]

Oh, no.

(I don't think I ever actually finished that book. Was that the one where Samantha Bee kept coming in to say how they do things in Canada?)

[pauraque]

No, I believe that was America (The Book). (We sold that one too.)

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I remember when it was joked with more than some seriousness that you could just have guest comics be president and it would make more sense.

This was how we got through the hanging chads period.

[bemused_writer]

The Daily Show and Colbert Report were such big parts of my life back then! And I still keep up here and there. I was only ever peripherally aware of fandom elements, but I remember there was a really cool Colbert Report fan site that kept track of episodes and such.