Art by KOZ

Miami Vice Slash. Early 'shippers' (long before that word was coined) saw this pairing probable due to the repeated close conversations and UST. I mean, these two talked face to face like divers buddy-breathing so often you wanted to yell "just kiss him" at the screen three of four times per season.

Unfortunately, this early slashship precluded the blossoming of the Crockett/Tubbs stories. In some instances C/T were summarily dismissed as 'un-saleable' by print fanzine editors that wanted to break even on their small print runs. (It is incredibly expensive to produce a pulp zine.)

In a way, I think this early rejection worked out for the C/T works written after 2000. They missed the whole Mann-dated attack on MV fandom at large - when executive producer Michael Mann threatened all of fandom with legal action. The Mann event chilled publication of transformative works in the VIce 'verse. Mind you, it didn't stop us from writing, but it did slow publishing, and it almost killed the fandom. Almost.

Of course Miami Vice persevered despite Mann's attempt to forget it (he admits that he gets bored easily). As streaming and DVDs found new audiences and the new audience chattered on social media, it developed new fans. With some of those fans came the desire to create... and the transformative fiction followed. And it is GOOD fan fiction. The plots are sound, the tension high, the characterizations solid, and the sex... well, the sex is hot.

As the times changed we became able to express ourselves with a new cultural awareness of our sexuality. Suddenly we can forego the Bi-erasure paragraphs and get into the self-acceptance fun by exploring these relationships anew. And some of the best exploration is the relationship between Sonny and Rico. There are some fabulous writers stepping into the Testarossa... taking it OUT of the closet.