Snowflake Challenge, day 5: canons
Challenge #5: In your own space, promote a canon/talk about a part of canon that you love. Whether it is to fix-it, honor it, or expand upon it, canon is why we are all here. So, let's celebrate canon today and talk about our favorites. Nostalgic, new, problematic, or forever canons are all welcome to be loved, dissected, and discussed. Have a favorite scene? A much-loved character? A much-maligned character? Just love the whole thing epically? Talk about it all or as little as you want!
I've done "deep dives" into individual canons in past Snowflakes, and the ones I'm feeling particularly fannish at the moment are all ones I've done before, and not too long ago. So I decided to try a different approach -- I took a look at my tags, and decided I'd speak a little bit (lol, OK, mostly a lot) about any fandom that appeared in my tags more than 50 times. It so happened that there were 13 of those, which felt like a manageable number. And they turned out to span a nice range of canons, too -- nostalgic favorites and fandoms I never expected to get into, canons where I was involved in online fandom and ones I've shared with my kids, fandoms where I read a lot of fic and canons where I produced some fanworks and canons where really I just like reading/watching and discussing the source canon and don't consume fanworks at all, book and TV show fandoms, canons I consider essentially perfect and canons I still care about only grudgingly, etc. So, a nice range along all kinds of axes.
Plus, it seems like a good sort of "fandom intro" post to have around.
I considered whether I should go in alphabetical order or chronological-for-me order, and I think alphabetical is a better way to organize it for people reading, so:
A Song of Ice and Fire -- I've had such a weird trajectory with this canon! I remember first seeing the books when I was in college, and reading the prologue of the first book and being like, ugh, what are these names, why can't he just use real names. But eventually I came back to it and read the first two books, which were the ones that were out at the time, and found them interesting enough, but not something that won me over immediately, so I wasn't keeping track of sequels. Somewhere in there I did read the first two Dunk & Egg stories in the Legends anthologies, but it didn't make me go track down the other main timeline books, until several people on my f-list started posting about reading ASOIAF when A Feast for Crows came out, and then I was like, oh yeah, I should go back to those. Which I finally did in late 2006, and disvcovered that A Storm of Swords contained the things it would take for me to go from reasonably enjoying the books as an epic fantasy series to LOVING them -- Jaime Lannister's POV and House Tyrell. It turned out that while the worldbuilding and plot were interesting enough, what I was actually here for was Jaime Lannister's unexpectedly compelling perspective and redemption arc, the tyrannical competence of Lord Tywin, and Olenna Tyrell's snark. I blazed through ASoS and AFfC in less than three weeks, went looking for fics (then only available in locked comms because GRRM disapproved of fic), fanart, meta, and whatever else I could find.
In 2008, ASOIAF arrived in the world of stamping comms (with asoiaf_stamp, which of course I immediately joined, and was stamped as Petyr Baelish (I actually like Littlefinger a lot as a character, so I was OK with the, heh). The stamping comm was fun, but the important thing is that it led me to westerosorting, which was a sorting community and landcomm (created by deeplyunhip, cyshobbitlass, and honest_illusion) where Great Houses competed to earn points to win the Game of Thrones. I was sorted into House Tyrell, which becamse probably the strongest fannish association for me (though I love sorting and tend to collect these fannish sortings whenever I can). I'm pretty sure it was also the awesomeness of everyone at westerosorting that kept me in the fandom as long as I stayed, the brilliance of the fic, art, and humour produced by the community, and just how amazing everyone was -- a significant portion of my current flisters and especially close online friends started out as people I met on there (including several who are now full-fledged, stayed-at-my-house, met-my-family RL friends) -- and many of the ones who no longer are are people I really miss. This was also the canon/community that got me to produce the first fannish works in at least 10 years, and the first that I posted online (I think this was the very first), that got me venturing into graphics making, and in general had me doing something other than lurking in an online fandom. There were a great handful of years in here!
I don't think I would've stayed in the fandom for nearly as long without westerosorting, but, well, all good things come to an end. By the time A Dance with Dragons finally came out in 2011, I was losing my interest in discussing the existing canon, and the new canon actually wasn't all that much to my liking. The excitement leading up to the first season of Game of Thrones was invigorating, and I enjoyed the first season to a reasonable degree, but once we were up to season 2, I couldn't be bothered to keep watching. For the next couple of years, until late 2013 / early 2014, I was still in the fandom, reading fic and helping to mod the landcomm, but it was purely because of westerosorting itself (my Tumblr tag for ASOIAF at this point -- this was in the brief period when I was actually ON Tumblr -- was even "staying together for westerosorting"). And then the activity on the landcomm itself petered out, as fandom moved on to show-centric places and modes of engagement (we were a book comm that required having read the first 4 books to join). And I've basically not consumed any canon and very little fic or meta since.
It's possible that when The Winds of Winter finally comes out (if it ever gets published, that is), I will still care enough to read it. But I haven't actually planned seriously for such a slim/distant eventuality :P But regardless, my allegiance to House Tyrell is forever (as my very shiny T-shirt and an assortment of other swag will testify -- much of it gifted to me by westerosorting friends -- and many of the friendships made in that comm have transcended and survived multiple fannish obsessions.
Avatar: The Last Airbender -- I vaguely remember the show being a thing when it was first airing, but it looked like anime, which is a medium I avoid, so I never paid any attention to it. I'm actually not sure anymore what made me finally pick it up -- maybe there was general nostalgia for it on my f-list in anticipation of Legend of Korra coming out in a couple of months? Timing would be about right for that, since I started watching it in December 2011. I remember picking up the season 1 DVD at the library and figuring that if I didn't like it, at least my kids (then 10 and 8) seemed likely to enjoy it, so it was worth a shot. We started watching it together, and it was GREAT! I loved the premise -- elemental magic is a big magical worldbuiding favorite of mine, and here it was done really well -- and the characters grew on me over time. Sokka was my clear favorite early on, followed by Uncle Iroh, but that's because my even-more-favorites didn't join the cast until the later seasons -- Toph and Azula. Azula in particular became a favorite character who transcends her original fandom for me, and would be near the top of any list of favorite antagonists. She was also the first time I encountered a female character in the role of, essentially, The Dragon, which proved to me that I love characters in this role regardless of gender (I'd wondered about that). And then of course there's Zuko: while I don't love him as much as the other four, he definitely has the best character arc, which also transcends this specific fandom.
The cool thing about AtLA was that it was the first (and possibly still only, to this day?) fandom that I discovered simultaneously with my kids, which we were all fannish about. For a while there, though it never happened, I was helping them plan AtLA-themed Halloween costumes (Zuko and Azula; let's say there are certain similarities, despite the flipped birth order). It was neat to have all these fannish references we shared ("Most of it self-inflicted" and "No, Fire Lord Ozai, YOU are not wearing any pants" are the ones that get tossed around the most).
I did watch Korra as the show was airing, and had decent amounts of fun with the first season and the third (the second was not my favorite, but I had enough people on my flist watching that it made for a neat communal experience anyway), and for a while kept up with the graphic novels. Haven't read the new Kyoshi books yet, though I've liked F.C.Yee's Genie Lo books, so will probably check them out at some point, even though this part of the worldbuilding isn't actually all that interesting to me. I'd also been looking forward to rewatching AtLA when it showed up on Netflix finally, but after a couple of episodes came to the conclusion that the rewatch just wasn't doing the thing for me that it seemed to be doing for a lot of other people (I don't mean shipping Sokka/Zuko -- I shipped them the first time around :P -- but just, like, whatever was keeping so many folks rewatching and feeling all fannish again). I absolutely still love the show, but I'm starting to think that the fannish experience of it is tied to watching it specifically with my kids, and experiencing it on my own or with online fandom is just not going to be able to recapture it. Which is OK -- I'm happy to know so many people are discovering this show for the first time and falling in love with it and that the fandom is having a Renaissance; I don't need to be actively part of it to get a warm feeling from that. (My daughter, now a college student, is successfully rewatching it, but that's because she's introducing it to her boyfriend.)
Babylon 5 -- I like to joke that Ivanova was my junior prom date, but that actually is how my acquaintance with the fandom started: the geeky high school friend with whom I went to prom spent most of the evening telling me about this great sci-fi show he was watching, and especially about this awesome character Ivanova (possibly because, like her, I'm Jewish and Russian-born). Anyway, whatever he told me intrigued me enough that when he suggested I try to start watching the show at an episode where it would be easy to "jump on" -- season 2's "And Now for a Word", I took him up on it, and was hooked enough to watch religiously after that point through the next three and a half seasons. (I did eventually catch up on season 1 and the first half of season 2, when they had the reruns on TNT, but this is doubtless one of the reasons I never warmed up to Sinclair -- Sheridan was my first captain.) Mid-season 2 was actually a pretty good place to start watching, as the Great War arc is by far my favorite part of the show, and it's those middle seasons that best show off the things I most admire about B5 -- the depth and range of the alien characters (Londo, G'Kar, Delenn, Lennier, and Vir are all among my favorite characters), the scope and sweep of the epic conflict. B5 was also the first fandom where I followed a fannish community (The Lurker's Guide, which I'm so happy is still around in all its 90s website glory 25 years later), although I never did anything but lurk.
One of the really amazing things about B5 is how enduring it is.
ruuger has a wonderful post about fannish communities: Fandom is a city, and what they say about B5 is 100% reflective of my exerience:
Babylon 5 is also not a city. It is a desert, with ancient ruins that suggest that once, very long time ago, it was the home of something magnificent. But it's not a scary place, so you find yourself a nice shelter beneath some crumbled wall and light a fire. Suddenly you realise that there's someone standing next to you. 'Don't mind me,' they say, 'I just wanted to ask if you've watched that bit yet.'
By which I mean that, much as my own encounter with B5 began when a friend coaxed me into watching the show, that's kind of been my theme as a B5 fan too. First I got my best friend into watching the show with me. Years later, a succession of LJ friends discovered the show (well, in some cases the discovery happened when I handed them my DVDs :P), and I got to do exactly the thing described above and gleefully watch them get to one epic scene after another -- Mr Morden! G'Kar's epiphany! Delenn addressing the EarthGov military! the scene set to gospel music, you know the one! Vir's little wave! -- and fall in love with this show. Eventually my kids were old enough that I watched the show with them, too, and boggled at them preferring Sinclair to Sheridan, and giggled as they figured out Centauri anatomy. For a 20-year-old show, it held up pretty well!
I think of all of my fandoms, B5 is the one that has been a communal experience from start to finish -- I don't think much about it on my own, I was never fannish about it in a way where I wanted to create something for it -- but I followed a friend into it, have loved sharing it with other friends, reading about the show and the fandom -- and hearing about it, too: The Audio Guide to Babylon 5 was a Snowflake Challenge rec I picked up several years ago, which has been extremely relevant to my interests. And just being able to nod to other fans -- oh, you're a fan, too. Like, when I was wandering around Worldcon 2018 in a succession of fannish shirts, the only one that drew a comment was my B5 T-shirt (from the 90s, a birthday present from the best friend I got into the show) -- a random guy complimented me on it and said how much he loved the show, and shared that his wife was a Russian Jew like Ivanova. Which felt fitting, in a full circle kind of way. :)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- though they're contemporary shows, while I got into B5 when it was airing originally, it took me until late 2012 to finally get around to watching Buffy, and only because a friend (
lunasariel, who was one of the folks I got into B5) gave me the first season DVD. I avoided BtVS for ages because I don't like vampires and they were right there in the title, so why would I do that to myself? I watched the first couple of discs, still tentative, but found it was actually pretty fun to be watching a show set in high school in the 90s, since that's when my own high school years were. And while I still dind't find the vampires very interesting, I did find myself liking some of the characters quite a lot -- Xander and Willow pretty much from the start, joined by Giles in those early seasons, joined by Cordelia, Faith, Spike, and Anya as the show went on. I started respecting the show as a whole, too, after the season 1 finale. I am actually still not fully done with canon -- I stopped just short of "Seeing Red" in my binge; possibly at some point I will get over the hump and finish out season 6 and watch season 7, but I've also been told where I am is a decent stopping point, so I've not been in a hurry to do so. There are definitely aspects of this show that don't work for me at all -- Angel except when he's evil (sorry, Angel and B/A fans on my flist!), most of the romantic relationships and all of the drama manufactured to keep changing them around, several of the Big Bads -- but I do really love a large number of the characters, and some of the episodes are really, really good.
When my daughter was in high school, one of her teachers randomly showed them an episode of Buffy, and I jumped at the chance and asked if she wanted to watch them properly -- and she did, so we started a watch together in 2015. Progress has been uneven, especially as daughter moved on to college, so we're currently still mid-season 4, but it's been a fun fandom to share with her, especially as it gives her a (slightly vampire-infested) glimpse at what my high school era was like :)
Discworld is a huge favorite of mine, but I already talked about it for a past Snowflake here. These books are amazing, and I was just telling
eglantiere that this is one series/author I wish I'd met at an earlier age -- but even reading them for the first time as an adult made an indelible impression on me.
Dragaera is another huge favorite, but ditto. (The awesome thing about talking about it for Snowflake last year was that several flisters actually picked up the book, either to read right away or to pencil in for next (i.e. this) year, which I've been incredibly happy about.
The Dresden Files is a canon I'm kind of grumpy at, at the moment -- the moment being, I've read Peace Talks, which I found wholly unsatisfying, and spoiled myself for Battle Ground. And of the active fandoms on this list, it's probably the one I'm most conflicted about/frustrated by, the most grudgingly a fan of. There are a lot of things I like about these books -- I love Thomas, Ramirez, Kincaid and his relationship with Ivy, Marcone, Butters, Murphy, Molly; I love a lot of the snarky one-liners and fannish references. But I'm increasingly unsure I like where the books are going, or at least I definitely prefer Dead Beat and Proven Guilty type shenanigans to apocalyptic whatsits. I also get really annoyed at Harry's "chivarly" nonsense, and blood family nonsense (and wish I had a better feeling for how much of that was Harry's POV/unreliable narrator vs stuff Butcher actually believes, though, ultimately, does it even matter if I have to read it?) I expect that, as with previous low points, I'll get over my grumpiness and start enjoying the series more -- after 16 novels, I'm way too invested in these people to jump off now, probably. And I do want to know how the whole thing ends. But, well, right now, it appears we're on a break :P
Firefly -- I think I remember seeing the ads for Firefly on FOX when it was airing originally, and thinking, "what a dumb idea, a sci-fi show that's basically a Western", so I never watched it, of course, because why would I watch a Western? But in 2008, the short-lived Dresden Files TV show was up on Fancast (which doesn't seem to exist anymore), and after I finished catching up on that, I looked about for other things I could watch, and they had the full run on Firefly, so I decided to give it a shot, having heard great things about it online, because, let's face it, it's impossible not to. And, like, I'd never been mugged by a fandom before: I binged the whole thing in, I dunno, something like two days, and then watched it the whole way through again IN THE NEXT FOUR DAYS (I am a person who, a) doesn't watch TV in the first place, really, and b) pretty much never rewatches things), because I needed more and couldn't get my hands on Serenity until about a week after I finished my first run-through. And then spent the next month in a Firefly-haze, watching all the bloopers and interviews and commentary, reading reams of fic, and just generally diving into a 20-year-old fandom (which was still remarkably active. Those Browncoats, man!)
I've heard a lot of smart, valid criticisms of the show. And it seems pretty likely that if it had gotten more than one season, it probably would have screwed up some things, probably in fairly major ways (I'm already not a fan of the Mal-and-Inara storyline; the reported ideas for later that I've seen floating around... would not have helped that). But I really love almost everybody in this bar -- Jayne and his entirely unexpected nuance, Simon with his competence and mix of confidence and awkwardness, Book, Zoe, the way the whole crew fits together. And the quotes! So many quotes I'd been hearing for years which suddenly I knew the provenance of, which made them a dozen times funnier. So, not a flawless show, but a hell of an experience, and one I'm glad I had. Better late than never.
Harry Potter -- oh boy. I know these are strange times in Harry Potter fandom, what with JKR being horrible on Twitter, and the mess that was the last movie. And these were never perfect books -- from the start I had issues with the depiction of Slytherin as a house of evil wizards. I disliked most of the fifth book and big chunks of what JKR decided to do as part of the endgame, and am quite mixed on the movies. But the early books, which I read while in college, rewarding myself with a chapter of HP for finishing a chapter of Kinetics, were really great fun. And more than any other, this is a fandom I share with my family: with my younger brother, who was about Harry's age when he read the first one and grew up with these books; with my parents and my husband, who read them alongside me, so we had to juggle our copies to kind of keep pace; and now with my kids, who, after our multiple attempts to get them interested in the books and/or the movies in three different languages, "discovered" the books on their own at school and then became HUGE fans. My daughter even helped run her high school's Harry Potter club, where they made "potions" and played HP trivia. And one of the few highlights of 2020 was going with her to see a performance of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which was actually a fantastic experience, however "My Immortal"-like the script might have been. "Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!" and "Alas, earwax" are things we all say in day-to-day life. And however simplistic they may be, I do love how handy the Gryffindor-Slytherin-Ravenclaw-Hufflepuff sorting categories are, and I use them to describe real people I know and other characters more often than any other system. HP is also the fandom that originally got me on LJ, that originally got me reading fanfic on purpose, rather than scrolling by it while searching for other things, and so my oldest friends on LJ (many now also on DW) are relationships that I made through that fandom, and many of my favorite fanfic authors are authors I originally read for HP. And, just, it was such a gloriously vast fandom in its heyday, unmatched, I think, in its range and batshittery, which was a cool thing to be part of. No regrets, and a lot of fond feelings for the books still.
House MD has the distinction of being a fandom that is very enmeshed with LJ for me. I have never watched a medical drama show before or since, and would have, I'm pretty sure, never started watching House MD if intriguing-looking icons and fic for it had not started popping up on my f-list. So that led me to checking it out and discovering that while I did not appreciate the medical drama tension or gross-out procedures involving poking needles into various organs (yeesh), I did really like the characters -- House the brilliant asshole, Wilson the friend who stuck by him and occasionally gave as good as he got, Chase, Cuddy, even some of the brand new ducklings, although I stopped watching in season 5, when the number of characters I cared about among the regulars had dropped considerably and I was absolutely hating Cuddy's storyline. But 2005 through 2007, I was watching the episodes weekly, mostly real time (not anything I've managed with any show since Babylon 5), and discussing it with friends on LJ, which was actually a really fun experience. That's why the number of times I've used the tag is so high, too, for what was, for me, a pretty short-lived fandom: I was making weekly reaction posts.
Lord of the Rings -- this is the big one, and the very first canon I ever talked about for Snowflake, but that was in a locked post, and I should have an un-locked version, too, so that follows below (slightly abridged from the post at the link). After all, this is what I consider my One True Canon (and have a T-shirt that says so, courtesy of the amazing
cafemassolit/ikel89.
I read LotR at 13, which is probably the perfect time to read it, and it absolutely defined the next decade of my life. I started reading fantasy (still the bulk of my lesiure reading) -- till that point, it was mostly science fiction -- because I realized fantasy was a thing (it wasn't in Russia during my childhood, so that was news to me). I made my best friend read it, and we made up hilarious-to-us Mary Sue adventures in Middle-Earth. I read The Sil and started trying to teach myself Quenya, and made up my own alphabet and started making up my own language (borrowing heavily from Tolkien, of course). Eventually I stumbled onto online fandom (courtesy of Alta Vista -- remember that, any of you?), and spent hours -- literally hours, you guys! -- downloading pictures from Rolozo's with a 14.4k modem, and following webrings, and eventually hanging out on TheOneRing.net, and even occasionally talking to other people (but, like, literally a handful of times). My first internet handle was "yavanna". I knew a good chunk of the Appendices by heart, and read Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Tolkien several times and Tom Shippey's books of LotR meta. I discovered Auden and Peter S. Beagle because they'd written introductions to LotR. I went to Oxford largely because Tolkien was "from there", and went on pilgrimages to all of his colleges and houses and walked to Wolvercote to visit his grave. I bonded with totally random people because we had a love of LotR in common -- people like my mother's friend's second husband, whom we were meeting for the first time, or this retired lady (the cook at a friend-of-my-parents' makeshift camp) who overheard me arguing with a friend about the proper translation of Mirkwood into Russian.
Eventually, there were some movies. (Which, for the record, I mostly loved. The choices made around Faramir and Denethor aside.) LotR stopped feeling like a secret club and I started drifting away (not in a "It's Popular Now It Sucks" way, just, suddenly there were a lot of people whose primary canon was movie canon, and you could hardly find a picture of Legolas that didn't look like Orlando Bloom, and fic exploded (this is a fandom I've never wanted fic for, not counting my own Mary Sue adventures, of course), and, just, the percentage of discourse that I really didn't care about was swamping the discourse I wanted to participate in/lurk on the edges of, which was really frustrating -- like, IDK, coming to a neighborhood restaurant where you've been eating every week for ten years and finding that they'd changed 90% of the menu and only serve your favorites every other Tuesday.
I don't follow any LotR sites or communities at this point; I don't read LotR fic but for a few super-rare exceptions; I've forgotten a lot of historical LotR trivia, and I'm not even 100% sure I'd get the lines of the Ring inscription in the right order (though I can still recite it in Black Speech, and do, at every opportunity). But my references are still heavily influenced by LotR, and I keep falling back on them when talking to people who understand me best, and I keep writing "Frodo Lives!" on every whiteboard and patch of sand, which my family knows to expect. It is the central feature of my mental landscape -- I may not visit as often, but it's still there, dominating the skyline. Tolkien, LotR, Middle-Earth is where I'm from, in fandom terms.
Rivers of London/Peter Grant series is another fandom I've talked about before, back in 2015 -- not for Snowflake, for a December ramble meme, but it was a similar type of post. Actually quite a lot has changed in these books in the last 5 years -- we got 3 novels which advanced the plot considerably, several novellas which gave us different points of view, and a whole new medium in the graphic novels. The focus of the series may have drifted a bit from the central relationship that attracted me to them, but I still love these characters, and I still drop everything to read the lastest installment, whatever format it's in. And I can't wait to (hopefully) see this adaptation of the series at some point in the not too distant future. :D
Vorkosigan Saga -- another big favorite fandom for which I already have a locked post for a December ramble meme from 2015. The Vorkosiverse is my favorite sci-fi series, not because it has the most fascinating worldbuilding (although I do like the societal implications explored in this world), but because I love so many of its characters: Galeni, Mark, Aral, Cordelia, Gregor among my top favorites; Ivan, Lady Alys and Simon; and Miles himself has grown on me over time, too.
Given how much I love the books, I'm always a bit surprised how long it took me to get around to reading the series. The terrible covers are to blame -- I was seeing the books at the library for years and passing on them, because they looked ridiculous. Then I came to Livejournal, and the Vorkosigan name started popping up with some regularity among the people I followed, until it reached some kind of critical mass. So when a shiny silver-covered book drew my attention at the library and I picked it up and saw that it was part of the Vorkosigan Saga, I decided to give it a shot (this would've been around 2001, I think, i.e. while I was still lurking on LJ without an account of my own). The book was A Civil Campaign, the last installment of the series out at the time, which was proooobably not the best place to enter the series, but I totally loved it anyway, even though I didn't know who any of these people trying to get together were, or any of the backstory relationships, or the political and cultural setup of Barrayar, or basically any of the background for the ACC payoff. But it still worked, and I was hooked enough that I went back to Cordelia's Honor and read everything else I could find in my library for the series (which still involved jumping around a whole bunch). Then, in late 2008, I went back to the series with a vengeance and discovered that it was one of the rare series that I could enjoy rereading. I reread the Miles books, catching up the ones I'd not gotten to on first exposure, many of which turned out to be among my new favorites: The Vor Game (which made me ship Miles/Gregor), Brothers in Arms (which introduced me properly to Galeni and made him one of my favorite characters), and Memory (probably the best book in the series, and which cemented my love of Galeni). I've been following the books in publication order ever since then, including the ones that were not yet published at the time I made the previous post: Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (which I wouldn't qualify as a a novel, but I was happy to hear from these characters when I didn't think I would again) and The Flowers of Vashnoi novella (which I really liked, and which I think makes a fitting coda to the series). There are still two Vorkosiverse things I have not read: "Winterfair Gifts" and Falling Free. I actually own both of those, but have been putting off reading them, probably out of a desire to have some "new" Vorkosiverse left, since it seems like the canon, if not closed, is definitely closing... (and I actually do think it's closed, after Flowers of Vashnoi).
Ultimately, I think it's probably for the better that I waited so long to start reading these books, because I feel like part of the reason the saga and I clicked so well is that I was in just the right spot in life when I encountered it. I'd just had my first child, you see, and I have a very vivid memory of sitting on the little bench behind the local playground, rocking the stroller so she'd nap longer, and reading a Vorkosigan book. The saga is about a lot of things, but family and parent-child relationships and how children grow up into themselves are all definitely at the core of it, so coming to parenthood and Vorkosiverse at the same time was fortuitous. And Cordelia's "after five-space navigational math, how hard could motherhood be" frequently echoed in my mind as I tried to figure out how the hell to manage my two through their baby and toddler years :P I mean, obviously people who do not have children and people who do not want children love the Vorkosiverse, too, but I do think there's a synergy to coming across the books when you're a new parent; I know several people who also got into them at the same time in their lives. Anyway, I think there's something to it -- it's like having a friend who is going through the whole motherhood thing a couple of years ahead of you and being able to talk to them... plus (at least in my case) the reassurance that whatever you're having to deal with, at least your kid isn't Miles :P
I love reccing books in general, but it's almost pathological with me and the Vorkosigan Saga -- I think because of positive reinforcement, because I've had a really high success rate with it. And not, like, people read the book I recced them and liked it well enough, although there's been that, too -- I mean several people for whom it legitimately became one of their favorite series, a go-out-and-buy-all-the-books-and-start-reccing-them-to-everyone-they-know kind of favorite. It seems to occupy that sweet spot where it's obscure enough that someone who could really love it may not have come across it (or may have avoided it because of the aforementioned terrible covers) and fun enough that it has really broad appeal. (Like, I pretty much never bother reccing Discworld because I figure, unless I'm talking to someone very young, they've either already discovered and love it, or it's not their thing; and I don't actively rec Dragaera, because I feel like the books are enough of an acquired taste that I have a hard time predicting if someone would like them, and even my beloved Rivers of London has some things in it that I mostly rec it in a "if you like this, try that" sort of way. But Vorkosigan Saga is just... very reccable.) So, there are several people on LJ and at least one in real life whom I've gotten into the Saga, for which I'm very proud of myself. And
lunasariel (who was one of the aforementioned LJ people) coined the term "fandom baba" for my behavior (in the Vorkosiverse, the baba is sort of a matchmaker role), which is a title I'm proud to bear :D
The "honorable mention" fandoms, with more than 20 tags but fewer than 50, were the Chronicles of Amber, the Kushiel's Legacy books, Kingkiller Chronicles, Monday Begins on Saturday, MCU, BBC Sherlock, Star Trek AOS, and Temeraire, but obviously this post is plenty long as it is.
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1140427.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).