2012 fannish year in review
Past years: 2011 | 2010 | 2008-09 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004
general fannishness
At the end of January 2012, I finally came to terms with the fact, which has been true for some years now, that I am a different person than I was when I started participating in fandom: my life has changed, my priorities and needs have changed, the nature of my participation and the amount of time I have in which to participate have changed. In some ways that's sad, I guess, and I do miss the level of involvement I used to manage, but on the other hand I like the life I've made for myself - my work, my garden, my extensive and idiosyncratic list of interests and commitments - so I can't feel too bad about it. But it does mean that it is unhelpful to pretend to myself that I will somehow be able to magically return to my own personal golden age of fannish participation. I want a lot of things in my life, of which fandom is only one, though an important one, especially for my creative health.
I said in my 2011 review post that I was feeling a bit adrift, fannishly speaking, and that feeling persisted through much of 2012. After spending eight years essentially in vidding fandom and not engaging with much outside it, I found it difficult to go back to fandom-at-large for a particular show - Glee, in this case. I've always known that fandom was fic-centric, but there's a difference between knowing that and feeling it every day, seeing what's commented on and recirculated. It was frustrating, during Glee's fall hiatus, to get excited about various projects and challenges and then realize that despite official "contribute anything!" language, the themes or prompts were entirely inhospitable to vidding. The upshot was that I longed more than ever to participate in Festivids, the timeline of which unfortunately conflicts significantly with the rhythms of my offline life.
Sometime in March I realized that I was feeling a real lack of fannish connectedness because so few of my fandom friends were into Glee (and the few who were had different loci of emotional investment). Most of my primary contacts in fandom are people I met ten years ago via Buffy, and our interests have generally evolved along compatible lines since then; in many cases, we continue to share an interest in vids and vidwatching, if nothing else. Glee is the first time since Buffy ended, really, that I've felt a need to go in search of new people to share my shiny new thing with. But fandom's changed since then, and I kind of didn't know how to go about looking! Plus Glee fandom in general tends to make me feel old and awkward and behind the times in various ways. So many of the fans I encounter, especially on Tumblr, are the same age as my students or even younger, which is just... deeply weird for me.
So I pondered all that for a while, and worked intermittently on a post about Glee (and the fact that I started that post in March but didn't finish it until mid-August says some things about the year I've had), and began looking around for new people to chat with, and found some. \o/
fandom platforms
2012 is also the year I gave up and dived into Tumblr - the shallow end of the pool, but still. As it turns out, there are things about Tumblr that I quite like; the gifsets are fun (though as a vidder I sometimes find animated gifs frustrating: there's not enough attention paid to transitions and movement!), and there's a lot of fic posted there that's not available elsewhere. So as a (re)circulation device, Tumblr's great. But as a platform for discussion, it's all but useless, both structurally and visually. I can't even properly comment on most fic; I mean, I can and do hit the "like" button, and sometimes that's really all that's necessary, but there have been some terrifically thoughtful or moving stories that I'm genuinely bummed to be unable to leave substantive feedback on. Then again, if the author wanted substantive feedback presumably she'd post on a platform that enables it; I am not entitled to demand that authors post stories in exactly the ways or venues that I prefer.
In the wake of VividCon, and specifically the "Forever Reblog" panel, I semi-seriously considered posting my vids to YouTube, but honestly I'm not inclined to bother. Mostly this is because I am lazy; I miss the days of uploading a vid to my website, posting to the BMVD, and being done. ::shakes cane:: It's all I can do to aggregate links at the AO3. (Have I mentioned lately that I love the AO3's ability to embed vids? I so do.) One of the things that the VVC panel made clear to me is that YouTube is especially valuable for vidders who like to see vids getting lots of hits, which - look, I vid dead shows and Slings & Arrows and weird '90s indie film. The thousands-of-hits ship sailed a looooong time ago. To put things in perspective, more people have seen my vids, even in their non-YouTube-able state, than will ever read the most important and successful professional writing I ever do. Plus, there are a bajillion vids out there now. If somebody doesn't get the chance to see mine, I'm not convinced it's a tragedy; she's probably watching something else at least as interesting.
my shows
The short version: Holy shit I watched a lot of TV this year.
Castle has been knocking it out of the park this season. I am AMAZED at how well the show is handling the RST. It's just so delightful - sometimes funny, other times quite moving. And it's not just the RST either; the whole show has been firing on all cylinders this year. Whatever they fed the writers over the summer, I hope they keep doing it, because the show is making me so happy.
sdwolfpup's tag on Tumblr is "everything i ever wanted tbh," and that pretty much sums up how I feel about it too.
I continue to watch Doctor Who as I've done for the last several years: with enjoyment, but without any particular fannishness. Mostly I enjoy being more or less up to date on something that makes so many of my friends so happy. :D
One of the unexpected side effects of spending time on Tumblr is having Firefly gifsets cross my screen on a regular basis. I reblog most of them, usually with the tag "I love this scene so much," because honestly? There are just not a lot of Firefly scenes I don't love. If Tumblr has given me nothing else, it has given me the welcome gift of bringing my Firefly love from a warm glow back up to an active simmer. Which means I might actually finish my remaining Firefly vid idea before I grow old and die.
I made
sdwolfpup watch Friday Night Lights when she visited me in early July; my subsequent rewatch and her posts about the show had me falling in love with it all over again. This might actually be my year for vidding FNL! My audience is up into the double digits now!
I don't know what the hell Fringe thinks it's doing or how it's going to wrap itself up in, what, three more hours?, but I still love Olivia, so I'm still along for the ride.
I'm watching Game of Thrones in much the same way I've been watching Doctor Who (except with more reblogging on Tumblr, heh). Pretty much anything related to Arya or Brienne = made of win, as far as I'm concerned. But just thinking about trying to vid the show exhausts me.
Glee was my main fandom of the year, to my ongoing befuddlement. As I said in my big Glee post back in August, "I just never knew THIS was the fandom that was gonna make me so happy." To which I would now add, "I just never expected that my demented enthusiasm would have this much staying power." I've been reading fic by the truckload (though that's starting to taper off a bit), largely avoiding meta (god bless the people who generate it, but for me, at least, the show's too incoherent for enjoyable meta and is better made sense of via fic, which can fill in the show's gaps), and accumulating an embarassing number of vid ideas, some of which I have actually been working on in the last few weeks. As SDW occasionally reminds me, at least there aren't chicken feet.
Haven is still a laundry-folding show for me, but it really leveled up this season. Looking forward to the last two episodes of S3!
I watched Homeland S1 because of
fan_eunice's vid "Barton Hollow" (that vid, you guys, OMG). I'm looking forward to mainlining S2 while my other shows are on hiatus.
Nashville is one of my two big new shows for the year (and I have a song that might want to be a vidsong, but I'm swamped with more pressing ideas, so for the moment I'm going to hide and see if it goes away). As I said over in vonniek's LJ, I am sort of meh about a lot of the ~political intrigue~, but the characters are interesting, and I am fascinated by the show's representation of the different ways in which the three main female characters are attempting (with varied degrees of success) to claim or abdicate control over their own careers.
Once Upon a Time is the other of my two big new shows for the year. Women! being awesome in an assortment of ways! and talking to each other! and having complicated relationships! And then Prince Charming has to prick his finger on a spindle and go into a coma - again! WHAT IS NOT TO LOVE. One of my favorite things about S2 thus far has been the Mulan/Aurora dynamic; it's a fascinating inversion-with-variation on the traditional Between Men relationship where the passion between two guys is displaced onto a woman they both (sort of) want. In this case, Philip is playing the role of the woman (conveniently dead, even!), and Mulan and Aurora are bound together by their relationships with him. Basically this show just makes me really happy.
I was watching too much TV this fall to keep up with Treme, but now that we're on winter hiatus I should have a chance to catch up.
my vids - or rather vid, singular
How I Got Over (The Wire)
Yeah, this was a low-output year even for me. *facepalm*
I'd had a vid idea for The Wire for years and hadn't gotten around to it, and then sisabet tossed off this idea when she volunteered for the VividCon auction in 2011, and I sort of fell in love with it and asked if I could steal it, and she graciously agreed, and then I dithered around for more than a year before actually making it. It was fun to make, for fairly heartbreaking values of "fun," and it went over considerably better than I expected it to, which was surprising and delightful and no doubt due more to the source and the song than to me, but I'm fine with that because I love both those things too.
And... I think that's actually all I have to say about that.
new things I tried
Once again I made my VVC Premieres vid in a week (well, eight days), so, uh, it's all kind of a blur. But this really wasn't a Year Of New Things for me, vidding-wise; this was more a year of hanging on by my fingernails. I've made enough ensemble vids by now that I have an established process, and I've learned both to trust that process and to tweak it as necessary in service of the particular needs of individual vids.
stuff I learned
I learned - well, re-learned - that sometimes I need to pick an audience and make a vid for that audience and let go of everything else. In this case, I realized early on that, because the Wire is a very complicated show and also a very talky show, there were a lot of details about the boys that I was never going to be able to convey in a vid - important details, things that really matter to how the vid comes across as a whole, things like the fact that Namond, despite being the one who finally gets over, is not really the smart one. Randy has business savvy, Michael's sharp in a whole lot of ways, Dukie is maybe the cleverest of them all. Namond's bright, yeah, and mouthy, and he's committed to being himself, but he's not all that special; the fact that he gets over and the rest don't is not meritocracy at work. It's luck, and timing, and money. That's part of the point of the last two seasons of the show, and I wanted it to be part of the point of the vid, but ultimately I just had to admit to myself that I was making a vid for people who already love the show and could bring some of that context and some of the emotion that comes with it, and people in the Premieres show who hadn't seen The Wire would just have to suck it. Heh. I have no idea what the vid is like for people who don't know the show, but it got a very good response from people who do, and that's what I wanted; I feel like I did right by the show and these characters.
I also re-learned that spontaneity is good, even though it gives me hives; making this vid was nowhere on my list of goals for 2012, and yet it's my only substantial contribution to fandom for the year.
goals for the coming year
As usual, I have a long list of vids I want to make: a vid for Escapade that I started more than a year ago, four Glee vids, three FNL vids, a Firefly vid, a vid for Premieres that I don't want to talk about lest I jinx it. Obviously I will not make even a fraction of those. I am trying to steer a middle course between obsessive mono-focus, which leaves me utterly derailed if an idea goes wrong, and having so many project drafts that I get overwhelmed and finish nothing.
I also want to post more on DW/LJ, to watch more vids, and to leave more comments on vids and fic. Thank goodness for the kudos feature on the AO3, but I've read and seen some wonderful stuff this year that really deserves more substantive appreciation than I've made time to provide.
This year I also have a rather extensive and time-sensitive list of personal and professional goals unrelated to fannish activities, so I suppose my overarching goal is to balance those competing demands in productive and satisfying ways.
Thinking back holistically over the past year, I find that, even though I didn't feel as fannishly connected as I'd like to, fandom was still tremendously important to my day-to-day well-being. One of the things about fandom for which I am most grateful is that through it I've found friends who share my commitment to fannishness - not just particular shows we have in common, but the impulse to make and share our own creations related to those shows - and who at the same time value me whether or not I am able to participate in a particular form of fandom at a given moment, who respect my attempts to lead a multifaceted (if rather quiet) life. It's hard to express just how at-home and appreciated that makes me feel, but wow, it's been an important port in the ongoing storms of my offline life. I'm very grateful.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read
comments on Dreamwidth
general fannishness
At the end of January 2012, I finally came to terms with the fact, which has been true for some years now, that I am a different person than I was when I started participating in fandom: my life has changed, my priorities and needs have changed, the nature of my participation and the amount of time I have in which to participate have changed. In some ways that's sad, I guess, and I do miss the level of involvement I used to manage, but on the other hand I like the life I've made for myself - my work, my garden, my extensive and idiosyncratic list of interests and commitments - so I can't feel too bad about it. But it does mean that it is unhelpful to pretend to myself that I will somehow be able to magically return to my own personal golden age of fannish participation. I want a lot of things in my life, of which fandom is only one, though an important one, especially for my creative health.
I said in my 2011 review post that I was feeling a bit adrift, fannishly speaking, and that feeling persisted through much of 2012. After spending eight years essentially in vidding fandom and not engaging with much outside it, I found it difficult to go back to fandom-at-large for a particular show - Glee, in this case. I've always known that fandom was fic-centric, but there's a difference between knowing that and feeling it every day, seeing what's commented on and recirculated. It was frustrating, during Glee's fall hiatus, to get excited about various projects and challenges and then realize that despite official "contribute anything!" language, the themes or prompts were entirely inhospitable to vidding. The upshot was that I longed more than ever to participate in Festivids, the timeline of which unfortunately conflicts significantly with the rhythms of my offline life.
Sometime in March I realized that I was feeling a real lack of fannish connectedness because so few of my fandom friends were into Glee (and the few who were had different loci of emotional investment). Most of my primary contacts in fandom are people I met ten years ago via Buffy, and our interests have generally evolved along compatible lines since then; in many cases, we continue to share an interest in vids and vidwatching, if nothing else. Glee is the first time since Buffy ended, really, that I've felt a need to go in search of new people to share my shiny new thing with. But fandom's changed since then, and I kind of didn't know how to go about looking! Plus Glee fandom in general tends to make me feel old and awkward and behind the times in various ways. So many of the fans I encounter, especially on Tumblr, are the same age as my students or even younger, which is just... deeply weird for me.
So I pondered all that for a while, and worked intermittently on a post about Glee (and the fact that I started that post in March but didn't finish it until mid-August says some things about the year I've had), and began looking around for new people to chat with, and found some. \o/
fandom platforms
2012 is also the year I gave up and dived into Tumblr - the shallow end of the pool, but still. As it turns out, there are things about Tumblr that I quite like; the gifsets are fun (though as a vidder I sometimes find animated gifs frustrating: there's not enough attention paid to transitions and movement!), and there's a lot of fic posted there that's not available elsewhere. So as a (re)circulation device, Tumblr's great. But as a platform for discussion, it's all but useless, both structurally and visually. I can't even properly comment on most fic; I mean, I can and do hit the "like" button, and sometimes that's really all that's necessary, but there have been some terrifically thoughtful or moving stories that I'm genuinely bummed to be unable to leave substantive feedback on. Then again, if the author wanted substantive feedback presumably she'd post on a platform that enables it; I am not entitled to demand that authors post stories in exactly the ways or venues that I prefer.
In the wake of VividCon, and specifically the "Forever Reblog" panel, I semi-seriously considered posting my vids to YouTube, but honestly I'm not inclined to bother. Mostly this is because I am lazy; I miss the days of uploading a vid to my website, posting to the BMVD, and being done. ::shakes cane:: It's all I can do to aggregate links at the AO3. (Have I mentioned lately that I love the AO3's ability to embed vids? I so do.) One of the things that the VVC panel made clear to me is that YouTube is especially valuable for vidders who like to see vids getting lots of hits, which - look, I vid dead shows and Slings & Arrows and weird '90s indie film. The thousands-of-hits ship sailed a looooong time ago. To put things in perspective, more people have seen my vids, even in their non-YouTube-able state, than will ever read the most important and successful professional writing I ever do. Plus, there are a bajillion vids out there now. If somebody doesn't get the chance to see mine, I'm not convinced it's a tragedy; she's probably watching something else at least as interesting.
my shows
The short version: Holy shit I watched a lot of TV this year.
Castle has been knocking it out of the park this season. I am AMAZED at how well the show is handling the RST. It's just so delightful - sometimes funny, other times quite moving. And it's not just the RST either; the whole show has been firing on all cylinders this year. Whatever they fed the writers over the summer, I hope they keep doing it, because the show is making me so happy.
sdwolfpup's tag on Tumblr is "everything i ever wanted tbh," and that pretty much sums up how I feel about it too.
I continue to watch Doctor Who as I've done for the last several years: with enjoyment, but without any particular fannishness. Mostly I enjoy being more or less up to date on something that makes so many of my friends so happy. :D
One of the unexpected side effects of spending time on Tumblr is having Firefly gifsets cross my screen on a regular basis. I reblog most of them, usually with the tag "I love this scene so much," because honestly? There are just not a lot of Firefly scenes I don't love. If Tumblr has given me nothing else, it has given me the welcome gift of bringing my Firefly love from a warm glow back up to an active simmer. Which means I might actually finish my remaining Firefly vid idea before I grow old and die.
I made
sdwolfpup watch Friday Night Lights when she visited me in early July; my subsequent rewatch and her posts about the show had me falling in love with it all over again. This might actually be my year for vidding FNL! My audience is up into the double digits now!
I don't know what the hell Fringe thinks it's doing or how it's going to wrap itself up in, what, three more hours?, but I still love Olivia, so I'm still along for the ride.
I'm watching Game of Thrones in much the same way I've been watching Doctor Who (except with more reblogging on Tumblr, heh). Pretty much anything related to Arya or Brienne = made of win, as far as I'm concerned. But just thinking about trying to vid the show exhausts me.
Glee was my main fandom of the year, to my ongoing befuddlement. As I said in my big Glee post back in August, "I just never knew THIS was the fandom that was gonna make me so happy." To which I would now add, "I just never expected that my demented enthusiasm would have this much staying power." I've been reading fic by the truckload (though that's starting to taper off a bit), largely avoiding meta (god bless the people who generate it, but for me, at least, the show's too incoherent for enjoyable meta and is better made sense of via fic, which can fill in the show's gaps), and accumulating an embarassing number of vid ideas, some of which I have actually been working on in the last few weeks. As SDW occasionally reminds me, at least there aren't chicken feet.
Haven is still a laundry-folding show for me, but it really leveled up this season. Looking forward to the last two episodes of S3!
I watched Homeland S1 because of
fan_eunice's vid "Barton Hollow" (that vid, you guys, OMG). I'm looking forward to mainlining S2 while my other shows are on hiatus.
Nashville is one of my two big new shows for the year (and I have a song that might want to be a vidsong, but I'm swamped with more pressing ideas, so for the moment I'm going to hide and see if it goes away). As I said over in vonniek's LJ, I am sort of meh about a lot of the ~political intrigue~, but the characters are interesting, and I am fascinated by the show's representation of the different ways in which the three main female characters are attempting (with varied degrees of success) to claim or abdicate control over their own careers.
Once Upon a Time is the other of my two big new shows for the year. Women! being awesome in an assortment of ways! and talking to each other! and having complicated relationships! And then Prince Charming has to prick his finger on a spindle and go into a coma - again! WHAT IS NOT TO LOVE. One of my favorite things about S2 thus far has been the Mulan/Aurora dynamic; it's a fascinating inversion-with-variation on the traditional Between Men relationship where the passion between two guys is displaced onto a woman they both (sort of) want. In this case, Philip is playing the role of the woman (conveniently dead, even!), and Mulan and Aurora are bound together by their relationships with him. Basically this show just makes me really happy.
I was watching too much TV this fall to keep up with Treme, but now that we're on winter hiatus I should have a chance to catch up.
my vids - or rather vid, singular
How I Got Over (The Wire)
Yeah, this was a low-output year even for me. *facepalm*
I'd had a vid idea for The Wire for years and hadn't gotten around to it, and then sisabet tossed off this idea when she volunteered for the VividCon auction in 2011, and I sort of fell in love with it and asked if I could steal it, and she graciously agreed, and then I dithered around for more than a year before actually making it. It was fun to make, for fairly heartbreaking values of "fun," and it went over considerably better than I expected it to, which was surprising and delightful and no doubt due more to the source and the song than to me, but I'm fine with that because I love both those things too.
And... I think that's actually all I have to say about that.
new things I tried
Once again I made my VVC Premieres vid in a week (well, eight days), so, uh, it's all kind of a blur. But this really wasn't a Year Of New Things for me, vidding-wise; this was more a year of hanging on by my fingernails. I've made enough ensemble vids by now that I have an established process, and I've learned both to trust that process and to tweak it as necessary in service of the particular needs of individual vids.
stuff I learned
I learned - well, re-learned - that sometimes I need to pick an audience and make a vid for that audience and let go of everything else. In this case, I realized early on that, because the Wire is a very complicated show and also a very talky show, there were a lot of details about the boys that I was never going to be able to convey in a vid - important details, things that really matter to how the vid comes across as a whole, things like the fact that Namond, despite being the one who finally gets over, is not really the smart one. Randy has business savvy, Michael's sharp in a whole lot of ways, Dukie is maybe the cleverest of them all. Namond's bright, yeah, and mouthy, and he's committed to being himself, but he's not all that special; the fact that he gets over and the rest don't is not meritocracy at work. It's luck, and timing, and money. That's part of the point of the last two seasons of the show, and I wanted it to be part of the point of the vid, but ultimately I just had to admit to myself that I was making a vid for people who already love the show and could bring some of that context and some of the emotion that comes with it, and people in the Premieres show who hadn't seen The Wire would just have to suck it. Heh. I have no idea what the vid is like for people who don't know the show, but it got a very good response from people who do, and that's what I wanted; I feel like I did right by the show and these characters.
I also re-learned that spontaneity is good, even though it gives me hives; making this vid was nowhere on my list of goals for 2012, and yet it's my only substantial contribution to fandom for the year.
goals for the coming year
As usual, I have a long list of vids I want to make: a vid for Escapade that I started more than a year ago, four Glee vids, three FNL vids, a Firefly vid, a vid for Premieres that I don't want to talk about lest I jinx it. Obviously I will not make even a fraction of those. I am trying to steer a middle course between obsessive mono-focus, which leaves me utterly derailed if an idea goes wrong, and having so many project drafts that I get overwhelmed and finish nothing.
I also want to post more on DW/LJ, to watch more vids, and to leave more comments on vids and fic. Thank goodness for the kudos feature on the AO3, but I've read and seen some wonderful stuff this year that really deserves more substantive appreciation than I've made time to provide.
This year I also have a rather extensive and time-sensitive list of personal and professional goals unrelated to fannish activities, so I suppose my overarching goal is to balance those competing demands in productive and satisfying ways.
Thinking back holistically over the past year, I find that, even though I didn't feel as fannishly connected as I'd like to, fandom was still tremendously important to my day-to-day well-being. One of the things about fandom for which I am most grateful is that through it I've found friends who share my commitment to fannishness - not just particular shows we have in common, but the impulse to make and share our own creations related to those shows - and who at the same time value me whether or not I am able to participate in a particular form of fandom at a given moment, who respect my attempts to lead a multifaceted (if rather quiet) life. It's hard to express just how at-home and appreciated that makes me feel, but wow, it's been an important port in the ongoing storms of my offline life. I'm very grateful.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read
comments on Dreamwidth