all the cool kids are
... soliciting opinions on whether signing up for due South seekrit santa is a good idea.
Y/N? I'm leaning towards yes - well, today, anyway.
... posting maps of personal fannish histories.
Which is tricky, because I use 'fan' to mean different, somewhat overlapping things, sometimes in the same sentence. I am a fan of this, but not a fan, you know? Or maybe I am a fan, but I'm not 'in fandom.'
I preface because I care.
I was born the year The Hobbit was released as a cartoon. Middle Earth was my original fandom, in terms of connection to the source. I watched the cartoon versions of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings (scary! with the stabbing!) and The Return of the King endlessly on Betamax, played The Hobbit read-along record incessantly - and I can't even remember the first time I read the full novels. Thanks to my grandmother, there had always been copies in the house. My parents commissioned a statue of me for my grandparents. I refused to sit for it unless my favorite invisible friend did, too. Fortunately, the artist found that cute and had mom bring in a reference. So - Bilbo Baggins and ifreet, aged 2:
imaginary_friend
My closest school friendship in middle school was founded upon a shared enthusiasm for J.R.R. Tolkien. Arguing bookish arcana with Tisha was much easier than trying to figure out that one thing that would make the rest of our classmates like me. A map of Middle Earth hung on the wall between my windows, and I used to daydream adventures for the places not explored in the trilogy.
Tisha and I also became heavily invested in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The cartoon version. We probably saw every episode of the early nineties. We bitched about replacement voice actors, played the arcade game and the ninetendo game, and made an abortive attempt to play TMNT and Other Strangeness, the role-playing game, but couldn't pull together enough regulars. I bought action figures and collectibles; my sister gave me a cell of Raphael for Christmas. (He was mostly my favorite, though it was a close thing with Leonardo. Tish was Donatello all the way.) I still have several pieces of my TMNT fanart - including the picture of Splinter that I drew on my rat dissection lab book in 9th grade bio.
(I came by that sort of compulsive geekiness the honest way. My dad is, was, always will be a huge Trek fan. His law office features an assortment of Star Trek memorabilia: tech manuals tucked in alongside the Great Minds books, ship models atop the cabinet, framed posters on the wall. Star Trek: The Next Generation began airing while I was in high school. It subsequently became much easier to find presents for dad on gift-giving occasions.
I also blame him for my high tolerance for truly bad movies and tv that is good in concept but not necessarily execution. He was a huge fan of USA's Up All Night, so I was, too. Also? Knight Rider and Airwolf.)
In high school, I was less fannish and more generally geeky. Most of my time went to academics, books, speech and debate team... I discovered anime - cartoons with consequences! though really hard to find at the time - and I biked to the comic book shop weekly. I even got dad to drive me to my first comic book convention - we went as a family, and sis was Not Thrilled. But I did all that in a vacuum - my friends were academic-geeky, too, but I didn't know other fans. Particularly not girl fans - I hated whenever the comic shop would hire a new guy, because then I had to go through the whole "No, I'm not shopping for my boyfriend" thing all over again.
High school was fun by the end, but uni was great nearly from the start, because right off the bat I started meeting awesome people. J recognized me in the dorm stairwell the day we moved in - we had been on competing h.s. academic teams. Within that first month, she was helping me stake out the ground lounge on Saturday morning for serious cartoon watching. mrswolfwood reminded me how much fun embracing fannish love could be, with her huge outspoken admiration of music groups, actors, movies. The two of us may have been the only fans of American Gothic. Our entire group loved Star Wars (given our ages, not a huge surprise), but MrsW and K took it to the next level: they were the ones who wallpapered their dorm room with the scripts.
Senior year, I rented an apartment with a friend from h.s. physics. We were both fans of entirely different things (my Buffy and her WWF were usually on on the same night, which was SAD MAKING if we were both home) - except Highlander the series. We loved it. We mocked it (she's an equestrian, I was a fencer. The show gave her much more material). We loved it some more. I was killing time in a lab and ran a search on Highlander.
I found a Duncan/Amanda/Methos story.
It wasn't my first encounter with fanfic, but it was the first I liked. My friends (J being the worst, but I'm not sure MrsW and K were entirely innocent) tended to haze one another with joke emails, including GRAPHIC stories found online - about the Smurfs. The X-men. The Brady Bunch. There is not enough brain bleach IN THE WORLD. And an earlier search for Forever Knight had turned up a story! About Nick Knight! With exclamation points at the end of every sentence! Even the descriptive ones!
But this. This was actually well-written. Good character insight. And frankly hot.
And then I logged off and went on about my college life, without a thought to how that story came into existence, who might have written it, or why. Then came the Virginia year, which we won't talk here about except to mention that I rediscovered anime, thanks to Cartoon Network's Toonami.
In 2000, I moved back home and started working at a bookstore with iceaffinity. I discovered that she, too, liked anime. She lent me tapes and fansubs, gave me copies of openings and closings and character songs. She eventually mentioned that she'd written some fanfiction for a series, if I was interested. And then she explained what it was and emailed me her ff.net link.
The light bulb finally lit. After reading her stories, I hunted around for more. Also through iceaffinity, I met more girls into anime and fanfiction, including akarui_rynka and yukihada. We attended our first anime convention - and I found it a much better fit than the comic cons had been. Somewhere in all that, I learned about doujinshi -- fan-produced comics -- and from reading articles about that phenomenon, I learned about a subgenre -- shounen ai/yaoi: Japanese girls writing boys into romantic relationships with one another. Huh, I thought, that's weird. Interesting. Weird.
And then I found Gundam Wing yaoi. And despite the warnings from anti-yaoi fangirls about OOCness and the general lesser worth of those stories, I read some. They were neither particularly OOC nor worse in quality when taken as a group than the gen/het stories had been. I was intrigued. I went on to read the entire Gundam Wing Addiction archive as it stood at that time (excepting one extremely prolific and downright odd author, and I started but didn't finish a few of the 20+ chapter epics).
I joined a couple predominantly shounen ai/yaoi GW mailing lists. The thing was, I wasn't sure how it all worked. I mean, the mechanics of it I got, sure -- how to write to the list as a whole, how to email directly to another member, how to cut duplicate text when replying, that was easy enough. I'd been using email and academic mailing lists for years by then. What I didn't know was how to talk to strangers online, because all the advice I'd ever been given was: Don't.
So I lurked. I posted a drabble and a tiny humor thing. I sent the occasional "I liked this" email. I disagreed with someone, twice, and convinced myself both times that the person at the other end would remember and hate me for all time. I eventually burned out on GW - first on the larger OTPs (3x4, 1x2 and 1xR), then on the alt pairings, too. I unsubscribed and returned to reading on web pages. When I discovered authors I'd liked in GW had written for other series, I read those stories, too, if I was familiar with the source, then tracked down other authors from their rec lists.
I read a lot of Weiss Kreuz.
And then came the day I wanted something new to read, and I wanted to read someone I knew would be good, but no one had updated their website in weeks. But there was some older stuff I hadn't read. Live action (which I'd felt weird about, because, you know, there were real actors wearing those characters' faces). But I was familiar with the series, having been an anthropology student myself back when it aired.
Yeah, it was The Sentinel. I read my way through a couple rec lists. Quite a few of these authors had also written for due South, and eventually I ran out of recommended Sentinel authors. I had started my lj but hadn't yet discovered fan communities, or it would have taken longer. I waffled, then started reading the due South stories, despite having NO knowledge of canon.
I liked them rather alot. I wondered about the canon - then found the season one dvds by accident. (I still wondered about the canon, because by then I'd figured out that the Ray of season one was frequently NOT the Ray being slashed.)
I followed a link back to a livejournal community - ds_flashfiction.
I started commenting on stories, then non-story journal entries. It was easier, alittle, to figure out what other people were doing - what was acceptable or expected - through lj, where the history is partially visible, than it had been on the mls. I friended people (albeit hesitantly). I signed up for the badfic challenge on flashfiction, then highwaymiles and stop_drop_porn. I started posting a few non-challenge fics.
I participated in out_of_con_txt chats and then a couple other ds/Canada fandom chats. By the following spring, I'd signed up for MJ. I panicked quietly and went anyway. I had fun, met other fans, and made some friends. And as far as I know, I did not actively offend anyone nor create any life-long enemies. And then later in the summer, I met up with the_antichris, izzybeth, shoemaster, etben, custardpringle, and kalpurna in Chicago. In terms of community, due South is really my first fandom.
I'm a fan of many things. I talk about anime and manga with my local friends and attend conventions in costume. I'm a huge fan of Minekura Kazuya and CLAMP, but I have no connection to the various fandoms that have grown from their works. I love watching Doctor Who and Supernatural and Avatar and Firefly with friends, and I'm aware that the fandoms exist because those same friends are in them, but I'm not part of them either. I worked in a bookstore - Harry Potter just sort of happened to me, but again, I don't think of myself as being 'in' the fandom. I might someday be a member of Stargate: Atlantis fandom - I do read and comment sometimes. Psych is a someday possiblity. But right now? I don't think of myself as a member of any fandom other than ds/ds 6 degrees.
And even in due South fandom, I still worry about friending people. I rarely exchange emails or IMs directly with anyone I don't know in RL, because I worry about imposing. I still usually feel like I don't quite know how all this works.
But I'm getting better at it.
Y/N? I'm leaning towards yes - well, today, anyway.
... posting maps of personal fannish histories.
Which is tricky, because I use 'fan' to mean different, somewhat overlapping things, sometimes in the same sentence. I am a fan of this, but not a fan, you know? Or maybe I am a fan, but I'm not 'in fandom.'
I preface because I care.
I was born the year The Hobbit was released as a cartoon. Middle Earth was my original fandom, in terms of connection to the source. I watched the cartoon versions of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings (scary! with the stabbing!) and The Return of the King endlessly on Betamax, played The Hobbit read-along record incessantly - and I can't even remember the first time I read the full novels. Thanks to my grandmother, there had always been copies in the house. My parents commissioned a statue of me for my grandparents. I refused to sit for it unless my favorite invisible friend did, too. Fortunately, the artist found that cute and had mom bring in a reference. So - Bilbo Baggins and ifreet, aged 2:
imaginary_friend
My closest school friendship in middle school was founded upon a shared enthusiasm for J.R.R. Tolkien. Arguing bookish arcana with Tisha was much easier than trying to figure out that one thing that would make the rest of our classmates like me. A map of Middle Earth hung on the wall between my windows, and I used to daydream adventures for the places not explored in the trilogy.
Tisha and I also became heavily invested in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The cartoon version. We probably saw every episode of the early nineties. We bitched about replacement voice actors, played the arcade game and the ninetendo game, and made an abortive attempt to play TMNT and Other Strangeness, the role-playing game, but couldn't pull together enough regulars. I bought action figures and collectibles; my sister gave me a cell of Raphael for Christmas. (He was mostly my favorite, though it was a close thing with Leonardo. Tish was Donatello all the way.) I still have several pieces of my TMNT fanart - including the picture of Splinter that I drew on my rat dissection lab book in 9th grade bio.
(I came by that sort of compulsive geekiness the honest way. My dad is, was, always will be a huge Trek fan. His law office features an assortment of Star Trek memorabilia: tech manuals tucked in alongside the Great Minds books, ship models atop the cabinet, framed posters on the wall. Star Trek: The Next Generation began airing while I was in high school. It subsequently became much easier to find presents for dad on gift-giving occasions.
I also blame him for my high tolerance for truly bad movies and tv that is good in concept but not necessarily execution. He was a huge fan of USA's Up All Night, so I was, too. Also? Knight Rider and Airwolf.)
In high school, I was less fannish and more generally geeky. Most of my time went to academics, books, speech and debate team... I discovered anime - cartoons with consequences! though really hard to find at the time - and I biked to the comic book shop weekly. I even got dad to drive me to my first comic book convention - we went as a family, and sis was Not Thrilled. But I did all that in a vacuum - my friends were academic-geeky, too, but I didn't know other fans. Particularly not girl fans - I hated whenever the comic shop would hire a new guy, because then I had to go through the whole "No, I'm not shopping for my boyfriend" thing all over again.
High school was fun by the end, but uni was great nearly from the start, because right off the bat I started meeting awesome people. J recognized me in the dorm stairwell the day we moved in - we had been on competing h.s. academic teams. Within that first month, she was helping me stake out the ground lounge on Saturday morning for serious cartoon watching. mrswolfwood reminded me how much fun embracing fannish love could be, with her huge outspoken admiration of music groups, actors, movies. The two of us may have been the only fans of American Gothic. Our entire group loved Star Wars (given our ages, not a huge surprise), but MrsW and K took it to the next level: they were the ones who wallpapered their dorm room with the scripts.
Senior year, I rented an apartment with a friend from h.s. physics. We were both fans of entirely different things (my Buffy and her WWF were usually on on the same night, which was SAD MAKING if we were both home) - except Highlander the series. We loved it. We mocked it (she's an equestrian, I was a fencer. The show gave her much more material). We loved it some more. I was killing time in a lab and ran a search on Highlander.
I found a Duncan/Amanda/Methos story.
It wasn't my first encounter with fanfic, but it was the first I liked. My friends (J being the worst, but I'm not sure MrsW and K were entirely innocent) tended to haze one another with joke emails, including GRAPHIC stories found online - about the Smurfs. The X-men. The Brady Bunch. There is not enough brain bleach IN THE WORLD. And an earlier search for Forever Knight had turned up a story! About Nick Knight! With exclamation points at the end of every sentence! Even the descriptive ones!
But this. This was actually well-written. Good character insight. And frankly hot.
And then I logged off and went on about my college life, without a thought to how that story came into existence, who might have written it, or why. Then came the Virginia year, which we won't talk here about except to mention that I rediscovered anime, thanks to Cartoon Network's Toonami.
In 2000, I moved back home and started working at a bookstore with iceaffinity. I discovered that she, too, liked anime. She lent me tapes and fansubs, gave me copies of openings and closings and character songs. She eventually mentioned that she'd written some fanfiction for a series, if I was interested. And then she explained what it was and emailed me her ff.net link.
The light bulb finally lit. After reading her stories, I hunted around for more. Also through iceaffinity, I met more girls into anime and fanfiction, including akarui_rynka and yukihada. We attended our first anime convention - and I found it a much better fit than the comic cons had been. Somewhere in all that, I learned about doujinshi -- fan-produced comics -- and from reading articles about that phenomenon, I learned about a subgenre -- shounen ai/yaoi: Japanese girls writing boys into romantic relationships with one another. Huh, I thought, that's weird. Interesting. Weird.
And then I found Gundam Wing yaoi. And despite the warnings from anti-yaoi fangirls about OOCness and the general lesser worth of those stories, I read some. They were neither particularly OOC nor worse in quality when taken as a group than the gen/het stories had been. I was intrigued. I went on to read the entire Gundam Wing Addiction archive as it stood at that time (excepting one extremely prolific and downright odd author, and I started but didn't finish a few of the 20+ chapter epics).
I joined a couple predominantly shounen ai/yaoi GW mailing lists. The thing was, I wasn't sure how it all worked. I mean, the mechanics of it I got, sure -- how to write to the list as a whole, how to email directly to another member, how to cut duplicate text when replying, that was easy enough. I'd been using email and academic mailing lists for years by then. What I didn't know was how to talk to strangers online, because all the advice I'd ever been given was: Don't.
So I lurked. I posted a drabble and a tiny humor thing. I sent the occasional "I liked this" email. I disagreed with someone, twice, and convinced myself both times that the person at the other end would remember and hate me for all time. I eventually burned out on GW - first on the larger OTPs (3x4, 1x2 and 1xR), then on the alt pairings, too. I unsubscribed and returned to reading on web pages. When I discovered authors I'd liked in GW had written for other series, I read those stories, too, if I was familiar with the source, then tracked down other authors from their rec lists.
I read a lot of Weiss Kreuz.
And then came the day I wanted something new to read, and I wanted to read someone I knew would be good, but no one had updated their website in weeks. But there was some older stuff I hadn't read. Live action (which I'd felt weird about, because, you know, there were real actors wearing those characters' faces). But I was familiar with the series, having been an anthropology student myself back when it aired.
Yeah, it was The Sentinel. I read my way through a couple rec lists. Quite a few of these authors had also written for due South, and eventually I ran out of recommended Sentinel authors. I had started my lj but hadn't yet discovered fan communities, or it would have taken longer. I waffled, then started reading the due South stories, despite having NO knowledge of canon.
I liked them rather alot. I wondered about the canon - then found the season one dvds by accident. (I still wondered about the canon, because by then I'd figured out that the Ray of season one was frequently NOT the Ray being slashed.)
I followed a link back to a livejournal community - ds_flashfiction.
I started commenting on stories, then non-story journal entries. It was easier, alittle, to figure out what other people were doing - what was acceptable or expected - through lj, where the history is partially visible, than it had been on the mls. I friended people (albeit hesitantly). I signed up for the badfic challenge on flashfiction, then highwaymiles and stop_drop_porn. I started posting a few non-challenge fics.
I participated in out_of_con_txt chats and then a couple other ds/Canada fandom chats. By the following spring, I'd signed up for MJ. I panicked quietly and went anyway. I had fun, met other fans, and made some friends. And as far as I know, I did not actively offend anyone nor create any life-long enemies. And then later in the summer, I met up with the_antichris, izzybeth, shoemaster, etben, custardpringle, and kalpurna in Chicago. In terms of community, due South is really my first fandom.
I'm a fan of many things. I talk about anime and manga with my local friends and attend conventions in costume. I'm a huge fan of Minekura Kazuya and CLAMP, but I have no connection to the various fandoms that have grown from their works. I love watching Doctor Who and Supernatural and Avatar and Firefly with friends, and I'm aware that the fandoms exist because those same friends are in them, but I'm not part of them either. I worked in a bookstore - Harry Potter just sort of happened to me, but again, I don't think of myself as being 'in' the fandom. I might someday be a member of Stargate: Atlantis fandom - I do read and comment sometimes. Psych is a someday possiblity. But right now? I don't think of myself as a member of any fandom other than ds/ds 6 degrees.
And even in due South fandom, I still worry about friending people. I rarely exchange emails or IMs directly with anyone I don't know in RL, because I worry about imposing. I still usually feel like I don't quite know how all this works.
But I'm getting better at it.