December meme: Intro to fandom
[December posting meme daily list, for which I am taking prompts]
Prompt from
theladyscribe: What was your intro to fandom?
When I was a wee Lanna, Star Trek: The Next Generation was a thing that existed. 90s television accessibility was also, alas, a thing that existed. I was a fan who had not seen the majority of the show. I did, however, buy TNG marbles at the Science Center, read all the TNG books I could get, owned a Star Trek communicator shaped keychain, have a TNG notepad, had TNG postcards that I kept and put on the walls--
And when I got my hands on the internet, I went to StarTrek.com and watched tiny .avi clips of episodes! And read summaries! Because watching episodes was hard! But every other bit of the fandom, that was actually accessible.
(true story: I have seen maybe two episodes of Voyager in my lifetime. But I watched the one that was promoted as having Data in it. In order to get the channel to watch this episode, I had to stand over the television, pointing the antenna is a specific direction, and even then, it was staticy. But I was able to watch the episode, sort of.)
Yeah, I don't miss the days when the hardest part of being in a fandom was CONSUMING THE CANON.
It is therefore also very amusing, since my earliest fandom was Star Trek, that the first fandom I wrote fic for was... Star Wars. Yeah, that rivalry stuff is nonsense, they are vastly different canons. Star Trek is science, Star Wars is fantasy.
The Star Wars story is also pretty damn indicative of both myself (I have honestly always been this way) and also that time period in fandom: my first Star Wars Experience was Spaceballs, which was a staple of my childhood because we owned the VHS, and that I still believe is the best Star Wars movie ever made. Then my great-aunt bought me the one-volume novelization of the three Star Wars movies, which I sat on for a bit, but then read. It was at this point that I joined the Star Wars fandom. It was later that I actually watched the movies. This is how, to this day, I feel the Star Wars novelizations are my real "canon" for Star Wars: Owen is Obi-Wan's brother, etc.
Anyway, yeah, the 90s-fannish!Lanna can be summed up as "watching canons is too hard, therefore even visual canons are just book canons". The first book I remember buying in a store was Q Squared and I still feel that book is a masterclass in alternative universes. But for me, Star Trek and also Star Wars are primarily book fandoms. Because that's how I was able to access them. And quite frankly, even once I owned the Star Wars movies, it's a hell of a lot of easier to page through a book and read it, than it is to spend two hours watching a movie. Books are just easier to consume than visual media, especially on the go.
Also, Star Trek and Star Wars merchandized the fuck out of themselves, especially with tie-in books. You cannot blame me for seeing them as primarily book-based when they both had SO MANY BOOKS.
(This is partly why I refuse to read the new Star Wars books. I already spent a ton of money, from a childhood access-to-money-amount, on the EU, just to have them joss it. So they can fuck right off, I'm not getting fooled again. If it's not on the screen, I don't feel any need to put it into my fic. And even if it is on the screen, I still don't feel any need to put it into my fic. If I wanna read stuff that isn't in the movies, I have fandom for that, I don't need to go hunting for books.)
This entry was originally posted at https://lannamichaels.dreamwidth.org/1020361.html.