Fandom Snowflake: Day 6
Still tired, but I have another post-I-made-earlier. (I really should stop making posts and hiding them, but never mind.) Also, I am posting my 
fandom_stocking fics about places finally. If I post any to AO3, then anyone suddenly getting a "gift", it'll probably just be that. Sorry.
In your own space, share a book/song/movie/tv show/fanwork/etc that changed your life. Something that impacted on your consciousness in a way that left its mark on your soul.
I saw other people saying that they had no such show/book etc. Perhaps I'm too impressionable, then, but I have several. (Although, maybe it's partly my tendency to rewatch things, and most of them were from when I was a teenager - which is probably true for most of us - and I was ill and stuck home a lot. And to a certain extent, some from when I've been ill again. I suppose if you've got hours and hours to lie there and think about odd bits of the few books and TV episodes you can manage to read or watch, (and re-watch) and so on, it's bound to creep into your thinking in ways things don't when you're running about in your normal life.)
Anyway, some I can't (or won't) explain here, but the main one is Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones, which is a very good book, but also very complicated, dark and twisted up, in a way that I didn't really get as a teenager but I do now. However, I read it and read it and I still so often do my thinking through it, and snatches of it still run through my head. It's hard to explain what I mean exactly, but part of it is the idea of how heroism might work in the real world (Now Here) as opposed to the dramatic way it does in stories, fairy tales and so on (Nowhere) - "Being a hero means learning to ignore how embarrassed you feel." And giving a means of expressing the way real life and imagination intersect. (The "Now Here/Nowhere" thing, just one letter, one turn away, the same and opposites). It made me think, and still does. And to try to look properly at things, instead of see what you expect to see.
And other things, in lesser ways, mostly, but yes. I was explaining something in Public Eye to myself the other day by means of Fire & Hemlock.
But Diana Wynne Jones, S25 and S26 of Doctor Who (especially The Happiness Patrol - yes, really!), Press Gang, CS Lewis's NF - these are the things that got into my head and shaped me and challenged me and gave me new ways of thinking. I didn't get out much as a teenager; I was ill for four years, so I needed something and those really weren't bad things all told. The weirdness of my brain, let me show it to you. But I like it this way.
And, yes, again now, things for helping my find my way through being ill, for being sort of channels of thought when I was in an incoherent fog, or for distracting me - Joan Aiken's Midnight Is A Place (by Joan Aiken), Enemy at the Door and Public Eye (all things that in some way involved working through bad times, setting a pattern for me to follow) and Sapphire and Steel, which certainly distracted me beautifully for about a whole two years.
After all, if there weren't some stories, in whatever format they may come in, that impacted us and touched our core, or soul, or whatever you prefer to call it, there wouldn't be all that much point in them, in the end. We use them to make sense of the world, supposedly. And so I just happen to make sense of the world through Fire & Hemlock, which I suppose is a little weird, but then again, I think the world's more than a little weird, too, so I have no regrets.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth -- Comments there:
fandom_stocking fics about places finally. If I post any to AO3, then anyone suddenly getting a "gift", it'll probably just be that. Sorry.
In your own space, share a book/song/movie/tv show/fanwork/etc that changed your life. Something that impacted on your consciousness in a way that left its mark on your soul.
I saw other people saying that they had no such show/book etc. Perhaps I'm too impressionable, then, but I have several. (Although, maybe it's partly my tendency to rewatch things, and most of them were from when I was a teenager - which is probably true for most of us - and I was ill and stuck home a lot. And to a certain extent, some from when I've been ill again. I suppose if you've got hours and hours to lie there and think about odd bits of the few books and TV episodes you can manage to read or watch, (and re-watch) and so on, it's bound to creep into your thinking in ways things don't when you're running about in your normal life.)
Anyway, some I can't (or won't) explain here, but the main one is Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones, which is a very good book, but also very complicated, dark and twisted up, in a way that I didn't really get as a teenager but I do now. However, I read it and read it and I still so often do my thinking through it, and snatches of it still run through my head. It's hard to explain what I mean exactly, but part of it is the idea of how heroism might work in the real world (Now Here) as opposed to the dramatic way it does in stories, fairy tales and so on (Nowhere) - "Being a hero means learning to ignore how embarrassed you feel." And giving a means of expressing the way real life and imagination intersect. (The "Now Here/Nowhere" thing, just one letter, one turn away, the same and opposites). It made me think, and still does. And to try to look properly at things, instead of see what you expect to see.
And other things, in lesser ways, mostly, but yes. I was explaining something in Public Eye to myself the other day by means of Fire & Hemlock.
But Diana Wynne Jones, S25 and S26 of Doctor Who (especially The Happiness Patrol - yes, really!), Press Gang, CS Lewis's NF - these are the things that got into my head and shaped me and challenged me and gave me new ways of thinking. I didn't get out much as a teenager; I was ill for four years, so I needed something and those really weren't bad things all told. The weirdness of my brain, let me show it to you. But I like it this way.
And, yes, again now, things for helping my find my way through being ill, for being sort of channels of thought when I was in an incoherent fog, or for distracting me - Joan Aiken's Midnight Is A Place (by Joan Aiken), Enemy at the Door and Public Eye (all things that in some way involved working through bad times, setting a pattern for me to follow) and Sapphire and Steel, which certainly distracted me beautifully for about a whole two years.
After all, if there weren't some stories, in whatever format they may come in, that impacted us and touched our core, or soul, or whatever you prefer to call it, there wouldn't be all that much point in them, in the end. We use them to make sense of the world, supposedly. And so I just happen to make sense of the world through Fire & Hemlock, which I suppose is a little weird, but then again, I think the world's more than a little weird, too, so I have no regrets.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth -- Comments there: