Fandom fun
I've been having giant amounts of fun trolling through people's LJ memories, since the FL is a bit slow today. Or I have nothing to do and keep refreshing it every five seconds because I don't have a life outside of the internet...
And now I am happily nostalgic about all sorts of fandom stuff, even though I am also realizing, wow, I am such a fandom newbie still. I've basically had three fandoms. I think I found fandom in tenth grade -- seven years ago almost!! Hrm. I was kind of disappointed in the internet because there wasn't anything readable on it that I could find (mind you, this is back in 1997 or something). What I basically wanted was this giant portal into a world filled of books that I could access for free, my idea of paradise, especially while still living in Taiwan. Ugh, getting my hands on new reading material back then was so hard!
So I'd surf around Yahoo links, and I kept coming across this weird term: "fan fiction." What was that? Then some girl in my class got hooked on X-Files. The name was familiar, and so I started going online to look for stuff, and whoa, fan fiction! I think one of the first things I read was Madeleine Partous' Shadow Puppets. I was confused as hell, having never seen the show before, but immediately started digging up other stuff. Then I started watching X-Files and surfing sites for episode summaries. It's a weird way to start watching a show -- knowing important pieces of canon via fanfic, and MSR fic to boot. So big moments were obviously Pusher and Scully's abduction and subsequent return, the "iced tea" comment, all that. Some of them I think I still haven't seen. I watched the pilot and Squeeze (is that the "if it's iced tea, it's love" one?) for the first time this year on DVD, and weird! I've had those scenes in which Scully drops her bathrobe and the car conversation done so many times in fic that it was almost strange to see it on screen.
I'm such a typical fan too -- rabid MSR shipper, read Madeleine Partous and Punk Maneuverability, Paula Graves (although I got sick of those after a while) and Karen Rasch (ditto) and Lydia Bower (I still haven't been able to reread the Scully is dying from cancer fics, hee). Then I think it went off air in Taiwan -- I had seen bits and pieces of S2, S3 and S4, thanks to TV here and reruns during the summer in CA. Watched some of S5 thanks to tapes that one of our old teachers sent to us (me and my friend, who were probably the only two people who knew about this fandom thing in my high school). Went to college and was immediately bowled over by the fact that I could watch X-Files in real time! Unfortunately, this was also during the crappy S6, plus, everyone laughed at me and X-Files, and I eventually stopped watching and never started again. It's weird finding out that a lot of people on LJ were in the XF fandom and remember all those names that I do! It's also kind of interesting thinking that all those people got to know of each other during the XF fandom! My fandoms never quite overlapped -- XF fans didn't really transfer into anime fandom, anime fandom didn't really translate into Buffy fandom. The cool thing about that was I got to be different fannish people at each stage.
In the meanwhile, in junior year, I got hooked on to Gundam Wing. Then, I knew how to get into fandom proper -- hit the fanfic sites, hit the episode summaries, etc. With XF, I was always a passive fan. Never had access to newly aired episodes, no need to write fic because there were lots of good writers already, no website, nothing. For GWing I started getting annoyed that all the sites had the same character descriptions cribbed from the official site (Heero has moss green hair and cerulean blue eyes, or something!), and eventually was persuaded by another friend to start our own GWing site, with episode analyses and stuff. I'm still rather proud of the never quite finished, now defunct Too Much Testosterone. Haha, my first bid for fandom fame ;). Also wrote a few horribly sappy Zechs and Noin fics because I couldn't find any I liked. Alas, my dreams of being a BNF were cruelly dashed when I realized the vast majority of the fandom was interested in slash. Plus, they were probably put off by the fact that I called myself "Lt. Noin," after a character in the show ;). I remember GWing most for the giant fan wars, Relena-bashing, general female character bashing, my small attempts to stand up for Noin, and, of course, the giant yaoi wars of doom. Since I haven't actually seen an XF fanwar, I can't say how it compares, but wow, anime had some killers. Plus, you know, there was the whole thing in which people would throw in historical perogative, what with Japan having male-male love going back to the samurai! Anime had a weird hierarchy -- the more you knew about Japan, the more authoritative you were. So you'd have people going around saying, "I've taken two years of Japanese and lived there for a month, so I say this! This is the most accurate version! You must listen to me when I say this is the explanation of yaoi!" Now we can see my vainglorious reasons for going into East Asian studies and learning Japanese ;).
Ah, such drama -- mods abandoning mailing lists, rival MLs springing up, the yaoi debate being revived every two weeks ago by newbies: "What is this yaoi thing?! OMG that's so disgusting the pilots aren't gay and wouldn't sleep with each other!" I got so burned out of that fandom.
Now I'm in the Jossverse fandom and have vicariously lived through Spike wars, early Buffy versus late Buffy naysayers, etc. It's kind of sad it's drawing to a sort of end too, what with the cancellation of Angel =(. This is the first time I've made actual friends in the fandom -- the other times I think I just never staked out enough area to get to know people (plus, no offense, but... there were a lot of weird people in the GWing fandom). So it's kind of interesting, being a fan fan who talks to other fans and socializes and stuff. Wow, now I feel all nostalgic and I kind of want to check out the GWing fandom again. Best not though!
And now I am happily nostalgic about all sorts of fandom stuff, even though I am also realizing, wow, I am such a fandom newbie still. I've basically had three fandoms. I think I found fandom in tenth grade -- seven years ago almost!! Hrm. I was kind of disappointed in the internet because there wasn't anything readable on it that I could find (mind you, this is back in 1997 or something). What I basically wanted was this giant portal into a world filled of books that I could access for free, my idea of paradise, especially while still living in Taiwan. Ugh, getting my hands on new reading material back then was so hard!
So I'd surf around Yahoo links, and I kept coming across this weird term: "fan fiction." What was that? Then some girl in my class got hooked on X-Files. The name was familiar, and so I started going online to look for stuff, and whoa, fan fiction! I think one of the first things I read was Madeleine Partous' Shadow Puppets. I was confused as hell, having never seen the show before, but immediately started digging up other stuff. Then I started watching X-Files and surfing sites for episode summaries. It's a weird way to start watching a show -- knowing important pieces of canon via fanfic, and MSR fic to boot. So big moments were obviously Pusher and Scully's abduction and subsequent return, the "iced tea" comment, all that. Some of them I think I still haven't seen. I watched the pilot and Squeeze (is that the "if it's iced tea, it's love" one?) for the first time this year on DVD, and weird! I've had those scenes in which Scully drops her bathrobe and the car conversation done so many times in fic that it was almost strange to see it on screen.
I'm such a typical fan too -- rabid MSR shipper, read Madeleine Partous and Punk Maneuverability, Paula Graves (although I got sick of those after a while) and Karen Rasch (ditto) and Lydia Bower (I still haven't been able to reread the Scully is dying from cancer fics, hee). Then I think it went off air in Taiwan -- I had seen bits and pieces of S2, S3 and S4, thanks to TV here and reruns during the summer in CA. Watched some of S5 thanks to tapes that one of our old teachers sent to us (me and my friend, who were probably the only two people who knew about this fandom thing in my high school). Went to college and was immediately bowled over by the fact that I could watch X-Files in real time! Unfortunately, this was also during the crappy S6, plus, everyone laughed at me and X-Files, and I eventually stopped watching and never started again. It's weird finding out that a lot of people on LJ were in the XF fandom and remember all those names that I do! It's also kind of interesting thinking that all those people got to know of each other during the XF fandom! My fandoms never quite overlapped -- XF fans didn't really transfer into anime fandom, anime fandom didn't really translate into Buffy fandom. The cool thing about that was I got to be different fannish people at each stage.
In the meanwhile, in junior year, I got hooked on to Gundam Wing. Then, I knew how to get into fandom proper -- hit the fanfic sites, hit the episode summaries, etc. With XF, I was always a passive fan. Never had access to newly aired episodes, no need to write fic because there were lots of good writers already, no website, nothing. For GWing I started getting annoyed that all the sites had the same character descriptions cribbed from the official site (Heero has moss green hair and cerulean blue eyes, or something!), and eventually was persuaded by another friend to start our own GWing site, with episode analyses and stuff. I'm still rather proud of the never quite finished, now defunct Too Much Testosterone. Haha, my first bid for fandom fame ;). Also wrote a few horribly sappy Zechs and Noin fics because I couldn't find any I liked. Alas, my dreams of being a BNF were cruelly dashed when I realized the vast majority of the fandom was interested in slash. Plus, they were probably put off by the fact that I called myself "Lt. Noin," after a character in the show ;). I remember GWing most for the giant fan wars, Relena-bashing, general female character bashing, my small attempts to stand up for Noin, and, of course, the giant yaoi wars of doom. Since I haven't actually seen an XF fanwar, I can't say how it compares, but wow, anime had some killers. Plus, you know, there was the whole thing in which people would throw in historical perogative, what with Japan having male-male love going back to the samurai! Anime had a weird hierarchy -- the more you knew about Japan, the more authoritative you were. So you'd have people going around saying, "I've taken two years of Japanese and lived there for a month, so I say this! This is the most accurate version! You must listen to me when I say this is the explanation of yaoi!" Now we can see my vainglorious reasons for going into East Asian studies and learning Japanese ;).
Ah, such drama -- mods abandoning mailing lists, rival MLs springing up, the yaoi debate being revived every two weeks ago by newbies: "What is this yaoi thing?! OMG that's so disgusting the pilots aren't gay and wouldn't sleep with each other!" I got so burned out of that fandom.
Now I'm in the Jossverse fandom and have vicariously lived through Spike wars, early Buffy versus late Buffy naysayers, etc. It's kind of sad it's drawing to a sort of end too, what with the cancellation of Angel =(. This is the first time I've made actual friends in the fandom -- the other times I think I just never staked out enough area to get to know people (plus, no offense, but... there were a lot of weird people in the GWing fandom). So it's kind of interesting, being a fan fan who talks to other fans and socializes and stuff. Wow, now I feel all nostalgic and I kind of want to check out the GWing fandom again. Best not though!