What does fandom mean to me?
A topic prompt from 
executrix: Prompts: what did you want from fandom when you first got involved? Did you get it? What do you want now? Are you getting it?
*rubs hands gleefully* I love talking about fandom :-)
I first got involved with fandom through the posting boards on the official Buffy site, back in 1999, when the show was just nearing the end of season two. At that time, I was getting to the end of my first year at university (studying pathology and microbiology) and I'd made the decision to leave, but I didn't want to just quit and go home. I was determined to finish out the year and pass my exams, to prove to myself that I could do it and I was leaving because the course wasn't right, and not because I wasn't smart enough for it.
I was tired and doubting myself, but finally seeing a light at the end of a dark tunnel. My parents had leant me a computer to have in my room at uni, and I had a good Internet connection for the first time in my life. One day, I decided to see what information there was about this new show I'd found called Buffy.
Heh.
All I really wanted was to read some discussions about the show and maybe to talk about it a bit. I wasn't expecting to make friends or be heavily involved in anything fannish. I didn't know fanfic existed, so I definitely wasn't looking for that. The only thing I was really looking for was some discussion about this awesome show I was watching, that nobody else around me knew about.
What I got was that, and so much more.
The Buffy posting board, at that time, was the place to go for Buffy fans. It hosted some amazing meta discussions about every aspect of the show and the issues raised in the storylines. The community there was fantastic: vibrant, chatty, and incredibly friendly. They took newbies in and helped them to learn how to interact on the Internet safely, which made us feel very welcome. Every day, there was leatherjacket's Question of the Day to spark conversation (sometimes serious, sometimes silly), which was a good fallback if we didn't have anything else to discuss and produced some amazing meta.
The board could be very silly and funny at times, too. Whole afternoons playing Calvinball. The time we held a prom. A whole bunch of things that would now be classified as creative role playing, except we were just having fun without thinking about how we were having fun.
Internet at that time was skewed heavily towards text, because most people were on dial-up, so our silliness and play had to be done through words. And there was no ability to post a gif that expressed all our feelings, so we meta'd hard with a lot of discussion.
I guess that I found a heck of a lot more than I expected to get when I first found fandom: community, friends, people who liked the kind of meta discussions about media that I'd always wanted and had never found in RL.
So, I'd say that I found far more than I knew I wanted when I first got involved with fandom. It opened my eyes to what was possible and available, you know?
What do I want now from fandom?
A lot of the same things that I found during that same first burst of fannishness, I guess. A community, friends, and people to discuss the movies, books, and TV shows I'm loving. A place to share and discuss writing. Now that I'm starting to branch out into original writing, I guess that I'm looking for people to discuss that with who come from a fannish ficcish background. I've been checking out writing boards, but none of them feel like a place where I fit. My roots in fanfic change the way I think about writing and worldbuilding, I guess, and I feel like an interloper in the regular writing boards.
I'm also looking for a place where I can, when I need to, just be silly and happy and ridiculous. Meta is awesome and wonderful and I love discussions, but sometimes I just need to look at gifs of pretty people and cats doing daft things.
The second part - pretty pictures and silly videos - is what I use Tumblr for. I rarely look at any of the tags (except the Clint/Coulson tag, which is a mellow lovely place) and I keep my dash carefully cultivated so it is largely a happy place for me. Pretty stuff, fun stuff, nothing to make me ragey or unhappy.
Twitter is where I go now for news, company, and community. It's a very immediate way of being fannish and I really enjoy my Twitter time.
The really detailed meta and fannish discussion is something that I feel like I've been missing lately, and that's why I'm trying to get back into doing fandom on journals. Trying to be meaningful in 140 chars is almost impossible. Tumblr is a terrible platform for discussion. I'm on a lovely mailing list for Agents of SHIELD episode discussion, but I'm a multi-fannish person, so that doesn't satisfy all my needs.
Plus, discussion of writing (fanfic and original) really doesn't happen anywhere on either Twitter or Tumblr. I've done lots of throwing around plot bunnies on Twitter (that's an incredible amount of fun), but anything with more depth seems impossible there.
So, I guess that I'm not getting everything I want out of fandom at the moment, but I'm trying to change that by being more involved in the areas I've been missing.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenay.dreamwidth.org/507081.html. There are currently
babbles on the entry on Dreamwidth. Leave comments at http://selenay.dreamwidth.org/507081.html?mode=reply
executrix: Prompts: what did you want from fandom when you first got involved? Did you get it? What do you want now? Are you getting it?
*rubs hands gleefully* I love talking about fandom :-)
I first got involved with fandom through the posting boards on the official Buffy site, back in 1999, when the show was just nearing the end of season two. At that time, I was getting to the end of my first year at university (studying pathology and microbiology) and I'd made the decision to leave, but I didn't want to just quit and go home. I was determined to finish out the year and pass my exams, to prove to myself that I could do it and I was leaving because the course wasn't right, and not because I wasn't smart enough for it.
I was tired and doubting myself, but finally seeing a light at the end of a dark tunnel. My parents had leant me a computer to have in my room at uni, and I had a good Internet connection for the first time in my life. One day, I decided to see what information there was about this new show I'd found called Buffy.
Heh.
All I really wanted was to read some discussions about the show and maybe to talk about it a bit. I wasn't expecting to make friends or be heavily involved in anything fannish. I didn't know fanfic existed, so I definitely wasn't looking for that. The only thing I was really looking for was some discussion about this awesome show I was watching, that nobody else around me knew about.
What I got was that, and so much more.
The Buffy posting board, at that time, was the place to go for Buffy fans. It hosted some amazing meta discussions about every aspect of the show and the issues raised in the storylines. The community there was fantastic: vibrant, chatty, and incredibly friendly. They took newbies in and helped them to learn how to interact on the Internet safely, which made us feel very welcome. Every day, there was leatherjacket's Question of the Day to spark conversation (sometimes serious, sometimes silly), which was a good fallback if we didn't have anything else to discuss and produced some amazing meta.
The board could be very silly and funny at times, too. Whole afternoons playing Calvinball. The time we held a prom. A whole bunch of things that would now be classified as creative role playing, except we were just having fun without thinking about how we were having fun.
Internet at that time was skewed heavily towards text, because most people were on dial-up, so our silliness and play had to be done through words. And there was no ability to post a gif that expressed all our feelings, so we meta'd hard with a lot of discussion.
I guess that I found a heck of a lot more than I expected to get when I first found fandom: community, friends, people who liked the kind of meta discussions about media that I'd always wanted and had never found in RL.
So, I'd say that I found far more than I knew I wanted when I first got involved with fandom. It opened my eyes to what was possible and available, you know?
What do I want now from fandom?
A lot of the same things that I found during that same first burst of fannishness, I guess. A community, friends, and people to discuss the movies, books, and TV shows I'm loving. A place to share and discuss writing. Now that I'm starting to branch out into original writing, I guess that I'm looking for people to discuss that with who come from a fannish ficcish background. I've been checking out writing boards, but none of them feel like a place where I fit. My roots in fanfic change the way I think about writing and worldbuilding, I guess, and I feel like an interloper in the regular writing boards.
I'm also looking for a place where I can, when I need to, just be silly and happy and ridiculous. Meta is awesome and wonderful and I love discussions, but sometimes I just need to look at gifs of pretty people and cats doing daft things.
The second part - pretty pictures and silly videos - is what I use Tumblr for. I rarely look at any of the tags (except the Clint/Coulson tag, which is a mellow lovely place) and I keep my dash carefully cultivated so it is largely a happy place for me. Pretty stuff, fun stuff, nothing to make me ragey or unhappy.
Twitter is where I go now for news, company, and community. It's a very immediate way of being fannish and I really enjoy my Twitter time.
The really detailed meta and fannish discussion is something that I feel like I've been missing lately, and that's why I'm trying to get back into doing fandom on journals. Trying to be meaningful in 140 chars is almost impossible. Tumblr is a terrible platform for discussion. I'm on a lovely mailing list for Agents of SHIELD episode discussion, but I'm a multi-fannish person, so that doesn't satisfy all my needs.
Plus, discussion of writing (fanfic and original) really doesn't happen anywhere on either Twitter or Tumblr. I've done lots of throwing around plot bunnies on Twitter (that's an incredible amount of fun), but anything with more depth seems impossible there.
So, I guess that I'm not getting everything I want out of fandom at the moment, but I'm trying to change that by being more involved in the areas I've been missing.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenay.dreamwidth.org/507081.html. There are currently
babbles on the entry on Dreamwidth. Leave comments at http://selenay.dreamwidth.org/507081.html?mode=reply