Canon experiences you can only have once
Kind of open-ended, I know. But I ran across a mention of the original Homestuck flash animations tonight, and that made me think about the whole experience of spending three or four solid days bingeing it back in 2010 or 2011, whenever that was - when the series was unfinished, when it was kind of a niche thing that was starting to snowball rather than overhyped to the point where there was such a thing as having a "Homestuck phase" in fandom, and basically just the whole experience of discovering it as this unfolding, non-sequential multimedia experience that wasn't quite like anything I'd ever read before.
I'm never going to do that again, for a variety of reasons. You basically can't without the Flash (though apparently there are archives that replicate the Flash animations), but also because there is no way I'm either devoting several solid consecutive days of my life to rereading a webcomic, or sustaining a reread of something that dense, convoluted, repetitive, and occasionally downright stupid over the number of weeks or months it would take to read it at a sane pace. Not to mention that half the fun of it the first time was having literally no idea what new bonkers tangent it was going to go off on, and I don't know how much enjoyment I'd actually get out of it without the element of surprise, now that I know where it's all going and how disappointing some of it was.
It's not even that Homestuck was ever influential or life-changing for me, because it wasn't. At all. I never even got into it in a fandom way, aside from watching some vids. I was just struck by the complete unrepeatability of that reading experience, which was probably the only time I'll ever read it from the beginning and might even be the only time I read it at all; I don't know if I'd even enjoy it if I read it now. But at one point in my life it fascinated me enough to spend the better part of a week doing literally nothing else but reading it.
There are probably a lot of experiences like that in most people's lives, and I know I have others - those times when you find a book or movie at exactly the right time in your life, when before or after wouldn't be the same, or the times when the actual surrounding experience of the thing is the special, unrepeatable part. You can always reread or rewatch, but you only ever get one first time with any show, book, or movie - and yet, sometimes the special, unrepeatable time isn't even the first time; it's some other aspect that makes it that way.
What are some of yours? This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1402464.html with
comments.
I'm never going to do that again, for a variety of reasons. You basically can't without the Flash (though apparently there are archives that replicate the Flash animations), but also because there is no way I'm either devoting several solid consecutive days of my life to rereading a webcomic, or sustaining a reread of something that dense, convoluted, repetitive, and occasionally downright stupid over the number of weeks or months it would take to read it at a sane pace. Not to mention that half the fun of it the first time was having literally no idea what new bonkers tangent it was going to go off on, and I don't know how much enjoyment I'd actually get out of it without the element of surprise, now that I know where it's all going and how disappointing some of it was.
It's not even that Homestuck was ever influential or life-changing for me, because it wasn't. At all. I never even got into it in a fandom way, aside from watching some vids. I was just struck by the complete unrepeatability of that reading experience, which was probably the only time I'll ever read it from the beginning and might even be the only time I read it at all; I don't know if I'd even enjoy it if I read it now. But at one point in my life it fascinated me enough to spend the better part of a week doing literally nothing else but reading it.
There are probably a lot of experiences like that in most people's lives, and I know I have others - those times when you find a book or movie at exactly the right time in your life, when before or after wouldn't be the same, or the times when the actual surrounding experience of the thing is the special, unrepeatable part. You can always reread or rewatch, but you only ever get one first time with any show, book, or movie - and yet, sometimes the special, unrepeatable time isn't even the first time; it's some other aspect that makes it that way.
What are some of yours? This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1402464.html with
comments.