... in which she's the biggest geek in the whole wide world
OK, so rachel2205 asked me about multi-fandom love and asked which fandoms were most important to me and why. My comment got way too big for the comment box, so here it goes. If anyone wants to turn this into a fandom love meme, then please go right ahead, because I am all about discovering what people love and why.
The thing with me is that I am ultimately polyfannish. As with lots of things, being made to choose just seems really wrong to me; expecting one fandom to provide everything all the time seems a bit too much. Obviously different fanfic brings different things, but I don't see the point in fannish stuff that does anything but place canon at centre stage, which means this is kind of limited. A Sports Night fic in which everyone dies isn't going to work nearly as well for me, simply because that's not the nature of the canon. This is because I don't exactly seperate the canon from the fandom; I hang around fandom purely and simply to share my love of the canon and the people who love it. I go to fandom for "more of the same, only different".
So, I have different fandoms for pretty much every possible mood. And, um, I am not kidding there. I'm not active much in more than two or three at a time, usually, but I've never seen any reason why a new fandom should mean giving up the old. (The only fandom I've given up is Dawson's Creek, which, y'know, I was a kidlet and some of the fic was way better than the show and just shut up. :P) This means a lot of fandoms.
Anyway, here in brief is what I love about each of them.
- Harry Potter is brilliant because it's so huge and ongoing; there's so much that you'll never run out, and there's lots of brilliant theorising. I love predicting and analysing it. Lemony Snicket fandom is also all about the analysing and the theorising, but less with the fic.
-Lord of the Rings is one I don't go to much, but I've loved sharing the story and especially my love of the Hobbits. Hobbits are the ultimate in healing escapism. Lord of the Rings is essentially about love, and how, horeven though it can't make every bad thing better, it can do a hell of a lot, and that is generally the feeling I go to the fandom for. It's also very much the backdrop to everything else; there are so many ways in which it influenced pretty much everything after it, and so understanding this series feels to me like getting to the essence of everything.
-Sports Night and The West Wing, as befitting the fact they were made by the same people, are loved for similar reasons: they're my fandoms about real people with modern issues and all the complexities and analysis of modern life that goes with that. Sports Night is cuter and has geeks in it, while West Wing is better for the angry politicalness. These are also where some of the smartest and funniest geeks I've ever heard of hang around; both are side-splittingly hilarious, occasionally while also being heart-wrenchingly angsty, and that's something that means a lot to me.
- Gundam Wing I love for its extremes. These are geniuses: extremely talented, capable people who kill and love with an equal desperation. Firefly is kind of similar, only more realistic; the characters live in a harsh world, but they are still people, and people I care about at that. This also means, especially with Firefly where existentialist philosophy is canon, that they deal very directly with the big issues.
- I love Good Omens because it's funny and deals with religion in a way I love, as well as being beautifully able to be used to explain real-life things, both historical and modern British. (Drunken angels are apparently on the long list of things I find inherently funny. Like chickens. Hee, chickens.)
- Horatio Hornblower and the Aubrey/Maturin books (and also all the stuff based on Classics of the Greek or Roman kind and to a certain extent the Jeeves and Wooster books too) are for me all about finding out random historical things and geeking about them while also analysing relationships etc in a different social context than today's. Mmm. I'm also fascinated by the way the historical context informs the characters; Jack Aubrey, for instance, couldn't possibly be from any other era than the one he's in.
- Sherlock Holmes geeking is also all about the historical context, but there is additional goodness in the form of the picking holes in the canon and then patching them up again, as well as marveling at Sherlock's powers of snark and occasionally getting a good mystery in as well. There's a strong sense of being tied to reality in this fandom that's not exactly replicated elsewhere, and I think that's really cool. It appeals to the pedant in me.
- Blakes 7 is almost the opposite, in that it's all about what people could be. It's also won the Angstiest Fandom Ever award every year since it first aired; it's all about seeing the dark and understanding it and occasionally embracing it, all the ways in which life is neither easy or simple. Oh, and it's got a very bitter kind of humour to it that is sometimes the essence of goodness. It deserves a place in the "extremes" category too, but mostly for me it's the bleakness.
- X-files is kind of like this too; I don't read it much, but when I do it's because I want to see people dealing with the knowledge that the world is a dark and creepy place, and how to try to live in the face of that. It sort of became obselete in that sense with the advent of B7 into the life of Katie, since in my opinion Blakes 7 generally does the whole "fighting the darkness and its effect of people and their relationships" thing rather better - especially since X-files world went crazy and there were alien babies and who the fuck understood what was going on by the end anyway? But still, sometimes I want that in the modern world, and that's where X-Files comes in. Also, the cute partnership in the face of that; I got into fandom in the first place because Mulder and Scully's relationship was just so lovely, and that's still there.
- Neil Gaiman fandom of any kind is about rediscovering the wonder in the everyday. That and just marveling at the power of story. So is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, although R&G is possibly the only thing ever able to be more meta than Neil fandom.
- Stargate: SG-1 and The Sentinel are for me about team dynamics; a team of four in the Stargate world and a team of two in the Sentinel. The same goes for Shooting Fish, actually. This is all about created families and how we go about choosing them and why and how they work.
- My comicbook/superhero love in general can also be tied to this sort of, which makes sense in that they're all about putting a new spin on the concept of a hero, understanding the role heroes play in the world, the trouble that causes, and the extent to which their importance has nothing to do with them. This obviously ties in to other fandoms too, like Harry Potter and Aubrey/Maturin and Blakes7... and, well, pretty much all of them, but is most explicit and important here.
- Queer as Folk is all about queer Mancunians; I love it for being so entirely real (reading some QAF stuff is just like walking down Canal Street myself) while also being totally fucking hilarious. I regularly get Vince's voice in my head for no apparent reason ("Oh, like YOU'D move to fucking Didsbury!") and QAF fandom lets him out.
- Pretty much everything else, like Have I Got News For You or Spaced, is pretty much entirely about the community. StarTrek and DrWho, which I will admit I don't love as much as the above, are about knowing what people are talking about. And as for stuff like Spaced, well, it's catchphrases and randomness that can be used to bring joy to everyday life. Having the right words to express something, being able to say "... I've got some fucking jaffa cakes in my pocket!" after other people start getting Really Freaking Deep, make references to the Gruesome Twosome of Ian and Duncan Smith or talk about terribly well-endowed young men from the village is the difference between giving up and getting through the day.
The thing with me is that I am ultimately polyfannish. As with lots of things, being made to choose just seems really wrong to me; expecting one fandom to provide everything all the time seems a bit too much. Obviously different fanfic brings different things, but I don't see the point in fannish stuff that does anything but place canon at centre stage, which means this is kind of limited. A Sports Night fic in which everyone dies isn't going to work nearly as well for me, simply because that's not the nature of the canon. This is because I don't exactly seperate the canon from the fandom; I hang around fandom purely and simply to share my love of the canon and the people who love it. I go to fandom for "more of the same, only different".
So, I have different fandoms for pretty much every possible mood. And, um, I am not kidding there. I'm not active much in more than two or three at a time, usually, but I've never seen any reason why a new fandom should mean giving up the old. (The only fandom I've given up is Dawson's Creek, which, y'know, I was a kidlet and some of the fic was way better than the show and just shut up. :P) This means a lot of fandoms.
Anyway, here in brief is what I love about each of them.
- Harry Potter is brilliant because it's so huge and ongoing; there's so much that you'll never run out, and there's lots of brilliant theorising. I love predicting and analysing it. Lemony Snicket fandom is also all about the analysing and the theorising, but less with the fic.
-Lord of the Rings is one I don't go to much, but I've loved sharing the story and especially my love of the Hobbits. Hobbits are the ultimate in healing escapism. Lord of the Rings is essentially about love, and how, horeven though it can't make every bad thing better, it can do a hell of a lot, and that is generally the feeling I go to the fandom for. It's also very much the backdrop to everything else; there are so many ways in which it influenced pretty much everything after it, and so understanding this series feels to me like getting to the essence of everything.
-Sports Night and The West Wing, as befitting the fact they were made by the same people, are loved for similar reasons: they're my fandoms about real people with modern issues and all the complexities and analysis of modern life that goes with that. Sports Night is cuter and has geeks in it, while West Wing is better for the angry politicalness. These are also where some of the smartest and funniest geeks I've ever heard of hang around; both are side-splittingly hilarious, occasionally while also being heart-wrenchingly angsty, and that's something that means a lot to me.
- Gundam Wing I love for its extremes. These are geniuses: extremely talented, capable people who kill and love with an equal desperation. Firefly is kind of similar, only more realistic; the characters live in a harsh world, but they are still people, and people I care about at that. This also means, especially with Firefly where existentialist philosophy is canon, that they deal very directly with the big issues.
- I love Good Omens because it's funny and deals with religion in a way I love, as well as being beautifully able to be used to explain real-life things, both historical and modern British. (Drunken angels are apparently on the long list of things I find inherently funny. Like chickens. Hee, chickens.)
- Horatio Hornblower and the Aubrey/Maturin books (and also all the stuff based on Classics of the Greek or Roman kind and to a certain extent the Jeeves and Wooster books too) are for me all about finding out random historical things and geeking about them while also analysing relationships etc in a different social context than today's. Mmm. I'm also fascinated by the way the historical context informs the characters; Jack Aubrey, for instance, couldn't possibly be from any other era than the one he's in.
- Sherlock Holmes geeking is also all about the historical context, but there is additional goodness in the form of the picking holes in the canon and then patching them up again, as well as marveling at Sherlock's powers of snark and occasionally getting a good mystery in as well. There's a strong sense of being tied to reality in this fandom that's not exactly replicated elsewhere, and I think that's really cool. It appeals to the pedant in me.
- Blakes 7 is almost the opposite, in that it's all about what people could be. It's also won the Angstiest Fandom Ever award every year since it first aired; it's all about seeing the dark and understanding it and occasionally embracing it, all the ways in which life is neither easy or simple. Oh, and it's got a very bitter kind of humour to it that is sometimes the essence of goodness. It deserves a place in the "extremes" category too, but mostly for me it's the bleakness.
- X-files is kind of like this too; I don't read it much, but when I do it's because I want to see people dealing with the knowledge that the world is a dark and creepy place, and how to try to live in the face of that. It sort of became obselete in that sense with the advent of B7 into the life of Katie, since in my opinion Blakes 7 generally does the whole "fighting the darkness and its effect of people and their relationships" thing rather better - especially since X-files world went crazy and there were alien babies and who the fuck understood what was going on by the end anyway? But still, sometimes I want that in the modern world, and that's where X-Files comes in. Also, the cute partnership in the face of that; I got into fandom in the first place because Mulder and Scully's relationship was just so lovely, and that's still there.
- Neil Gaiman fandom of any kind is about rediscovering the wonder in the everyday. That and just marveling at the power of story. So is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, although R&G is possibly the only thing ever able to be more meta than Neil fandom.
- Stargate: SG-1 and The Sentinel are for me about team dynamics; a team of four in the Stargate world and a team of two in the Sentinel. The same goes for Shooting Fish, actually. This is all about created families and how we go about choosing them and why and how they work.
- My comicbook/superhero love in general can also be tied to this sort of, which makes sense in that they're all about putting a new spin on the concept of a hero, understanding the role heroes play in the world, the trouble that causes, and the extent to which their importance has nothing to do with them. This obviously ties in to other fandoms too, like Harry Potter and Aubrey/Maturin and Blakes7... and, well, pretty much all of them, but is most explicit and important here.
- Queer as Folk is all about queer Mancunians; I love it for being so entirely real (reading some QAF stuff is just like walking down Canal Street myself) while also being totally fucking hilarious. I regularly get Vince's voice in my head for no apparent reason ("Oh, like YOU'D move to fucking Didsbury!") and QAF fandom lets him out.
- Pretty much everything else, like Have I Got News For You or Spaced, is pretty much entirely about the community. StarTrek and DrWho, which I will admit I don't love as much as the above, are about knowing what people are talking about. And as for stuff like Spaced, well, it's catchphrases and randomness that can be used to bring joy to everyday life. Having the right words to express something, being able to say "... I've got some fucking jaffa cakes in my pocket!" after other people start getting Really Freaking Deep, make references to the Gruesome Twosome of Ian and Duncan Smith or talk about terribly well-endowed young men from the village is the difference between giving up and getting through the day.