Special Snowflakes: The Fandom Edition [day 2]
Challenge #2
In your own space, talk about your fannish history.
I've been in online fandom since around 1997. Before that I was a fan without a community. Still a fan, but not knowing what was possible.
I started with Star Wars, She-Ra (the 1980s cartoon), Mask, Thunderbirds, He-Man, and Captain Planet. There might have been Care Bears, Voltron, Transformers, and Thundercats in there, but I don't remember anymore. But they were all movies or shows that I watched regularly on Saturday mornings or which I caught on weekday afternoons when my mum would allow it.
My first 'fanfic plot' was conceived back in 1986 after watching Return of the Jedi, where I wanted a fic where Luke turned to the Dark Side at Endor and it was Leia who had to bring him back. I didn't have the skill to write it.
Incidentally, last year, after asking for it in
fandom_stocking with the acknowledgement that I was singing into the wind, the freaking amazing
rain_sleet_snow wrote me the Star Wars fic 'My Brother's Keeper! (And this is why fandom is fucking awesome.)
I wrote assorted self-inserts and Mary Sues from age 10 until age 20, at which point using the internet for geekery became A Thing and I was already using the internet for education so it was an easy first jump.
From there it was Bulletin Boards (Melanie Rawn's Princedoms and Exiles), the now defunct Yahoo Groups(Pratchett's Discworld), Geocities webrings (X-Men comics, specifically, Generation X), and a brief foray into newsgroups (Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel). And through it all was AIM, ICQ, Messenger, and other early-days chats.
It was difficult to be involved in fandom from Australia, largely because of the screwy way that media licences operate. A syndicated or cable show would come out in the US, and an Australian channel would buy it if it looked good. But if the ratings didn't prove as promising as hoped (and they never did for the sci-fi shows that I wanted to watch, because no Australian channel ever showed a full and proper season - just a couple of episodes) then they'd stop showing it entirely. Your best option for getting to watch a whole season in Australia was pay TV, to the tune of $80 a month. Which was fine when you were sharing a house with a couple of geeky guys, but not so great when you moved out and were living on your own.
Frankly? Downloading episodes was a godsend, even if the resolution was bad and the picture was blurry. Episodes were 32Kb and 'squintyvision'. That is, you could just about work out what was happening if you left it at size - a 5cm x 8cm (2"x3.5") window on your computer - but you didn't get fine expressions.
It also meant you could actually keep up with episodes of series that were watched in the US and so could keep up with discussings happening elsewhere in the world.
And it was at that point that I discovered Stargate SG1, email lists, 'shipping', and I began making friends who were watching the same show and loving the same things that I loved about it, who talked to me.
Within a year, I was writing fic and posting it to the lists, had an LJ, and spending most of my time in fandom. DW followed LJ, and Tumblr added on but didn't replace DW. I still have Tumblr (
tielan) but I don't use it anymore and I have a twitter account (
tielan_f) but I was never active there. Just too much to keep up everywhere, so these days I'm only active in DW and Discord.
And I guess I'm not that active in fandom either right now.
My most recent fandoms - the ones where I made my name - have been MCU and Pacific Rim, but I've been involved to varying degrees in Merlin BBC, Sanctuary TV, Battlestar Galactic (2003), Firefly, Buffy/Angel, Stargate SG1, Justice League Unlimited, Stargate Atlantis...and probably a bunch of others that I've forgotten. My AO3 overview gives you a full list of which fandoms I've written in, but it's probably not exhaustive.
My oldest online fic is at fanfiction.net here and here. The stuff I wrote for Generation X has since been lost to time and abandoned websites. These days I publish at AO3 - although I'm slowing down in part because nothing has caught my attention since the MCU spit out Endgame (and I watched that mostly for completeness sake because I suspected I wasn't going to like the way they ended it, which, surprise, I didn't).
In 2019, I only published around 25 stories, as compared to 2018, which was about 40. (I think around 2009 I was publishing maybe a hundred fifty a year.) Most of those are exchanges. I always sign up for Chocobox, Yuletide, and Trick or Treat in the last couple of years - but quite a few are just out of my own head, off my own bat.
In 2020, I hope to finish off a bunch of the MCU AUs that I wrote in chapters and haven't finished, but I'll be moving my attention away from fannish stuff, focusing more on my own writing (and activism in real life).
--
A small thing that I still find amusing is that I never thought of myself as fannish until the 2000s. And even then I'm an odd duck among my family. My mum is the kind who watches a non-procedural TV show and asks "who's that?" and "what's happening?" and "why did they do that thing?" and then spends the five minutes after the episode finishes saying "I don't understand" even after someone explains it to her. My sisters avoid anything that could suck them in, because they have lives to live (although B2 has lately started watching the DC movies and all associated things). My stepdad and stepbrothers aren't interested in fannish/geeky/nerdy things beyond a generalised public interest.
Then, a few years ago, I went to visit my father in Vietnam. Apart from visits, we haven't lived in the same household for thirty years. And I came down one morning to find him binge-watching the latest episode of Supergirl and getting really worked up about Alex's boyfriend/colleague finding out about Kara.
As it turns out, I inherited my fannishness. :)
In your own space, talk about your fannish history.
I've been in online fandom since around 1997. Before that I was a fan without a community. Still a fan, but not knowing what was possible.
I started with Star Wars, She-Ra (the 1980s cartoon), Mask, Thunderbirds, He-Man, and Captain Planet. There might have been Care Bears, Voltron, Transformers, and Thundercats in there, but I don't remember anymore. But they were all movies or shows that I watched regularly on Saturday mornings or which I caught on weekday afternoons when my mum would allow it.
My first 'fanfic plot' was conceived back in 1986 after watching Return of the Jedi, where I wanted a fic where Luke turned to the Dark Side at Endor and it was Leia who had to bring him back. I didn't have the skill to write it.
Incidentally, last year, after asking for it in
fandom_stocking with the acknowledgement that I was singing into the wind, the freaking amazing
rain_sleet_snow wrote me the Star Wars fic 'My Brother's Keeper! (And this is why fandom is fucking awesome.)
I wrote assorted self-inserts and Mary Sues from age 10 until age 20, at which point using the internet for geekery became A Thing and I was already using the internet for education so it was an easy first jump.
From there it was Bulletin Boards (Melanie Rawn's Princedoms and Exiles), the now defunct Yahoo Groups(Pratchett's Discworld), Geocities webrings (X-Men comics, specifically, Generation X), and a brief foray into newsgroups (Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel). And through it all was AIM, ICQ, Messenger, and other early-days chats.
It was difficult to be involved in fandom from Australia, largely because of the screwy way that media licences operate. A syndicated or cable show would come out in the US, and an Australian channel would buy it if it looked good. But if the ratings didn't prove as promising as hoped (and they never did for the sci-fi shows that I wanted to watch, because no Australian channel ever showed a full and proper season - just a couple of episodes) then they'd stop showing it entirely. Your best option for getting to watch a whole season in Australia was pay TV, to the tune of $80 a month. Which was fine when you were sharing a house with a couple of geeky guys, but not so great when you moved out and were living on your own.
Frankly? Downloading episodes was a godsend, even if the resolution was bad and the picture was blurry. Episodes were 32Kb and 'squintyvision'. That is, you could just about work out what was happening if you left it at size - a 5cm x 8cm (2"x3.5") window on your computer - but you didn't get fine expressions.
It also meant you could actually keep up with episodes of series that were watched in the US and so could keep up with discussings happening elsewhere in the world.
And it was at that point that I discovered Stargate SG1, email lists, 'shipping', and I began making friends who were watching the same show and loving the same things that I loved about it, who talked to me.
Within a year, I was writing fic and posting it to the lists, had an LJ, and spending most of my time in fandom. DW followed LJ, and Tumblr added on but didn't replace DW. I still have Tumblr (
tielan) but I don't use it anymore and I have a twitter account (
tielan_f) but I was never active there. Just too much to keep up everywhere, so these days I'm only active in DW and Discord.
And I guess I'm not that active in fandom either right now.
My most recent fandoms - the ones where I made my name - have been MCU and Pacific Rim, but I've been involved to varying degrees in Merlin BBC, Sanctuary TV, Battlestar Galactic (2003), Firefly, Buffy/Angel, Stargate SG1, Justice League Unlimited, Stargate Atlantis...and probably a bunch of others that I've forgotten. My AO3 overview gives you a full list of which fandoms I've written in, but it's probably not exhaustive.
My oldest online fic is at fanfiction.net here and here. The stuff I wrote for Generation X has since been lost to time and abandoned websites. These days I publish at AO3 - although I'm slowing down in part because nothing has caught my attention since the MCU spit out Endgame (and I watched that mostly for completeness sake because I suspected I wasn't going to like the way they ended it, which, surprise, I didn't).
In 2019, I only published around 25 stories, as compared to 2018, which was about 40. (I think around 2009 I was publishing maybe a hundred fifty a year.) Most of those are exchanges. I always sign up for Chocobox, Yuletide, and Trick or Treat in the last couple of years - but quite a few are just out of my own head, off my own bat.
In 2020, I hope to finish off a bunch of the MCU AUs that I wrote in chapters and haven't finished, but I'll be moving my attention away from fannish stuff, focusing more on my own writing (and activism in real life).
--
A small thing that I still find amusing is that I never thought of myself as fannish until the 2000s. And even then I'm an odd duck among my family. My mum is the kind who watches a non-procedural TV show and asks "who's that?" and "what's happening?" and "why did they do that thing?" and then spends the five minutes after the episode finishes saying "I don't understand" even after someone explains it to her. My sisters avoid anything that could suck them in, because they have lives to live (although B2 has lately started watching the DC movies and all associated things). My stepdad and stepbrothers aren't interested in fannish/geeky/nerdy things beyond a generalised public interest.
Then, a few years ago, I went to visit my father in Vietnam. Apart from visits, we haven't lived in the same household for thirty years. And I came down one morning to find him binge-watching the latest episode of Supergirl and getting really worked up about Alex's boyfriend/colleague finding out about Kara.
As it turns out, I inherited my fannishness. :)