snowflake challenge #10
challenge #10 - write a love letter to fandom
dear fandom,
thank you for the guild, the fandom by which all others shall be judged. thank you for wizardworld chicago and the sacrifice of the blessed virgin larry and the fact that one year it took three people using three different fasteners to get my stupid papier-mache ears to stay on. thank you for one week discussing the new issue and seven weeks discussing everything else. thank you for making me a high priestess of the dark lord, thank you for the excitement of fifty people on the mailing list, and thank you for the welcome mats.
thank you for buffy, my introduction to lj fandom. thank you for letting me find my niche in a place that felt big and cliqueish and not as welcoming as what i was used to. thank you for the episode recaps and the conversations and the squee and the quotes, and thank you for all the concentrated reruns.
thank you for queer as folk and giving me a reason to say about one of my friends "oh, we met through porn". thank you for flight of the phoenix, fandom of two. thank you for the black donnellys and the jonathan tucker phone tree and the billy lush email alert system. thank you for the tiny show, the other fandom of two. thank you for justified, for "we dug coal together", and thank you for making my squee so obvious that even my sister knew it.
thank you for spn in the early days, when it was small and welcoming and weird, because somehow we always end up here. thank you for the music and the meta and the playlists and the pie charts and the jokes about yaks and the felt metallicar with the headlights that glowed in the dark. thank you for the episode recaps, again. no thank you for prompting me to buttonhole total strangers to share my opinions, but thank you for allowing such passions to flourish. thank you for ten years of winchestercons and wincons, for vid shows and ghost tours and badfic idol and fannish auctions and the winprom and the roadhouse and the ability to get fangirl on people in person. thank you for all the panels and roundtable discussions, and the most random conversations with the most random people because their names were familiar or because we'd just walked out of the same panel or because they recognized me from four years ago. thank you for the opportunity to wear my top hat and my granny boots, thank you for the chance to be a tourist in other people's cities, thank you for cards against humanity and "why am i sticky?", and above all thank you for pulling me down the rabbit hole.
thank you for the mcu, far bigger and more intimidating than buffy ever was, and still the gift that keeps on giving. thank you for the movies and the endless squee and the several months when the internets watched me lose my damn mind. thank you for wizardworld philly and my fifteen minutes of tumblr fame because sometimes i forget to use my inner voice and embarrass myself in public.
thank you for the old guard and the several months when tumblr watched me lose my damn mind again.
thank you for the fic and the art and the vids and the fancrafts and the straight-up discussions about canon. thank you for otps and notps and brotps and the million ways to look at relationships. thank you for fannish osmosis. thank you for the quotes and the references and the shorthand that allow fen to recognize each other out in the world. thank you for the plot bunnies and thank you for all the bigbangs, and thank you for being the reason i can just about date a movie from the cars.
thank you for the stuff, for the t-shirts and the prints and the bracelets and the lego minifigs and the phone charm and the little chest of bpal imps and both model metallicars. thank you even for the papier-mache ears, and the fact that i only got rid of them years later because i moved house, even tho i only wore them the one time.
thank you for broadening my horizons in so many ways, and thank you for always showing me something new.
and thank you for the people, all the fun, funny, smart, talented, kind, generous, silly weirdos i've been blessed to meet and befriend. thank you for the people i've lost touch with and the people i still talk to. thank you for the people i had one conversation with one time. thank you for the people who comment on my fic and who want to talk about canon. thank you for all the fen i'll never meet, who keep fandoms alive through sheer force of will.
thank you for the movies and the tv shows and the books and the comics, and thank you for all the people who share them with me.
love and sloppy kisses,
cindy