Fandom Appreciation Challenge - Day 7
Today’s task is to write a love letter related to fandom.
Mine is to all the fans, and especially to the writers and vidders, who reappear in a fandom I love after leaving a fandom I loved years before! Not many things are more exciting than discovering that one of your favourite authors from the past is now writing in your latest interest. (I live in hope that this will happen with cesperanza, astolat and killabeez, but I’m pretty sure that sometime over the next 40 or so years, it will!)
Take the organiser of this challenge, china_shop, who entered fandom with some fantastic F/K due South stories in 2004. I read everything she wrote until she branched out into Ray/Ray, F/K/V and RPF, none of which are really my thing. Years went by… Then suddenly she’s writing wonderful White Collar and all this quality-guaranteed stuff is appearing on my friendslist on a regular basis.
It works the other way around, too: you discover a good writer via say Yuletide and then, when you’re belatedly getting into an older fandom, have the pleasure of seeing their name in an archive or on a recs list for something they wrote years before. I have a pretty good memory for usernames/pseudonyms (much better than for names and faces in person!) and absolutely love it when this happens. I loved lyrstzha’s 2007 Yuletide Keen Eddie story A Vermillion to One, but at the time didn’t share any other fandoms with her. After watching Angel last year, I went looking for some Spike/Angel and was thrilled to see her name in the Slashing the Angel archive. Not surprisingly, that story was excellent too!
Fandom seems to be a fairly entrenched hobby/lifestyle choice for most people and there isn’t a high attrition rate. It’s still young enough that many of the people who created what I think of as history are still creating things in the here and now. It was a thrill to discover when I came to LJ that many of the esteemed personages of the Media Cannibals are still vidding.
At the local level, where almost everyone I know is quite multi-fannish, there’s the fun of occasionally and unpredictably sharing a main interest with someone. I’ve rarely had more fun than the couple of months in 2008 when sarren and I were head over heels for The Persuaders at the same time, and at the moment I have bardiegrub to complain about House’s behaviour with.
I looked back on the last time I did this exercise for this challenge and was slightly shocked to see that it was in 2006, not about three years ago like I thought. Then I looked at the other people who participated then. Most of them are still around, with active journals and wide-ranging fannish interests. It’s the longevity of most people’s fannish participation that creates both a sense of community and, for a few, a strong, enduring brand name that makes the day of people like me when we see it appear in our latest fandom! Thanks to you all for sticking around and continuing to do what you do, sometimes in the very places I most wish you were doing it!
Mine is to all the fans, and especially to the writers and vidders, who reappear in a fandom I love after leaving a fandom I loved years before! Not many things are more exciting than discovering that one of your favourite authors from the past is now writing in your latest interest. (I live in hope that this will happen with cesperanza, astolat and killabeez, but I’m pretty sure that sometime over the next 40 or so years, it will!)
Take the organiser of this challenge, china_shop, who entered fandom with some fantastic F/K due South stories in 2004. I read everything she wrote until she branched out into Ray/Ray, F/K/V and RPF, none of which are really my thing. Years went by… Then suddenly she’s writing wonderful White Collar and all this quality-guaranteed stuff is appearing on my friendslist on a regular basis.
It works the other way around, too: you discover a good writer via say Yuletide and then, when you’re belatedly getting into an older fandom, have the pleasure of seeing their name in an archive or on a recs list for something they wrote years before. I have a pretty good memory for usernames/pseudonyms (much better than for names and faces in person!) and absolutely love it when this happens. I loved lyrstzha’s 2007 Yuletide Keen Eddie story A Vermillion to One, but at the time didn’t share any other fandoms with her. After watching Angel last year, I went looking for some Spike/Angel and was thrilled to see her name in the Slashing the Angel archive. Not surprisingly, that story was excellent too!
Fandom seems to be a fairly entrenched hobby/lifestyle choice for most people and there isn’t a high attrition rate. It’s still young enough that many of the people who created what I think of as history are still creating things in the here and now. It was a thrill to discover when I came to LJ that many of the esteemed personages of the Media Cannibals are still vidding.
At the local level, where almost everyone I know is quite multi-fannish, there’s the fun of occasionally and unpredictably sharing a main interest with someone. I’ve rarely had more fun than the couple of months in 2008 when sarren and I were head over heels for The Persuaders at the same time, and at the moment I have bardiegrub to complain about House’s behaviour with.
I looked back on the last time I did this exercise for this challenge and was slightly shocked to see that it was in 2006, not about three years ago like I thought. Then I looked at the other people who participated then. Most of them are still around, with active journals and wide-ranging fannish interests. It’s the longevity of most people’s fannish participation that creates both a sense of community and, for a few, a strong, enduring brand name that makes the day of people like me when we see it appear in our latest fandom! Thanks to you all for sticking around and continuing to do what you do, sometimes in the very places I most wish you were doing it!