retrospective: a decade in fandom
After spending an unpleasant Christmas and Boxing Day with some sort of stomach bug of doom, I managed to recover, go to Philadelphia for a lovely but exhausting couple of days, and return home last night unhindered by any of the air travel horrors that have assailed so many people in recent days. Not the best holiday break in the world, but not the worst, either. Today I've thus far spent much of the day in much-needed solitude, gluttonously immersing myself in Yuletide stories--watch this space for recs in the upcoming days. I should be getting back to work, but first I just need to be quiet, y'know? Fortunately, I came home to New Year's Eve plans of staying in with the roomies and a few other close friends, rather than going out into the mayhem, and this should be lovely and exactly my pace right now.
And it's the last day of the year and, depending on how one counts these things, the decade, and this seems to call for the obligatory ruminations.
2009 has been relatively uneventful, both personally and fannishly (with the exception, in the latter category, of my bitter and emphatic breakup with BSG). Looking back at the decade is a richer experience in navel-gazing. At the end of 1999, I was a 19-year-old undergrad, still living in the same small town doing much the same things I'd done for the 19 years before that. But in 2000 I moved to England for a few months, and this was the beginning of the subsequent decade of independence, adulthood, academia, and generally learning to be comfortable in my own skin. I left the town of 5000 people where I'd lived most of my life to move by myself to New York City. I've lived more years of this decade outside the US than in it. I've earned two degrees and am nearly finished with a third. I've learned to make my own choices.
Compared with all that, a focus on fandom is perhaps trivial, but this has also been my first decade of fandom, and since this community has brought me so much joy and so many dear friends, that's no small thing. It was sometime in 2000 when, for some reason, I decided to google (or yahoo search? msn search? were we googling yet in 2000?) X-Files episode summaries or reviews. I had been a devoted XF viewer for years, but it had never occurred to me to do anything but watch it on television. But something made me want to go back to remember something about past episodes, or some such thing, and in wading through search results I found not only episode reviews but also fanfic. I had never heard of fanfic before this. Stories about Mulder and Scully after the credits had rolled! Stories about Mulder and Scully having (a lot of) sex! Casefile stories! It was a revelation. I had no idea that I was also discovering a long-term hobby and a community of astonishingly smart and generous people who have made my life so much richer and more joyful. And so it seems worth looking back on my first decade in fandom.
The X-Files (1994-2002)
I started watching X-Files in about 1994, but as I mentioned, I didn't discover fandom until 2000. It took me another couple years after that to delurk, and I was never very active in the fandom. Those last few years of the show were horrifically disappointing in many ways (baby plot of OMGDOOM!, anyone?), but I nevertheless latched onto Doggett and Reyes, despite being convinced I would not like John Doggett when I heard he would be introduced. I was proved wrong, and I eventually delurked on the XFMU yahoo group and wrote my first fanfic (now mercifully gone from the internet!) not about my beloved Scully and Mulder (I think I was too intimidated to wade into that pond) but about Doggett and Reyes. In many ways this was a fannish trial run of sorts: I didn't make many connections (though I did meet mylittleredgirl, my oldest fandom friend!) and mostly lurked, but I still think back on those days with fondness and occasionally wander back to Gossamer for a little dose of nostalgia.
Stargate: SG-1 (2003-2007, recurring thereafter)
It hadn't occurred to me that my interest in fandom might extend beyond X-Files or become a lifestyle habit. After XF was canceled, I kept poking at fic and fandom and became increasingly frustrated that I was still so interested in a show that was over. One day, I was channel-surfing and happened upon an episode of SG-1: specifically the season 5 opener "Enemies," which is part 2 of a 3-parter. I was completely confused (I didn't realize Teal'c was a good guy, among other things, because in that ep he is brainwashed not to be), mostly unimpressed, but somehow intrigued. I remember thinking that maybe watching a bad sci fi show would help me get over X-Files, and SG-1 seemed to have the right combination of bad-yet-watchable. I went to the internet and read up on the characters and the setup. I tuned in the following week for "Threshold."
I've often wondered what might have happened if I'd first stumbled upon different SG-1 episodes. Maybe I'd have fallen for Sam first. Maybe I wouldn't have found anything in the show to dig my teeth into at all. But instead the first ep I saw with any awareness of what was going on was "Threshold," and I fell for Janet Fraiser. The debate between Janet and Bra'tac in that episode--whether it's possible to save both Teal'c's body and his soul--and the conflict between Janet's dual role as physician and military officer was what sold me on the show. I didn't realize at the time that Janet was only a minor recurring character. She was the reason I decided to watch the show again, and she was the reason I went to the internet and found SG-1 fandom. I was looking for fic about Janet, and what I found was fic that paired her with Daniel. Okay, I thought. Daniel, too, seemed to occupy this ambiguous space between the military and non-military worlds, and I liked the way both he and Janet negotiated those conflicts. I read more. I tried to watch more episodes--though I was still on dial-up internet at the time, so this was a slow process. And in the process, the first fannish community I really became a part of was the danandjan yahoo group. This was my first insight into fandom as a community: I made friends and began to realize that there was more to this whole fandom thing than the stories we had in common. In 2004 I attended my first gathering of fangirls in the flesh--with mylittleredgirl, meg_tdj, and grav_ity--and began to accept that it really wasn't weird at all to have dear friends I'd met on the internet.
I spent a couple of years writing pretty bad Daniel/Janet fic and rarely venturing out of the Daniel/Janet community into the wider world of SG-1 fandom. But in September 2004 I started this LJ, and that also began the slow branching out to other corners of fandom. I started reading and writing fic about other characters. I got into gen and turned into something of an SG-1 multishipper. Meanwhile, on the show they killed Janet and broke my heart, they had season 8 of doom, and then introduced new characters that I grew to adore, and somewhere in all of this Daniel grew into a character that I understood but no longer liked very much.
I continue to have a soft spot for SG-1 as a whole and for the old days of Daniel/Janet, specifically. Many of those Daniel/Janet friends remain dear friends. But for the most part my SG-1 interest trickled off a couple of years ago, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Farscape (2005-forever)
September 29, 2005 was something of a watershed moment in my fannish decade: my first post about Farscape, shortly after I'd started watching it. As I proceeded to devour the rest of the show in the subsequent months, I fell HARD and FAST--harder and faster than I've fallen for any other television show. I just...SHOW!!!!!!! I've talked at length about why and how I love Farscape, so I won't do it again here, but it is my show of shows, and I am doubtful that there will ever be another that I will love this much.
But Farscape was also a very important shift for me in terms of fandom. Comparatively, I've never been as active in Farscape fandom as I have been in others--SG-1 or BSG, for instance. The show was over by the time I started watching, so I missed the fannish heyday of the show. I read a great deal of fic in a short period of time, but I haven't maintained much of a desire to continue reading FS fic, and I've written a little bit of fic of my own, but not much. Yet that was enough. The fic I read was so smart! Much of what I'd been reading and writing before that, in XF and SG-1, was pretty standard shipper stuff--the kind of fic that I think serves a particular purpose in fandom and which I continue to enjoy. But it hadn't really occurred to me (even though, yes, I was working on a PhD in English by this time and really should have been more aware of things like narrative potential) that fic could do so many other things, as well! Because Farscape itself did so much with John and Aeryn's relationship, I found I didn't really need to read shippy fic. Instead, I started reading gorgeous, long plotty things; smart and lyrical meditations on unrealized realities; and most of all, the genre that has become my favorite to read and to write, the analytical character study in fic form.
Through reading Farscape fic and meta, I realized how much I'd been unconsciously limiting the pleasures I had the potential to get from fandom. I love thinky analysis and difficult fiction! And fandom could be that, too! It didn't have to stop involving silly, shippy stuff (see also: my affection for cop partners), but it also has an outlet for all of the analytical thinky stuff I was already enjoying in my academic work. I'm not sure why it took me five years of fandom to figure that out, but it did. But my experience with Farscape fandom changed my approach not only to Farscape itself, but also to SG-1, in which fandom I was also active at the time, as well as most of my fannish involvement ever since.
And of course, Farscape introduced me to a whole host of other wonderful fannish friends, some of whom convinced me to do what seemed like the craziest thing I'd yet contemplated: going to Dragon*Con! It was well worth it, and I continue to be so glad that I know all of you Farscape people (many of whom were among the group who first puppy-piled me back when I began to get into the show--FS remains the Most Welcoming Fandom EVER!), even though few of us really do much posting about Farscape on a regular basis anymore.
Battlestar Galactica (2006-spring 2009)
BSG didn't appeal to me when it began. I heard all the buzz, but I just didn't like the look of the show that much. I saw what I now know was "Bastille Day" when it first aired and couldn't make it to the end of the episode, so bored and confused was I. Katee Sackhoff--especially with her miniseries and s1 haircut--bears a striking resemblance to an ex-friend of mine, an unfortunate coincidence that contributed to me not wanting to start watching the show and to my longstanding difficulties with loving Kara as much as I would have liked to. Most of what I knew about the show in the first two seasons was Lee and Kara, and they just didn't compel me. But in the fall of 2006, R. wanted to watch the series and asked if I wanted to watch with her. I agreed.
I was a little slow to warm up to it even when I started watching. I still don't love the miniseries, though it grew on me, eventually. I never thought much of season 1 was quite as brilliant as a lot of people did. But I did manage to fall pretty hard for a certain Laura Roslin, and by the Kobol arc I was sold on the show as a whole: moral ambiguity, difficult choices, complicated plotting and characters, philosophy and religion! It turned out to be my kind of show, after all.
It's still hard to think about how much I grew to love this show, in light of how much I continue to bitterly hate the end. But as most of you who have been reading my journal in the past few years know, this show has gotten the most fannish words and attention from me, up through the middle of this past year. I don't know that I need to write many more now, because you know how brilliant I thought the show was for a while there, and how much I adored the character of Laura Roslin, and you also know how betrayed I felt with the show's conclusion. Even with what happened in the end, though, I loved writing fic and meta for this show, and while I may not ever let myself get quite that involved in a show again (though who knows, I suppose), it was an enjoyable intellectual and emotional investment while it lasted.
The better story here, however, is the community of fans. I've made such amazingly wonderful friends through a mutual love of this show. gabolange, of course, must top such a list, were I to enumerate it, and the rest of you know who you are, as well. It's been such a delight sharing both the high and low points of the show with you, being overawed by your brilliant fic, meta, and vids, and most of all, building friendships that I hope will last for a long time to come. The fannish community is, after all, the thing.
Honorable Mentions, plus the Next Decade
The four aforementioned shows are the four fandoms in which I've been really active, so they get their own categories. But there are also shows that I've loved and lost (Stargate: Atlantis); shows that I adore but feel no compulsion to engage with fannishly (The West Wing, Friday Night Lights); shows that I keep planning to spend more time with, if only I had the time to spend (TSCC, Babylon 5, Star Trek: DS9); and my array of silly cop shows that push a very necessary button for me but don't take up a lot of my time or brainpower (Bones, Castle, CSI: NY, L&O: SVU).
I'll be very interested to see where my next decade in fandom takes me, assuming I'm around doing fannish things for another decade. I certainly don't plan to disappear any time soon, though I'm without an active fandom at the moment (and without a lot of time to spend on fannish pursuits anyway), and that's something of a new situation for me since I first tuned into that fateful first episode of SG-1 some years ago. It will be interesting to see what form, if any, the December 31, 2019 retrospective will take, and I do hope that many of you are still in my lives at that point to read it!
And it's the last day of the year and, depending on how one counts these things, the decade, and this seems to call for the obligatory ruminations.
2009 has been relatively uneventful, both personally and fannishly (with the exception, in the latter category, of my bitter and emphatic breakup with BSG). Looking back at the decade is a richer experience in navel-gazing. At the end of 1999, I was a 19-year-old undergrad, still living in the same small town doing much the same things I'd done for the 19 years before that. But in 2000 I moved to England for a few months, and this was the beginning of the subsequent decade of independence, adulthood, academia, and generally learning to be comfortable in my own skin. I left the town of 5000 people where I'd lived most of my life to move by myself to New York City. I've lived more years of this decade outside the US than in it. I've earned two degrees and am nearly finished with a third. I've learned to make my own choices.
Compared with all that, a focus on fandom is perhaps trivial, but this has also been my first decade of fandom, and since this community has brought me so much joy and so many dear friends, that's no small thing. It was sometime in 2000 when, for some reason, I decided to google (or yahoo search? msn search? were we googling yet in 2000?) X-Files episode summaries or reviews. I had been a devoted XF viewer for years, but it had never occurred to me to do anything but watch it on television. But something made me want to go back to remember something about past episodes, or some such thing, and in wading through search results I found not only episode reviews but also fanfic. I had never heard of fanfic before this. Stories about Mulder and Scully after the credits had rolled! Stories about Mulder and Scully having (a lot of) sex! Casefile stories! It was a revelation. I had no idea that I was also discovering a long-term hobby and a community of astonishingly smart and generous people who have made my life so much richer and more joyful. And so it seems worth looking back on my first decade in fandom.
The X-Files (1994-2002)
I started watching X-Files in about 1994, but as I mentioned, I didn't discover fandom until 2000. It took me another couple years after that to delurk, and I was never very active in the fandom. Those last few years of the show were horrifically disappointing in many ways (baby plot of OMGDOOM!, anyone?), but I nevertheless latched onto Doggett and Reyes, despite being convinced I would not like John Doggett when I heard he would be introduced. I was proved wrong, and I eventually delurked on the XFMU yahoo group and wrote my first fanfic (now mercifully gone from the internet!) not about my beloved Scully and Mulder (I think I was too intimidated to wade into that pond) but about Doggett and Reyes. In many ways this was a fannish trial run of sorts: I didn't make many connections (though I did meet mylittleredgirl, my oldest fandom friend!) and mostly lurked, but I still think back on those days with fondness and occasionally wander back to Gossamer for a little dose of nostalgia.
Stargate: SG-1 (2003-2007, recurring thereafter)
It hadn't occurred to me that my interest in fandom might extend beyond X-Files or become a lifestyle habit. After XF was canceled, I kept poking at fic and fandom and became increasingly frustrated that I was still so interested in a show that was over. One day, I was channel-surfing and happened upon an episode of SG-1: specifically the season 5 opener "Enemies," which is part 2 of a 3-parter. I was completely confused (I didn't realize Teal'c was a good guy, among other things, because in that ep he is brainwashed not to be), mostly unimpressed, but somehow intrigued. I remember thinking that maybe watching a bad sci fi show would help me get over X-Files, and SG-1 seemed to have the right combination of bad-yet-watchable. I went to the internet and read up on the characters and the setup. I tuned in the following week for "Threshold."
I've often wondered what might have happened if I'd first stumbled upon different SG-1 episodes. Maybe I'd have fallen for Sam first. Maybe I wouldn't have found anything in the show to dig my teeth into at all. But instead the first ep I saw with any awareness of what was going on was "Threshold," and I fell for Janet Fraiser. The debate between Janet and Bra'tac in that episode--whether it's possible to save both Teal'c's body and his soul--and the conflict between Janet's dual role as physician and military officer was what sold me on the show. I didn't realize at the time that Janet was only a minor recurring character. She was the reason I decided to watch the show again, and she was the reason I went to the internet and found SG-1 fandom. I was looking for fic about Janet, and what I found was fic that paired her with Daniel. Okay, I thought. Daniel, too, seemed to occupy this ambiguous space between the military and non-military worlds, and I liked the way both he and Janet negotiated those conflicts. I read more. I tried to watch more episodes--though I was still on dial-up internet at the time, so this was a slow process. And in the process, the first fannish community I really became a part of was the danandjan yahoo group. This was my first insight into fandom as a community: I made friends and began to realize that there was more to this whole fandom thing than the stories we had in common. In 2004 I attended my first gathering of fangirls in the flesh--with mylittleredgirl, meg_tdj, and grav_ity--and began to accept that it really wasn't weird at all to have dear friends I'd met on the internet.
I spent a couple of years writing pretty bad Daniel/Janet fic and rarely venturing out of the Daniel/Janet community into the wider world of SG-1 fandom. But in September 2004 I started this LJ, and that also began the slow branching out to other corners of fandom. I started reading and writing fic about other characters. I got into gen and turned into something of an SG-1 multishipper. Meanwhile, on the show they killed Janet and broke my heart, they had season 8 of doom, and then introduced new characters that I grew to adore, and somewhere in all of this Daniel grew into a character that I understood but no longer liked very much.
I continue to have a soft spot for SG-1 as a whole and for the old days of Daniel/Janet, specifically. Many of those Daniel/Janet friends remain dear friends. But for the most part my SG-1 interest trickled off a couple of years ago, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Farscape (2005-forever)
September 29, 2005 was something of a watershed moment in my fannish decade: my first post about Farscape, shortly after I'd started watching it. As I proceeded to devour the rest of the show in the subsequent months, I fell HARD and FAST--harder and faster than I've fallen for any other television show. I just...SHOW!!!!!!! I've talked at length about why and how I love Farscape, so I won't do it again here, but it is my show of shows, and I am doubtful that there will ever be another that I will love this much.
But Farscape was also a very important shift for me in terms of fandom. Comparatively, I've never been as active in Farscape fandom as I have been in others--SG-1 or BSG, for instance. The show was over by the time I started watching, so I missed the fannish heyday of the show. I read a great deal of fic in a short period of time, but I haven't maintained much of a desire to continue reading FS fic, and I've written a little bit of fic of my own, but not much. Yet that was enough. The fic I read was so smart! Much of what I'd been reading and writing before that, in XF and SG-1, was pretty standard shipper stuff--the kind of fic that I think serves a particular purpose in fandom and which I continue to enjoy. But it hadn't really occurred to me (even though, yes, I was working on a PhD in English by this time and really should have been more aware of things like narrative potential) that fic could do so many other things, as well! Because Farscape itself did so much with John and Aeryn's relationship, I found I didn't really need to read shippy fic. Instead, I started reading gorgeous, long plotty things; smart and lyrical meditations on unrealized realities; and most of all, the genre that has become my favorite to read and to write, the analytical character study in fic form.
Through reading Farscape fic and meta, I realized how much I'd been unconsciously limiting the pleasures I had the potential to get from fandom. I love thinky analysis and difficult fiction! And fandom could be that, too! It didn't have to stop involving silly, shippy stuff (see also: my affection for cop partners), but it also has an outlet for all of the analytical thinky stuff I was already enjoying in my academic work. I'm not sure why it took me five years of fandom to figure that out, but it did. But my experience with Farscape fandom changed my approach not only to Farscape itself, but also to SG-1, in which fandom I was also active at the time, as well as most of my fannish involvement ever since.
And of course, Farscape introduced me to a whole host of other wonderful fannish friends, some of whom convinced me to do what seemed like the craziest thing I'd yet contemplated: going to Dragon*Con! It was well worth it, and I continue to be so glad that I know all of you Farscape people (many of whom were among the group who first puppy-piled me back when I began to get into the show--FS remains the Most Welcoming Fandom EVER!), even though few of us really do much posting about Farscape on a regular basis anymore.
Battlestar Galactica (2006-spring 2009)
BSG didn't appeal to me when it began. I heard all the buzz, but I just didn't like the look of the show that much. I saw what I now know was "Bastille Day" when it first aired and couldn't make it to the end of the episode, so bored and confused was I. Katee Sackhoff--especially with her miniseries and s1 haircut--bears a striking resemblance to an ex-friend of mine, an unfortunate coincidence that contributed to me not wanting to start watching the show and to my longstanding difficulties with loving Kara as much as I would have liked to. Most of what I knew about the show in the first two seasons was Lee and Kara, and they just didn't compel me. But in the fall of 2006, R. wanted to watch the series and asked if I wanted to watch with her. I agreed.
I was a little slow to warm up to it even when I started watching. I still don't love the miniseries, though it grew on me, eventually. I never thought much of season 1 was quite as brilliant as a lot of people did. But I did manage to fall pretty hard for a certain Laura Roslin, and by the Kobol arc I was sold on the show as a whole: moral ambiguity, difficult choices, complicated plotting and characters, philosophy and religion! It turned out to be my kind of show, after all.
It's still hard to think about how much I grew to love this show, in light of how much I continue to bitterly hate the end. But as most of you who have been reading my journal in the past few years know, this show has gotten the most fannish words and attention from me, up through the middle of this past year. I don't know that I need to write many more now, because you know how brilliant I thought the show was for a while there, and how much I adored the character of Laura Roslin, and you also know how betrayed I felt with the show's conclusion. Even with what happened in the end, though, I loved writing fic and meta for this show, and while I may not ever let myself get quite that involved in a show again (though who knows, I suppose), it was an enjoyable intellectual and emotional investment while it lasted.
The better story here, however, is the community of fans. I've made such amazingly wonderful friends through a mutual love of this show. gabolange, of course, must top such a list, were I to enumerate it, and the rest of you know who you are, as well. It's been such a delight sharing both the high and low points of the show with you, being overawed by your brilliant fic, meta, and vids, and most of all, building friendships that I hope will last for a long time to come. The fannish community is, after all, the thing.
Honorable Mentions, plus the Next Decade
The four aforementioned shows are the four fandoms in which I've been really active, so they get their own categories. But there are also shows that I've loved and lost (Stargate: Atlantis); shows that I adore but feel no compulsion to engage with fannishly (The West Wing, Friday Night Lights); shows that I keep planning to spend more time with, if only I had the time to spend (TSCC, Babylon 5, Star Trek: DS9); and my array of silly cop shows that push a very necessary button for me but don't take up a lot of my time or brainpower (Bones, Castle, CSI: NY, L&O: SVU).
I'll be very interested to see where my next decade in fandom takes me, assuming I'm around doing fannish things for another decade. I certainly don't plan to disappear any time soon, though I'm without an active fandom at the moment (and without a lot of time to spend on fannish pursuits anyway), and that's something of a new situation for me since I first tuned into that fateful first episode of SG-1 some years ago. It will be interesting to see what form, if any, the December 31, 2019 retrospective will take, and I do hope that many of you are still in my lives at that point to read it!