fan day 4: compare and contrast

[tielan]

Day 5: Compare and/or contrast your very first fandom obsession and your very latest fandom obsession.

So...the issue with this is that I'm not sure what my Very First Fandom Obsession is.

If we count meeting people via the Internet, then probably Discworld fandom.

If we count being excited about a canon to the point of thinking up stories about those characters? I was doing that in 4th grade (10 years old) about 80s cartoons (Mask and She-Ra at the very least).

I know I had a BIG PLAN for a Star Wars AU where Luke falls to the dark side on Death Star II and Leia has to go on the run and save her brother and the galaxy...

I almost think this was the story they ended up aiming for with Kylo Ren and Rey. Except...very badly done. And without a suitable history for it.

I mean, that would have been an interesting Star Wars Sequels AU: where the golden son with everything in his favour falls to the dark side, and the trusted 'sister/friend' has to bring him back while not being tempted by the dark side herself.

Then you have Poe, who's the 'functional rival' of the golden son to Leia: the one who briefly dips into his own arrogance and pride, but pulls back and doesn't fall to the dark in the end. You have Rose, who also a protege of Leia's (or maybe of Chewbacca for her tech background) and friendly rival with Rey.

And then Finn could have been the warning - the one who escaped from under the darkness and served as a warning, which the golden son ignores in favour of power. If you want to set up a love triangle, you then have two very reasonable options that could go either way so long as it was done with a delicate touch.

Granted, we are talking about an industry that is majority male directors and producers and scriptwriters making films for what they think is majority male audiences (and a few girlfriends). A delicate touch is not going to turn up anywhere in the process.

Oh for what was possible!

--

So...first fandom obsession to most recent one?

I'm still trying to work out which is first and which is most recent? I mean, MCU was the big one for eight years, but Pacific Rim is more recent. I have nothing I'm currently into - lots of things sound nice, I lack the discipline to sit down and watch. However, I've also been dipping my toe back into Atlantis, Trek, Harry Potter, and Justice League thanks to fffc, so are they still fannish obsessions?

Maybe I'll talk more about the fannish experience than the fandoms themselves?

I've always liked the stories of 'ordinary' people doing extraordinary things, and of extraordinary people doing the things that they should be doing because they're extraordinary. Although, in some ways, that pretty much covers all the sci-fi/fantasy genre, doesn't it? 'Curtainfic' or 'below decks' is a very specific answer to the 'all the interesting stuff happens where the important people are' mentality.

Obviously, I like the 'ordinary people doing extraordinary things' genre more, particularly if the character is someone that few people in fandom expect anything of. Naturally this character is more likely to be a woman or a non-white, and either way she's going to be a stoic - because the women that people like aren't usually 'stoic', while the non-white characters are usually drawn as 'stoic' and when they're depicted as 'emotional' a lot of people find them scary.

I think the major difference between my first fandoms and my more recent obsessions is the way I approach them now. I'm older and grumpier and angrier and I want what I want, not just what I'm being given by people who determine that I should just take what I'm given and shut my yap. I'm not willing to live on a diet of mishandled characters and frustrating artistic decisions and female characters getting shunted off to the side so the boys can do the important things.

Hence, fanfic. And rants.

Comments

[thothmes]

Tolkien was my first fannish obsession. I was six and my Dad read me The Hobbit, his own favorite book. When I got back from a year in Greece and Palestine with my mom and stepfather, we launched into The Lord of the Rings. My most recent fannish obsession is SG-1, which is definitely not brand shiny new. Basically I linger there because I really watch little tv and few movies these days, and the books I’ve been reading have largely been pretty self-contained one-offs that have been satisfying but nothing I need to continue. I’m kind of in a holding pattern waiting for something to come along and sweep me off my feet again.

SG-1 was my first intro to online fandom and fanfic that was not as professionally published as the Star Trek original series mass market paperbacks, and for a while after discovering it I read a massive number of Pride and Prejudice variations/continuations/changes of POV in paperbacks because after reading so much SG-1 stuff, and having written some myself, I was just fascinated by the process, the authorial choices, and the success or failure of characterization. The stories themselves were secondary to the intellectual pursuit of deconstructing those authorial choices. But that phase is over, and I have gleaned what I wanted, I guess.

The path from fandom to fandom is fantasy. I’m 63, and I have made my peace with the inexorability and mundane qualities of reality, but my life has been, from its earliest years, characterized by that struggle. Reality is just so, well, real. If I can, I visit elsewhere, fantasy, sci-fi, historical fiction, and I am unbound and free. I try to ground what I write in reality, like a path back or the string on a balloon, because untethered fantasy is not real enough to dwell in, but when I write it’s also an escape from a place that is too real.

As to why I write? I’m a writer’s daughter. It is the family method of coping with the chafing of reality. My father took his reality, broke it into kaleidoscopic little pieces, and put it back together to form realities of his own making. I do the same to make fantasies, because my world already has far too many realities.