fandom meme answers

[thedarlingone]

Feel free to still ask me fandoms, I just thought I'd go ahead and do the first set of answers.

thisbluespirit asked: "How about Sapphire & Steel?"

1. What got you into this fandom in the first place? - Um, I know eponymous_rose did an intro post and I was trying a lot of her fandoms around that time (she got me into Mass Effect, for sure), but I seem to remember the reason I was actually interested was David McCallum, continuing on from MFU fandom. ^_^ Also I can't be sure but I think that may have been in/around 2010, which would mean that the fact of it being Extremely Slow meant I could watch it without getting all sorts of heart palpitations and having to have a lie down. Advantages of ancient telly! XD (You may remember, but new people probably will not, that after my breakdown in 2010, there was a long time where I thought I might have CFS because there was so little I could do without getting too shaky and brain-foggy to function. At this point I am fairly confident in saying I have not got CFS, but I really owe bookblather for that year I spent doing nothing on her couch under her terrible cat. I do not think I would be nearly as recovered without that.)

Also the fanfic is/was universally high quality, which I've never seen happen in any other fandom. There's usually at least some dregs.

2. Do you think you'll stay in this fandom or eventually move on? - I always move on. Always. It is a sadness. :S But it's not like I'll stop liking it, and I was never a big contributor. I still read in it, occasionally, and someday I may even find the time to rewatch it, though I have a lot less time these days.

3. Favorite episodes/books/movies, etc? - Assignment 2 is still my favorite. This is not unrelated to the thing with Steel singing. :D They're all excellent though.

4. Do you participate in this fandom (fanfiction, graphics, discussions)? - I have committed two S&S drabbles in my time, and an icon or two, but I don't think the comm ever made it over from LJ, so I don't really know where I would look for the fandom. *pokes AO3* ...that's nearly as much recent fic as the X-Wing fandom. Definitely not dead, then. Am I just in the wrong places?

5. Do you think more people should get into this fandom? - You know, I never really have an answer for that. On one hand, I always feel like of course more people should be in my underappreciated fandoms; on the other hand, I'm very conscious that people have different tastes and an extremely slow, very strange, no-budget show from 1980 with evil pillows is only going to attract a very specific audience.

***

liadt asked: "Doctor Who?"

1. What got you into this fandom in the first place? - Ravelry, I think. I honestly don't recall the exact procedure by which I wandered into the who_knits group/comm over there, years and years ago, but that was definitely the first step.

2. Do you think you'll stay in this fandom or eventually move on? - I've always had kind of an odd relationship to Doctor Who as a fandom. It's one of those where I've put in an extra effort to participate because it was available as an active fandom to participate in, rather than just sort of falling down it. And I can't handle open canons at all, so I kind of wandered away after Moffat's first season (when I watched as it was airing, with very mixed results). At this point, I really don't see myself actually watching or rewatching much more of it than the scraps and oddments I've seen, but I can follow fanfic and recognize characters in icons. I mostly just read things my friends write rather than seeking out fic, though.

3. Favorite episodes/books/movies, etc? - Well, for all that I've only seen one or two of his episodes, I latched on instantly to Christopher Eccleston's Doctor. I do occasionally consider actually watching his season, even though I suspect I would begin to remember all the issues I have with Russell T. Davies in very short order. (They are extremely different than the issues I have with Steven Moffat, but they are certainly there.) Of the parts I've actually seen more than a bit of, I'm very attached to Three-era and Team UNIT, but I do wish Liz and Delgado!Master had been in the same season. That could have been amazing.

4. Do you participate in this fandom (fanfiction, graphics, discussions)? - Mneh. I had to check whether I'd ever actually written any Doctor Who fic. Turns out I did, including a couple of pieces I'm actually still fairly proud of (Liberation, which inspired a really good remix by agapi42, and Things That Did Not Happen In 2011), but... yeah. It's been a while. I probably won't be back.

5. Do you think more people should get into this fandom? - I mean, unlike most of my fandoms, there are a fair number of people in it already. But it does have the advantage of being about seventeen fandoms in a trenchcoat, so everyone can probably find a corner they like. It just takes some poking around to find your corner, and there may not be anyone else there when you arrive. (Or there may. Most people who are left aren't planning to leave.)

***

brin_bellway asked: "Mass Effect? ("favorite mission" would probably be the analogous thing for question 3)"

1. What got you into this fandom in the first place? - Being a nerd for statistics and optimization, honestly. eponymous_rose was doing her Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer livestreams where she would play a random character class with a random weapon, and I kept wanting to get a closer look at the weapons and their stats. So I eventually wound up buying ME3 on sale for $10, and being gifted the first two games by somebody I'd met through e_rose's livestream chats, and then limping through the games on extremely underpowered computers over the next several years. (About ninety percent of the "okay, let's clear your cache and background apps" skills I use at work are based on principles I learned trying to free up enough CPU and RAM space to get through a multiplayer match without crashing.)

2. Do you think you'll stay in this fandom or eventually move on? - Well, I keep trying to play other video games but not managing it. Lego Star Wars is adorable and enjoyable but has become extremely frustrating because I keep getting stuck on levels where "move your character to these precise locations this fast" is a requirement and I can't make it work, at least with the clunky PC controls. So I keep coming back to Mass Effect as the one series of video games I'm actually capable of playing well enough to enjoy them. I'm going to be very depressed when the multiplayer servers finally shut down; hopefully that'll be a while, there are still people besides me playing, but one is uncomfortably aware that the heat death of that particular universe is probably a lot closer than one suspects. :P

I'll be here till they kick me out, I guess is the short answer.

3. Favorite episodes/books/movies, etc? - If we count this as favorite game, I have a soft spot for ME3 multiplayer specifically. That's not technically a game on its own, being sold as part of ME3, but I'm not sure what else you'd count it as. If we count it as favorite mission, Zorya for sure. (That would be the mission officially known as "Zaeed: The Price of Revenge", a Mass Effect 2 DLC mission, aka Zaeed's loyalty mission aka the one time I have ever seen a video game try to do "moral dilemma" and actually stick the landing.)

For the unfamiliar, since I do want to expand on that a bit: most of the gameplay of Mass Effect 2 consists of recruiting eight to twelve ragtag misfits and forging them into a loyal team by completing a quest for each one. Zaeed, voiced by Robin Sachs, is my favorite of the available ragtag misfits; he's one of the completely optional ones, where the character and their loyalty quest are bundled separately from the game as DLC ("downloadable content"). Zaeed's specific loyalty quest is to help him kill Vido, the asshole who betrayed and almost killed him twenty years ago. ("You survived a gunshot to the head?" "And you survived your ship getting disintegrated. A stubborn enough person can survive just about anything." God, it just doesn't pack as much of a punch without the voice acting. Robin Sachs was amazing.) Once the mission gets rolling, you face a choice between catching Vido before he gets away, or rescuing a group of trapped workers in the now-on-fire oil refinery where Vido has been holed up. If you go after Vido, you gain Zaeed's loyalty but you have to listen to the dying screams of the refinery workers while you fight your way through the refinery after Vido. If you rescue the refinery workers, Vido gets away; it is possible to gain Zaeed's loyalty for game-mechanic purposes if you have high enough charisma, but he is so sad afterwards.

On my first playthrough, I had intended to default to taking the option where I would save the workers, because I usually play close to 100% "paragon" (the Mass Effect equivalent of the "Light Side" morality mechanic from Bioware's earlier Star Wars game, Knights of the Old Republic), but... well. For me specifically? Zaeed's PTSD is one of the two fictional portrayals I've ever seen that really click with me (the other is of course Wes Janson). Unlike me, Zaeed actually has the option for revenge and closure against the person who wronged him. I find I can't refuse him that.

So. At least for me: genuine moral dilemma in a goddamn video game. Partly because of my own history, partly because of the voice acting, partly because the writing really is just that good. I know not everybody finds it to be a dilemma at all, but I was genuinely impressed. So that's why Zorya is my favorite mission and Zaeed my favorite character.

(Also, a small detail of game design I absolutely love, which may or may not be a glitch but to me it's Characterization: part of the gameplay involves the ability to tell your NPC squadmates "go there and stay there until I call you or walk out of range". Until you complete his loyalty quest, Zaeed does not stay where you put him. He keeps charging into battle and getting killed. Once you gain his loyalty, he actually obeys your commands rather than haring off on his own. I imagine other characters have similar well-thought-out tiny details in their design, but Zaeed is the one I take on every mission and therefore the one where I noticed.)

4. Do you participate in this fandom (fanfiction, graphics, discussions)? - Well. Not really. Most of the Zaeed fic is by one particular person with whose characterization I emphatically disagree. I was trying to write a fic with my own Shepard, Janet, but that was during a time period where I was extremely depressed, on the wrong meds, and writing anything seemed like pulling one word at a time like teeth from the jaws of a particularly cranky monster. (I had my wisdom teeth out with local anesthetic, some years back. I have a very vivid mental image associated with "pulling teeth". ;P) So it never really went much of anywhere, and when my writing ability came back it came with a focus on X-wing fandom, so... no. Other than the livestreams I did on Twitch some years back, not all of which have survived because I didn't remember to flip the "no don't delete this after two weeks" switch on each one, I haven't really participated in the fandom.

5. Do you think more people should get into this fandom? - Like I said. I usually tend to figure that people who will like a fandom are probably already in the fandom unless it's something brand new, or that has just had its first regional DVD release or something. But I would certainly appreciate having more people to play ME3 multiplayer with. All the friends I used to play with have wandered off to other games or just don't have time to play video games at all anymore. And it really is a damn good trilogy of games, even if the ending of game three was so notoriously bad that they had to first release a story patch for it and then move the next game to another galaxy to avoid addressing it. ^_^ (ME3 is by far the weakest of the trilogy content-wise, i.e. has the most "yeah we all just ignore that" bits and the most "here I fixed that story bit we all hate" mods available, but the gameplay is also by far the smoothest. Or I'm better at it because multiplayer was good practice. ;P)

Comments

[liadt]

Getting into a TV fandom through Ravelry must be unique? Certainly different!

[thedarlingone]

Well, I got into fandom in general through Ravelry, so I suppose it followed... ^_^

[liadt]

Ah, cool:)

[thisbluespirit]

You know, I never really have an answer for that. On one hand, I always feel like of course more people should be in my underappreciated fandoms; on the other hand, I'm very conscious that people have different tastes and an extremely slow, very strange, no-budget show from 1980 with evil pillows is only going to attract a very specific audience.

The answer is always yes in this case, though! It is an awesome no budget show with evil pillows. :-D