nattering about fandom
Jun. 8th, 2019 03:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thedarlingoneA question meme from squidgiepdx. Meant to be answered over the course of fifteen days, but I know very well I will forget. So here goes.
We all have that ONE fandom, or OTP. But what would you consider your backup fandom? Bonus: Who is your backup OTP? Same fandom or different?
You know, I don't really do "one true fandom/pairing". I've been known to describe the way I interact with fandoms as serial monogamy - when I'm in a fandom I am in that fandom, 100%, to whatever level of investment I have in any fandom at that time, and then I eventually always move on. Granted, this is my third go-round in X-wing fandom, although it's the first time I actually found other people here (aside fromvirusq, and I haven't shown any sign of moving on yet, but I know it'll happen. I just hope I don't leave too many unfinished novels behind when I do, because that would be sad. :P
Uh. That was a lot of words to explain that since I don't really have "that ONE fandom", I don't know that I have a "backup fandom" either. In terms of canons I always seem to wander back to, there's LOTR (where I really don't participate in the fandom at all), there's Mass Effect... Mass Effect might be my "backup fandom". I guess. Lord knows I'd be happy to find someone else who still plays ME3 multiplayer to run around with, it's a lot more fun with friends.
OTPs are also a complicated topic. I didn't really used to ship characters or write shipfic much at all, but X-wing pilots tend to have enough "everybody is poly because Avengers" going on that I find myself writing more shippiness. Lots of Wes/Hobbie and OT4. I don't think you could call either of those a "backup" OTP, though, I ship them pretty much interchangeably. This meme may be getting off to a confusing start. ^_^
If you were able to insert yourself into one fandom as your reality, what would it be? Bonus: How different would you be in that reality?
Oh, dear lord. You mean one canon universe, right? So... uh. This is one of those questions I always have a lot of trouble with, too. Most canons are so full of war and big changes and actiony action stuff, I tend to be like "why would I want to live there?", especially the ones where you have to rely on being of noble birth or a Jedi or something in order to even have any plot agency. I tend to picture myself living way off outside the edges of the story, in whatever the equivalent of the Shire is, the part of the world where Plot isn't happening much, and most of those are... not significantly better than here. For starters, I'd want a world with advanced medical technology and free healthcare, because otherwise I'd be absolutely useless physically. The best I could hope for in a medieval world would be a life as a limping, always-exhausted monk/nun copying manuscripts or spinning thread or something.
Possibly Star Wars, because they do seem to have both advanced medical technology and free healthcare. Maybe I could even make a living as a proofreader. That would be nice. 'Course, if I get to change things like my physical body and my medical conditions, that opens up a lot more possibilities...
What character do you think you would end up being best friends with? Bonus: What other character would you and your new bestie give a hard time to?
I have literally no idea how to answer this question. If I'm interacting with the characters from whatever chosen canon... I'm very bad at self-inserts. It comes of having been male for the majority of my teens and fannish life, I think; I had plenty of overqualified roles available that I could just project onto. I mean, if I'm suddenly put into the place of my projection character, that's... a very different question. I might still go for Star Wars, but I had better be immune to motion sickness. :P But if I'm Wes, then obviously Hobbie /the_dour_one and I are giving Wedge a hard time, because that's what we do. ^_^
You get to crossover two completely different fandoms. What two shows, and why? Bonus: Give us a preview!
Oh, wow, canonically cross over? That's... difficult. Especially given media restrictions and so forth, and given the fact that I'm usually more about fusions than full-world crossovers. Um, I'm going to go for the Leverageverse AU we're eventually maybe going to write someday - that is, in a world where Palpatine was stopped before Order 66, disgraced Jedi Leia Skywalker recruits a ragtag band of criminals to help avenge the death of her brother, Prince Luke Naberrie. Featuring genderfluid grifter and art thief Tycho Celchu (black sheep of a minor noble house of not-blown-up Alderaan), socially awkward orphan thief Wedge Antilles (adopted and raised by smuggler Booster Terrik after a few years living on the streets of Corellia), former clone commando Wes Janson (not genetically a clone, but he has the mannerisms and social/cultural whatnots, because that's how being a clone commando works; occasionally forgets he doesn't actually have the same face as five million other people), and sarcastic slicer Hobbie Klivian (who escaped his abusive family at age sixteen and stole a significant proportion of Ralltiir's GDP as a fuck-you). TOGETHER THEY DO CRIMES! ...we really could get six seasons and a movie out of this, if only we didn't keep trying to write all our other stories as well. :P
You get to insert your favorite OTP into a new fandom. Who is the OTP, and what fandom? Bonus: Give us a preview!
These are definitely not questions I would have thought of myself. I mean, as far as the OTP, Wes/Hobbie is the obvious choice, but I'm not sure how to insert just them into a different fandom without doing, again, a full-on fusion setup - all the characters from one 'verse, all the worldbuilding from the other. Can you really have Wes and Hobbie without Wedge and Tycho? Luke and Leia? Han and Chewie? How many people do you transplant?
(I mean, I could just go modern AU and call it good, but that seems like cheating. ^_^)
But, yeah, probably wind up doing a fusionverse again. There was a Stargate AU we were discussing a while back, I think that was the closest I've got to transplanting just a few characters into another fandom's 'verse - it was the Fab Four as a Gate team, obviously. Wedge is the leader, Hobbie is the scientist / the one who can fix the DHD when it inevitably goes wrong, Wes is the muscle, and Tycho is the obligatory alien (his world were going to double-cross and kill them, and Tycho chose to warn them and then escape with them). I wasn't thinking of it as OT4 because when I was in SG-1 I was always very much on the side of "you do not date within your own Gate team (pining is fine)", but I mean... it probably could be, maybe? That would be a rather different dynamic though.
What fandom that got a series finale was that most appropriate/most satisfying. Bonus: What about it would you have changed, if anything?
Hm. Series finales... for all that I don't really do open canons, not a lot of my fandoms have had series finales rather than just stopping, and there are barely any of those I've actually seen. The SGA finale was entertaining but concerning - I actually metashkaztra because I was having stress dreams over Todd being stuck in the brig and potentially starving. Haven't seen the SG-1 finale or the DS9 finale, Mass Effect 3 notoriously had such a bad ending they had to set the next game in another galaxy in order to avoid addressing it. I think, of all the series finales I have seen, TNG's "All Good Things..." was pretty damn excellent. I'd have to rewatch it to remember exactly why, but I know it had lots of excellent feels.
What fandom that got a series finale was the LEAST appropriate/least satisfying. Bonus: How would you have fixed it?
*cackles* MASS EFFECTTTTTTTT :D seriously, any series finale is going to have some haters, and gamers are among the bitchiest of fans due to both the interactive nature of the medium and the high proportion of entitled white dudes, but there are close to half a dozen extremely elaborate fanmade mods I can think of just dedicated to fixing the ME3 finale according to the modmaker's tastes, all extremely popular, and the company themselves had to release an ending-fixing mod (which still didn't make it good but addressed a couple of the loudest complaints) just to get the extreme furor to die down a tad.
How would I have fixed it? Oh, well, that's a question. I still have an unfinished story (probably not ever going to be finished - like I said, serially fannish for one canon at a time) that was going to address that. I was going to tie in the dark-energy foreshadowing stuff, so that the climactic choice Shepard would face was "if I set off this gadget, it'll probably destroy the Reapers, but it'll also make Earth's sun go all Haestrom, and we don't know how fast. Instantly? Five years? Ten?" And then based on the amount of goodwill from the other species that Earth had based on your actions and how much scientific prowess you'd gathered to help build the widget, the closing cutscenes would show you various results for humanity, whether we got a new homeworld and help moving, whether we had to become nomadic exiles like the quarians, whether the sun just went nova instantly and killed us all. In any event, being that close to the source of the energy, Shepard's cybernetics would all get fried, meaning they could die or almost-die depending on... whatever. (I wasn't killing my Shepard, obviously.)
There is a usermade mod I really like that takes a different spin on how to fix the ending, though. It's very simple: instead of Shepard uploading themself into the Reapers' hivemind and mind-controlling them into being friendly to organics, EDI uploads herself and reprograms them as a fellow synthetic. Which is honestly just so damn simple and elegant I wish I'd thought of it. I wish they'd thought of it. Sure, I would have had rants about the whole Joker/EDI storyline, and I'd wish EDI had gotten more time to figure out being her own person as an unshackled AI, but - it works. Two minutes of changed dialogue and it makes so much more sense.
What is a fandom that you never thought you'd get into, but did? Bonus: How did you end up getting into it?
Hah. You mean one I was watching from outside for a long time and never thought I'd jump into, or one I just never thought of at all? Because I never know what fandoms are going to grab me before I tumble headfirst into them. I don't think there's one that I was eyeing beforehand; that's not how I work. I go straight from "that looks interesting" to deep-dive to "OMG YOU GUYS THIS FANDOM". Which is why I don't know when I'll wander away from X-wing fandom or what will grab my interest next. Which is a precarious sort of way to live, but it's the only way I function in fandom. :S
What is the smallest fandom that you're in?
X-wing is pretty damn small, honestly. We've got something like half a dozen active writers, three or four artists (one of whom is also a writer), an assortment of people who meta and squee. The canon's not huge, either - ten to fourteen books depending on how you count, and I for instance only really base my work off four of those. There's a lot more people and activity here than any of the other times I've been in this fandom, though.
What is the largest fandom that you're in?
Let's make that "have been in", since as we discussed, with the serial fandoming. I think Stargate SG-1 would be it - I got into the fandom just after the show went off the air, when it was still a very active megafandom. Doctor Who wasn't nearly as big during the time I was in it, and most of my others have been various levels of microfandom (except Yuletide, which is an agglomerate of microfandoms). But X-wing is large enough that I've gotten back into beta reading, which is nice.
What is the fandom that you're in, but none of your fen are?
See, that doesn't really happen to me. I mean, I get into a new fandom, I usually don't know anybody, but then I make friends. ^_^ I don't usually manage to drag other people with me into a new fandom, but does anybody, really? I think I've met most of my longtime fannish friends through... well, let me think, it's hard to generalize when you don't actually remember. I met at least one through![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
asexuality, one or two through ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
ds9_rewatch, at least one through Doctor Who, several through Mass Effect, one through MacGyver (my very first fandom back in 2008), and one who from my perspective just sort of materialized in my comments and wrote a half-drabble about Sapphire & Steel. And most of those people are still associated with the fandoms we met in.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the unifying principle which keeps people tagging along as I fandom-hop seems to be, that all my friends are people who enjoy watching people flail excitedly about stuff they have no personal familiarity with. I am also such a person, and so we all flail excitedly at each other about things we have not seen. But if I'm in a fandom, I accumulate a new subset of "my" fen pretty rapidly. ^_^
What fandom did everyone else get into, but you never did?
Ah, I see, so the previous question was trying to ask what canon I'm into that I've never managed to rope any of my friends into. There are lots of those, but I don't fandom about them. Trying to fic for something that has not got any fic, outside of Yuletide, stresses me out. It feels too much like being The Father Of Your Country or some shit.
Uh. Anyway. There are also lots of fandoms I've never gotten into. Right now, I am watching all the Good Omens squee and gifsets go by with a mildly entertained expression. I sort of drifted around the fringes of Avengers fandom until it became clear that the found-family aspect was going to keep being actively disassembled by canon, I've picked up a lot more about Les Mis via fannish osmosis than I ever expected to, I still haven't seen Rogue One... this is the flip side of the serial fandom thing. I am the cat who walks by myself, and all places may not be alike to me, but "everybody else is in here" has extremely little to do with whether a fandom will grab me. I tried to be fannish about Doctor Who for a long time but never quite clicked with it properly; it took me a while to figure out how to exist in this sort of liminal space, and I will admit, it is really nice to be in a fandom with other people in it again, but I don't expect that to last forever.
What do YOU consider fandom's "little black dress"? Is it a coffeeshop AU? Sharing a bed trope? Bonus, share your favorite example.
I'm not remotely sure what the question is trying to ask. A trope/premise/AU that works with any fandom/pairing? Half of me is like "there is too much variety in fandoms and pairings for there to be one single thing that works for every one of them", half of me is like "the popular tropes are going to work with every pairing/fandom that attracts fans because that workability is part of why we're attracted to them", a subset of that half is like "if you're a good enough writer anything works with anything" (hubris, I can haz), and a very small bitter corner of me is like "Racism". ;P
(Seriously. I used to have a sort of algorithm, roughly cobbled together and with few actual numbers, for predicting what the most popular pairings would be in any fandom. It included a note that unless both characters were white, it didn't matter how many other predictors the pairing fit, it would be down there with the femslash or even lower. When I saw The Force Awakens, I was honestly hopeful I would be proven wrong, because Finn/Poe ticks every damn box and then some. But noooope! Fandom continues to be racist about who gets megashipped. Fucking fandom. Human beings are the worst. :P)
Some long fics used to come with a playlist. What's a song that you were introduced to by something fannish, and what was it inspired by? Bonus: Share a link to the song/music.
I'm not a very musical person, and when I did occasionally read fics with playlists I did not listen to the playlists. But a song I was introduced to by something fannish is, of course, What About Everything, through the definitive multi-era Doctor Who tribute vid by Calapine. I don't actually know at this point how I acquired a copy of the song, but I do still have it on my phone.
What is something you do today that you wouldn't be doing if not for fandom? Examples: Vacation with fellow fen, running a community, etc.
I wouldn't be alive if not for fandom. Literally, fannish friends have saved my life multiple times. And almost everything I do outside of work is fandom-related one way or another.
I should give a special shout-out tobrin_bellway, though, because she sent me a link a few years back that helped me find my D&D group, and then when I was creating a new character I panicked and decided to play tiefling Wes Janson, and then while I was doing character research I found a link to Rogue Podron, and from there I found out there were actually other people in the fandom this time around... so yeah. Brin is indirectly responsible for me starting to write again, accidentally acquiring a co-author, learning to write smut, all sorts of things. ^_^
squidgiepdx. Meant to be answered over the course of fifteen days, but I know very well I will forget. So here goes.We all have that ONE fandom, or OTP. But what would you consider your backup fandom? Bonus: Who is your backup OTP? Same fandom or different?
You know, I don't really do "one true fandom/pairing". I've been known to describe the way I interact with fandoms as serial monogamy - when I'm in a fandom I am in that fandom, 100%, to whatever level of investment I have in any fandom at that time, and then I eventually always move on. Granted, this is my third go-round in X-wing fandom, although it's the first time I actually found other people here (aside from
virusq, and I haven't shown any sign of moving on yet, but I know it'll happen. I just hope I don't leave too many unfinished novels behind when I do, because that would be sad. :PUh. That was a lot of words to explain that since I don't really have "that ONE fandom", I don't know that I have a "backup fandom" either. In terms of canons I always seem to wander back to, there's LOTR (where I really don't participate in the fandom at all), there's Mass Effect... Mass Effect might be my "backup fandom". I guess. Lord knows I'd be happy to find someone else who still plays ME3 multiplayer to run around with, it's a lot more fun with friends.
OTPs are also a complicated topic. I didn't really used to ship characters or write shipfic much at all, but X-wing pilots tend to have enough "everybody is poly because Avengers" going on that I find myself writing more shippiness. Lots of Wes/Hobbie and OT4. I don't think you could call either of those a "backup" OTP, though, I ship them pretty much interchangeably. This meme may be getting off to a confusing start. ^_^
If you were able to insert yourself into one fandom as your reality, what would it be? Bonus: How different would you be in that reality?
Oh, dear lord. You mean one canon universe, right? So... uh. This is one of those questions I always have a lot of trouble with, too. Most canons are so full of war and big changes and actiony action stuff, I tend to be like "why would I want to live there?", especially the ones where you have to rely on being of noble birth or a Jedi or something in order to even have any plot agency. I tend to picture myself living way off outside the edges of the story, in whatever the equivalent of the Shire is, the part of the world where Plot isn't happening much, and most of those are... not significantly better than here. For starters, I'd want a world with advanced medical technology and free healthcare, because otherwise I'd be absolutely useless physically. The best I could hope for in a medieval world would be a life as a limping, always-exhausted monk/nun copying manuscripts or spinning thread or something.
Possibly Star Wars, because they do seem to have both advanced medical technology and free healthcare. Maybe I could even make a living as a proofreader. That would be nice. 'Course, if I get to change things like my physical body and my medical conditions, that opens up a lot more possibilities...
What character do you think you would end up being best friends with? Bonus: What other character would you and your new bestie give a hard time to?
I have literally no idea how to answer this question. If I'm interacting with the characters from whatever chosen canon... I'm very bad at self-inserts. It comes of having been male for the majority of my teens and fannish life, I think; I had plenty of overqualified roles available that I could just project onto. I mean, if I'm suddenly put into the place of my projection character, that's... a very different question. I might still go for Star Wars, but I had better be immune to motion sickness. :P But if I'm Wes, then obviously Hobbie /
the_dour_one and I are giving Wedge a hard time, because that's what we do. ^_^You get to crossover two completely different fandoms. What two shows, and why? Bonus: Give us a preview!
Oh, wow, canonically cross over? That's... difficult. Especially given media restrictions and so forth, and given the fact that I'm usually more about fusions than full-world crossovers. Um, I'm going to go for the Leverageverse AU we're eventually maybe going to write someday - that is, in a world where Palpatine was stopped before Order 66, disgraced Jedi Leia Skywalker recruits a ragtag band of criminals to help avenge the death of her brother, Prince Luke Naberrie. Featuring genderfluid grifter and art thief Tycho Celchu (black sheep of a minor noble house of not-blown-up Alderaan), socially awkward orphan thief Wedge Antilles (adopted and raised by smuggler Booster Terrik after a few years living on the streets of Corellia), former clone commando Wes Janson (not genetically a clone, but he has the mannerisms and social/cultural whatnots, because that's how being a clone commando works; occasionally forgets he doesn't actually have the same face as five million other people), and sarcastic slicer Hobbie Klivian (who escaped his abusive family at age sixteen and stole a significant proportion of Ralltiir's GDP as a fuck-you). TOGETHER THEY DO CRIMES! ...we really could get six seasons and a movie out of this, if only we didn't keep trying to write all our other stories as well. :P
You get to insert your favorite OTP into a new fandom. Who is the OTP, and what fandom? Bonus: Give us a preview!
These are definitely not questions I would have thought of myself. I mean, as far as the OTP, Wes/Hobbie is the obvious choice, but I'm not sure how to insert just them into a different fandom without doing, again, a full-on fusion setup - all the characters from one 'verse, all the worldbuilding from the other. Can you really have Wes and Hobbie without Wedge and Tycho? Luke and Leia? Han and Chewie? How many people do you transplant?
(I mean, I could just go modern AU and call it good, but that seems like cheating. ^_^)
But, yeah, probably wind up doing a fusionverse again. There was a Stargate AU we were discussing a while back, I think that was the closest I've got to transplanting just a few characters into another fandom's 'verse - it was the Fab Four as a Gate team, obviously. Wedge is the leader, Hobbie is the scientist / the one who can fix the DHD when it inevitably goes wrong, Wes is the muscle, and Tycho is the obligatory alien (his world were going to double-cross and kill them, and Tycho chose to warn them and then escape with them). I wasn't thinking of it as OT4 because when I was in SG-1 I was always very much on the side of "you do not date within your own Gate team (pining is fine)", but I mean... it probably could be, maybe? That would be a rather different dynamic though.
What fandom that got a series finale was that most appropriate/most satisfying. Bonus: What about it would you have changed, if anything?
Hm. Series finales... for all that I don't really do open canons, not a lot of my fandoms have had series finales rather than just stopping, and there are barely any of those I've actually seen. The SGA finale was entertaining but concerning - I actually met
ashkaztra because I was having stress dreams over Todd being stuck in the brig and potentially starving. Haven't seen the SG-1 finale or the DS9 finale, Mass Effect 3 notoriously had such a bad ending they had to set the next game in another galaxy in order to avoid addressing it. I think, of all the series finales I have seen, TNG's "All Good Things..." was pretty damn excellent. I'd have to rewatch it to remember exactly why, but I know it had lots of excellent feels.What fandom that got a series finale was the LEAST appropriate/least satisfying. Bonus: How would you have fixed it?
*cackles* MASS EFFECTTTTTTTT :D seriously, any series finale is going to have some haters, and gamers are among the bitchiest of fans due to both the interactive nature of the medium and the high proportion of entitled white dudes, but there are close to half a dozen extremely elaborate fanmade mods I can think of just dedicated to fixing the ME3 finale according to the modmaker's tastes, all extremely popular, and the company themselves had to release an ending-fixing mod (which still didn't make it good but addressed a couple of the loudest complaints) just to get the extreme furor to die down a tad.
How would I have fixed it? Oh, well, that's a question. I still have an unfinished story (probably not ever going to be finished - like I said, serially fannish for one canon at a time) that was going to address that. I was going to tie in the dark-energy foreshadowing stuff, so that the climactic choice Shepard would face was "if I set off this gadget, it'll probably destroy the Reapers, but it'll also make Earth's sun go all Haestrom, and we don't know how fast. Instantly? Five years? Ten?" And then based on the amount of goodwill from the other species that Earth had based on your actions and how much scientific prowess you'd gathered to help build the widget, the closing cutscenes would show you various results for humanity, whether we got a new homeworld and help moving, whether we had to become nomadic exiles like the quarians, whether the sun just went nova instantly and killed us all. In any event, being that close to the source of the energy, Shepard's cybernetics would all get fried, meaning they could die or almost-die depending on... whatever. (I wasn't killing my Shepard, obviously.)
There is a usermade mod I really like that takes a different spin on how to fix the ending, though. It's very simple: instead of Shepard uploading themself into the Reapers' hivemind and mind-controlling them into being friendly to organics, EDI uploads herself and reprograms them as a fellow synthetic. Which is honestly just so damn simple and elegant I wish I'd thought of it. I wish they'd thought of it. Sure, I would have had rants about the whole Joker/EDI storyline, and I'd wish EDI had gotten more time to figure out being her own person as an unshackled AI, but - it works. Two minutes of changed dialogue and it makes so much more sense.
What is a fandom that you never thought you'd get into, but did? Bonus: How did you end up getting into it?
Hah. You mean one I was watching from outside for a long time and never thought I'd jump into, or one I just never thought of at all? Because I never know what fandoms are going to grab me before I tumble headfirst into them. I don't think there's one that I was eyeing beforehand; that's not how I work. I go straight from "that looks interesting" to deep-dive to "OMG YOU GUYS THIS FANDOM". Which is why I don't know when I'll wander away from X-wing fandom or what will grab my interest next. Which is a precarious sort of way to live, but it's the only way I function in fandom. :S
What is the smallest fandom that you're in?
X-wing is pretty damn small, honestly. We've got something like half a dozen active writers, three or four artists (one of whom is also a writer), an assortment of people who meta and squee. The canon's not huge, either - ten to fourteen books depending on how you count, and I for instance only really base my work off four of those. There's a lot more people and activity here than any of the other times I've been in this fandom, though.
What is the largest fandom that you're in?
Let's make that "have been in", since as we discussed, with the serial fandoming. I think Stargate SG-1 would be it - I got into the fandom just after the show went off the air, when it was still a very active megafandom. Doctor Who wasn't nearly as big during the time I was in it, and most of my others have been various levels of microfandom (except Yuletide, which is an agglomerate of microfandoms). But X-wing is large enough that I've gotten back into beta reading, which is nice.
What is the fandom that you're in, but none of your fen are?
See, that doesn't really happen to me. I mean, I get into a new fandom, I usually don't know anybody, but then I make friends. ^_^ I don't usually manage to drag other people with me into a new fandom, but does anybody, really? I think I've met most of my longtime fannish friends through... well, let me think, it's hard to generalize when you don't actually remember. I met at least one through
asexuality, one or two through ds9_rewatch, at least one through Doctor Who, several through Mass Effect, one through MacGyver (my very first fandom back in 2008), and one who from my perspective just sort of materialized in my comments and wrote a half-drabble about Sapphire & Steel. And most of those people are still associated with the fandoms we met in.I guess what I'm trying to say is that the unifying principle which keeps people tagging along as I fandom-hop seems to be, that all my friends are people who enjoy watching people flail excitedly about stuff they have no personal familiarity with. I am also such a person, and so we all flail excitedly at each other about things we have not seen. But if I'm in a fandom, I accumulate a new subset of "my" fen pretty rapidly. ^_^
What fandom did everyone else get into, but you never did?
Ah, I see, so the previous question was trying to ask what canon I'm into that I've never managed to rope any of my friends into. There are lots of those, but I don't fandom about them. Trying to fic for something that has not got any fic, outside of Yuletide, stresses me out. It feels too much like being The Father Of Your Country or some shit.
Uh. Anyway. There are also lots of fandoms I've never gotten into. Right now, I am watching all the Good Omens squee and gifsets go by with a mildly entertained expression. I sort of drifted around the fringes of Avengers fandom until it became clear that the found-family aspect was going to keep being actively disassembled by canon, I've picked up a lot more about Les Mis via fannish osmosis than I ever expected to, I still haven't seen Rogue One... this is the flip side of the serial fandom thing. I am the cat who walks by myself, and all places may not be alike to me, but "everybody else is in here" has extremely little to do with whether a fandom will grab me. I tried to be fannish about Doctor Who for a long time but never quite clicked with it properly; it took me a while to figure out how to exist in this sort of liminal space, and I will admit, it is really nice to be in a fandom with other people in it again, but I don't expect that to last forever.
What do YOU consider fandom's "little black dress"? Is it a coffeeshop AU? Sharing a bed trope? Bonus, share your favorite example.
I'm not remotely sure what the question is trying to ask. A trope/premise/AU that works with any fandom/pairing? Half of me is like "there is too much variety in fandoms and pairings for there to be one single thing that works for every one of them", half of me is like "the popular tropes are going to work with every pairing/fandom that attracts fans because that workability is part of why we're attracted to them", a subset of that half is like "if you're a good enough writer anything works with anything" (hubris, I can haz), and a very small bitter corner of me is like "Racism". ;P
(Seriously. I used to have a sort of algorithm, roughly cobbled together and with few actual numbers, for predicting what the most popular pairings would be in any fandom. It included a note that unless both characters were white, it didn't matter how many other predictors the pairing fit, it would be down there with the femslash or even lower. When I saw The Force Awakens, I was honestly hopeful I would be proven wrong, because Finn/Poe ticks every damn box and then some. But noooope! Fandom continues to be racist about who gets megashipped. Fucking fandom. Human beings are the worst. :P)
Some long fics used to come with a playlist. What's a song that you were introduced to by something fannish, and what was it inspired by? Bonus: Share a link to the song/music.
I'm not a very musical person, and when I did occasionally read fics with playlists I did not listen to the playlists. But a song I was introduced to by something fannish is, of course, What About Everything, through the definitive multi-era Doctor Who tribute vid by Calapine. I don't actually know at this point how I acquired a copy of the song, but I do still have it on my phone.
What is something you do today that you wouldn't be doing if not for fandom? Examples: Vacation with fellow fen, running a community, etc.
I wouldn't be alive if not for fandom. Literally, fannish friends have saved my life multiple times. And almost everything I do outside of work is fandom-related one way or another.
I should give a special shout-out to
brin_bellway, though, because she sent me a link a few years back that helped me find my D&D group, and then when I was creating a new character I panicked and decided to play tiefling Wes Janson, and then while I was doing character research I found a link to Rogue Podron, and from there I found out there were actually other people in the fandom this time around... so yeah. Brin is indirectly responsible for me starting to write again, accidentally acquiring a co-author, learning to write smut, all sorts of things. ^_^
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Date: 2019-06-09 03:21 am (UTC)(Never played D&D myself, but the fandom can be entertaining. And I speak Yendorian almost natively (I was maybe six when I started?): while not mutually intelligible with D&D jargon, it does give you a head start.)
((For anyone reading this who knows enough about Nethack to react with "you played *Nethack* when you were *six*??": to be fair, I didn't venture out of infinite-lives mode much until I was about thirteen.))
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Re: fandom serial-monogamy, I don't experience this with fandoms *in general*, but I do get something similar with video games specifically. I can't be...I think of it as being "in phase with" a game...I can't be in phase with more than one game at a time, and while I can encourage or discourage particular phases to some extent, it's primarily a subconscious process that decides what I'll play when. Phases tend to be a few weeks or so long, but it can be a couple of days or several months between shifts.
(And God help me if I go more than a few days without being in phase with *anything*. It's...honestly it's a lot like loss of libido, that feeling like part of you is missing.)
I'm used to it, and like I said it's part of me, but it can be a bit annoying, especially when interacting with people who don't understand (which is most people). No I *cannot* change my mind on a whim, no I *cannot* play one game in the morning and another in the evening, and no I *cannot* do anything that involves promising (a) player(s) that I'll be around at some particular time more than a few days into the future, especially not on a recurring basis.
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Date: 2019-06-23 06:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-24 12:36 am (UTC)About half the games I play have time-limited stuff (the same half that have microtransactions). Sometimes I wish I could be the kind of person who can show up to all of them or even a broad sampling of them, but I just can't. I keep thinking I'll be able to manage popping in for just a minute or two for some small one, but it almost never works out.
(This is why my FR gathering skills *still* aren't maxed out after all this time. I think with the way the math works out, I have *just* enough time to get my remaining gathering achievements before they freeze the current achievement system in mid-August, if I gather every day and keep my dragons fed. I highly doubt I'm actually going to be in phase the whole time, though. I will try to pop in, and *maybe* with the added motivation of the deadline I'll be able to (plus I've stopped raising fodder hatchlings except during contested dom battles, which makes it a lot easier to keep dragons fed because I can just convert stockpiles of everything in advance): we'll see.)
As for holiday events and the like, a lot of players in any decent-sized MMO will miss any given event, so usually devs will make the event system pretty forgiving. Flight Rising makes its event items tradeable so you can buy one secondhand if you show up late; Runescape mostly gives cosmetic unlocks or things that you can already get somewhat slower by regular gameplay (I like to get the cosmetic unlocks when I can, but in practice I'm not going to use them and so won't really be missing much if I don't get one; they're pretty much just trophies); Pokemon Go will run the same event (or one with the same prizes) again at some later point. (My first legendary was Zapdos, and I think I didn't get it until like the third event in which Zapdos was available.) If anything I think Crawl should run *more* events: it's so rare for a Crawl phase to actually coincide with one of their twice-yearly tournaments.
If I ever win a trip to Disney World or something like that, I'll probably be trying very hard to shift into phase with Pokemon Go for it. It'd be nice to try that out: I hear that playing in Florida and especially at Disney is pretty great. (Because of the way Niantic drew the continent boundaries as boxes, most of Florida technically counts as South America for continent-specific-play purposes. And it's equatorial, too, so you can also get *that* exclusive. Plus, as previously mentioned, the Wi-Fi coverage at Disney is amazing.)
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I tend to feel a certain amount of inertia, a reluctance to poke my head into any other game for fear of getting swept up in it. (Which *is* often the result, though not reliably.) The inertia is stronger if my current game has time-limited stuff.
I also find that if circumstances prevent me from playing anything for a couple days, I'll often come back to a different game than when I left.
It's very much possible for me to shift into the same phase I was in before: to feel wavery and not really into anything for a couple days and then end up going back to the same game.
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Date: 2019-07-14 03:02 pm (UTC)(The points I switch between are not exactly "male", "female", and "neutral", and the neutral setting doesn't feel like the label "agender" fits it. I kind of like "neutrois" but I can't pronounce it reliably at all. Granted, the fact that I'm somewhat romance-repulsed probably affects how I interpret the a- prefix; I have never been gender-repulsed. But I mostly oscillate among "all the way male", "profoundly uninterested in gender" (which would be all the way "neutrois" or whatever I call it, which both is and is not a specific gender feeling in itself), "about 70% male 30% neutrois", "about 30% male 70% female", a couple other less common mixes, and very rarely "all the way female", which usually comes with being suddenly lesbian / mostly-female-attracted bi, and throws me entirely off kilter because it's so unlike anything I'm used to and because I have all sorts of issues around femaleness and femininity and the ways that gender performance is policed. Usually a swing toward "all the way female" winds up with me crying because most of the fun parts of femme presentation - fancy shoes, glitzy earrings, makeup, cute sexy dresses - are off limits for me due to stupid physical limitations like my sensitivity to trace amounts of nickel in piercings or the idiotic construction of my feet.)
Uh. That got long and rambly and probably irrelevant. Sorry?
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Date: 2019-07-14 09:03 pm (UTC)No worries. :)
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>>the fun parts of femme presentation - fancy shoes, glitzy earrings, makeup, cute sexy dresses<<
I'm guessing that's part of you being more into shiny things than me, and maybe the allosexuality. My presentation preferences tend to be determined by, in rough order of importance, "what's practically useful", "what's low-effort", and "what won't attract attention to me" (for similar reasons to why I avoid making a post if I suspect it would go viral). (Admittedly, point #1 tends to lead me to stuff weird enough to fail point #3 (like surgical masks), but at least it's not conventionally sexy, so that's something.)
I do like to look feminine *enough* to make it easy to guess my pronouns, but waist-length hair + lack of testosterone + glasses (which obscure my thick eyebrows) mean that's pretty easy for me.
(people say that waist-length hair is high-effort, but I have no idea what they're talking about)
((I *do* braid my hair a lot more often than eighteen-year-old me, but only for work, and only because I work with food; I still ~never do buns, and don't use products other than dandruff shampoo and *occasionally* hairspray))
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Date: 2019-06-09 08:44 am (UTC)Also re. the racism, while it is there (our society is racist, our mainstream media including our fandom canons reflect that, and fandom is part of society and therefore also biased and racist), you can't do that sum as proof with one canon and one specific ship. People who are strongly drawn to an F/M foe!yay ship (or possibly an F/M Beauty and the Beast trope), are unlikely to ship an M/M hero-buddy-type ship anyway. And those tropes have been popular in fandom forever; they didn't suddenly pop up to enable people to avoid shipping the supposedly 'progressive' ship here or anywhere else. We can point to overall trends, racist bias in finding white actors more attractive overall (therefore often the hub of shipping in their fandoms), but we can't do any This One Ship/Fandom/Character = All the Problems in Society/Fandom equations. In individual examples it just breaks down, because the way we human beings consume fiction is so intensely personal and complicated that it is impossible to say why anybody likes (or ships) anything without talking to them in some depth - and even then, they may not understand it themselves. Even when a canon - say old canons in particular - might be in itself unquestionably racist, you can't even make the equation that everyone who likes it or is fannish about it is themselves racist, because, as I said, the reasons why we consume fiction and how we interpret it are so complex and personal, you would definitely at least need to at least be getting into algebra or something other than simple addition or multiplication.
*hugs*
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Date: 2019-06-09 02:31 pm (UTC)*tired sigh* Was I? I didn't think I was. I was trying to talk about statistics, and why TFA was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. (I'd been holding to "it's just that there aren't any very shippable characters of color in most things, because representation", and then I was like "here is a good test case for that hypothesis", and then I was like "...I don't remember anybody called Hux?" ;P) But I suppose, with tumblr fandom being what it is, and the Reylos and the Antis being at each other's throats, there could be more disclaimers in there about people shipping what they ship and so forth. I'm just so bloody tired of the whole mess. :P
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Date: 2019-06-09 04:53 pm (UTC)Oh, indeed! *hugs*
And I'm not saying there isn't racism, or trends that incline towards that, but judging people's morality on their preferred fiction or ships in any way shape or form is highly questionable because, as I said, however it appears in general, individually it breaks down into something that is infinitely personal and complex. Your ship/kink/fandom/character is not mine, and that's okay. It's fiction. How we behave to each other is what counts, not what we read, or even necessarily what we write, especially in shipping when it can often come down to what random thing somebody finds hot or not.
I'm a librarian, I signed a charter against censorship, and I did Media Studies and I don't enjoy seeing fandom swallowed by moral panics of the sort usually run by Mary Whitehouse types. It doesn't make it any less of a moral panic if I might agree with the morals. So, I get really fed up with this stuff and didn't necessarily mean you were doing all of it, but you were teetering on the thin end of the wedge - no one fandom, ship or anything can be a suitable test case, because ships are never exactly like things, so there's just no way anyone could do that. It might be indicative of the problem, but that's about it. (Sorry!)
ETA: Anyway, sorry, didn't mean to go on at you! *hugs* As you can tell, my librarian self is annoyed at fandom and way too cowardly to do this on tumblr. You have all my sympathy - and admiration! - for managing to stay rational even in a quiet corner of SW fandom in its current state of epic wankiness. <3
*goes away to lie down instead of thinking about the Wrongness of People On the Internet*
no subject
Date: 2019-06-10 02:36 am (UTC)(For me, it's the exact opposite of a moral crusade, more the moment where I was like "well, fandom-in-the-aggregate is clearly going to be Like This no matter what, I'm only burning myself out being all activist and optimistic at things that are not going to change". Which may not be a good way for me to be either but maybe that's a little clearer about what I was actually trying to say? But I do get ranty and say things that often come out Wrong.)
Anyway, *hugs*