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. ^_^
