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A lot of people have been doing decade in review posts, given that it is the end of the year and the decade. I'm honestly having a hard time recognizing that 2010 was the beginning of this decade and not 2001. I find that I have a relatively short-term conception of time, even though I feel like I'm ancient. I'm assuming that some of that is depression-brain, but I don't really know if there is more at play.
I remember very little about 2010. I think that it was one of the last years that LiveJournal was active enough to be worth using in my estimation. I remember campaigning for some of my friends to move here instead of to tumblr, but then I eventually caved after seeing a few really pretty gif edits. I made an account, and it took me a while to jump ship completely. I think the last big fandom for me on LiveJournal was Stargate SG-1, but by the time I moved to tumblr in March 2011, it was mostly Merlin with a dash of Narnia in there somewhere.
I had been into Doctor Who since 2007 or so, but it would always come and go in its importance.
The Merlin fandom still being active was the Age of Innocence in terms of my being a tumblr user who saw it as more good than harm to fandom. It was in the time immediately before SuperWhoLock took hold and its subsequent embarrassing fall.
2011 was also the year that I saw X-Men First Class and Thor. I had seen Iron Man and Iron Man 2, I think, but I saw both the aforementioned films when my best friend visited me IRL for the first time. Prior to that, I knew that comic book movies were becoming more popular, but I wasn't actually aware of the development of the MCU as a cohesive narrative or the efforts being made toward that. I loved Thor, but X-Men First Class stole my heart.
I made this fanvid about Loki before the entire "Avengers fandom" took hold. (I think of the "Avengers fandom" as being kind of different from the MCU fandom if that makes any sense?) It was sometime shortly after this that I stopped being able to work on fanvidding because the world moved on from Windows Movie Maker with a script extension and .avi. Recently, I have begun experimenting with trying again, but not with much direction or anything to show for it yet.
X-Men First Class was my introduction of Jennifer Lawrence. It was at that time that I was really experiencing my first and last season of being particularly enamored with the cast and crew of something. Learning that Michael Fassbender was likely not a very good man and seeing Jennifer Lawrence buy into her own press to the point of being apparently unable to take responsibility for anything and playing up her quirkiness to a point of blatant insincerity kind of blew up and burst the bubble for me. Since then, I have kind of avoided knowing too much about behind-the-scenes stuff when I am invested in a fictional franchise out of fear of it souring it for me. I don't think I'll ever stop loving XMFC, though.
Learning about Jennifer Lawrence and enjoying her performance as Raven | Mystique (which she later apparently came to resent so much which also upsets me) led me to be interested in the fact that she had been chosen to portray Katniss Everdeen in the upcoming film adaptation of The Hunger Games. I had heard of The Hunger Games and at that particular point had not quite lost my high-school habit of reading all the time even though I was a couple of years into college. I had seen posts on tumblr about being one of the very few people on the platform who had not read The Hunger Games and it being a sort of joke. It is weird to think about that kind of cohesive sense of neighborly unity within fandom or tumblr's userbase at this point in time.
I picked up the first book at Walmart after some hem-hawing about it around the holidays. I blazed through it and remember buying the second and/or third books before Christmas break was over. I remember anticipating March 2012 intensely. I went to the midnight premiere with a girl I was in an art class with at the time that I took just-because at my university. She and I had gone to high school together, and she had been a cheerleader who dated boys constantly. I remember talking to her that night and various things came up including the fact that I was probably bi. At the time, she still insisted that she was probably straight. Within a year, she had moved to a slightly larger city, become a Hooters girl, and married a woman. (Maybe marrying her took a little longer, but still.) As far as I know, they're still married.
I don't know anyone personally anymore on a local level. Everyone either left, moved on, or both.
The Hunger Games as a movie was... okay. I remember thinking that they were very faithful to the first couple of chapters of the book to the detriment of some of the worldbuilding and Peeta's characterization. It had a lot of heart put into it as an adaptation, but the shaky cam did not age well whatsoever, and I remember feeling that it was initially a triumph just in that it didn't blatantly suck. However, I felt like they basically spent too much of their time and energy on the establishing shots to the expense of everything else in the story, like they did it chronologically and were running out of zest for it by the last act of the film.
Nevertheless, being into that and seeing it go from a book fandom to a film fandom to virtual silence was interesting and sort of melancholy. I remember being really taken with the creativity of the fandom right at the juncture where trailers and promotional material were out but the film itself hadn't come out yet. There were fan films and parodies. There was also a lot of actually kind of "classy" marketing. I remember there being a series of China Glaze nail polishes of which I bought several. They were based on the, like, primary export of each of the Districts. And I remember discussions about how ironic the level of commercial marketing there was for the series was, given that we were basically being proven to "be the Capitol." By the time Catching Fire came out in theaters in 2013, I had drawn away from the fandom considerably because of the aforementioned disillusionment and the way in which the fandom seemed to sort of fizzle in my neck of the woods once the movies became a thing more than the books. I do remember there being another wave of commercial marketing, but this time all of the stuff was available at Walmart, and the cosmetics partnership was with CoverGirl. Not that this is a bad thing. If merchandise should be available to the primary audience, the fact that they did things that would be available at Walmart rather than only at mall stores and beauty supply shops was probably better-aimed in the end.
2012 was the year of The Avengers too. I remember making it to a showing in another city by the skin of my teeth. It is the last time I even remember trying to go to a local theater and finding that the film I wanted to see was sold out. I was disappointed enough that I bought a ticket in another city like 45 minutes away and drove there fast that Saturday and had to settle for being much closer to the screen than I prefer. But it felt like a cultural moment. Much like The Hunger Games, the film hasn't aged that well. But it felt like I was there, that showing up meant something. The whole thing with midnight showings of certain highly-anticipated blockbusters and it being a sort of thing for fans who bothered with extra perks has since given way to opening day just being Thursday for most big-tent productions, and that cheapens it somehow. It removes a bit more of the illusion that it is anything but a cash-grab, y'know.
I recall Agents of SHIELD coming out that year and rushing home from a local burger stand type place with a small sandwich and a big tea to watch the first episode. It... really didn't catch me from the first moment, because AOS has always had this way of not quite being what I expect it to be at first brush. And over time, that has actually endeared it to me more than the MCU proper much of the time, but again - I bothered to show up.
At some point during the post-Avengers 2012 era, I also got into Young Avengers and Matt Fraction's Hawkeye comic which remain the only western comics I've ever even tried to keep up with. I gave up on collecting the latter at some point, but I know that I own most of the main canon of the first run of YA... somewhere.
Looking at my old tumblr archive one thing that stands out to me is how my interests sort of bled into each other and didn't just suddenly cease back then. I think that this had to do with the fact that even though I was on tumblr almost every day, I didn't feel this never-ending pressure to keep up, and the tone of discourse was still different-enough that it didn't feel like doing anything was going to be stepping on a landmine. People still answered each other's questions rather than ignoring people in a way that made them feel all alone in fandom if they weren't "popular" and "pure" or devolving into screaming and harassment.
It is at this point that my memory becomes a bit fuzzy. And in this case, I don't even think it was because I was having a particularly brain-blanked period of time. I know that during 2013, I got really into Pacific Rim and that maybe it was just before that that Portal had taken an oddly prominent role in my life. For a little while, I was one of the most well-known Chell roleplayers and one of the longest-lived, though it eventually got to a point where no one would roleplay with me because I was... too good at writing, according to them. So I moved on to Raleigh Beckett for a while, but then someone in that fandom snapped my heart in two, and I guess that might be one reason it's hard to remember with any greater specificity.
And 2014 was the last year fandom on tumblr felt good in any way rather than just tolerable to bad. It was the year that Captain America: The Winter Soldier came out, and there was a brief resurgence of people trying to be actively social based on topics of interest with little "networks" and using private tumblrs that had only network-pages on their landing pages to chat with each other about common interests. Those quickly became little more tan excuses for people who had amassed some level of popularity to lord it over people, to make a pretty minimalist set of graphics, and to move on quickly, though. TWS was the last movie I remember having very low expectations of and coming out with my world just altered. And somehow it was at that midpoint of the decade when everything started to change in tone. Things became lonelier and darker. People started conflating political discourse and fandom discourse to the point that it was no longer a discussion about representation in mainstream media but one about entitlement.
And as I try to carry on, I could mention a few other fandoms that have come onto my radar since then. The Expanse and Arrow/the CW DCTV universe were somewhere in there. As were other less fandomy shows that I was briefly really into like Skins and Pretty Little Liars. But really, I am sort of running out of steam here, and it doesn't really feel like I am doing anything that momentous. All I know is that this decade feels like it has been two really separate eras of time for me: the one in which I was in university and discovering new things, albeit online rather than through nightlife and drug use, and the one where I was constantly bracing for impact and drawing away from being too involved with things lest I get hurt.
I kind of wonder if that had to do specifically with everything that getting into Fate/stay night and its fandom entailed, or if that was just a coincidence.
This article really sums up another of my laments better than I ever could: The Decade Fandom Went Corporate.
Oh, and we got our dog Charlie in 2011. He was named after Charles Xavier on my part, but my parents accepted it because my step-grandfather was named Charlie.
I started writing this post trying to see if there would be some eureka moment where I could take my fandom experiences of the past decade and help establish a coherent narrative that helped me to make any sort of statement about what the decade meant or the what the subsequent decade might mean. But I really can't. It's so fractured down the middle that any effort to continue with this seems meaningless. I can say that while fandom isn't my entire life, it has represented a large part of the accompaniment of my life when anything felt like it was going well. That sort of symbiotic, if parasocial relationship with a piece of media has always accompanied contentment, whether it was the source of it or something that ran alongside. And I guess that even though I still like things and occasionally get preoccupied with them, I no longer experience that kind of zest for anything. It feels like that and in many other things that I have cauterized myself against disappointment to a degree that nothing will feel like the first half of the decade did again in terms of hope or anything else.
And I guess that's it, then.
I remember very little about 2010. I think that it was one of the last years that LiveJournal was active enough to be worth using in my estimation. I remember campaigning for some of my friends to move here instead of to tumblr, but then I eventually caved after seeing a few really pretty gif edits. I made an account, and it took me a while to jump ship completely. I think the last big fandom for me on LiveJournal was Stargate SG-1, but by the time I moved to tumblr in March 2011, it was mostly Merlin with a dash of Narnia in there somewhere.
I had been into Doctor Who since 2007 or so, but it would always come and go in its importance.
The Merlin fandom still being active was the Age of Innocence in terms of my being a tumblr user who saw it as more good than harm to fandom. It was in the time immediately before SuperWhoLock took hold and its subsequent embarrassing fall.
2011 was also the year that I saw X-Men First Class and Thor. I had seen Iron Man and Iron Man 2, I think, but I saw both the aforementioned films when my best friend visited me IRL for the first time. Prior to that, I knew that comic book movies were becoming more popular, but I wasn't actually aware of the development of the MCU as a cohesive narrative or the efforts being made toward that. I loved Thor, but X-Men First Class stole my heart.
I made this fanvid about Loki before the entire "Avengers fandom" took hold. (I think of the "Avengers fandom" as being kind of different from the MCU fandom if that makes any sense?) It was sometime shortly after this that I stopped being able to work on fanvidding because the world moved on from Windows Movie Maker with a script extension and .avi. Recently, I have begun experimenting with trying again, but not with much direction or anything to show for it yet.
X-Men First Class was my introduction of Jennifer Lawrence. It was at that time that I was really experiencing my first and last season of being particularly enamored with the cast and crew of something. Learning that Michael Fassbender was likely not a very good man and seeing Jennifer Lawrence buy into her own press to the point of being apparently unable to take responsibility for anything and playing up her quirkiness to a point of blatant insincerity kind of blew up and burst the bubble for me. Since then, I have kind of avoided knowing too much about behind-the-scenes stuff when I am invested in a fictional franchise out of fear of it souring it for me. I don't think I'll ever stop loving XMFC, though.
Learning about Jennifer Lawrence and enjoying her performance as Raven | Mystique (which she later apparently came to resent so much which also upsets me) led me to be interested in the fact that she had been chosen to portray Katniss Everdeen in the upcoming film adaptation of The Hunger Games. I had heard of The Hunger Games and at that particular point had not quite lost my high-school habit of reading all the time even though I was a couple of years into college. I had seen posts on tumblr about being one of the very few people on the platform who had not read The Hunger Games and it being a sort of joke. It is weird to think about that kind of cohesive sense of neighborly unity within fandom or tumblr's userbase at this point in time.
I picked up the first book at Walmart after some hem-hawing about it around the holidays. I blazed through it and remember buying the second and/or third books before Christmas break was over. I remember anticipating March 2012 intensely. I went to the midnight premiere with a girl I was in an art class with at the time that I took just-because at my university. She and I had gone to high school together, and she had been a cheerleader who dated boys constantly. I remember talking to her that night and various things came up including the fact that I was probably bi. At the time, she still insisted that she was probably straight. Within a year, she had moved to a slightly larger city, become a Hooters girl, and married a woman. (Maybe marrying her took a little longer, but still.) As far as I know, they're still married.
I don't know anyone personally anymore on a local level. Everyone either left, moved on, or both.
The Hunger Games as a movie was... okay. I remember thinking that they were very faithful to the first couple of chapters of the book to the detriment of some of the worldbuilding and Peeta's characterization. It had a lot of heart put into it as an adaptation, but the shaky cam did not age well whatsoever, and I remember feeling that it was initially a triumph just in that it didn't blatantly suck. However, I felt like they basically spent too much of their time and energy on the establishing shots to the expense of everything else in the story, like they did it chronologically and were running out of zest for it by the last act of the film.
Nevertheless, being into that and seeing it go from a book fandom to a film fandom to virtual silence was interesting and sort of melancholy. I remember being really taken with the creativity of the fandom right at the juncture where trailers and promotional material were out but the film itself hadn't come out yet. There were fan films and parodies. There was also a lot of actually kind of "classy" marketing. I remember there being a series of China Glaze nail polishes of which I bought several. They were based on the, like, primary export of each of the Districts. And I remember discussions about how ironic the level of commercial marketing there was for the series was, given that we were basically being proven to "be the Capitol." By the time Catching Fire came out in theaters in 2013, I had drawn away from the fandom considerably because of the aforementioned disillusionment and the way in which the fandom seemed to sort of fizzle in my neck of the woods once the movies became a thing more than the books. I do remember there being another wave of commercial marketing, but this time all of the stuff was available at Walmart, and the cosmetics partnership was with CoverGirl. Not that this is a bad thing. If merchandise should be available to the primary audience, the fact that they did things that would be available at Walmart rather than only at mall stores and beauty supply shops was probably better-aimed in the end.
2012 was the year of The Avengers too. I remember making it to a showing in another city by the skin of my teeth. It is the last time I even remember trying to go to a local theater and finding that the film I wanted to see was sold out. I was disappointed enough that I bought a ticket in another city like 45 minutes away and drove there fast that Saturday and had to settle for being much closer to the screen than I prefer. But it felt like a cultural moment. Much like The Hunger Games, the film hasn't aged that well. But it felt like I was there, that showing up meant something. The whole thing with midnight showings of certain highly-anticipated blockbusters and it being a sort of thing for fans who bothered with extra perks has since given way to opening day just being Thursday for most big-tent productions, and that cheapens it somehow. It removes a bit more of the illusion that it is anything but a cash-grab, y'know.
I recall Agents of SHIELD coming out that year and rushing home from a local burger stand type place with a small sandwich and a big tea to watch the first episode. It... really didn't catch me from the first moment, because AOS has always had this way of not quite being what I expect it to be at first brush. And over time, that has actually endeared it to me more than the MCU proper much of the time, but again - I bothered to show up.
At some point during the post-Avengers 2012 era, I also got into Young Avengers and Matt Fraction's Hawkeye comic which remain the only western comics I've ever even tried to keep up with. I gave up on collecting the latter at some point, but I know that I own most of the main canon of the first run of YA... somewhere.
Looking at my old tumblr archive one thing that stands out to me is how my interests sort of bled into each other and didn't just suddenly cease back then. I think that this had to do with the fact that even though I was on tumblr almost every day, I didn't feel this never-ending pressure to keep up, and the tone of discourse was still different-enough that it didn't feel like doing anything was going to be stepping on a landmine. People still answered each other's questions rather than ignoring people in a way that made them feel all alone in fandom if they weren't "popular" and "pure" or devolving into screaming and harassment.
It is at this point that my memory becomes a bit fuzzy. And in this case, I don't even think it was because I was having a particularly brain-blanked period of time. I know that during 2013, I got really into Pacific Rim and that maybe it was just before that that Portal had taken an oddly prominent role in my life. For a little while, I was one of the most well-known Chell roleplayers and one of the longest-lived, though it eventually got to a point where no one would roleplay with me because I was... too good at writing, according to them. So I moved on to Raleigh Beckett for a while, but then someone in that fandom snapped my heart in two, and I guess that might be one reason it's hard to remember with any greater specificity.
And 2014 was the last year fandom on tumblr felt good in any way rather than just tolerable to bad. It was the year that Captain America: The Winter Soldier came out, and there was a brief resurgence of people trying to be actively social based on topics of interest with little "networks" and using private tumblrs that had only network-pages on their landing pages to chat with each other about common interests. Those quickly became little more tan excuses for people who had amassed some level of popularity to lord it over people, to make a pretty minimalist set of graphics, and to move on quickly, though. TWS was the last movie I remember having very low expectations of and coming out with my world just altered. And somehow it was at that midpoint of the decade when everything started to change in tone. Things became lonelier and darker. People started conflating political discourse and fandom discourse to the point that it was no longer a discussion about representation in mainstream media but one about entitlement.
And as I try to carry on, I could mention a few other fandoms that have come onto my radar since then. The Expanse and Arrow/the CW DCTV universe were somewhere in there. As were other less fandomy shows that I was briefly really into like Skins and Pretty Little Liars. But really, I am sort of running out of steam here, and it doesn't really feel like I am doing anything that momentous. All I know is that this decade feels like it has been two really separate eras of time for me: the one in which I was in university and discovering new things, albeit online rather than through nightlife and drug use, and the one where I was constantly bracing for impact and drawing away from being too involved with things lest I get hurt.
I kind of wonder if that had to do specifically with everything that getting into Fate/stay night and its fandom entailed, or if that was just a coincidence.
This article really sums up another of my laments better than I ever could: The Decade Fandom Went Corporate.
Oh, and we got our dog Charlie in 2011. He was named after Charles Xavier on my part, but my parents accepted it because my step-grandfather was named Charlie.
I started writing this post trying to see if there would be some eureka moment where I could take my fandom experiences of the past decade and help establish a coherent narrative that helped me to make any sort of statement about what the decade meant or the what the subsequent decade might mean. But I really can't. It's so fractured down the middle that any effort to continue with this seems meaningless. I can say that while fandom isn't my entire life, it has represented a large part of the accompaniment of my life when anything felt like it was going well. That sort of symbiotic, if parasocial relationship with a piece of media has always accompanied contentment, whether it was the source of it or something that ran alongside. And I guess that even though I still like things and occasionally get preoccupied with them, I no longer experience that kind of zest for anything. It feels like that and in many other things that I have cauterized myself against disappointment to a degree that nothing will feel like the first half of the decade did again in terms of hope or anything else.
And I guess that's it, then.
