Challenge #2
In your own space, talk about your fannish history.
I have done this a dozen times before, and I have a tendency to ramble and give a lot of details that make the substance get lost in the experience. This time, because I would like to work on rambling less and because I would like to both sleep and have time to do anything else tonight, I have decided that maybe I will do a sort of bullet point list!
I probably haven't mentioned every fandom I like or have been interested in above, but that's sort of the shape of how I came to be here now.
Forgot this bit yesterday:
In your own space, talk about your fannish history.
I have done this a dozen times before, and I have a tendency to ramble and give a lot of details that make the substance get lost in the experience. This time, because I would like to work on rambling less and because I would like to both sleep and have time to do anything else tonight, I have decided that maybe I will do a sort of bullet point list!
- ☙ Fandom started for me when I began to be really invested in the fact that, despite the dub's kid-friendly editing, Sailor Moon had a continuing story sometimes. I was aware of the fact that grown-up tv shows could have that, but here was something with fantastical elements and dramatic stakes that appealed to me as a child. I was hooked, and it was around this time that I began to get my very first inklings as to the fact that the internet existed. I started to sometimes search "Sailor Moon" and find GeoCities websites and things like that.
- ☙ I got into several other stories in a fandom-y way after that. The next one I recall was maladaptive daydreaming that I did about a Digimon Adventure alternate universe that involved a lot of one-blanket-scenario developed sexual tension and incestuous thoughts and love triangles and sacrifices that proved love and stuff like that, all to the B-Side of the Lion King soundtrack tape because it was the first time I was really aware that I enjoyed soundtrack music.
- ☙ One of the first things I shipped in live action was the boy and girl from a movie I owned called The Amazing Panda Adventure.
This movie came out in 1995 when I would have been four years old. I am sure it was a year or two before I had it because I had it on VHS. But anyway, as you can see in the clip these two kids have a sort of "you're an idiot"/"you're naive" belligerent tension which I was apparently into even back then. It's so weird because these kids are obviously very young, but given that I was even younger, I guess I perceived them as being solidly preteens even though I am not even sure they're that old now. But anyway through the movie they go through this adventure to save the panda cub and to get back to their adults, and it is a sort of coming of age story. It's been years since I watched it in full, but it made an impression on me about how as they grew to respect and care for each other that they were also having these brief moments of sort of realization of themselves as organisms that could even possibly experience attraction.
There is a scene in it where they fall into some water that is full of leeches, and in their panic they strip off all their clothes so as to get the leeches off their bodies. Then they realize they're naked/in their underwear and hide in the brush and have to do something or other so as to give each other privacy to cover up somehow before thy can move on. I was looking this up and found the CommonSense Media page about it and it had some parent reviewer going "I don't know why that was necessary." But as a child who was a bit precocious in becoming sexually/romantically aware, I guess I kind of understood it to be one of those formative moments of sort of becoming self-aware in that way. It isn't lurid or lewd, but it is something that seemed relatable to me as a child.
Like I said, whether it was based on a mental health issue or not, I was a bit precocious in becoming interested in such things, and at the time I didn't realize how young they were or how young I was. But a part of me, looking back even now, kind of wants to imagine that they stay in touch or reconnect later in life and fall in love when they're appropriately capable of doing so. - ☙ I started to learn how to write prose by myself, writing fanfiction about Sailor Moon in my free time in second grade. It was like a code-breaking exercise to realize that the things I was learning about punctuation and spelling could be used in this way. That was the banner year when I stopped despising learning to write and spell, though it wouldn't fully settle in until I started being home-schooled.
- ☙ When I started being home-schooled in fourth grade, my aunt opted to try home-schooling her son as well. His older sister had become pregnant when she was just shy of eighteen and her boyfriend was fifteen. Columbine had just happened. It was sympathetic that my aunt wanted to try. But ultimately, I was home-schooled while my cousin was just corralled at home and encouraged to read because his mother simply wasn't equipped to be a home-schooling teacher.
As a result, he started to spend a lot of his time playing Unreal Tournament online. Back then everyone had dial-up, so it started to really frustrate me because he was one of the few peers I had whom I could call during the day since we were both at home, and it tied up the phone-line. Between him and the last crush I claimed during third-grade whom I still talked to on the phone from time to time but also found was tying up the line with the internet connection a lot, I got AOL Instant Messenger. This allowed me to talk to them some. - ☙ Shounen Jump came out in America in 2004, shortly after I started using AIM. My cousin bought the first two issues, and I borrowed them to read the YuGiOh manga. Then I kept borrowing them until finally, after he had thoroughly decimated the covers by using them as mousepads when playing Unreal, my cousin simply gave the issues to me because he had read everything he wanted to read in them and I clearly had much more interest in constantly revisiting them. I started to read YuYu Hakusho as well as it was the only other thing that really caught my interest (tried Naruto and One Piece at different times and didn't like them, though I don't recall if both of those were featured in the original issues in the US).
- ☙ I was disappointed still that my cousin was always busy with being online. At some point, he referred me to the AIM screenname of a girl he had met on GameFAQs who happened to be much more into YYH than he was, even though he liked it. I set about trying to break the ice and talk to her, but she didn't really believe me about my intentions, so she pretended to after several efforts on my part to start talking to her. Then she invited me into a group chatroom with some of her more consistent friends from GameFAQs and they set about trying to trip me up and catch me in a lie to find out I was an older man or boy trying to creep on the girl. That didn't happen, and instead I met two of my first really enduring online friends in that chatroom even though I never did manage to become friends with that girl. One of those people I had to give up eventually due to his hostility related to mental health issues and misanthropy, but one of them I am still friends with to this day.
- ☙ The next big leap for me was getting into reading books instead of watching the anime that was available in the American dub market and reading manga. Harry Potter was first becoming big when I was in third grade, but it took a few years to reach saturation.
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toxictsukino got really into Harry Potter at some point, but I couldn't do so because my parents while not necessarily hyper-conservative themselves are middlingly conservative and would listen to the hand-wringing of the crazy types who hated anything that was more complex or dark than Mickey Mouse for children's entertainment. They were super suspect of something that blatantly called its magic "witchcraft." So I couldn't really get into HP, but toxictsukino recommended Artemis Fowl to me, too. And so that became the next-best thing. - ☙ One of those online friends I made that I mentioned earlier suggested The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for me, which also became super formative in terms of helping to carve the niche into my brain that helped me to enjoy British absurdism that never quite tipped over the ugly nihilism line.
- ☙ Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith came out in theaters in 2005. Before that, I had seen Star Wars: The Phantom Menace several times at a neighbor's house, but I didn't understand what Star Wars even was. She tried to explain it to me based on her grandfather's explanation, but I thought that she was talking pure nonsense when she told me that Anakin and Padme would get married one day based on the smile they shared in the sort of triumphant final scene (I'm sure her grandfather had helped her understand this but it was lost on me). Mostly she was into the character of Padme, so we just watched those scenes over and over. AOTC came out and went without my ever hearing a word about it. But then one day my cousin (the older sister of the aforementioned one) offered to take me with her and her oldest son (the one conceived while she was in high school) to see it. And thus I was hooked on Star Wars and specifically the prequel trilogy for a couple of years after that. I bonded with another cousin of mine over it.
- Star Wars fixation stuck around for several years until I started attending public high school in tenth grade (2006-2007 school year). I didn't stop liking it because of anything internal. Rather, it was because starting school again after being free of its social pressures as a home-schooled student for so long were exhausting to me. Then I met and began my short-lived relationship with my abusive ex, and one of the first things he used to get to me was the fact that I was carrying a Star Wars book around with me for the first few weeks of school before I gave up on ever completing it. During that first semester, I completed my first fanvid which still exists in all its less than 240p glory:
TBH I know it's rough and forced in parts, but a part of me is still actually kind of proud of it. If nothing else, it represents a sort of understanding of themes and a retention of material that I think I don't have anymore, probably due to lack of practice.
Anyway, Star Wars as an interest kind of dried up for me a little bit at a time and then all at once due to depression setting in because of what I was going through in real life. Then it just didn't matter anymore and was somewhat soured by association. Then came... - ☙ Doctor Who. Doctor Who was recommended to me by the online friend whom I had to eventually give up contact with due to aforementioned issues. He happened to be British, and so he had the context to be excited when the revival came out in 2005. I had heard him talk about it for a bit, but I had a very fuzzy and inaccurate understanding of what it was about. (I think I assumed it was somehow about science fiction and medicine.) But then one day during the Christmas Break of that awful first year back in public high school, I saw a marathon of the show on. The first day, I didn't know what to think about it, but they must have been doing a lot of Doctor Who that week because it was when they were like first able to show Series 2 in the US or something? And slowly it slotted into place as something that gave me hope where I had utterly lost it. And Doctor Who is still an intense recurring interest for me because I feel like it gave me a lifeline where I had none. It was also the first fandom that I participated in actively on LiveJournal and when I started to understand the ins and outs of fandom culture as it existed at the time. I had dabbled in the periphery of being a voice in fandom since 2003 (when I was twelve) and made my first fanfiction.net account to comment on fics with and gradually started writing my own, but I feel like DW was the first one where I felt I was "in a fandom" while knowing what that meant.
- ☙ Stargate SG-1 was big for me but mostly in the sense that it was the first thing I got into that didn't seem to hyper-idealize youth. I still like it a lot, but I also feel like I still haven't played out my feelings on the series to their full potential. I revisit it sometimes, but it is really sad to me that some of the heyday of that fandom is becoming lost to the sands of internet time and Russian LiveJournal.
- ☙ At some point early in my senior year, I finally joined anime club. I had bailed on it when I started to a couple of years before, as I mentioned in another post incidentally tonight. But I didn't join out of any particular love for anime at the time. I was really only into the anime that I had always been into, and I hadn't picked up a new anime or manga in years. But I wanted to go to Katsucon with them that February just as a sort of affordable likeminded peer field trip. The anime club were nerds in other ways, lots of them were LGBT, and they were just gentle. I wasn't completely sure that I was bi at the time and waffled on it, but I knew at the very least that I was an ally, and I just liked being around a handful of people I knew from anime club. So when I started attending, one of the things they were screening at club meetings were the original like less-than-five-minute sometimes shorts of Axis Powers Hetalia. It's sort of cringey at this point, but that fandom is where I met my best friend on a one-on-one roleplaying matching website. And it helped me to conceptualize some stuff I was learning about history and was the only time I ever really cared about the Olymics, so there's that.
- ☙ Merlin, the BBC series, was also a big moment for me in terms of fandom. It was one of the first things that taught me that it was okay to be critical of a property (there are aspects of Merlin that are just silly, bad, or hilariously low-budget) while also loving it a lot. It and SG-1 were the fandoms that I was into when I jumped ship from LJ to tumblr, I remember. The Chronicles of Narnia was also somewhere in there, particularly because I got into that narrative through the movies and would have no love for the books at all without them even though I think I generally admire some of the other things C.S. Lewis thought or did. But gosh check my Narnia tag if you wanna go into all that.
- ☙ Going into college, my fandoms were mostly a sort of cycle of fandoms I already had for a while. The next big ones to come along waited a few years and were: the MCU and the Marvel universe in general via also liking X-Men: First Class a lot (more than Thor or Captain America TFA which also came out that year). I got into The Hunger Games first because Jennifer Lawrence had been in XMFC and was going to be Katniss, but upon reading the books I decided that Katniss was pretty miscast even though the movies aren't awful anyway.
- ☙ The next big game-changer in terms of my fandom behavior was getting into Portal, the videogame. I played it just to mind-blank or to have something of small mental stimulation when I was too depressed to engage with other interests. Then I started making myself go for walks most days, trying to get back into some shape, and I found that as I listened to certain music, I was preoccupied with Chell and the worldbuilding that was within the game. I made a post about it on tumblr, a GLaDOS rp and ask blog replied, and I ended up making a Chell RP account. I'm still weirdly invested in Portal, and while I don't quite like how much of an The Office (UK) fusion it is on the Stephen Merchant fandom end of things, Blue Sky is still just the gold standard for what I wish I could contribute to fandom and holds up easily against any YA book I have ever read.
- ☙ At the time of writing this, it is hard to think of any other big game-changers for me in terms of fandom. Since then, I have kind of known what I was about, even as I pingponged around the above-listed fandoms in cycles and learned to take on new ones. It is hard to think of any others that feel like they really moved me to feel differently about the experience except possibly The Expanse which just feels big and (no pun intended or is it) expansive and dark but emotionally not-nihilistic. And the mountains the fandom moved to save the show from cancellation are just one of those chef's-kiss inspiring moments of fandom not being full of Anti rhetoric and sucking really hard.
I probably haven't mentioned every fandom I like or have been interested in above, but that's sort of the shape of how I came to be here now.
Forgot this bit yesterday:
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Date: 2020-01-04 08:18 pm (UTC)From: