My Life in Fandom
Friday, April 6th, 2012 03:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evila_elf(I would totally love to hear about other people's experiences in fandom. Have you always been involved in something? Has fandom been a rather new occurrence? Feel free to write up a post in your own LJ and link back here!)
I can't really remember a time when I haven't been obsessing about one thing or another. I remember a diary entry, back when diaries used to be made of paper and you had to hand write everything, where I had used an ugly marker to say 'I turned on the TV today and *Name of Show* was on!!' (only there were tons of misspellings ha!). I was probably about 5 at the time.
When I was about three, we rented our first VCR player from the Video store. It seems so bizarre now! This was the mid 80s. Most of the video stores still had options for renting Beta tapes, though hardly anyone ever checked them out. There used to be an empty video box on a stand, with two eye-hooks underneath. One held a circle for VHS, another for Beta. Oops, getting sidetracked.
I used to have favorite movies that I would play over and over and over again. I watched TV for about 30 min. to an hour before school, so I would just loop the same movie for a few weeks.
As far as series go, the first I got truly obsessive over was Bonanza (okay, I 'played' Captain Planet in grade school with my friends - we had rings and everything!). I had my brother record episodes that aired on cable TV for me. And this was the first fandom that I tried writing for. Only amounted to two pages of bad!fic. And this was also before I got a computer, so I didn't know fanfiction existed at the time. I was about pre-teen/early teen at this time. I did the whole programming the VCR player to catch all the reruns that aired on local TV. I memorized all the words to the two-part ep that was made into a movie so I could recite dialogue along with the cast (whoa, people wanted to hurt me when I did that!).
Around this time I also started liking certain actors. I would go to bookstores and look in the movie guides, write down everything they had been in, then when I got home, I would call the four or five local video stores to see what movies they had. Old fashioned movie hunting was always fun! I still get that thrill of the 'hunting' phase of my new obsessions :D Some of my first favorite actors were Emilio Estevez (I watched Young Guns II when I was sick and too lazy to change the channel. Thank you, flu) and Christian Slater.
I also watched every Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer movie ever made after I saw Huck Finn with Elijah Wood (I remember noting his name down on a pad of paper so I could follow his career as he did more movies).
Around 16/17 years old, I feel in love with Pokemon. I...really have no explanation for this lol. But I collected the trading cards (I still have TONS of them that I don't think I can get rid of lol), collected the toys (my personal favorite is a Pikachu that says its name when you touch two sensors on the bottom of its feet--if you do it too rapidly, it sounds like it is saying 'fuck you!').
This was right when I got my first desktop computer ($1000 and it came with a scanner and printer and a whopping 1.6 gigs of memory!).
I had been watching X-Files since it started airing in 1993. With the addition of my new computer, I could obsess over it online and I started by reading fanfic. And it didn't take me very long to go ew at the Mulder/Scully romance and camp out in the Angst section (I miss Gossamer - or whatever it was called, such a lovely archive!). From Angst, I moved to Slash. my only familiarity with the term was slasher/horror movies. I really don't remember what my reaction was to Mulder/Krycek, except that I loved itand I never read het again. I wrote a bit, but never finished anything (story of my life lol).
Still obsessive with collecting Pokemon crap, I moved to Digimon about the time my X-files obsession was nearing an end (later seasons, oh how I hated you). And I finally wrote and posted some fanfic upon discovering fanfiction.net. I cringe to read what I used to write! But the encouragement over there was amazing! Almost 200 reviews for an 11 chaptered fic!
Wrote about 7 Digimom fics, then I moved on to some other anime shows (KENSHIN!!) and got into buying fansubs through the mail. Loved discovering new shows that way! Various anime kept be busy from 1999 to 2001 when Lord of the Rings hit the theater. *has a fangirl moment* And the odd thing is...I didn't really go OMG over it until I finally saw the extended version before the second movie came out. I actually laughed at the cliffhanger at the end of movie 1. (this also gave me my first taste of RPF, though I didn't care about the actors much to give a toss)
With as much as I obsessed over LOTR, I only did a few short stories for it. I was quite content to read novel lengthed fanfiction for it. The quality of writing was amazing for the pit.
After that, I rediscovered MASH the TV series. I've always loved it, but now maybe I was finally old enough to fall completely in love with Hawkeye. I made manips, wrote a lot of fics, and was finally introduced to Livejournal. I had been hearing about LJ for about a year at this point (we're at 2004), but journals sounded boring. But then I fell in love with a gal's writing and had to do some internet stalking. And there I found a handful of other MASH fanatics, which was awesome considering how old of a show it was.
All in all, I wrote 10 fics for MASH and have about 20 incomplete bits and starts from my MASH folder.
Then House happened. There was a huge shift in the MASH fandom to House. I came in about 4 episodes late, and loved it immediately. This was also the fandom where I met my two best friends *waves to them if they haven't fallen asleep by this point*
I wrote House fics from 2005 to 2008. I wrote 25 fics and 30 drabbles. And I have 40 incomplete fics (one involving a threesome and another involving...House's cane). This was where I wrote my first R and NC-17 fics, and had some fun with different kinks lol.
Fell in love with RPS (real person slash) during all this and wrote a few Hugh Laurie/Robert Sean Leonard mini-fics, and then cowrote a massive Robert Sean Leonard/Alan Davies series of fics that spawned almost 200 fics. I think we were 10 fics shy of finishing the whole series and reaching 200 when inspiration died.
After that, I did some Idol RPS fics, mainly four Cake fics (Blake/Chris), and made some manips.
Then I fell hard for Supernatural. The AU fics in the fandom were amazing and I read way more than I wrote. I wrote three fics for the RPS fandom (and wrote 14 little fics for MMoM - The merry month of masturbation, even though I hate reading those types of fics). 18 incomplete fics in my folder *sadface* I had some really neat ones, but I kept jumping around between them so much that nothing got done. And it was a highly competitive fandom, so not many comments. Shouldn't be discouraging, but it is. Was in the fandom from 2009 to 2010.
After that...I was without a major fandom for a year and a half. I squeed over shows on TV all the time, but never enough to go look up fanfiction.
Series 1 of Sherlock happened, which I found a few months after it aired and the squee had died down. I really enjoyed it, but didn't Love it. I believe I was still clinging to SPN at the time (I really can only do one fandom at a time), and I knew it would be AGES until the next series started up.
A coworker, who had also seen s1, started getting excited and kept asking me when s2 was coming out (yes, I am the bringer of all information and fun stuffs lol), which in turn got me excited. I rewatched s1 I think around August 2011?
Then the anticipation started building online for s2. I entertained myself by catching some of Benedict Cumberbatch's other things on Youtube. Hawking and The Last Enemy. Not the best choices. Then Third Star was posted online. I jumped on it because Sherlock Guy+Angst! I was a bit disappointed in it, because I thought it would be more...heartfelt? More about the journey and experiences rather than the characters goofing around.
I watched it again and fell in love. This prompted me to hack my DVD player to make it all region and buy the movie from the UK. (I made the DVD have a pit stop in Australia to visit a friend, who had a similar meh to OMG!!!1 reaction as I did). And it turns out the DVD is actually region free, despite what it says on the box *dances*
...where was I....?
Series 2 of Sherlock came out. Fandom squeed (I think, I was going at it a bit too loud to hear anyone else, myself). I have three fics posted and nine more I am working on.
And I am making it a goal to watch everything Benedict Cumberbatch has ever been in. SO MUCH STUFF! YAY! I also seem to be doing a decent job of multitasking between Sherlock and Cabin Pressure (Benedict's radio program, which is awesome!).
Sad to think of a time when there will be another fandom to add to the list. I can't really think of not being addicted to Sherlock anymore :(
I am really grateful to all the online friends I have made over the years and it is great fun seeing some of them pop up in other fandoms years later and crossing paths. As a kid, I had always been shy and awkward, and the internet has given me a place where I don't have to worry about things, too much. Other people just don't understand how 'internet friends' can mean more than 'real life' friends. Though I guess at this point, several of you internet friends have become RL friends XD
Okay, signing off now. Didn't mean to spend nearly two hours typing this. Kudos to anyone who actually made it to the end of this!
I can't really remember a time when I haven't been obsessing about one thing or another. I remember a diary entry, back when diaries used to be made of paper and you had to hand write everything, where I had used an ugly marker to say 'I turned on the TV today and *Name of Show* was on!!' (only there were tons of misspellings ha!). I was probably about 5 at the time.
When I was about three, we rented our first VCR player from the Video store. It seems so bizarre now! This was the mid 80s. Most of the video stores still had options for renting Beta tapes, though hardly anyone ever checked them out. There used to be an empty video box on a stand, with two eye-hooks underneath. One held a circle for VHS, another for Beta. Oops, getting sidetracked.
I used to have favorite movies that I would play over and over and over again. I watched TV for about 30 min. to an hour before school, so I would just loop the same movie for a few weeks.
As far as series go, the first I got truly obsessive over was Bonanza (okay, I 'played' Captain Planet in grade school with my friends - we had rings and everything!). I had my brother record episodes that aired on cable TV for me. And this was the first fandom that I tried writing for. Only amounted to two pages of bad!fic. And this was also before I got a computer, so I didn't know fanfiction existed at the time. I was about pre-teen/early teen at this time. I did the whole programming the VCR player to catch all the reruns that aired on local TV. I memorized all the words to the two-part ep that was made into a movie so I could recite dialogue along with the cast (whoa, people wanted to hurt me when I did that!).
Around this time I also started liking certain actors. I would go to bookstores and look in the movie guides, write down everything they had been in, then when I got home, I would call the four or five local video stores to see what movies they had. Old fashioned movie hunting was always fun! I still get that thrill of the 'hunting' phase of my new obsessions :D Some of my first favorite actors were Emilio Estevez (I watched Young Guns II when I was sick and too lazy to change the channel. Thank you, flu) and Christian Slater.
I also watched every Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer movie ever made after I saw Huck Finn with Elijah Wood (I remember noting his name down on a pad of paper so I could follow his career as he did more movies).
Around 16/17 years old, I feel in love with Pokemon. I...really have no explanation for this lol. But I collected the trading cards (I still have TONS of them that I don't think I can get rid of lol), collected the toys (my personal favorite is a Pikachu that says its name when you touch two sensors on the bottom of its feet--if you do it too rapidly, it sounds like it is saying 'fuck you!').
This was right when I got my first desktop computer ($1000 and it came with a scanner and printer and a whopping 1.6 gigs of memory!).
I had been watching X-Files since it started airing in 1993. With the addition of my new computer, I could obsess over it online and I started by reading fanfic. And it didn't take me very long to go ew at the Mulder/Scully romance and camp out in the Angst section (I miss Gossamer - or whatever it was called, such a lovely archive!). From Angst, I moved to Slash. my only familiarity with the term was slasher/horror movies. I really don't remember what my reaction was to Mulder/Krycek, except that I loved it
Still obsessive with collecting Pokemon crap, I moved to Digimon about the time my X-files obsession was nearing an end (later seasons, oh how I hated you). And I finally wrote and posted some fanfic upon discovering fanfiction.net. I cringe to read what I used to write! But the encouragement over there was amazing! Almost 200 reviews for an 11 chaptered fic!
Wrote about 7 Digimom fics, then I moved on to some other anime shows (KENSHIN!!) and got into buying fansubs through the mail. Loved discovering new shows that way! Various anime kept be busy from 1999 to 2001 when Lord of the Rings hit the theater. *has a fangirl moment* And the odd thing is...I didn't really go OMG over it until I finally saw the extended version before the second movie came out. I actually laughed at the cliffhanger at the end of movie 1. (this also gave me my first taste of RPF, though I didn't care about the actors much to give a toss)
With as much as I obsessed over LOTR, I only did a few short stories for it. I was quite content to read novel lengthed fanfiction for it. The quality of writing was amazing for the pit.
After that, I rediscovered MASH the TV series. I've always loved it, but now maybe I was finally old enough to fall completely in love with Hawkeye. I made manips, wrote a lot of fics, and was finally introduced to Livejournal. I had been hearing about LJ for about a year at this point (we're at 2004), but journals sounded boring. But then I fell in love with a gal's writing and had to do some internet stalking. And there I found a handful of other MASH fanatics, which was awesome considering how old of a show it was.
All in all, I wrote 10 fics for MASH and have about 20 incomplete bits and starts from my MASH folder.
Then House happened. There was a huge shift in the MASH fandom to House. I came in about 4 episodes late, and loved it immediately. This was also the fandom where I met my two best friends *waves to them if they haven't fallen asleep by this point*
I wrote House fics from 2005 to 2008. I wrote 25 fics and 30 drabbles. And I have 40 incomplete fics (one involving a threesome and another involving...House's cane). This was where I wrote my first R and NC-17 fics, and had some fun with different kinks lol.
Fell in love with RPS (real person slash) during all this and wrote a few Hugh Laurie/Robert Sean Leonard mini-fics, and then cowrote a massive Robert Sean Leonard/Alan Davies series of fics that spawned almost 200 fics. I think we were 10 fics shy of finishing the whole series and reaching 200 when inspiration died.
After that, I did some Idol RPS fics, mainly four Cake fics (Blake/Chris), and made some manips.
Then I fell hard for Supernatural. The AU fics in the fandom were amazing and I read way more than I wrote. I wrote three fics for the RPS fandom (and wrote 14 little fics for MMoM - The merry month of masturbation, even though I hate reading those types of fics). 18 incomplete fics in my folder *sadface* I had some really neat ones, but I kept jumping around between them so much that nothing got done. And it was a highly competitive fandom, so not many comments. Shouldn't be discouraging, but it is. Was in the fandom from 2009 to 2010.
After that...I was without a major fandom for a year and a half. I squeed over shows on TV all the time, but never enough to go look up fanfiction.
Series 1 of Sherlock happened, which I found a few months after it aired and the squee had died down. I really enjoyed it, but didn't Love it. I believe I was still clinging to SPN at the time (I really can only do one fandom at a time), and I knew it would be AGES until the next series started up.
A coworker, who had also seen s1, started getting excited and kept asking me when s2 was coming out (yes, I am the bringer of all information and fun stuffs lol), which in turn got me excited. I rewatched s1 I think around August 2011?
Then the anticipation started building online for s2. I entertained myself by catching some of Benedict Cumberbatch's other things on Youtube. Hawking and The Last Enemy. Not the best choices. Then Third Star was posted online. I jumped on it because Sherlock Guy+Angst! I was a bit disappointed in it, because I thought it would be more...heartfelt? More about the journey and experiences rather than the characters goofing around.
I watched it again and fell in love. This prompted me to hack my DVD player to make it all region and buy the movie from the UK. (I made the DVD have a pit stop in Australia to visit a friend, who had a similar meh to OMG!!!1 reaction as I did). And it turns out the DVD is actually region free, despite what it says on the box *dances*
...where was I....?
Series 2 of Sherlock came out. Fandom squeed (I think, I was going at it a bit too loud to hear anyone else, myself). I have three fics posted and nine more I am working on.
And I am making it a goal to watch everything Benedict Cumberbatch has ever been in. SO MUCH STUFF! YAY! I also seem to be doing a decent job of multitasking between Sherlock and Cabin Pressure (Benedict's radio program, which is awesome!).
Sad to think of a time when there will be another fandom to add to the list. I can't really think of not being addicted to Sherlock anymore :(
I am really grateful to all the online friends I have made over the years and it is great fun seeing some of them pop up in other fandoms years later and crossing paths. As a kid, I had always been shy and awkward, and the internet has given me a place where I don't have to worry about things, too much. Other people just don't understand how 'internet friends' can mean more than 'real life' friends. Though I guess at this point, several of you internet friends have become RL friends XD
Okay, signing off now. Didn't mean to spend nearly two hours typing this. Kudos to anyone who actually made it to the end of this!
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no subject
Date: 2012-04-06 10:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-06 06:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-06 02:53 pm (UTC)I've just come off a 4-year Viggo Mortensen/Sean Bean bender, and I never thought I'd fall for Cumberbatch so damn hard, but fallen I have. I love it. :D
This was so much fun to read, thanks for posting it!
no subject
Date: 2012-04-06 06:30 pm (UTC)Do you think you might go back to Viggo/Sean when The Hobbit comes out, even though neither are going to be in it? I'm really looking forward to the movie!
no subject
Date: 2012-04-06 06:35 pm (UTC)I hate to let go of an old fandom completely, so you never know. I am actually thinking of doing a Necromancer/Estel story. Young!Aragorn might be completely ripe for the plucking. :D I can't wait for the movie either - SO exciting!
no subject
Date: 2012-04-07 12:43 am (UTC)I love that with LJ we can just add good stuffs to our memories. I don't go back and read them very much when I have moved on, though.
Here's to hoping the world doesn't end so we can have The Hobbit and S3 of Sherlock!
no subject
Date: 2012-04-06 06:04 pm (UTC)Also, lol, I have that same Pikachu! I think my mom bought it for me for Christmas 1998. It's been on the same batteries since then, and still works.
My whole fandom history is also incredibly long (my first fandom was Muppet Babies, when I was 3, complete with horrible fanfic/fanart) so uh... yeah. Suffice it to say, I've come full circle from one 80s cartoon to another (Transformers/GI Joe). Which is... kind of tragic.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-06 06:33 pm (UTC)They don't make batteries like they used to, do they? Mine has the same ones as well!
Over the last year or so, I have been going back and tracking down all the old movies I used to love, and books, thanks to several 'what was that' communities. Fun hunting them down.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-07 12:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-06 11:10 pm (UTC)My currents are Sherlock, Star Trek, and Supernatural.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-07 12:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-07 03:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-07 07:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-09 02:04 am (UTC)Do you think you are ever going to get over your block?
Meeting people online is an awesome part of fandom! I am horrible with small talk, so I don't do so well talking to people in real life about...anything not relating to fandom lol.