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Meta Meme: topic by Skuf
Her prompt:
Has Fandom changed since you joined it? Do you have the same feelings about Fandom now as then?
Wow, all right, I think the real answer to this -- after meditating on it for a day and a half -- is: my fandom experience has shifted so much that I can't possibly compare then and now in a relevant way.
I first became involved in online collective (as opposed to performing fannish activities myself, in a vacuum, which I've been doing pretty much all my life) fandom back in 2000 or 2001. The fandom was Gundam: Wing. I discovered fic, feedback, author pages, ff.net (that might have come later), and the drama that was pairings, along with the idea of yaoi/slash. That last one? Completely squicked me. I avoided it stringently, sticking to the het side of fandom. And then I read this one fic... rated G or PG, nothing sexy, just pilotbonding (or, for all I remember, it might have been OZbonding). I edged into yaoi slowly, via fics that avoided explicit sex.
Hampered by an unshakeable distaste for the most popular pairing in the fandom (1x2), and a general disinterest in the second-most popular (3x4), I nonetheless slowly became a yaoi fan, reading increasingly-explicit works until I was pretty much ignoring het and reading anything that kept its prose purple enough to avoid anatomical or profane terms. I grew fond of a series of self-insert fics written by a group of ficcers who knew each other; I had no idea self-inserts were "bad," and these were humourous. I also recognised my taste for complex, sometimes outwardly-villainous or turncoat characters; by the end of my stint in GW fandom I mostly ignored the 15-year-old pilots in favour of Treize and Zechs. :D
My second major fandom was Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. This was the fall of a major hurdle -- before this, I stuck safely to animated or textual characters, squicked by the idea of reading about a real person, however fictional the personality attached. Liam Neeson, however, is very convincing. :D This fandom was my first All Slash fandom, and my first venture into the sort of fandom where self-inserts were very rare. (Mary Sues were somewhat more common, often as a gets-the-pair-together catalyst.) I'm not entirely sure which fandom I started picking up the wider views of Sues and self-inserts on; it might have been toward the tail end of GW, sometime in TPM, or even in some of the minor fandoms I toyed with in between those two; nonetheless, at some point I became aware that writing standards beyond grammar could be/were applied to fanfic. I definitely became aware of the existence of large, multi-author, pairing-specific archives: MasterApprentice was an amazing revelation, with gigbytes of fic all in one place, easily searchable by pairing or posting date! Instead of disparate circles of 1x2 and 3x4 and multipairing writers, tenuously linked by webrings or recs, there was one archive full of anything you could think of.
By the time I entered Harry Potter fandom, I was used to the idea of large fandoms, pairing-specific social circles or archives, writers with One True Pair, No True Pair, and every shade in between, and the sorts of characters and pairings that I preferred. No surprise I gravitated into HP/SS very quickly! :D HP fandom was my introduction to the LJ fandom experience; before it, I'd had only the MasterApprentice mailing list and, erm, whatever sort of smoke signals we used in GW -- I honestly can't even recall how I found things then! LJ made fandom more social -- people didn't just post fic or respond to feedback emails; many posted about their real lives, as well, or short snips like "I wrote another chapter of HP/SS today!" that probably wouldn't make it onto a mailing list. It also meant I had to develop a definite fannish identity: when writing individual emails, it didn't really matter how I signed them, since no one was comparing notes or considering me as "a member of the fandom" in a more generic sense. I made a fannish journal and became a reccer, mainly from spillover excitement as my favourite pairing took off. (I remember when If You Are Prepared first came out, and when Telanu's page called HP/SS a "rare pairing"!)
To me, my fandom experience(s) have been so disparate from fandom to fandom that I don't really think of them as a progression, where change might be observed and attributed to Fandom rather than to quirks of a particular fandom. For one, I seem to zigzag across the book/film and anime/Western animation lines quite a lot, making it very hard to tell cultural differences from progressive changes; Gundam Wing and TPM weren't all that far apart in my personal timeline, but the "culture" of each fandom was quite different, which I attribute more to the community (and perhaps the greater connexion and the medium than to evolution of fandom itself.
I feel pretty lucky about the breadth of my fandom experience! I have been to a SF/F con, an anime con, and HP midnight book releases (in costume); I have met fandom friends ranging from teenagers to grandmothers; I have a basic comprehension of a number of fannish cultures, from the mainstream (HP, Star Wars) to the obscure (Lois Bujold, Eroica) to the obscure-within-the-mainstream (HP/SS in Harry Potter). I know how to read a manga page and where to find fic for a tiny novel-based fandom. I can compare slash and yaoi, have friends in both camps, and enjoy both styles, as well as where they overlap.
Now, post-HP, I'm in that odd limbo of "looking for a fandom," which is interesting and aggravating. (I got entangled in Loveless for a while, but the author's lack of updates means the fandom is evaporating.) I worry that I'll never find another huge and thriving and engrossing fandom like HP; and I'm not sure what will happen then. Can I go back to small, disorganised fandoms? Can I manage without a steady stream of fic to rec? If so, I clearly can't be "a reccer" -- so what will I become? Will I ever be more than a lurker again, even if being an unknown reccer is only a slight step up? :D
Has Fandom changed since you joined it? Do you have the same feelings about Fandom now as then?
Wow, all right, I think the real answer to this -- after meditating on it for a day and a half -- is: my fandom experience has shifted so much that I can't possibly compare then and now in a relevant way.
I first became involved in online collective (as opposed to performing fannish activities myself, in a vacuum, which I've been doing pretty much all my life) fandom back in 2000 or 2001. The fandom was Gundam: Wing. I discovered fic, feedback, author pages, ff.net (that might have come later), and the drama that was pairings, along with the idea of yaoi/slash. That last one? Completely squicked me. I avoided it stringently, sticking to the het side of fandom. And then I read this one fic... rated G or PG, nothing sexy, just pilotbonding (or, for all I remember, it might have been OZbonding). I edged into yaoi slowly, via fics that avoided explicit sex.
Hampered by an unshakeable distaste for the most popular pairing in the fandom (1x2), and a general disinterest in the second-most popular (3x4), I nonetheless slowly became a yaoi fan, reading increasingly-explicit works until I was pretty much ignoring het and reading anything that kept its prose purple enough to avoid anatomical or profane terms. I grew fond of a series of self-insert fics written by a group of ficcers who knew each other; I had no idea self-inserts were "bad," and these were humourous. I also recognised my taste for complex, sometimes outwardly-villainous or turncoat characters; by the end of my stint in GW fandom I mostly ignored the 15-year-old pilots in favour of Treize and Zechs. :D
My second major fandom was Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. This was the fall of a major hurdle -- before this, I stuck safely to animated or textual characters, squicked by the idea of reading about a real person, however fictional the personality attached. Liam Neeson, however, is very convincing. :D This fandom was my first All Slash fandom, and my first venture into the sort of fandom where self-inserts were very rare. (Mary Sues were somewhat more common, often as a gets-the-pair-together catalyst.) I'm not entirely sure which fandom I started picking up the wider views of Sues and self-inserts on; it might have been toward the tail end of GW, sometime in TPM, or even in some of the minor fandoms I toyed with in between those two; nonetheless, at some point I became aware that writing standards beyond grammar could be/were applied to fanfic. I definitely became aware of the existence of large, multi-author, pairing-specific archives: MasterApprentice was an amazing revelation, with gigbytes of fic all in one place, easily searchable by pairing or posting date! Instead of disparate circles of 1x2 and 3x4 and multipairing writers, tenuously linked by webrings or recs, there was one archive full of anything you could think of.
By the time I entered Harry Potter fandom, I was used to the idea of large fandoms, pairing-specific social circles or archives, writers with One True Pair, No True Pair, and every shade in between, and the sorts of characters and pairings that I preferred. No surprise I gravitated into HP/SS very quickly! :D HP fandom was my introduction to the LJ fandom experience; before it, I'd had only the MasterApprentice mailing list and, erm, whatever sort of smoke signals we used in GW -- I honestly can't even recall how I found things then! LJ made fandom more social -- people didn't just post fic or respond to feedback emails; many posted about their real lives, as well, or short snips like "I wrote another chapter of HP/SS today!" that probably wouldn't make it onto a mailing list. It also meant I had to develop a definite fannish identity: when writing individual emails, it didn't really matter how I signed them, since no one was comparing notes or considering me as "a member of the fandom" in a more generic sense. I made a fannish journal and became a reccer, mainly from spillover excitement as my favourite pairing took off. (I remember when If You Are Prepared first came out, and when Telanu's page called HP/SS a "rare pairing"!)
To me, my fandom experience(s) have been so disparate from fandom to fandom that I don't really think of them as a progression, where change might be observed and attributed to Fandom rather than to quirks of a particular fandom. For one, I seem to zigzag across the book/film and anime/Western animation lines quite a lot, making it very hard to tell cultural differences from progressive changes; Gundam Wing and TPM weren't all that far apart in my personal timeline, but the "culture" of each fandom was quite different, which I attribute more to the community (and perhaps the greater connexion and the medium than to evolution of fandom itself.
I feel pretty lucky about the breadth of my fandom experience! I have been to a SF/F con, an anime con, and HP midnight book releases (in costume); I have met fandom friends ranging from teenagers to grandmothers; I have a basic comprehension of a number of fannish cultures, from the mainstream (HP, Star Wars) to the obscure (Lois Bujold, Eroica) to the obscure-within-the-mainstream (HP/SS in Harry Potter). I know how to read a manga page and where to find fic for a tiny novel-based fandom. I can compare slash and yaoi, have friends in both camps, and enjoy both styles, as well as where they overlap.
Now, post-HP, I'm in that odd limbo of "looking for a fandom," which is interesting and aggravating. (I got entangled in Loveless for a while, but the author's lack of updates means the fandom is evaporating.) I worry that I'll never find another huge and thriving and engrossing fandom like HP; and I'm not sure what will happen then. Can I go back to small, disorganised fandoms? Can I manage without a steady stream of fic to rec? If so, I clearly can't be "a reccer" -- so what will I become? Will I ever be more than a lurker again, even if being an unknown reccer is only a slight step up? :D
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How long did it take you to discover slash? As mentioned, I did get into it in my first major fandom, though I was still easily squicked by a lot of it; did you have a similar gradual acclimatisation process?
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Ever go back to an old fandom and suddenly see potential where you didn't before? And what were your older, slash-free fandoms? :D
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