fandom research, philosphical cimbabble

[cimorene]

froda_baggins is collecting data about how people feel about fandom and fandoms for an emergency school project here. i encourage everyone's participation. questions like 'where did you start to hear your muses?' and 'why do you think fandom is important to you?' really sparked my interest and i wrote a wee essay-like thing. my answers only came to me as i started to write them, but they're things i want to think about more so i'm recording them here. and, uh, you can all think about them too, or you can skim over, just as you wish.

>Why do you think fandom is so important to you?

i love the concept of a SHARED universe, with SHARED characters. everyone's views of them may be different, but they overlap, and they overlap with canon and diverge from it, and then there's fanon, and there's a FEELING to the body of work in a fandom that's a nebulous collective of the work and the prescence of all the people in that fandom. within all those interwoven, overlapping ideas there are an infinite number of truths, and every idea in a shared universe becomes a dialogue, a discussion, with the fandom and everyone in it.

>Second, where do you generally get inspiration from? i.e., is it pictures, songs, other fics, or something elese? Or is it just the movie/book/comic/celebrity?

very rarely the canon is so definite, so strong and so characteristic, that a story grows out of it. episode spackles, post-episode stories, stories about main characters--that kind of thing. but every character has a heart of me and every story's theme has to do with what has been most on my mind. pictures and songs are nice to look at and listen to do but have nothing to do with 'inspiration' for stories for me--i find the results artificial. other stories are another matter. fandoms thrive on the interchange of ideas--authors reading and discussing other work.

Comments

2late4survey.also,dittoeverything'ceptlastpar

[oneko-briar.livejournal.com]

i<3u

Re: 2late4survey.also,dittoeverything'ceptlastpar

[cimness.livejournal.com]

you're amusing. you agree with 'everything except the last paragraph' out of two paragraphs? <3

Re: 2late4survey.also,dittoeverything'ceptlastpar

[oneko-briar.livejournal.com]

:snarls: LJbastard cut me off! or something. it's supposed to say "'cept the last paragraph's bit about inspiration from photos/etc being artificial, because I find making a story out of a moment in an article or photo, for me, is a lot about what RPF cannon is all about. I find it very, *very* inspirational and as for the results, hardly never 'fake'. :pauses: " <- sticks end quote just because. of course that wasn't what it was supposed to say, but it was sort of the point.

:nyah:

Re: 2late4survey.also,dittoeverything'ceptlastpar

[cimness.livejournal.com]

to my mind, it often emerges like songfic. i have learned to dread author's notes like 'i was just watching blah blah and i heard/saw blahblah...'