The Fannish Personality (Where I am Right Now, Fannishly)

[cimorene]

I saw a couple of people on my dlist here post that they'd updated their fandom info and I thought, what a good idea! So last night I skimmed through my DW profile and made some minor changes, then updated my trusty

Ten Things I Assume You Know About Me If You Read My Journal

(That isn't required reading; I'm not, like, mad about it. I just refer to these things without footnotes or background info.)

But I got to thinking about my fandom belonging and my fandom interests, which have changed a lot from the community-based, almost... club-like vibe of lj communties. I still imbibe a lot of visual stimulus from Tumblr daily, but I'm trying to move more interaction here to Dreamwidth, because that's where the interaction happens. Working on having conversations here, and so on. Not so much, necessarily, about fannish interests - fandoms, I mean - but perhaps that's mostly my few fandom interests/the fewer opportunities on dw to talk about them now. And there's more about meta, which interests me perhaps more anyway, because my interest (such as it is!) in reading fanfiction this year has been like...:

↳ Comb through my Highlander bookmarks, recs, and old journal entries in search of other references to check out, and attempt to find up-to-date links to things; fail for the most part. Go through the Highlander fics on AO3. Post updated recs.

↳ Read Steve/Eddie Stranger Things fic all summer, going slowly more and more crazy because it's all written by British teenagers and it's no longer cool to use betas, or apparently even proofreaders, and everybody insists on putting modern British slang in and calling sweatshirts "sweaters", which is a big problem because there's an iconic sweatshirt in canon so it shows up in almost every fic and I just want to get a Tumblr megaphone and make a PSA about what a sweater was in 1980s America to these dweebs who are too young to have learned how to Google apparently... oh, I also posted recs for that in the summer though! Here

↳ Brief 1-week tour of Our Flag Means Death, primarily modern AUs, after the show came out. Cute, but getting twee-er by the minute.

↳ Brief 3-4 week period of intermittently checking the AO3 tag for The Sandman (TV) after it came out. Going through all the stages of grief and then relaxing in a warm bath of surreal amusement because the only part of this incredible and humongous universe that is producing fanfiction is characterization-agnostic wish-fulfillment schmoopangst about Dream and Hob Gadling, the immortal English peasant, and the occasional bit of hilaribble kinkfic about The Corinthian.

↳ I think there was a period in there where I discovered by accident that people write slash about TinTin, which I've never read nor watched, but I was so curious that I had to go looking, but then I had to try to block the trauma from my brain.

↳ Just the last week or two I've been going back through The Dark Is Rising fic because usually I expect a good supply of new Will/Bran fic every Yuletide, but this year there wasn't that much.

On Tumblr, though, your stance to fanfic or fanworks isn't important: you can reblog things just because they're pretty! Or to put it another way, the whole fannish personality can flourish there, not just like... fandoms (media fandoms). I'm a fan of Glass Onion and I'm also a fan of bauhaus lighting, for example! A fan of cats and a fan of dogs! All those things can be shuffled together on equal footing on Tumblr:

• Hannibal is evergreen


• Black Sails is still the best show I've ever seen


• Everything Everywhere All At Once gifsets currently abound


• Basically full time Interview with the Vampire fan there, even though I haven't really tried to read any fanfiction - it doesn't necessarily seem to need it? Although I do still think AUs could be really funny


• Lots of Glass Onion love there since it came out recently. The cleverness of the source, plus the huge mountain of references to other content (Agatha Christie but also golden age and classic mysteries in general) make this a tough one to achieve fanfiction of - it's already a skilfull pastiche of Agatha Christie, and that's a thing that thousands of people have tried and failed at before. This is to say that I wasn't expecting anything very good when I poked around briefly at the fanworks, but yeah, I quickly backed back out.


• Excitement slowly rising for Season 2 of Good Omens. Neil Gaiman is tight-lipped so we are pretty spoiler-free.


• permament member of LOTR fandom and pretty much any old movie that I love


• permanent member of cute animal pictures fandom (and posting pics of my pets to teaandmisanthropy)


• permanent member of fun and weird medieval and historical facts and historical garments fandom


• permanent member of Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Brutalism, Mid-Century Modernism, Arts & Crafts, and traditional architecture fandom (previously expressed also on my sideblog designobjectory until, as mentioned yesterday, the brainfreeze happened and I had to take a break


• Occasionally parrot fandom makes a resurgence. Love parrots. Especially cockatoos.


• What else...? Memes. Anti-capitalism. Science.


• Big fan of golden age mysteries, as often mentioned here, and particularly Agatha Christie's Poirot eg maisouipoirot, although there isn't a very constant flow of this content - not a very active fandom

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

This is all very fascinating; thank you. I need to do this sometime as well, when my brain is better organized.

(FYI my interest in the tarot does not include a doctrinaire belief in psychic powers, etc. but also I am never offended when people think it's bullshit.)

I knew a lot of this stuff already from reading you for years, but it's so nice to see the whole story there. You are an amazing person and I did not quite realize that we fell into fandom at about the same time. I knew you and Wax from Lotrips and am so glad to still have the connection.

When I moved from Lotrips to briefly The Sentinel and then on into Stargate SG-1 I abandoned reading a bunch of people and switched to reading people in that active fandom and that was a HUGE MISTAKE. This was still on LJ. Then many people I used to read did not go to Dreamwidth (and I never warmed to Tumblr) so that makes my longtime fannish friends like you even more precious to me.

Happy New Year.

[cimorene]

LOL, good! I've heard that a surprising amount of times lately, especially given that it was usually NOT after saying something Skeptical first. It seems to be quite popular to just like them as a toy/aesthetic/meditation tool.

[laurajv]

ok BUT i want to know how Benoit knows Angela, Stephen, Kareem, and Natasha. Bennie. How. What even is your life.

[cimorene]

I think it's not that implausible at a certain level of celebrity which the world's greatest detective could reasonably have! The funniest part about that scenario was that all of them were TOGETHER in one group.

[hebethen]

I feel like a lot of fan stuff (in both senses) these days is on Discord, which hurts my soul because it's really shitty for archival -- though simultaneously I recognize that sometimes it's exactly the unarchivability that makes people feel comfortable -- it's all a mess!

[cimorene]

Ugh, yeah, same. I keep meaning to give it a try at least, but then like... not. It feels nearly as intimidating as walking into a party! And I never feel like I have the energy to do that. But also, I don't even have an active fandom to use as a topic of conversation. Sigh.

[torachan]

Even though it seems like the Interview with the Vampire TV show is very different from the books, it has caused a huge influx of readers for book-based fic. I'm getting kudos (and even the occasional comment) on a daily basis for my VC fics these days. Sometimes the entire kudos email will just be nothing but VC. (When I first uploaded them on AO3 when the site was new, they got zero hits. No one was interested in VC anymore at all. Then a few years ago there did seem to be a little revival and I was getting kudos here and there, and then the TV show hit and WHAM.)

[cimorene]

Oh yeah, I'm sure. If nothing else, there's a lot more book fic available for the curious who might have started with show fic! BUt the earlier spike interests me. I wonder if it was related to the popularity of memes and analysis and gifsets etc of the Tom Cruise movie? I've definitely seen more content about it in the last few years...

[torachan]

I think part of it was just that AO3 is getting more and more usage, so all older stuff is getting discovered more, but yeah, idk. There definitely seemed to be a little VC revival even before the show.

[which_chick]

On the strength of this post, I have now watched a season and a half of Black Sails. You have not steered me wrong. There is so much delight here. Thanks!

[cimorene]

Always glad to spread the knowledge of Black Sails, however incidentally!