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It's nearly one am, and I cannot sleep. Normally this would not be a problem, but for once in my shamefully lazy life, I have to be somewhere in the morning, specially in the village at ten, to work, argh. So I knocked up Loki in order to do some more multiple regression analysis, as that always puts me to sleep, but I don't want to do that, I want to talk about fandom. More specifically, I want to talk about the difference between liking something and being fannish about it. If you ask what's brought this on, and I would if I were, it's a combination of factors, but mostly the fact I'm feeling fannish again, and, well, I've been in fandom five years now, almost exactly. (February 2001, baby.) I've been around a good long time, to a certain extent I grew up here, in this fandom safe-space, and even if I limit myself to talking about my own experience, I have something to talk about.
Back to the main point, there is a difference between liking something and being fannish about it, and I'm trying to put my finger on what it is. For example, one of my favourite television programmes ever is the Cheers spin-off sitcom, Frasier. I've seen just about every episode and I know large portions of the dialogue, and I still laugh at the jokes. I love that show, but I'm not fannish about it. I know this. Moreover, I can tell you very precisely what I have been fannish about during those five years in fandom: Stargate SG-1, M*A*S*H, Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Doctor Who. More peripherally, there's been Good Omens, Firefly and Battlestar Galactica (and, as of the moment, Life On Mars), but as fandoms go, I'm serially monogamous. And I know I'm not the only one. I used to get fannish when very ickle - I seem to remember being positively enamoured of school stories, Chalet School, Malory Towers and suchlike (and I also seem to remember![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
clareyperson sharing that sort of fannish love, even then), and later, Anne of Green Gables. The thing is, I was pretty sure I was the only one at that point. It changed with the whole online fandom thing, when I found whole communities of people devoted to the things I was devoted, and willing to chat and make friends. I just browsed through archives, first, and then I tried mailing lists, and then I got an LJ - not this one, as this was before even then - and settled comfortably into LJ fandom. And years later I'm still here, and still happy to be here.
But what is it, about things that we are fannish about? Looking at my list above, I can't actually see much in common between each of the fandoms. I'm going to be radical and suggest that science fiction and fantasy have a lot to do with it, as I reckon most fandoms do have that fantastical element to them, and as well as that, I'd suggest some scope for filling in gaps. As far as the latter goes, there's so much room to play in the Harry Potter universe that two HP fans can spend twenty-four hours a day being fannish and never come across each other (seriously; I had to remix another HP writer two years ago, and I looked at her fic and I just had no clue where to even begin, it was so different), and SG-1, too, had the scope that they could go anywhere, and Doctor Who has that lovely capacity for literally anywhere in space and time. But things like BSG have less scope. (I'd pause to say that theorising, too, looks like it has an effect - seems to me that Life On Mars has a fannish following not because it's a seventies cop show, although that does make it fun, but because of the added uncertainty about Sam being in a coma and related wackiness.) And M*A*S*H, bless it, is a big fat statistical outlier.
Add that to the fact that lots of people don't fill in gaps at all when they write fic, and my theory looks like it's on shaky ground. So, I don't know, and I'm looking for ideas. Why do people get fannish about the things they do? I have absolutely idea. Why do people get fannish at all? I have a private crack-addled theory that it is, in fact, a gene. Some people have it and some people don't, and it explains why some people fall into fandom with a joyful whoop, some are a bit meh about it, some people, if they came across it, would think the entire thing extremely weird; it all depends on whether they are homo- or heterozygous for a co-dominant allele. And it might even go some way to explaining why a lot of fannish people are female, a lot of them are queer, a lot of them are of above-average intelligence, a lot of them are teenagers or in their twenties and thirties, etc., etc.
This might, in fact, be a far more interesting topic to do a multiple regression analysis on. [/end geekery]
Actually, the one aspect of fandom I'd like explaining is the way it tends to help take people places they wouldn't otherwise have gone. This is the bit that involves my personal soapbox, so you might want to scroll onto the end now, but I maintain I have a point, even if it is mostly anecdotal. I was thirteen-nearly-fourteen when I first discovered fandom. That's pretty young, I think, on average, but still, fairly normal. And my memories of that time are not particularly clear, but they're not pleasant. I've written elsewhere, I know, that I was so unhappy then, I didn't even know I was; I didn't know there was another way to live. Looking back it's all very basic teenage angst, involving not having many friends, but rather a lot of people who used me, and, finally, losing what friends I did have for some reason I can't even remember. It all culminated in an exceedingly lonely winter. When I found all this stuff on the internet I didn't have any distractions, such as real-life friends, to keep me from devouring it all. I'm a geek now and I was then, I read a lot, I wrote little stories in spiral-bound reporters' notebooks, I wasn't pretty and I was very shy.
But things are different now and fandom is a major part of that. First of all, it held me together through that year. I had my own project, and after I started writing fic, talking to people, I almost had friends of my own, of a type. And there washathy_col, who is still one of my best friends, but can't have known what she was to me then. I guess it was as simple as, well, confidence. Over time, I stopped caring so much about what everyone else thought, because I'd found something they hadn't, and then, well, things got better and better until the one day I got all my hair chopped off in the morning and met my first boyfriend in the afternoon, and the rest is history. I have a real life now, and I think fandom opened my eyes to the possibility that I could do and be what I wanted.
The point to this - and there is one - is that I am not the only person this happened to. During the couple of years I was librarian, I ended up making a lot of fannish friends, almost by accident. They seemed to congregate in quiet places, like a school library, and I think they were all escaping from the same thing, finding the same sanctuary I found.eternalwings, three years younger than me, has my job: looking after people. And I know she'll do it admirably. Because high school is miserable and fandom is important.
I have a feeling this is getting a bit sentimental, so I'll stop, but I've wanted to write about it for a while. And while I'm here, everyone, please, tell me how and why you got into fandom. Was it similar, or totally different?
Back to the main point, there is a difference between liking something and being fannish about it, and I'm trying to put my finger on what it is. For example, one of my favourite television programmes ever is the Cheers spin-off sitcom, Frasier. I've seen just about every episode and I know large portions of the dialogue, and I still laugh at the jokes. I love that show, but I'm not fannish about it. I know this. Moreover, I can tell you very precisely what I have been fannish about during those five years in fandom: Stargate SG-1, M*A*S*H, Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Doctor Who. More peripherally, there's been Good Omens, Firefly and Battlestar Galactica (and, as of the moment, Life On Mars), but as fandoms go, I'm serially monogamous. And I know I'm not the only one. I used to get fannish when very ickle - I seem to remember being positively enamoured of school stories, Chalet School, Malory Towers and suchlike (and I also seem to remember
clareyperson sharing that sort of fannish love, even then), and later, Anne of Green Gables. The thing is, I was pretty sure I was the only one at that point. It changed with the whole online fandom thing, when I found whole communities of people devoted to the things I was devoted, and willing to chat and make friends. I just browsed through archives, first, and then I tried mailing lists, and then I got an LJ - not this one, as this was before even then - and settled comfortably into LJ fandom. And years later I'm still here, and still happy to be here. But what is it, about things that we are fannish about? Looking at my list above, I can't actually see much in common between each of the fandoms. I'm going to be radical and suggest that science fiction and fantasy have a lot to do with it, as I reckon most fandoms do have that fantastical element to them, and as well as that, I'd suggest some scope for filling in gaps. As far as the latter goes, there's so much room to play in the Harry Potter universe that two HP fans can spend twenty-four hours a day being fannish and never come across each other (seriously; I had to remix another HP writer two years ago, and I looked at her fic and I just had no clue where to even begin, it was so different), and SG-1, too, had the scope that they could go anywhere, and Doctor Who has that lovely capacity for literally anywhere in space and time. But things like BSG have less scope. (I'd pause to say that theorising, too, looks like it has an effect - seems to me that Life On Mars has a fannish following not because it's a seventies cop show, although that does make it fun, but because of the added uncertainty about Sam being in a coma and related wackiness.) And M*A*S*H, bless it, is a big fat statistical outlier.
Add that to the fact that lots of people don't fill in gaps at all when they write fic, and my theory looks like it's on shaky ground. So, I don't know, and I'm looking for ideas. Why do people get fannish about the things they do? I have absolutely idea. Why do people get fannish at all? I have a private crack-addled theory that it is, in fact, a gene. Some people have it and some people don't, and it explains why some people fall into fandom with a joyful whoop, some are a bit meh about it, some people, if they came across it, would think the entire thing extremely weird; it all depends on whether they are homo- or heterozygous for a co-dominant allele. And it might even go some way to explaining why a lot of fannish people are female, a lot of them are queer, a lot of them are of above-average intelligence, a lot of them are teenagers or in their twenties and thirties, etc., etc.
This might, in fact, be a far more interesting topic to do a multiple regression analysis on. [/end geekery]
Actually, the one aspect of fandom I'd like explaining is the way it tends to help take people places they wouldn't otherwise have gone. This is the bit that involves my personal soapbox, so you might want to scroll onto the end now, but I maintain I have a point, even if it is mostly anecdotal. I was thirteen-nearly-fourteen when I first discovered fandom. That's pretty young, I think, on average, but still, fairly normal. And my memories of that time are not particularly clear, but they're not pleasant. I've written elsewhere, I know, that I was so unhappy then, I didn't even know I was; I didn't know there was another way to live. Looking back it's all very basic teenage angst, involving not having many friends, but rather a lot of people who used me, and, finally, losing what friends I did have for some reason I can't even remember. It all culminated in an exceedingly lonely winter. When I found all this stuff on the internet I didn't have any distractions, such as real-life friends, to keep me from devouring it all. I'm a geek now and I was then, I read a lot, I wrote little stories in spiral-bound reporters' notebooks, I wasn't pretty and I was very shy.
But things are different now and fandom is a major part of that. First of all, it held me together through that year. I had my own project, and after I started writing fic, talking to people, I almost had friends of my own, of a type. And there was
hathy_col, who is still one of my best friends, but can't have known what she was to me then. I guess it was as simple as, well, confidence. Over time, I stopped caring so much about what everyone else thought, because I'd found something they hadn't, and then, well, things got better and better until the one day I got all my hair chopped off in the morning and met my first boyfriend in the afternoon, and the rest is history. I have a real life now, and I think fandom opened my eyes to the possibility that I could do and be what I wanted.The point to this - and there is one - is that I am not the only person this happened to. During the couple of years I was librarian, I ended up making a lot of fannish friends, almost by accident. They seemed to congregate in quiet places, like a school library, and I think they were all escaping from the same thing, finding the same sanctuary I found.
eternalwings, three years younger than me, has my job: looking after people. And I know she'll do it admirably. Because high school is miserable and fandom is important.I have a feeling this is getting a bit sentimental, so I'll stop, but I've wanted to write about it for a while. And while I'm here, everyone, please, tell me how and why you got into fandom. Was it similar, or totally different?
