Ramble

[raven]

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 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?

Comments

[flickgc.livejournal.com]

My (definition of) fandom != Your (definition of) fandom

It's something I keep meaning to write a long and informed article about, but never quite manage to get my head around.

Actually, what I need to do is speak to some of the people that I know who are very much in fandom in both senses.

But, to answer your point, yes, fandom did a huge amout for me. I'm utterly glad I got involved with it: it gave me friends when I got to London. It gave me people to write to (yes, actual paper letters. Because I am So Old) before I did. Fandom is great. The only issue I have with it is that it's so damn bloody hard to get people like you interested in anything except commercial Wolf cons....

[the-acrobat.livejournal.com]

Oh, *hugs hugs hugs*
Likewise. But it wasn't fandom. It was The Internet, capital I, which was brand new at least as something ordinary people might have when I was thirteen and painfully shy and attending a dreadful school where everyone disliked me because they couldn't pronounce my name and the clothes I wore had once been fashionable on another continent but were a joke where I was living. I met all of these wonderful people on The Internet and we bonded over life and what made us different and what was the same. We wrote e-mails and built websites and it was wonderful and gave me the confidence not to be shy-mouse but to be outrageous. And so when people said, "You're weird," and called me things like "Astronaut," I grinned and said, "Damn right!" And there was fiction there, too, but mostly original fiction and poetry and there was transferring to a different school and getting a whole bunch of hilarious real life friends whom I still know and treasure to this day. And then fandom came along when I was seventeen or eighteen, I think, and I remember wishing I'd known about it two or three years previous to that because it might really have helped me through some awful times when I didn't write because I hated the melodrama of what was coming out on the page. I discovered fandom through M*A*S*H because I had a bulletin board full of M*A*S*H pictures in my dorm room at King's and I was doing an image search and I stumbled on to mash-slash and HELLO? What's this? So I discovered fandom and slash in one go and the rest is history. And I'm a geek and queer and maybe somewhat intelligent, so I would probably fit into your genetic theory. And I'm still trying to define myself as a fan, but I am very, very, very comfortable with it, finally. Isn't it fun being (somewhat) grown up?
Because high school is miserable and fandom is important. That just about sums it up.
And you were fannish about Anne of Green Gables as a wee thing? YESS! That's fabulous!
Anyway, I think I've filled up your comment box enough, but *loves you lots*. Sleep well.

[that_mireille]

How did I get into fandom? I was born into it. Grew up in a Trek-fan (and old literary-SF-fan) household. While I was a geek, I wasn't really fannish until I hit junior high and discovered Doctor Who, which I loved the way my dad loved Trek and his issues of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

And it might even go some way to explaining why a lot of fannish people are female,

A lot of fannish people are male, too; they just don't move in the same fannish circles...

a lot of them are of above-average intelligence,

A hobby that largely depends on reading/writing (even the stereotypical Trek fanboy reads magazines/books about the show, writes long screeds about some bit of technical neepery, etc., all without touching fanfic) is going to attract people of average to above-average intelligence, I think.

a lot of them are teenagers or in their twenties and thirties, etc., etc.

In fic-based parts of fandom, that's a new-ish thing (last 10 years or so)--when I was a newbie, thirties and forties seemed more common, because it required disposable income (for zines and cons and things). Now, all you need is a computer, which more and more people have or have access to.

[thiswaltz.livejournal.com]

Wow, your story of how you got into fandom is amazingly similar to mine. It was early spring 2001, I was thirteen, and depressed and all but dropped out of school for many reasons that I don't completely remembe because my memeory of the time is quite hazy. So I was home one day to catch a marathon of some show called Earth2.

I looked it up on the interenet and found out that it had been concelled after the first season in '95 and the fan effort had failed to revive it. Desperate for more information I followed a link to something called 'fan fiction.'

After that I was insatiable for it. I didn't get involved in forums or interactiveness, I just read fanfiction. I think fanfic is what got me thru that time. It wasn't til recently that I started getting into forums and lj communities for my fannish devotions. Part of it was that I kept getting into shows that had either had been over for years, or were almost over.

I was serially monogamous about my fannihness, too, they were(in order) Earth2, ST:Voyager, The Pretender, The X-files, La Femme Nikita, Buffy, The West Wing, StarGate:Atlantis, Doctor Who, BSG and now I'm edging into House,MD. Oy, that's a longer lis than I thought XD. Of I still spend time rereading a lot of the older TWW stuff, though.

When people ask why I read/write fic I say things like 'well, it's to fill in the gaps' or 'it's a good writing excersive' but those don't feel like the truth, do they.

In some ways it feels like hearing wonderful song that's sug slightly out of key in some parts. You want to go thru and make it hit all the right notes for you. But that doesn't hold up very well, because I thought West WIng, and Doctor who for that matter were pretty well pitch perfect. A lot of times it seems to be about pairings/ships as well. *shrugs* I don't think I really know. It's just this urge. this need to have *more of that story*. I've had that since before I knew what fanfiction was, but I think knowing about it lets me be more articulate with that urge.

And the forums/lj have the lovely added bonus of letting you connect with other people. People from all over, even.

I think fandom/fanfic has grown me up, exposed me to a whole hell of a lot more than I would've if I'd spent my time only reading regular books. And a wide a varied arsenal of fandom lingo to confuse my nonfannish friends ;).

So... More than I meant to say. Hope that answered you questions.

[ra-sar.livejournal.com]

Finding out about online fandom for me was such a weird thing because I had been making up stories about whatever TV or movie I was obsessed with (and therefore becoming obsessed with various tv shows and movies) as far back as my memory goes. I distinctly remember inventing stories about The Care Bears and various adventures involving the Big Bad Wolf well before I was five. Around that time I also started writing letters to Chip and Dale from 'The Rescue Rangers' and they (in my parents' handwriting, naturally) always wrote me back. When I learned how to write, I started writing these stories down. In grade five when I turned in a sequel to The Girl with Silver Eyes as a creative writing assignment my teacher was, I recall, rather confused and so I did not hand in my Mary-Sue involving charcters from The Dark is Rising.

I didn't know anything about Internet fandom until a little after I started my Star Wars obsession at age 13 (though to be fair I didn't have internet access until age 12) and all of a sudden I realized that other people did what I did too and I was thrilled to death. It was such an "oh god, I'm not insane!" moment because being fannish was something I had tried to stop doing but was unable to and all of a sudden I realized I didn't have to. Still, it took a fandom as small and supportive as M*A*S*H slash to get me to actually participate in any meaningful way, beyond just observing the fandom from a distance.

[emily-shore.livejournal.com]

What a good essay.

I suppose I got into fandom when I was five or so, when I started watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. I know that I made up stories about it, and my first written fanfic is a Riker/Troi story where they are married and have a daughter... I wrote that when I was seven or so. It's been pretty much nonstop since then. I don't remember feeling unhappy or isolated by my fannishness, partly because my mother is a very fannish person and I always had her to talk to; partly also because I never went to school and didn't realise quite how unusual I was.

The question of what things we're fannish about is a good one, and one which I've been asking myself recently. I agree that in general fantastic scenarios tend to make better fandoms, but this isn't universally true. I have a history of being fannish about things that don't actually have fandoms in the traditional sense--British politics and the space program being the two major ones. For me, interesting people and gaps to fill in are the common factors.

Another question is, what *is* fannishness, or fannish behaviour? How can you tell when you have a fandom? The traditional measure is when you're taking part in a community of fans... but I think that's a bit inadequate. I can tell that my interest in the space program is a fannish one, even though no one else is interested in it in quite the same way as me. I write fanfic about it, and make icons (see above) and music videos. I wouldn't want to reduce fannnishness to a list of activities like that--it's more of an attitude--but the activities show active engagement with the source material, and I think that's an important marker of a fandom.

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

Regarding your point about liking something and being fannish about it--YES. I've written an entry or two about this, too. And actually I'm finally starting to get a sense of what makes me fannish about a given story/universe, because I spent a long sleepless night this week and, to fill the time, ended up making this obsessive categorized list of my favorite television shows. What I found out was that there are distinct factors (genre, degree of arc, subject matter, age of characters, etc) that contribute to my affection for shows, and when a bunch of them converge, more likely than not I end up becoming fannish. (The selling point, though, is that there's one character who hooks me. That's absolutely required.) I keep meaning to post my list and those factors in a entry, but I haven't had much spare time or Internet access lately.

Anyway! The point was that I'm much the same as you, in terms of my approach to fandom. I call myself serially monogamous too, and I'd say the major loves of my fannish life thus far have been Les Miserables, M*A*S*H, Band of Brothers, Oz, and Sports Night--the ones I've felt compelled to write about. If I'd been on the Internet when I discovered Star Trek, I'm sure that would have been on the list, too. Like someone else above, I also was fannish long before I had a communal outlet for the impulse; I was writing stories in my head as soon as I could think.

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.

This is eerily like my experience. I think I was twelve when I first discovered fandom, but it wasn't till I was thirteen that I first introduced myself to the community, and I was fourteen when I posted my first fic. I also have very few clear memories of that time, except that I was sort of generally and unconsciously unhappy for no particular reason. Oddly enough, I didn't really join fandom as a full-time participant--i.e., I didn't self-identify as a member--until M*A*S*H, when I was, I think, much more consciously unhappy. And boom, there it was: there was fandom, there were people commenting on what I had to say and contacting me offlist and including me, and it was a revelation.

--This comment is getting way too long, in part because I've been meaning since the beginning of break to write an entry on this subject. I realized on my birthday that fandom, in one form or another, had seen me through the entirety of my teenage years; that some of the people from those early days are still friends of mine; that my LJ itself was celebrating its four-year anniversary. That astounds me. Who knew there was a community on Earth that would take me in for this long? :)

[bekkypk.livejournal.com]

Fandom for me is when you live and breathe the the thing in question, when you interact with it or squeal about it it's extasy and when you fall out from it eventually its painful, like loving a person, only not quite.
Like who, for me, is an eternal undercurrant on my life. If I'm unhappy I know I can always go and read one of my fave novels. I don't because I'm too busy whining on t3h intarweb about it, but I can. When I'm stupidly bored at work, my mind wanders to fanfic and possibilities and what lies around the next corner for them. I fear cybermen and autons and when I hold my boy's hand I feel like Rose Tyler...
But thats just me.
xx

[dougs.livejournal.com]

When Flick says "I am So Old", I'm slightly amused, because there are people in her/my fandom who see even me as "So Young", and I'm so old that Flick was one of the Young People before I discovered people your age.

[dougs.livejournal.com]

I take your point about fandom selecting for intelligence. In fact, there's a perfect example earlier in the same paragraph, the paragraph which opens with "lots of people don't fill in gaps at all" and then goes on to say that "it all depends on whether they are homo- or heterozygous for a co-dominant allele", and makes the perfectly natural and easy assumption that people will know what you're talking about and that an explanation will be not only unnecessary and unnatural, but condescending also.

[cedara]

As a wee one, I was fannish about school stories (Enid Blyton and the likes), but I also devoured Star Trek stuff and thrillers (I loved watching Starsky&Hutch). That was all pre-computer days. I started with Internet fandom shortly after I first went online in 1995 - and it was Babylon 5. I found people to chat with and as a result I went to my first con ever when there was the Wrap Party in London. While B5 is still one of my faves, I shortly found other things I liked and with Sentinel, I started to write - in English. Never stopped, and even up today, I prefer my fandoms in English. After all that's where the main action is.

[dougs.livejournal.com]

And, because I hit "Post Comment" before I'd answered the substantive question. I'm retaining here the distinction Flick makes earlier about her fandom vs. your fandom.

At university in the mid-1980s, I wasn't a member of the SF+F society, because (it seemed to me) they were almost exclusively into wargaming, and they met on the same afternoon each week as the word-game society, and I was at the time a Scrabble player of county standard. However, I knew some of the people in the SF+FS, mathematicians for the most part.

While I was there, I picked up a flyer for ZZ9 (http://www.zz9.org/), a fan club for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Now I'd been a fan (in the mundane sense) of both SF and humour for a long time, and in this book (for I came first to the book, and only later to the radio and TV series) I'd found them comfortably working together, which was unusual. I joined ZZ9, and started receiving their club magazine. So that means I've been a ZZ9er for about 20 years now.

A little later, in my middle year at university, my sexuality (which had been awakened and vigorously exercised by someone else the previous year) was stretched, warped and twisted by someone I met there, and I left university very thoroughly mixed up by that abuse.

In the ensuing few years, mostly online, I did a great deal of reading in connection with the issues over which I was mixed up, but wasn't really in a position to put any of it into practice.

I went to my first convention ("convention", in this sense, meaning a non-commercial event run by a group of fans rather than a promotions company, where the key activity is standing around in a bar talking Old Toot to each other) in October 1991. This convention -- advertised in the pages of ZZ9's magazine -- was "Eroticon Six", a convention all about kink. I'd recently started going out with Anne (who later became my wife), and things were going very slowly with her, partly because of my earlier mixed-up-ness.

Eroticon Six drove home that people as strange as me were, in fact, quite normal. Which was mightily encouraged. I came home from there having bought a membership for another convention the following May, and told Anne that I wouldn't be able to take her out on her birthday because of this. As a result of the ensuing discussion, I took her to the next convention.

And fandom, the fan-run-SF-Convention kind of fandom, helped me accept the kind of person I am as a valid kind of person. That's a very woolly and inept way of describing what it did, but it'll have to do.

When Anne died in September 2001, I stopped going to conventions. This was a stupid move. About nine months later, I dragged myself to a convention -- plokta.con release 2 (http://www.plokta.com/plokta.con/release2/) -- where, amongst other things, I received an LJ invite code from hawkida. I wrote a poem while I was there which subsequently became my first LJ post (http://dougs.livejournal.com/395.html), and which received good feedback, both at the con and elsewhere. So I started looking for places where I could start writing in earnest once more. As part of this process, I ended up joining the Mash-slash Yahoo! Group, and thus found my way into your kind of fandom. At about the same time, on the anniversary of Anne's death, I resumed attendance at the London pub meetings (http://news.ansible.co.uk/london.html), and realised what I'd been missing from my kind of fandom, and that was really the beginning of my rehabilitation from bereavement.

Golly, that got long. Sorry.

[amchau.livejournal.com]

I don't seem to see the same line between liking something and fannishness. I do have grades of fannishness, though, but in my head they're a spectrum, something like this:

1 - read/watched/heard and liked it, but not captivated enough to seek it out again.

2 - read/watched/heard and liked it, will read/watch/listen to the next part, but not seeking it out on the internet.

3 - consumed, liked, continued to consume, and have done a Google search on it.

4 - consumed, liked, continued to consume, did a Google search, found a fanfic archive, but didn't read much of it.

5 - consumed, liked, continued to consume, did a Google search, found a fanfic archive, and read the whole thing in a matter of days.

6 - consumed, liked, continued to consume, did a Google search, found a fanfic archive, read it all, carried on thinking about the characters and coming up with plot bunnies.

7 - consumed, liked, continued to consume, did a Google search, found a fanfic archive, read it all, carried on thinking about the characters to the point where 'talking to myself' became 'talking to X from the TV show'.

8 - consumed, liked, continued to consume, did a Google search, found a fanfic archive, read it all, carried on thinking about the characters, and grew plot bunnies which ate my brain and demanded to be written.

9 - consumed, liked, continued to consume, did a Google search, found a fanfic archive, read it all, carried on thinking about the characters, wrote fanfic, posted fanfic, got feedback, wrote more fic, etc.

Because each stage is basically dependent on the ones before it-- there's some shifting in whether or not the characters become ones I think about all the time before or after I read all the fic I can find and stand to read, depending on the size of the canon and the fandom-- I don't get so fannish about something which has a small fandom, or which has a fandom which is almost all het (witness how I'm not writing BSG fic, because while I want Adama/Tigh it's just not out there to read, and that makes me think there will be no readership for my fic, and anyway it's only on once a week and this series is all about babies), while with a little encouragement from fandom I will get deeply into anything which is freely avalible (e.g. M*A*S*H; now it's not on at two-episodes-a-night I doubt I could be as fannish as I was, even if I wanted to be).

My fannishness does go back a long way, though. I told myself stories about Thomas The Tank Engine (I vividly remember a story about Thomas getting a wasp's nest in his steam funnel, though I suspect that was before I could write), in that 'talking to myself is talking to X character' mould. My theory to explain it is that we're a bit like MENSA-- clever people with time on their hands invent things, based on what they find around them, to fill in their time and exercise their minds. MENSAns choose formal logic puzzles, Trekkies choose obscure bits of technical geekery, model railway buiders choose, well, model railways, and we like stories so we fill our spare time with stories and quotes and characters.

That's my theory, which is mine and belongs to me, unlike the one about the brontosaurus.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

I discovered fandom when I was sixteen, though I was definitely a fan from, um, 12? Earlier? Earlier, I think. But when I was 16, I was watching Dr Who and I saw an advert for a big thing called a "Doctor Who Celebration" at Longleat, lasting a week, but I wanted to go to two days of it. And somehow I got my parents to pay for a trip down south, and three nights in a youth hostel (relatively) near by, and the train fares from there to Longleat, and two day tickets at the Celebration. I cannot imagine how I did it. This was in 1983: what was being celebrated was (almost) Dr Who's 20th anniversary.

It was, in fact, my first convention. I spent hours standing in queues talking to other fans. I came away somehow bolstered up because, even though I had no idea that there was a structure out there (no one was selling fanzines at Longleat) I knew there were hundreds of people who felt about Dr Who the way I did. I wasn't just a weirdo: there were lots of other weirdos.

A few months later, via an advert in the closing issue of the B7 Monthly (or possibly in the back of the B7 Programme Guide I discovered that there were clubs, and wrote to them, and further discovered that there were fanzines, and indeed, before I was 17, discovered that there was slash, and I liked it. (My recollection is that the track went from discovering Horizon, and their enormous glossy newsletters that came out relatively regularly every quarter, and via Horizon discovering Vilaworld, and via an ad in Vilaworld discovering slash - a B7 zine called E-Man-Uelle. Which was terrible. But... slash!)

I had come out by then - I had discovered a gay youth group when I was a month past 17, and another slash fan, Ajay, and we'd swopped slash zines (she lent me Leslie Fish and I lent her E-Man-Uelle... it really wasn't a fair trade) and between us and with another fan, RiK, we started a "lesbian and gay fanzine", which we called "touched". And I put ads in Vilaworld and in Horizon - Horizon wouldn't publish the ad because it said "lesbian and gay" and children read their newsletters - but via Vilaworld I found other slash fans who liked the kind of thing we were doing.

[snowballjane.livejournal.com]

In my teens I was a fan (almost) alone. There were plenty of shows/books I loved enough to buy tie-in media/posters etc, but my three best friends weren't into them at all, so fannish interaction was mainly with my little brother and one guy in my politics class who shared my love of Sandman comics.

At university I had wonderfully geeky friends, was a member of Sci-fi Soc, went to one Christmas ball dressed as Han Solo (with Clare as Luke, Andy as C3P0, David as Darth Vader, Patrick as Arthur Dent and Vickie in a ball dress). You couldn't say we weren't fannish, but we really had no connection to wider fandom.

For me that happened when Patrick was working in Antarctica for six months and I was living alone in Wolverhampton and oh-so-bored-and-lonely and I first started talking to some people on the BBC messageboard for Gormenghast.

[jeeshee.livejournal.com]

I was about 13 and in love with The Tribe. My friends at school didn't quite understand - you were supposed to be obsessed with the Backstreet Boys. I didn't feel like I fitted in, and I didn't have any social life to speak of. Then I found the bulletin board at Tribeworld.com and suddenly there were people who wouldn't judge me. I don't think it made me come out of myself or anything, but it was good in that I realised I wasn't alone in wanting to create and escape to fantasy worlds.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I'm moved to ask if when you say "your age", you mean thirteen or twenty... *g*

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested in the difference, if/when you come to write it up. I'm currently very much interested this academic/thinky fandoms stuff.

The only issue I have with it is that it's so damn bloody hard to get people like you interested in anything except commercial Wolf cons....

Oh, now, that's not fair. *g* You have to explain that remark.

[dougs.livejournal.com]

Come to Eastercon. We'll not only explain it, but demonstrate.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

everyone disliked me because they couldn't pronounce my name

Meredith? Is it very difficult to pronounce? Or am I missing something there?

I stumbled on to mash-slash and HELLO? What's this?

GLEEE. M*A*S*H fandom, those six months or so where it was you and me and Leigh and Amber and the other Meredith and Flick and Douglas and everyone else - those were the halcyon days, I swear. There were no flamewars, no stupidity, not even much badfic, and I swear I've never had a better fannish experience.

And you were fannish about Anne of Green Gables as a wee thing?

Oh my yes. So much so, that even now, even now, when I get fannish about something, my dad asks: "But is it as good as Anne of Green Gables?" Those were good days, all of them. *loves you*

[dougs.livejournal.com]

Well, you were something like fifteen when I joined the Y!G, so that's what I meant.

I'm forty, and the "oh, you young people" brigade are anything from late-fifties upwards.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Thanks for telling me about it. You provide a lot of weight to my theory!

In some ways it feels like hearing wonderful song that's sug slightly out of key in some parts

Lovely, lovely way to put it! It's true, of course. And the connections you make to other people are in some ways the best part.

[flickgc.livejournal.com]

One very obvious difference is that one is mostly male and the other mostly female. Hmm. Maybe I'll have a think and see if I can pull it together.

You have to explain that remark.

I should have said 'any cons', rather than 'anything' -- my bad. But it's true: there are hardly any non-commercial cons that your-kind-of-fandom people go to, except maybe that Potter con (last year? iirc). I bet that you never even *contemplated* going to the Worldcon in Glasgow last August, did you? And yet you said in your post that most of the stuff you like is SFnal in nature, and there were (amongst many, many other items) a good dozen or more panels about writing, and about fanfic, and about Dr Who, and, and, and!

[g] I have teh fear of no one new ever soming along to things and getting involved.

I bet you aren't in OUSFG (or whatever it's called), either, are you?

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Around that time I also started writing letters to Chip and Dale from 'The Rescue Rangers' and they (in my parents' handwriting, naturally) always wrote me back.

Awww, that's sweet! I bet you were an adorable kid. *g*

, it took a fandom as small and supportive as M*A*S*H slash to get me to actually participate in any meaningful way

M*A*S*H slash fandom is probably the world's best fandom. I mean it. I've carried so many wonderful people with me from there. Thanks for sharing your fannish experience. *g*

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I did, as a matter of fact, contemplate Worldcon last year - hathy_col and I talked about it as a prelude to her moving up to Scotland, but nothing ever came of it because neither of us have much money to spare this year. There's something else at work, and that's my age, as dougs has been discussing - for most of my life in fandom, I've been a teenager without the independence and means to expand my fannish experience.

OUSFG is what it's called, and no, I'm not a member. The main fannish community I'm involved in down south is ou3fs. I'm lucky enough to have a large RL contingent of fannish friends, so in some sense every time we do something together we're having a mini-con, but it's with these people that I do the cons I do. So I guess I still don't understand the difference! :)