fandom migration

[escritoireazul]

brown_betty's tracking of fan movement has really made me think about my own fandom involvement.

This deals with online fandom, only, for me, and mostly only with fandoms in which I've written.



I started in Buffy the Vampire Slayer fandom in 1998 as a Willow/Angel shipper (and when ThatHappyPlace branched off of the WillAngel mailing list, I was right there, even though I ended up not going to Dragon*Con that year or any year since, actually). (Shortly after I also became a Willow/Spike shipper, an Angel/Spike shipper, and a fan of Oz.) Summer 1999, right after I graduated from high school, I realized, hey, if there's all this fanfic for BtVS, maybe there's other fanfic out there for things I enjoy.

I watched The Lost Boys for the first time that summer (I know! I'd missed out when I was younger), and ended up in the miniscule LB fandom for a long time. When I started, there was only one active list I could find, and one website, and then it just exploded (well, not in the way of Harry Potter or BtVS, but for a cheesy horror movie from the 80s, it exploded with fic). I stayed there for a long time (and am still there, more or less, as I've taken over the main mailing list for discussion and for fics, but the fandom is pretty quiet and mostly dead).

thestalkycop (my best friend, and I actually know her because of LB fanfiction, go fandom) dragged me into The Mighty Ducks fandom, though I'd long enjoyed the movies, where I promptly wrote three slash stories (Goldberg/Russ, because the heavy guys never get any love) and stopped writing (except for "Queertet Revisited", cowritten with thestalkycop) in the fandom.

(Side note, do you know what The Stalky COP means? Back in LB fandom, there's the Porn Family, which originally consisted of Valley, Tracy, and me, the Sisters Of Porn. We branched out and added to the family later, cousins, not sisters, and she became the Stalky Cousin Of Porn because she stalked me. Silly fandom things. I see this more on mailing lists, still, than in places like livejournal. I used to write little stories whenever we'd bring in new COPs, my first and only foray into Real Person Fic. Other COPs include das_hydra, Sammy Frog, and aea, plus people not on lj.)

The rest gets kind of hazy here.

My sister, crimson_keys, had a multi-fandom list and on it I read musesfool's "31 Flavors" which introduced me to XMM fandom. I read there for awhile, but didn't really start writing in it until 2004 with the xmmficathon. This led into Ultimate X-Men fic later.

Also from this list I was introduced to Pitch Black and the joy of Vin Diesel.

In 2000 I started reading the Harry Potter books because one of the kids for whom I was a nanny loved them. I stayed out of fandom until after I became a fan of musesfool's writing and then followed her from XMM into Harry Potter. Mostly I stay out of HP fandom, and only read a few authors I already know I will like.

I watched Firefly when it was on television, but I was in the middle of my last year at university and spent almost no time doing fandom things, so I wouldn't say I actually paid attention to the fandom until Serenity. Even now I read a little and write even less.

In the summer of 2004 I started this journal because I decided to separate my real life blog from the fandom aspect. Once here, I found things I'd always enjoyed, but had never seen a fandom for--The Fast and the Furious (even though I'm not actually active in this, because so much of it is Brian/Dom, and I'm all about Letty/Dom and Letty/Mia) and the Baby-Sitters' Club being the two big ones.

In the last two years (I missed my own anniversary) I've started writing in a much broader range of fandoms. I found Lost and Supernatural on my own, just looking for new things to watch, and then wrote in both because of ficathons/challenges.

thestalkycop forced me to watch Mean Girls, but again I didn't write a story until I wanted to be a part of Yuletide last year and needed to fulfill an open request. By the same token, Bend It Like Beckham was for Yuletide last year.

The most recent new one is Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants this year, also for a ficathon.

Livejournal has introduced me to many things, as people I like talk about them until I have to give them a try (BSG is the most recent one, along with D.E.B.S.). Someday I'll probably even write in them.


So, to sum up. For me, I'm more likely to be a fan for awhile before I start reading fic, and more likely to read a long time before I start writing. (I've been reading X-Men comics since I was a kid, and I didn't start writing comic fic until the past couple of years with Ultimate X-Men and my beloved gay Piotr.) I tend to follow authors I like and not read much else in fandom. And, since I started my fandom journal, I've been much less involved in fandom because my non-fandom life has become far too busy. I'm still working on finding a balance.

I don't have OTPs or OT3s. I'm mostly interested in f/f, occasionally het, and very rarely anymore m/m. I stay in fandom and on livejournal for the people much more than anything else, but fic is a close second. And I'm rambling now.

Comments

[aphrodite-mine.livejournal.com]

Very interesting link, and analysis. My own experience in fandom is SO scattered and explosive (and plus, I'm terrible with dates) that I fear my own attempts at this. But I might have to try, just because it's so damn interesting.

[escritoireazul.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

Once I hit livejournal with this journal, as opposed to the other one, my fandom experience became more scattered and hard to follow. The only reason I knew the dates above is because I had ways to follow it from here (except for when I first joined online fandom, but that was during my senior year of high school, so it's hard to forget that kind of dates).

I left of a lot here, side forays into LotR (as I followed musesfool there, too, and others, mostly reading, not writing, plus things I experienced through my sisters and not something I was interested in (Pop Slash and LotRPS--I'm not a fan of RPS, personally, but they each enjoyed those things).

I'd like to see your analysis of your fandom experience, no matter how scattered. Leave off the dates if you don't remember, they're not as important as the personal aspect of it, at least in my opinion.