Sunshine Challenge #2: An Entity of Mysterious and Fannish Origins

sunshine_challenge offers Prompt #2: Talk about your fannish identity.

It comes with some kickstarting questions, too, so that we can avoid staring at the abyss that is our fandom and not meeping out at the task of even trying to sum up (since it's usually too long to explain, even if you have a master list handy.)

1. What does your username mean? How is it pronounced?
   
   I came of Internet Age long before discussions of how problematic certain authors are become commonplace and easily findable with Internet searching. But my childhood consists of many of the SF/F hits that could be called "The Suck Fairy's Reunion Tour", and I picked a user name as a transformative act, although I didn't know it by that name at the time, extending a story that focused on one world that was completely high-fantasy and one that was completely rockets, rayguns, and AI, and how the two were linked with each other. There is no Silver Adept in the source, and that's probably a good thing, given the source is from someone who did Xanth. (I could have figured it out earlier, but I didn't start with the first book, where there's a scene where the main character man demands a printout of specs from a robot, she calls that rape, and it gets dismissed as a female robot being oversensitive.)
   
   To put it mildly, like many of the books I read when I was younger, the concept is fabulous and I could totally run with it. The actual execution is a lot less good. Going back to that would be paying rent to the Suck Fairy.
   
   Pronounce it as you would the two seperate words "Silver" and "Adept", although I usually go just by Silver.


2. What's your origin story? Is it fannish?
   
   Ish? I mean, I came of age in the early days of the World Wide Web, so I wasn't specifically connected to mailling lists or what we would think of as traditional channels. That said, I did participate in an RP forum for Sierra's Quest for Glory series for significant years, and on various webcomic forums, including College Roomies From Hell!!! (the three excalamation points stand for quality.) So transformative works, absolutely, but not fic writing or reading as such. Those things started disappearing with time and my inability to stay on top of the source materials, but Livejournal started while I was at University, and it became a happy platform for me, doing what Dreamwidth does now. For the most part, I didn't use it for fannish or RP purposes, lacking connections and other such things, although I was avidly following along with many of the deconstructions (and then starting up my own Giving of Grief) of works around, which did involve flash commentfic and other ways of trying to make source materials better. Because, again, the concepts are stellar for a lot of stories, but their execution leaves much to be desired, like when C.S. Lewis lets his allegory get in the way of his fantasy narrative, or the likelihood that Stephanie Meyer had stronger characters than the story she wanted to tell with them.
   
   It was eventually looking at an exchange on Dreamwidth that led to the creation of silveradept, but I also decided I liked those commentfic stories enough to preserve a few of them, and so that I would have some material to populate the new account with, so I didn't look too green.
   
   And from there it's been a lot of exchange fic, and slowly working out into writing other things that aren't exchange prompts, but I still am mostly a prompts-based writer. Nothing wrong with that, it just means finding external inspiration a lot of the time.
   
   So, I mostly skipped over a lot of the defining moments of fandom-as-defined-by-Fanlore by virtue of not really being in the thick of fandom. I always describe myself as fandom-adjacent, and I think that's still true.


3. What is your default icon about? Does it have personal meaning? Why did you choose it? What is it from?
   
   It's a kodoma (one of the nature spirits from Princess Mononoke) holding a trombone, with music coming out of the trombone. It has personal meaning, in the sense that the original design was for a section shirt for my collegiate marching band, which I cleaned up and then used, and eventually, on the CRFH!!! boards, someone offered to make icons better, and then to make them more Halloween-y, and that's how the current incarnation was born, and I've been using that for years now. It's pretty cool, honesetly, and I really enjoy all the other icons that I've collected to this point. They usually have stories associated with them, but they're often too long to fit into the boxes where you can give credit and tell those stories. So if you're ever curious, just ask.
   
   Most of the icons I have weren't created for the specific purpose of being fannish about their source materials, but for other purposes. They're usually just a visual shorthand of what I'm thinking or feeling or doing at that particular point.


4. Preferred pronouns?
   
   They/them/theirs is my preferred set, thank you.


5. Do you have a first language other than English?
   
   Regrettably, no. I would like to be more lingual than I am, but that is not currently the case.


6. What does "fannish identity" mean to you?
   
   That's a good question, and the subject of considerable discussion in and around fandom. There's usually a couple of categorizations that fandom thinks of itself in - what we consume and what we create. Consumptive fandom is easier to hide, as it were, because it's just absorbing the canon, maybe getting some goods, maybe some small discussions abotu plot points or goofs or other such things, but it's primary function is to receive what has been put out (and, often, judge it according to personal criteria. Which may or may not be shared by others in the fandom.)
   
   Creative fandom is much less difficult to hide, and comes with the attendant risks that someone else might find you and find you problematic or dislike your ship to the point of starting a ship war and engage in animosity. But there's also the benefit that other people will find you and think you're the bee's knees and encourage you to do more and/or recommend new things to you to get fannish about. I'd like to think that there are more of the latter than the former, even though I also know that the former are much more painful to have to deal with or exclude.
   
   Neither of these are inherently better than the other, because not everyone should have to be transformative to prove their fannish identtiy, but the ways that the transformative fandom interacts with canon, creators, and others is fascinating, and provides a lot of different templates to interrogate or twist a text into something much more representative or otherwise better than it could have been by itself.
   
   But it does involve needing to be open to the possibilities that are there. YKINMK(ATO) and such. A hundred thousand different sandboxes to play in, each with their own toys and implements to build things with, and each of us guests in those places, having to decide for ourselves how much we are going to tolerate before removing ourselves or how enthusiastically we want to join in.
   
   I think your fannish identitiy is whatever you're willing to claim as "your fandom(s)", whether that's wholehearted embrace of everything canonical, or just a fragmentary bit, or that you enjoy your canon with the necessary alternate timelines and universes applied to make it something less terrible. If it helped build you as a fan, and you acknowledge it, it's part of your identity.

Any questions? About this, or other things, or anything that you've seen around and would like more information about? I don't do a whole lot of talking about fandom unprompted, so it's a good opportunity to provide some prompts.