![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Challenge #2 asks us to talk about our fannish history. Here's the extra text to go along with it:
Where do I say "this is where it begins?" Is it the first story I wrote that I remember? That would put my beginning of fandom at Batman '66, because there's a notebook of short one-page stories I remember writing in the style thereof, even if they were crossovers with other entities entirely. (Adam West is my Batman, although Kevin Conroy will be a close second, but that's getting ahead of my planned structure.)
Is it, instead, the first thing that I remember thinking about self-inserts for? Because that can go a lot of different places. I know that Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers is too late for that idea, but I don't exactly know the right spot, because I don't remember if there was anything before the beginning of school that would qualify.
Is it the first thing I remember being invested in and wanting to catch updates as soon as they came out? Then it's Calvin and Hobbes, even if I didn't actually get the entire collection until much later on in life. But it would lead to a little bit of heartbreak at the end of the series. And also would get me enthralled with Dana Simpson's work, Ozy and Millie (and subsequent work, Phoebe and Her Unicorn), because the drawing and humor style very much was compatible with someone who loved Calvin and Hobbes.
Is it the first thing that I was charmed by when I watched it? Because that's Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. Even if I would eventually end up liking The Muppet Show a lot more than Sesame Street, since that's pitched to a particular demographic that you eventually age out of. And no, I didn't really appreciate Fred Rogers for the genius he was while he was around.
If you ask my parents, I was already trying to emulate the walk of game characters when I was small, which made them want to have me play games less, so that's possibly a starting point, too, although I'll reject it out of hand because my parents didn't get that I had a perfectly good distinction between fantasy and reality, and I had probably read something somewhere that said swinging your arms more was good for circulation or something.
Is it the first point where I recognized that something interesting and special might be happening? That's Batman: The Animated Series (there's Kevin Conroy), which told a deliberately anachronistic Batman story in an art deco style, and I remember loving it all. There's support here from from Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, Gargoyles, X-Men (the animated series), and many of the other groundbreakers of the animation renaissance that brought it out of the "kids' stuff" department where it never was (beceause Looney Tunes was never just slapstick, and Rocky and Bullwinkle, the Wacky Races, and other things that would be displayed on Cartoon Network weren't completely for children.) But without this boom, I doubt that the subsequent anime boom (and the Toonami block) would have become as large as it did, which would have prevented me from seeing tings like Quack Experimental Anime Excel Saga, getting introduced to portal fantasy classics of anime like Escaflowne and Fushigi Yugi, or getting to know the comics of 9th Elsewhere and The Tea Dragon Society. And all of that together gives me the tools to understand Miraculous Ladybug as a magical-girl anime and see the different approaches of its main characters. (And proclaim witout irony that Adrien Agreste fits the model of a Disney Princess.)
If I'm supposed to start at the oldest fandom, I could make a case that my fandom starts at the creation of the universe, given that I've enjoyed (although not written) stories about the deities and heroes of the earliest human writings and stories that we remember.
Any point that I say "well, it started here," from, there's a web of interconnected tings both to the past and the future. Each node is a start point, but it's also in conversation with every other node in the web, so everything connects to everything. I guess that's why it's probably best to impose an arbitrary scale on it, like time, just so I can have a point to begin with. And an arbitrary definition of what fandom means, so that I can find a boundary where I can say "before, I was not, after, I am."
That boundary is mostly memory. Even as a small child, I can remember voraciously working my way through the shelves on the library, reading just about anything that fell into the idea of fantasy or science fiction. Reading was an encouraged habit, although I don't have enough memory to know whether or not my parents attempted to guide or shape what I was reading and possibly steer me away from material that I wasn't cognitively ready to handle. Given that I adapted well to the OPAC where I could request materials from other branches of the library, I'm guessing it was probably much more likely that the librarian at the branch was involved in making sure I got enough to read of things that I would like. It's almost certain that the Suck Fairy has been very busy setting up slums across a wide swath of my childhood reading. Because I had to deal with the science fiction and fantasy canon as it was, in the days before the Web and before ubiquitous broadband access. I know full well that the author who I've taken my online person username from has Suck Fairy high-rises in it. At least I was smart enough to use something that was a transformative twist on the concept, a self-insert, a color not in the canonical spectrum. That's a starting point, as well, the space where I showed that I enjoyed the work, but not so much that I wanted my online self to be a perfect reflection.
The games I played and the comics I followed led me to some role-playing forums, where a few characters interacted for years, and where we built shared fanon and learned the art of getting along with each other (which sometimes worked, and sometimes didn't). That had stories posted and published, too, crossovers and original works and other such things. Because where I started writing is a lot earlier than when I started posting to AO3 and making it official, as it were, that what I was doing was fanworks. There's nearly two decades between "first story in the notebook" and "first story posted to AO3", with some lack-of-awareness that I was already in the thick of fandom and fannish activities.
Because the pathway I took around "fandom" and what it does isn't one like others, where people go looking for stories an find them and eventually start contributing their own. My pathway of fandom was mostly consumption of canon, and there were discussion forums that had some interesting games to play and a shared universe we built out of it, but that wasn't the thing that fandom-as-I-conceived was doing, because somewhere, and I can't blame Harry Potter for it, because I was doing these things long before Harry Potter came out and really raised the cultural knowledge and understanding of what shipping and slash was for my particular generational cohort, I think I had cemented on the idea of fandom as convention-going folk, and it wouldn't be until university or so that I went to my first convention. And graduate school before I really paid attention to the fic side of the equation and recognized it for what it was, since I was still sitting pretty firmly on the meta and canon discussion side of it. Thus, calling myself "fandom-adjacent" for a lot of my life, because I didn't go to conventions and I didn't write fic or think about shipping characters too much. Despite writing fic, shipping characters, and going to conventions. The brain is a wonderful thing, and it occasionally does not let go of a wrong thing of that wrong thing is important to how a person sees themselves. Best I can guess, I had internalized somewhere that fandom was squeeing girls and ficcing women, and since I identified as neither, I was not part of it. I would like to believe that I was at least sensible enough not to look down on them for it, but I grew up in a provincial place and didn't question a lot of it, so unless there's something in a journal entry proving otherwise, it is safer to assume I was worse then.
But I watched syndication of Star Trek, from The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, and weekly feeds of Babylon 5. I would watch Buffy from start to finish after I had already seen the DVDs of Firefly. Farscape was great. And Eureka and Warehouse 13 and Leverage and The Librarians. (And Castle, because Stana Katic and Molly Quinn made that show better than it had any right to be.) And Fringe (which influenced the enjoyment of Alice Isn't Dead). So lots of science fiction and fantasy programming. And Doctors Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen. And Person of Interest, which I found fascinating because of the Machine, who is nominally the viewpoint character for everything that happens in that show.
Watched almost none of the X-Files, though.
But also the animation boom! Which paved the way for Avatar: The Last Airbender and Avatar: The Legend of Korra. And Accel World, which developed out of the same prompt that produced Sword Art Online (and possibly the entire .hack franchise). Where Trigun became hot and Gatchaman rebooted.
And also where the United States got to see the raw material of the various series of Power Ranges and realize just how much got changed in the transition and then slowly get introduced to some of the other shows that had provided raw footage for other United States localizations, and that one series that has had maybe one localization that was terrible and one that was pretty good.
And also all the books and the manga and the everything, and watching with a certain amount of delight as representation begins to matter, and then good representation begins to matter, too. And the podcasts like Welcome To Night Vale where representation just is, rather than being a selling point or something that's supposed to be special.
And watching in horror and cynicism as platform after platform courted fen to get big and then stabbed them in the back when the people who controlled the purse strings said "No, not that. We want fen and interaction and content, but we cannot have smut."
And a series called RWBY, that will always be near and dear to my heart, because it understands what resilience is, and what forms it takes, and how you survive in hostile environments without losing who you are.
And some commentfic on someone else's deconstructions and eventually getting up enough courage (and encouragement from others) to get an Archive invitation and stash some stuff there, and sign up for an exchange, and then from there, start writing a lot, as well as taking on the big meta project, and a hundred thousand conversations, in person and over forums, about topics both fannish and not, and journals and everywhere except, it seemed, where fandom was congregating and now, well, I'm here. It all contributed to what I became. To the point where I can look back and say "I've always been in fandom, it just took me a long time to figure it out."
Which is a lot of words, frankly, to figure out that one sentence. But all of those words, and the shows, and the books, and the podcasts, and the forums, and the comments, and the scribblings in a notebook, and the posting of fic, they all contributed to that sentence and give it depth and nuance and provide the story that sits behind that sentence. A complete fannish history would take as long as my memory goes back to account for, because there's so much there, in different places, and forms, and ways, and all of it is important, even if some of it thinks it's more important than the others.
And that single sentence elides the impostor syndrome that comes along with not recognizing were you are. Because I still worry about whether a recipient will enjoy their work. Or whether my fandom way is a right way or not. Or whether small numbers are an indication of what people think of the quality of the work. Or whether I'm always going to be at arms-length from the heart and core of fandom, not because they're deliberately trying to exclude me, but because people who look like me have hurt them and they can't afford to trust anyone who looks like me fully.
I still maintain, however, that no matter what anyone else says, I've got at least some miniscule fragmentary part of a Hugo Award, because the technical achievements of the Archive cannot be realized without the corpus contained within. So, to whatever degree my fics and interactions and comments and kudos and the like contributed to the Archive's win, that's my tiny part of the Hugo all to myself.
That's at least some part of my history, of what I can recall and remember right now. Ask me questions, and more will appear. Tell me about your history, and we might have places where we share. And maybe, when I'm talking about something else entirely, I'll end up telling you more, because it seems relevant at the time.
To know where we are, we must know where we’ve been. Fanlore keeps up with the history of fandom as a whole, but what is your personal fannish history? How did you get here and now in fandom? What detours, curves, or shortcuts did you take in your journey? What were your first influences? Your most important influences?I have a feeling this is easier for the people who are more monofannish or who are new to fandom, but the closer you get to being a Fandom Ancient, the longer your history gets.
Where do I say "this is where it begins?" Is it the first story I wrote that I remember? That would put my beginning of fandom at Batman '66, because there's a notebook of short one-page stories I remember writing in the style thereof, even if they were crossovers with other entities entirely. (Adam West is my Batman, although Kevin Conroy will be a close second, but that's getting ahead of my planned structure.)
Is it, instead, the first thing that I remember thinking about self-inserts for? Because that can go a lot of different places. I know that Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers is too late for that idea, but I don't exactly know the right spot, because I don't remember if there was anything before the beginning of school that would qualify.
Is it the first thing I remember being invested in and wanting to catch updates as soon as they came out? Then it's Calvin and Hobbes, even if I didn't actually get the entire collection until much later on in life. But it would lead to a little bit of heartbreak at the end of the series. And also would get me enthralled with Dana Simpson's work, Ozy and Millie (and subsequent work, Phoebe and Her Unicorn), because the drawing and humor style very much was compatible with someone who loved Calvin and Hobbes.
Is it the first thing that I was charmed by when I watched it? Because that's Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. Even if I would eventually end up liking The Muppet Show a lot more than Sesame Street, since that's pitched to a particular demographic that you eventually age out of. And no, I didn't really appreciate Fred Rogers for the genius he was while he was around.
If you ask my parents, I was already trying to emulate the walk of game characters when I was small, which made them want to have me play games less, so that's possibly a starting point, too, although I'll reject it out of hand because my parents didn't get that I had a perfectly good distinction between fantasy and reality, and I had probably read something somewhere that said swinging your arms more was good for circulation or something.
Is it the first point where I recognized that something interesting and special might be happening? That's Batman: The Animated Series (there's Kevin Conroy), which told a deliberately anachronistic Batman story in an art deco style, and I remember loving it all. There's support here from from Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, Gargoyles, X-Men (the animated series), and many of the other groundbreakers of the animation renaissance that brought it out of the "kids' stuff" department where it never was (beceause Looney Tunes was never just slapstick, and Rocky and Bullwinkle, the Wacky Races, and other things that would be displayed on Cartoon Network weren't completely for children.) But without this boom, I doubt that the subsequent anime boom (and the Toonami block) would have become as large as it did, which would have prevented me from seeing tings like Quack Experimental Anime Excel Saga, getting introduced to portal fantasy classics of anime like Escaflowne and Fushigi Yugi, or getting to know the comics of 9th Elsewhere and The Tea Dragon Society. And all of that together gives me the tools to understand Miraculous Ladybug as a magical-girl anime and see the different approaches of its main characters. (And proclaim witout irony that Adrien Agreste fits the model of a Disney Princess.)
If I'm supposed to start at the oldest fandom, I could make a case that my fandom starts at the creation of the universe, given that I've enjoyed (although not written) stories about the deities and heroes of the earliest human writings and stories that we remember.
Any point that I say "well, it started here," from, there's a web of interconnected tings both to the past and the future. Each node is a start point, but it's also in conversation with every other node in the web, so everything connects to everything. I guess that's why it's probably best to impose an arbitrary scale on it, like time, just so I can have a point to begin with. And an arbitrary definition of what fandom means, so that I can find a boundary where I can say "before, I was not, after, I am."
That boundary is mostly memory. Even as a small child, I can remember voraciously working my way through the shelves on the library, reading just about anything that fell into the idea of fantasy or science fiction. Reading was an encouraged habit, although I don't have enough memory to know whether or not my parents attempted to guide or shape what I was reading and possibly steer me away from material that I wasn't cognitively ready to handle. Given that I adapted well to the OPAC where I could request materials from other branches of the library, I'm guessing it was probably much more likely that the librarian at the branch was involved in making sure I got enough to read of things that I would like. It's almost certain that the Suck Fairy has been very busy setting up slums across a wide swath of my childhood reading. Because I had to deal with the science fiction and fantasy canon as it was, in the days before the Web and before ubiquitous broadband access. I know full well that the author who I've taken my online person username from has Suck Fairy high-rises in it. At least I was smart enough to use something that was a transformative twist on the concept, a self-insert, a color not in the canonical spectrum. That's a starting point, as well, the space where I showed that I enjoyed the work, but not so much that I wanted my online self to be a perfect reflection.
The games I played and the comics I followed led me to some role-playing forums, where a few characters interacted for years, and where we built shared fanon and learned the art of getting along with each other (which sometimes worked, and sometimes didn't). That had stories posted and published, too, crossovers and original works and other such things. Because where I started writing is a lot earlier than when I started posting to AO3 and making it official, as it were, that what I was doing was fanworks. There's nearly two decades between "first story in the notebook" and "first story posted to AO3", with some lack-of-awareness that I was already in the thick of fandom and fannish activities.
Because the pathway I took around "fandom" and what it does isn't one like others, where people go looking for stories an find them and eventually start contributing their own. My pathway of fandom was mostly consumption of canon, and there were discussion forums that had some interesting games to play and a shared universe we built out of it, but that wasn't the thing that fandom-as-I-conceived was doing, because somewhere, and I can't blame Harry Potter for it, because I was doing these things long before Harry Potter came out and really raised the cultural knowledge and understanding of what shipping and slash was for my particular generational cohort, I think I had cemented on the idea of fandom as convention-going folk, and it wouldn't be until university or so that I went to my first convention. And graduate school before I really paid attention to the fic side of the equation and recognized it for what it was, since I was still sitting pretty firmly on the meta and canon discussion side of it. Thus, calling myself "fandom-adjacent" for a lot of my life, because I didn't go to conventions and I didn't write fic or think about shipping characters too much. Despite writing fic, shipping characters, and going to conventions. The brain is a wonderful thing, and it occasionally does not let go of a wrong thing of that wrong thing is important to how a person sees themselves. Best I can guess, I had internalized somewhere that fandom was squeeing girls and ficcing women, and since I identified as neither, I was not part of it. I would like to believe that I was at least sensible enough not to look down on them for it, but I grew up in a provincial place and didn't question a lot of it, so unless there's something in a journal entry proving otherwise, it is safer to assume I was worse then.
But I watched syndication of Star Trek, from The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, and weekly feeds of Babylon 5. I would watch Buffy from start to finish after I had already seen the DVDs of Firefly. Farscape was great. And Eureka and Warehouse 13 and Leverage and The Librarians. (And Castle, because Stana Katic and Molly Quinn made that show better than it had any right to be.) And Fringe (which influenced the enjoyment of Alice Isn't Dead). So lots of science fiction and fantasy programming. And Doctors Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen. And Person of Interest, which I found fascinating because of the Machine, who is nominally the viewpoint character for everything that happens in that show.
Watched almost none of the X-Files, though.
But also the animation boom! Which paved the way for Avatar: The Last Airbender and Avatar: The Legend of Korra. And Accel World, which developed out of the same prompt that produced Sword Art Online (and possibly the entire .hack franchise). Where Trigun became hot and Gatchaman rebooted.
And also where the United States got to see the raw material of the various series of Power Ranges and realize just how much got changed in the transition and then slowly get introduced to some of the other shows that had provided raw footage for other United States localizations, and that one series that has had maybe one localization that was terrible and one that was pretty good.
And also all the books and the manga and the everything, and watching with a certain amount of delight as representation begins to matter, and then good representation begins to matter, too. And the podcasts like Welcome To Night Vale where representation just is, rather than being a selling point or something that's supposed to be special.
And watching in horror and cynicism as platform after platform courted fen to get big and then stabbed them in the back when the people who controlled the purse strings said "No, not that. We want fen and interaction and content, but we cannot have smut."
And a series called RWBY, that will always be near and dear to my heart, because it understands what resilience is, and what forms it takes, and how you survive in hostile environments without losing who you are.
And some commentfic on someone else's deconstructions and eventually getting up enough courage (and encouragement from others) to get an Archive invitation and stash some stuff there, and sign up for an exchange, and then from there, start writing a lot, as well as taking on the big meta project, and a hundred thousand conversations, in person and over forums, about topics both fannish and not, and journals and everywhere except, it seemed, where fandom was congregating and now, well, I'm here. It all contributed to what I became. To the point where I can look back and say "I've always been in fandom, it just took me a long time to figure it out."
Which is a lot of words, frankly, to figure out that one sentence. But all of those words, and the shows, and the books, and the podcasts, and the forums, and the comments, and the scribblings in a notebook, and the posting of fic, they all contributed to that sentence and give it depth and nuance and provide the story that sits behind that sentence. A complete fannish history would take as long as my memory goes back to account for, because there's so much there, in different places, and forms, and ways, and all of it is important, even if some of it thinks it's more important than the others.
And that single sentence elides the impostor syndrome that comes along with not recognizing were you are. Because I still worry about whether a recipient will enjoy their work. Or whether my fandom way is a right way or not. Or whether small numbers are an indication of what people think of the quality of the work. Or whether I'm always going to be at arms-length from the heart and core of fandom, not because they're deliberately trying to exclude me, but because people who look like me have hurt them and they can't afford to trust anyone who looks like me fully.
I still maintain, however, that no matter what anyone else says, I've got at least some miniscule fragmentary part of a Hugo Award, because the technical achievements of the Archive cannot be realized without the corpus contained within. So, to whatever degree my fics and interactions and comments and kudos and the like contributed to the Archive's win, that's my tiny part of the Hugo all to myself.
That's at least some part of my history, of what I can recall and remember right now. Ask me questions, and more will appear. Tell me about your history, and we might have places where we share. And maybe, when I'm talking about something else entirely, I'll end up telling you more, because it seems relevant at the time.
