Fandom Snowflake 03 - Only by tooting our own horns can the composition can be heard

[silveradept]

In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you have created. It can be your favorite fanworks that you've created, or fanworks you feel no one ever saw, or fanworks you say would define you as a creator.

When your creative output (or rather, what you think of as your creative output) is so small, recommending your favorites is easier than it might be if you had a giant amount of possible works to choose from. It doesn't say a lot about the breadth of my fandom, though, unlike those who have a lot to choose from.

1. As a fantasy reader, primarily, I tend to key into dragons as a large part of my reading choices. Preferably dragons not in the one-dimensional Ultimate Evil forms. So the Enchanted Forest Chronicles (Wrede) are great for a young me to see that those stories exist (with bonus active princesses, invisible dusk-blooming chokevines, and wizards being melted with dish soap and water. Argelfaster.) and books like Seraphina and Shadow Scale (Hartman) successfully showing how living as a dragon in the human world is full of the sad experiences of discrimination.
   
   And then there's The Dragonriders of Pern, which at the time of reading it, seemed like a good fit for a dragon-loving child. It was because I liked it a a kid that I decided to go back through it and see how much I was looking at it with rose-colored glasses of nostalgia. As it turns out, a lot. So one of my recommendations is an ongoing giving-of-grief to The Dragonriders of Pern, because I can't change that I liked it as a kid, but I can go back to it and understand what it was I liked.
2. That is not to say that I think it's wrong to like problematic things. As our social consciousness expands, we look at things from our last and realize how far things have come from days when everyone assumed slaves were an essential part of a functioning society - at least now we try to hide it better. For all their faults, and those faults are legion, Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey advance the goal of a literate society by providing them with entertaining works to read.
   
   Being fannish, though, often means noticing details and their execution (or lack thereof). Being able to apply your own expertise to a story to make it better or to fix issues of Did Not Do The Research can help salvage an otherwise excellent fandom. So, number two is An analysis of the baseball scene in Twilight, pointing out as many ways as I could think of that proper baseball fans who are vampires would not be doing what the Cullens do (with extra care for Isabella Swan's life and health than the Cullens show).
   
   Speaking of baseball, the last two years I've been writing various essays about the game, its players, and some of the things that make it compelling and wonderful. The frame that helps give it coherence and scope has been a deck of Tarot cards with a baseball theme. Of the comments received on this series, the people reading certainly seem to enjoy them, which is nice to hear. They are all filed under the December Days: Baseball Tarot tag - please do look and comment. I love comments.
   
   So there's a sampling of the stuff that I do - it may not be your favored flavor, but it seems to be what I'm interested in writing.

Comments

[oswulf]

The baseball piece I enjoyed and painted a picture in my mind of "this is a person I'd enjoy reading more of, and probably enjoy having random irrelevant chats with."

My impression of your reference ability came more from your discussion of reference under your day 2 entry.

[silveradept]

Random irrelevant chats would be fab, thanks! I can always use more of those.

As for reference, it's not really about knowing everything. It's about knowing how and where to find everything. It's more of a combination of equal parts knowledge, experience, social engineering, human-cyborg relations, and pure flim-flam.

[oswulf]

It is. My knowledge suffers from having focused more on teen interaction & programming. My experience suffers from an environment where I get a lot more questions about "how do I print?" or "do you have a bathroom?" than meaty reference. I like to think I'm halfway-decent at flim-flam, though.

[silveradept]

Hrm. Did I forget to mention that I'm a Youth Services Librarian in a public library and basically the teen person for my branch? So I wouldn't count those as disqualifiers - they're advantages.

I often find that most people coming for reference interactions know what they want, or at least a good inkling of it, and what they need most is someone who can show them how the tools work. And if you have a good group of peers to help you when you're out of your expertise, the whole thing moves smoothly.

You are the Great and Powerful Oz, like all the rest of us.

[oswulf]

I am a shyster hiding behind a curtain. Got it. :)

Awesome. And don't get me wrong, I love being the YA librarian. Chalk it up to me succumbing to my excessive underconfidence.

[silveradept]

Aren't we all? Meaning both "shysters behind curtains" and "succumbing to excessive underconfidence". I sometimes think that seeing the secrets of how incomplete knowledge is helpful (inoculation against Dunning-Kreuger!) at the cost of core elements (can only have more and less confidence in answers).

[oswulf]

Well said. I think that's a major (though often unarticulated) throughline of my theological thinking--particularly in discussions with more "fundamentalist" strains of both theists and atheists. (Although I object to the term 'fundamentalist' to describe 'literalist', 'extremist', or 'evangelical'--but I've changed the subject two or 3 times in a single sentence so... perhaps quit while I'm... wherever I am...)

[silveradept]

I did mention needing more random conversations, did I not?

As for certainty, I believe that's the exclusive province of those with experience. Everyone else gets to guess.

[oswulf]

Well, *technically* you said you could use more random conversations, not that you *need* them. But that's just me nitpicking over technicalities.

Okay. Fundamentalism. I see nothing fundamental about picking out bible verses to support what people believed when one was a kid. It seems to me that religious "Fundamentalism" ought to refer to prioritizing what is most fundamental in religion. For Christianity, you can't get much more fundamental than what Christ explicitly declared the two most important commandments.

And if the faux-pas of getting theological hasn't driven you off I'm fully capable of the faux-pas of getting political.

[silveradept]

*points at the linkspams, which contain both theological and political matter regularly*

Most of those going to the fundament swear by the spoken words of The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton, even though the Christ-figure is supposed to be a new covenant. One might call them very confused Jews.

[oswulf]

We can quote "new covenant", they will answer "not to abolish the law but to fulfill it". For me, any apparent contradiction is well addressed by Paul "The letter of the law kills, the Spirit gives life."

[silveradept]

Ah, an excellent general argument - "Stop getting so bogged down in the details that you miss the point."

Which is one of those running messages through the whole work.

[oswulf]

Yes. Yes. Yes.